The Pluralism Project -- Hinduism in the Boston Area

Introduction

In May 1990, the first major Hindu temple ever constructed in New England was consecrated in the Boston suburb of Ashland. Inside the central sanctuary is the image of Sri Lakshmi, the auspicious goddess of wealth and blessings. To the right is a shrine housing the image of Vishnu, the transcendent Lord, and to the left is a shrine housing the image of Ganesha, the ever-popular elephant-headed remover of obstacles. These granite images were crafted by ritual artists, shipped from India, and consecrated during an entire week of ceremonies in Ashland. They were "bathed" in tubs of flowers, grains, and water, and by countless Sanskrit hymns. Their eyes were ritually opened, their breath ritually activated, and these Hindu deities became the divine residents of suburban Boston. On the final day of the consecration rites, more than 3,000 Boston area Hindus, all in a festive spirit, circled the temple in a colorful procession, following twelve Hindu priests each bearing on his head a large pot of consecrated water. The waters used for this ceremony were brought to Ashland from the Ganges River in India -- and from the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Merrimac, and the Colorado rivers in the U.S. A hydraulic hoist lifted the priests to the roof of the temple where they poured the water over the temple towers, elaborately carved with images of the Hindu deities. With the opening of this large temple, the Hindu community of New England has, for the first time, a new home and a significant architectural presence.

The story of the growth of the Sri Lakshmi Temple is typical of that of many U.S. Hindu communities. In the 1970s, new Indian immigrants, most of them professionals, began to have children and put down roots in their new American communities. As they looked toward the future, they realized that their children would have no cultural or religious foundation unless they took action to create a temple. Here in Boston, a group of Tamil families from South India met for puja and festivals in one another's homes. In 1978 they incorporated as the New England Hindu Temple, Inc. and held their first public event, a Divali or Lakshmi Puja, at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Melrose. For the next eight years, the New England Hindu Temple met regularly in the Needham Village Club. As one member recalled, "We used to go there once a month on a Sunday morning, clean up the whole place, rearrange the chairs, arrange the deities, and worship from about ten to two. Then we would eat together, clean up the place, and go." That pattern lasted until 1986 when land was purchased in Ashland for the temple. Today the Sri Lakshmi Temple provides a focal point for many diverse communities of Hindu immigrants in the Boston area. It is still South Indian in spirit, but seeks to attract a wider, more "ecumenical" congregation of Hindus. The membership is comprised of Indian immigrants from both the Vaishnava and Shaiva traditions from throughout New England. The community has continued to make additions to the temple and in 1996 consecrated the rajgopuram, the ornate "royal tower gateway" built at the entry of the temple complex, signaling the completion of the whole temple.

The ideas and the culture of India have had an impact on New England for well over 100 years. The history of relations between India and Boston probably began with the trading ships that sailed back and forth from Salem and Boston to India in the early nineteenth century. Often it was "missionaries and ice" on the outbound journey. In 1841, for example, John Christian Frederick Heyer and three missionary couples sailed from Boston bound for Columbo, Sri Lanka, on a freighter with a cargo of 260 tons of ice packed in sawdust. By mid-century, there were reports of Hindus participating in Salem's Fourth of July parade. The Peabody Museum in Salem today houses a rich collection of Indian arts and artifacts expressive of a rich period of commerce between India and New England.

Hindu texts and ideas became a lively part of the intellectual life of New England's most famous transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. As early as the 1820s Emerson began to write of India in his journals. He was introduced to Hindu literature by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. By the 1830s he had copies of the Bhagavad Gita and the Laws of Manu, and by the 1840s he began to publish excerpts from "Ethnical Scriptures" in the transcendentalist journal The Dial. Thoreau clearly had the Bhagavad Gita with him during his sojourn at Walden. "In the morning," he wrote, "I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta . . . in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial." In the winter, he marveled at both the physical and mystical connection between the land of the holy Ganges and his beloved Walden. As he contemplated the Bhagavad Gita from his hut, big ice-blocks of the pond he called "God's drop" were cut to be sent by rail to Boston and thence by ship to India. In 1855, these Concord philosophers received from a British friend what must then have been America's largest trove of the wisdom of India -- including the Rig Veda, the Mandukya Upanishad, the Laws of Manu, the Sankhya Karikas, and Hardy's Manual of Buddhism.

