Temple gets 'Indianization'
When the Sri Venkateswara Temple's remodeling is completed, its columns will be made from steel beams and concrete castings, not carved granite like its parent temple in India.
The main hall won't be an open-air courtyard, and its shrines will be decorated by garlands of mums, rather than roses or jasmine.
But the oldest Hindu temple in North America, perched atop a hill overlooking the Parkway East in Penn Hills, is becoming more "Indian," although with a Western Pennsylvania flavor.
The temple's elders say the transformation, expected to cost more than $1.5 million and be funded by donations, will help maintain its reputation as one of the top pilgrimage destinations for Hindus in the United States and Canada. They estimate between 80,000 and 100,000 pilgrims visit the temple every year.
"For Indian people who are living in this country, they consider this temple the temple to which they have to come once a year," said C.P. Natarajan, secretary of the temple's board of directors.
As with the original temple, consecrated in 1976, the remodeled temple is being completed by artisan architects from India known as silpis. A team of about 10 silpis have been casting traditional columns, friezes and cornices to adorn the temple. The processional courtyard, where devotees walk around the main shrine, is being retrofitted with columns decorated with traditional temple designs.
The "Indianization" project is part of an expansion completed in 2002 that covered over much of the temple's original architectural details.
The temple's interior includes shrines to Hindu deities, depictions of scenes from the Bhagavad Gita, or Hindu scriptures, and services performed by Hindu priests in Sanskrit.
The silpis follow the ancient artform of temple building, in which the layout of the building resembles the form of a deity reclining, with the "foot" being the main entrance.
The temple's national reputation is derived in part from its affiliation with the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Tirupathi, in southern India, according to Natarajan. That temple, visited by more than 50,000 pilgrims per day, helped the S.V. Temple in Penn Hills get off the ground in the 1970s.
Mary McGee, an associate professor of Indian Religions at Columbia University in New York City, said "the Pittsburgh temple" is nationally renowned among Hindus.
"When it was built, it followed the texts on how you build temples. A lot of the Hindu communities (in North America) initially gathered in basements of other churches or in YMCAs. Right away, the Pittsburgh temple started drawing people," said McGee. "People will go out of their way to go there."
Fred W. Clothey, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh, said the geography of the temple's location, among hills and near Pittsburgh's three rivers, makes the site more important.
Rivers have a sacred quality in India, and Venkateswara is a popular Indian deity whose name means "Lord of the Hills," Clothey said.
Other Hindu temples across North America have been "Indianized" as Indian-American communities have grown in numbers and become more comfortable with displaying their religious identity in their adopted country, McGee said.
"It shows a level of comfort that they can make that statement on the American landscape," McGee said.
The temple has about 1,000 local members, and about 50,000 members nationally, said Gutti V. Rao, chairman of the Indianization committee. According to the U.S. Census, about 10,000 Indian-Americans live in Allegheny County, with about half concentrated in Pittsburgh, Monroeville, Scott, McCandless and Upper St. Clair. There are other religious centers for eastern religions in the area, including a Hindu Jain temple in Monroeville, a Sikh temple and a Mosque built mainly by Indians, as well as a smaller Hindu temple in Monroeville.
Hinduism originated in India more than 3,000 years ago. It is the world's third largest religion, behind Christianity and Islam, with about 900 million adherents. It is estimated that 80 percent of Indians are Hindu. Census estimates put the U.S. population of Hindus at 766,000 in 2001.
Many pilgrims to the S.V. Temple come from as far away as California and Canada.
"If there's a three-day weekend in Canada, there won't be any parking here," said Rao, an engineer from Latrobe who helped found the temple in the 1970s.
Rao said the Indianization has been in the works for about five years.
The temple's congregation originally formed when a group of Indians living in the Pittsburgh area began conducting services in an abandoned church in Monroeville. Many of them, like Rao and Natarajan, were engineers and professionals who had come to the area for white collar jobs.
Rao, one of the temple's founders, said the current remodeling was in keeping with temple's original purpose.
"We wanted to maintain our culture for our kids," he said, "and to show our culture for the people who are from here."
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