By Premlata Venkataraman, Written October 2001
Note: Premlata has volunteered at the S. V. Temple for many activities, including talking to visitors from schools, universities, and churches about Hinduism and the temple.
The Hindu religion is at least 4000 years old, and many of its famous temples, both in India and outside, date back 1500 years. It was over a hundred years ago that the self-confident monk Vivekananda introduced the essence of Hindu thought to his eclectic multi-religious audience in Chicago. (He also had the courage to tell his countrymen how far the practices of their faith had degenerated over the millennia.) So, many Vedanta societies came into being all over the US long before we arrived. The early Sikh settlers organized a Gurudwara in California in 1900s.
In this backdrop, Hindu places of worship in North America completing twenty-five years may seem a small milestone. Yet, for Pittsburgh’s Indian community and the larger Indian community in North America, Sri Venkateswara Temple in Penn Hills and Ganesha Temple in New York completing 25 years is significant.
In the 1960s, the early Indian immigrants in Pittsburgh, mostly professionals, yearned for a place of worship. With so few Indians around then, people coming from all parts of India idealistically tried to come under one roof. But soon the reality of theological, liturgical, regional, and language differences arose acrimoniously. Those coming from southern India broke away to build their own temple, which grew into Sri Venkateswara Temple in Penn Hills. Those staying in the original group built the Hindu-Jain Temple ten years later.
The people who built the S. V. Temple — almost all of them are alive today — never would have dreamed that one day the temple would be a pilgrimage center for visitors from all over North America.
And as immigrants from South Asia settled all over the continent, the S.V. Temple and the New York temple became prototypes for organizing Hindu temples in their communities. With its democratically elected officials, it gave a system for volunteers to become involved in temple activities and provide organizational support. But its journey was smooth.
After a divisive fight in the 1980s over control, the S.V. Temple developed membership rules, bylaws, and elections, and organized the temple along the lines of mainstream Protestant churches. So, even as the Temple transplanted an “authentic” mode of worship ten time zones away, it also assimilated the Protestant tradition of self-governance. Whoever heard about memberships and bylaws in temples in India?!
Over the years, the S. V. Temple has organized several religious functions and staged programs in Indian performing arts, as in temples in India do. With the idea of transmitting the cultural heritage to the next generation, the temple provides facilities for dance classes and organizes music classes in summer. It also schedules dance recitals and music concerts. With these and similar programs by other organizations in our area, our youngsters are well aware of the sophistication of India’s dance and music traditions. What the S. V. Temple and the Ganesha Temple in New York started became templates for other temples in the US.
As the S. V. Temple tries to maintain its “authentic” traditions, it continues to rely exclusively on immigrants from India for running the place. Second-generation young men and women are not coming forward to take part in the inner workings of the temple. With the focus of the temple on ritual and propitiatory worship in Sanskrit that they don’t understand, many youngsters and adults alike stand disengaged. As our youngsters struggle to balance their American, Indian, and Hindu identities, not educating them on the evolution of the systems of Hindu beliefs through the millennia only makes it worse. This dilemma is at the heart of all Hindus and Hindu temples in the US and other Christian-majority countries.
Also, as the number of new immigrants swelled, fueled partly by the software explosion, the newer arrivals neatly fit into the larger subgroups formed on language, regional, and other criteria. In recent years, this has resulted in cliques based on regionalism, languages, and liturgies within S. V. Temple’s mostly South Indian membership.
With democracy came representative governance. The need for balance has resulted in a system based on quotas. This is changing into entitlements under which groups root for their region- or language-based programs and styles of worship. People seeing the irrelevance of these divisions to their life in the US or falling outside the language-based groups are left out both by design and indifference.
These aside, this is an important occasion to rejoice at how far the temple has come in twenty-five years; build on its strengths; strengthen it where it is weak, if possible; and proactively prepare where necessary for the challenges faced by the next generation.
Preparing for the challenges of the future requires that we anticipate future needs just as the temple’s founders did in the 1960s. Our children born and raised here-the future members of our community—are every bit “American” despite their desi veneer. Caste, languages, or religion that define us don’t seem to matter to them when they pick their mates. Divorce among them will be higher than among their parents, and so will be remarriages. And being well-educated, as they seek answers to life’s enduring questions, they will be open and eclectic in their spiritual search.
If temples in the US continue to stress rituals, liturgies, and propitiatory worship, we should not be surprised if our children stay out, walk away, or rebel. This will be unfortunate because the essence of Hinduism is eclectic, liberal, inclusive, and its philosophical foundation is sophisticated, unorthodox, and non-dogmatic.