Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples by Meenakshi Jain

Indic Books — entry · Journal & E-Magazine — Book Review

Histories of temple destruction usually end at the rubble. Meenakshi Jain’s Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples (Aryan Books International, 2019) begins there — and follows what happened next: priests spiriting images away by night, murtis buried in fields or sunk in tanks and wells against a better day, communities keeping the memory of a hiding place alive for generations, and consecrations performed again when the danger passed.

Jain works the way she always works: by accumulation of primary evidence — inscriptions, temple chronicles, colonial gazetteers, archaeological reports — arranged region by region until the pattern becomes undeniable. The ‘flight of deities’ emerges not as scattered anecdote but as a pan-Indian devotional practice: an organized, risk-laden discipline of preservation that the standard narratives of passive loss simply cannot accommodate.

The book’s quiet argument is about agency. A tradition that hid its gods, carried them across rivers, and rebuilt around them — sometimes after centuries — was never merely a victim of its history. It was, all along, the keeper of its own continuity. For readers following today’s reconsecrations, the book supplies the long context in which they belong.

Who should read it: anyone studying temple heritage seriously — alongside our Temple, Art & Heritage shelf and the Temple Architecture Yatra, where this history stands in stone. Browse more titles on the Indic Books shelf.

Credits: entry by Indic Warriors. Book: Meenakshi Jain, Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples: Episodes from Indian History (Aryan Books International, 2019).