The Hinduization Of America

June 9, 2005

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USA, June 5, 2005: From Hindu temples in Juneau, Alaska, to Tallahassee, Florida, and to Kauai, Hawaii, there is an ongoing process of Hinduizing the American sacred space. Hindu Americans have begun to cultivate the strains within their own religious tradition that foster a sense of the sacred earth through myth, ritual, ceremonies, and spirit power that more or less reflects Native American or American Indian cultures, says Francis C. Assisi in this lengthy article. Now, Hindu Americans are locating, establishing and embellishing sacred spaces in America by commingling the waters of the Ganga and the Kaveri with the Mississippi and Rio Grande, and by invoking the holy Indian rivers into the local waters. In the past twenty five years, the American landscape, with its rich abundance of rivers, mountains, forests, animals, ancestral graves and relics, is becoming sacred space to Indian Americans as it has been for American Indians through the millennia. They have enhanced and

spiritually empowered America's sacred landscape with more than 1,500 places of worship in North America.

Professor Vasudha Narayanan, an authority on diasporic Hinduism and professor at the University of Florida's Department of Religion, claims that Hindu rituals are part of the many ways in which the local landscape is being transformed to be sacred liturgical space for immigrant American Hindus. The point that Professor Narayan has

made is that Indians have made the land of the Americas ritually sacred in at least four ways: composing songs and pious Sanskrit prayers extolling the American state where the temples are located; identifying America as a specific dvipa or island as noted in the Hindu Puranas; physically consecrating the land with waters from

sacred Indian and American rivers; and literally recreating the physical landscape of certain holy places in India, as in Pittsburgh or Barsana Dam, Texas.

One way Hindus in America enhance the sacredness of their temples is to try to either recognize and rediscover resemblances between American physical landscape and distinctive sacred spots in India, or to recreate that similarity. The earliest attempt was at the Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh. Devotees voiced the similarity

between the sacred place in India where the rivers Ganga, Yamuna and the underground Saraswati meet, and the confluence of three local rivers. According to Prof Narayanan, some of the most sustained attempts in recreating the landscape are in Barsana Dham, Texas, and at the Iraivan Temple to Siva, in Kauai, Hawaii. Barsana Dham

resembles Barsana in Northern India, said to be the hometown of Radha, the beloved of Lord Krishna. Here, all the important landmarks of Krishna and Radha's homeland were recreated. At Iraivan Temple in Hawaii, not only are the names reminiscent of India, but the similar environment of tropical India meshes with the local Hawaiian land to create a unique milieu.

The Pittsburgh temple, the Barsana Dham in Texas, and the Iraivan Temple in Hawaii have become new pilgrimage destinations for millions of Indians living in North America. Even visitors from India make

it a point to include these temples in their itinerary according to the late Dr. Sambamurthy Sivachariyar, who was an important priest of a large temple in Madras, India. He presided as chief priest for the stone-laying ceremony of Iraivan Temple in 1995 and said, "I am too old to go on pilgrimage to the holy sites in the Indian Himalayan mountains, where, according to Hinduism, God Himself resides and gives His grace to pilgrims. That was a life-long dream of mine. But now that I have come to the most beautiful place in the world, Kauai, to this sacred land, I feel my dream has been fulfilled. I have come to the home of God." Interestingly, the ancient Hawaiians called the temple site, which is at the foot of Mount Waialeale near the sacred Wailua River, Pihanakalani, "where

heaven touches earth." To read the article in its entirety, click on "source" above.

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