The Hinduization Of America : there is an ongoing process of Hinduizing Sacred Space

[krsna]

 

http://www.indolink.com/displayArticleS.php?id=060305110343

 

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.