Many New Englanders, especially those of the liberal Unitarian tradition, were drawn to what they learned of India's religious ideas: its insistence on the oneness of the divine and its capacity to point to the transcendent unity of diverse paths and ways. Indeed, the connections between the Unitarians of Boston and some of the reformist "Hindu renaissance" movements in Bengal have been well documented, and the literary legacy of this relation is collected in the Andover-Harvard Library of Harvard Divinity School. Rammohan Roy in particular was admired for his Vedanta idealism and his critique of Hindu polytheism in favor of what seemed for all the world a Unitarian perspective. However, despite more than fifty years of interest in Indian thought, few New Englanders had met a Hindu. So in the late summer of 1893, when a handsome young Hindu reformer, Swami Vivekananda, arrived in Boston for a month's stay before the opening of the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, he attracted a great deal of attention. He was surely the first Hindu many in New England ever heard speak about his own religious tradition.

Vivekananda had taken a ship from Calcutta to Vancouver and then traveled by train to Chicago, arriving more than a month early for the Parliament. He quickly ran out of money. Fortunately, on the train from the West coast he met a Boston woman, Kate Sanborn, who graciously invited him to her house in the countryside outside Boston -- in Metcalf, not far from where the Sri Lakshmi Temple stands today. Ms. Sanborn, a writer, had been a professor of literature at Smith College. It was at her estate, Breezy Meadows, that Swami Vivekananda was introduced to a number of Bostonians, including Harvard Classics professor J.H. Wright. At Professor Wright's invitation, Vivekananda came to Annisquam on the North Shore, where he delivered his first public lecture at the Unitarian Church. He subsequently spoke at Wesley Chapel in Salem and caused a stir wherever he appeared on the North Shore in his silk tunic and turban.

At the Parliament, Vivekananda was received with enthusiasm, as he called for a universal religion "which would have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, and would recognize a divinity in every man or woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force would be centered in aiding humanity to realize its Divine nature." In the two years following the Parliament, Vivekananda returned to Boston many times. He spoke at the Methodist church in Lynn, at the North Shore Club, at Radcliffe College, and at the Procopeia Club on St. Botolph Street. During the summer of 1894 he spent time at Sarah Farmer's rural home in Eliot, Maine -- a place called Green Acre -- where she invited the serious study of religious ideas and where the Swami taught Vedanta to a summer encampment of transcendentalists and seekers. The local paper reported, "Each morning he meets a company of men and women under a large pine tree in the woods, and sitting cross-legged, discourses to them of the things of the soul." During Vivekananda's 1894 and 1896 visits, he seems to have made his headquarters in Cambridge at the 168 Brattle Street residence of Mrs. Ole Bull (Sara Bull), where a lively circle of people gathered to discuss everything from spirituality to women's suffrage. There he developed a friendship with William James and later had lunch with him at his home on Irving Street. He lectured twice at Harvard, in May of 1894 at Sever Hall and in 1896 to the Harvard Philosophical Society.

In the years following Vivekananda's early visits to Boston, monks of the Ramakrishna order in India regularly followed in his footsteps. In 1896, Swami Saradananda made the rounds of Green Acre and 168 Brattle Street. Then came Swami Abhedananda, who met William James and Harvard Sanskritist Charles Lanman at Sara Bull's home. Swami Paramananda followed and in 1909 established the first home of the Boston Vedanta Society on St. Botolph Street and a Vedanta Society retreat center in Cohasset. After Paramananda's death in 1940, the Cohasset center continued independently under the leadership of Sister Gayatri Devi. In 1941, Swami Akhilananda of the Providence Vedanta Center established a permanent center in Boston at 687 Boylston Street. Shortly thereafter, the present building at 58 Deerfield Street in the Back Bay was donated as the center for the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston. Swami Akhilananda had a long and vigorous ministry of nearly twenty years lecturing, counseling, and dining with both ministers and professors. Since 1962, Swami Sarvagatananda has been resident in Boston, continuing a century long tradition of Hindu Vedanta presence in this area.

Another Hindu teacher who, like Vivekananda, came to America for a conference and stayed to found a religious movement was Paramahamsa Yogananda. This Bengali religious leader came to a meeting of the International Congress of Religious Liberals held in Boston in 1920. This was the beginning of an American sojourn that would lead to the formation of the Self Realization Fellowship (SRF) which is still in existence today. Its headquarters is in Los Angeles, but here in Boston there is an SRF group that still meets in the tradition of Yogananda.

