Archaeological data forms the primary source material for this paper on the early Hindu temple in South Asia. The paper traces the study of the temple from its ‘discovery’ in the nineteenth century to the present and interrogates the traditional links often suggested between the temple as an agent of political legitimisation and the emergence of the State in the first millennium AD in ancient India. The paper uses the term ‘Hindu’ to articulate a pan-Indian cultural identity of the local population of the subcontinent long before the European discovery of the term in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and suggests that cultural practices, rituals and imagery as evident from a study of religious architecture formed the substratum of this self-perception and distinctiveness.