Hindu sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Mandirs and the grounds they stand in are nearly the whole of this map. Cremation grounds, wayside shrines, mathas, schools and offices make up the remainder, because the map covers everything belonging to one religion rather than its places of worship alone. There are more than 55,000 sites worldwide. Colour represents what kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every site here is one a mapper drew at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we have merged in no temple directory or government list.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says Hindu. We take that tag at its word and don't second-guess a building by its architecture or its name. Where a mapper wrote a tradition within Hinduism instead, such as `vaishnavism` or `shaivism`, we count it, though only a handful of sites do that. We keep Jain and Sikh sites off this map, because OpenStreetMap records each as a religion in its own right and each has a map of its own.

Colour

Colour represents what kind of site it is rather than which religion, because the religion is the whole map. Places of worship are about 95% of the map, which leaves every other class small. Grounds mapped as their own plot come next, then wayside shrines, then the burial class described below. Schools, former sites, religious buildings, offices, monasteries and community buildings each appear in small numbers. The monastery class is not a borrowed category here, because OpenStreetMap's monastery tag reaches the matha, a living Hindu institution.

What the burial class holds

Hindu funerary practice is cremation, so a burial class on this map looks wrong until you see what is in it. It holds cremation grounds, dozens of them formal crematoria, and a cremation ground is a Hindu religious site in its own right. These maps share one vocabulary of site types, and that vocabulary has a burial class and no cremation class. Renaming it on this map alone would break the comparison, so we explain it here instead.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. About half of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for half the map the size is not telling you how large the site is. We draw mandirs as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about half as wide again, and here that mostly lifts the temples against the schools and cremation grounds among them.

Where the map is empty

Most of these sites stand in India and Nepal, broadly where the tradition is practised, so the shape of the map is right in a way that a count of sites often is not. The gaps are elsewhere. Where a Hindu community lives somewhere OpenStreetMap has mapped thoroughly, its temples are nearly all here, and where it does not, many are missing. Even in India the mapping is far from complete, and no independent count of temples exists to measure it against.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A site shown here may have closed or changed use, and the building usually stands for years afterwards.

Source and licence

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