In the late 1960s and 1970s new streams of Hindu religious life came to Boston, including gurus and swamis and the groups of seekers and followers they attracted. One of the most durable groups was the International Society for Krishna Consciousness or ISKCON, known more popularly as "Hare Krishna" for its public chanting of "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama!" on Boston Common and in Harvard Square. This distinctively devotional style of Hinduism was brought to the U.S. by an Indian teacher, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, who began singing Lord Krishna's name in a storefront on the lower East Side in New York. Such a fervent piety did not, at first, seem a likely magnet for young Americans in the turmoil of the 1960s, but, astonishingly enough, it attracted a dedicated group of young people. In 1968, the first Krishna temple in the Boston area opened in an old house in Allston. After a few years, the community moved to a brownstone at 72 Commonwealth Avenue, where it continues today with a daily round of pujas in which the images of Lord Krishna and his beloved Radha are honored with incense and bells, oil lamps and flowers.

In this same period, students and professionals from India were attracted to the Boston area by its many universities. Since the worship and rituals of the Hindu tradition are performed largely at home, the small altars of their homes and apartments were surely the places where Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha, and Devi were first worshipped in Boston. Even today, home altars are important in the ritual life of a Hindu family. As for temple worship traditions and the sense of community and festivity the temple setting provides, the "Hare Krishna" temple on Commonwealth Avenue, with its largely Euro-American resident community, became a welcome temporary home for newly arrived Boston immigrant Hindus.

At the same time, groups of Indian Americans began to form cultural societies to celebrate festivals distinctive to their region and to provide a context in which language, dance, and music might be introduced to their children. During the 1970s more than a dozen new cultural societies were born. The Marathi Mandal gathers people to celebrate Maharashtrian holidays. The Gujarati Association of New England brings Gujaratis together to celebrate Divali, the Festival of Lights, and to participate in the folk-dancing event called Garba. The Telugu Association gathers about three times a year -- for the New Year called Ugade which usually falls in April, for a park picnic during the summer, and for a fall celebration of Divali. The Kerala Association brings both Hindus and Christians from Kerala together for Onam, the harvest festival in September. Prabasi, founded to promote Bengali language, culture, and arts, celebrates Durga Puja, the festival of the Goddess, in the fall. The Kannada Koota, formed by immigrants from Karnataka, observes Ganesh Puja in the late summer, Sankranti in January, and the New Year in the spring. The Orissa Association promotes dance and music from Orissa and has traditionally rented the Good Shepherd Church in Acton for its Ganesha Puja and Sarasvati Puja. There are also some all-India cultural and religious organizations. The Indian Association of Greater Boston observes "India Day" on August 15, sometimes with a parade and cultural performances at the Hatch Shell on the banks of the Charles River.

In 1978, a center called Shishu Bharati was formed to provide weekend education for children of Indian immigrants. It was started by a small group of parents who were concerned lest their children grow up in the United States with no real sense of Indian culture or languages. The school meets Sundays from 10:00 to 12:15 in the Marshall Simond Middle School in Burlington, MA. Students learn songs, have classes in a variety of Indian languages, and learn something of Indian history, geography, religion, and culture. There are yoga classes for the parents and a yearly fall celebration of Divali. Concern for the next generation is also one of the primary concerns of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHP), which has a Boston office. In the Boston area, the group sponsors a Bal Vihar for children to meet and to learn stories, songs, and rituals. The VHP-linked Hindu Students Council, based at M.I.T., brings Hindu students together from area colleges.

While the Sri Lakshmi Temple attracts Hindus from throughout New England, something of the variety of the Hindu tradition is also present in the Boston area. The Ganeshe Temple in Dorchester serves as a meeting place for Hindus from Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname. The Swaminarayan Hindu Temple in Stow combines an active and committed lay leadership with the strong spiritual presence of a living teacher, Pramukh Swami, who visits the United States every few years. Another lineage of the Swaminaryan movement has a temple in Lowell. The Chinmaya Mission has had a long tradition of bringing teachers to the Boston area, and Swami Chinmayananda lectured here often during his lifetime. His week-long summer lecture series held at Harvard or M.I.T. would attract hundreds of area Hindus each evening. Since Swami Chinmayananda's death in 1993, Swami Tejomayananda has continued the summer camp and lecture circuit of the Chinmaya Mission. A number of smaller satsangs or groups that gather for meditation, song, and study follow other Hindu teachers, such as Mata Amritanandamayi, also known as Ammachi. Ammachi's international tours attract hundreds of devotees when she stops for a few days in Boston.

If Swami Vivekananda were to visit Boston again today, he would find active yoga and meditation groups, Bengali summer picnics, practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine, a temple youth choir learning Sanskrit chants and Hindi devotional songs, a group that gathers to sing the Hindi Ramayana straight through, and a week's lectures on the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita at M.I.T. And had he managed to return to Harvard during commencement week in 1993, he would have heard American-born Hindus, children of the first generation of Hindu immigrants, chanting from the Vedas at Harvard's baccalaureate service!