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15. Hinduism in Pittsburgh

Creating the South Indian “Hindu”

Experience in the United States

vasudha narayanan

Do not reside in a town where there is no temple.

auvaiyar, Tamil woman poet, ca. second century c.e.

This essay was previously published as “Creating the South Indian ‘Hindu’ Experience in the
United States,” in The Sacred Thread: Modern Transmission of Hindu Traditions in India and
Abroad, ed. Raymond Brady Williams (Chambersburg, PA: Anima Publications, 1992), 147–76.

In southern India, where the landscape is studded with temple towers and where
deities are said to have manifested themselves spontaneously, it was hard to live in
a town where there was no temple. When the early Saiva Brahmins crossed the seas
to Cambodia and Indonesia in the fifth and sixth centuries c.e., they carried on their
temple-building activity. It may never be known whether these early emigrants ever
considered leaving the land that Manu, the lawgiver, describes as “where the black
antelope naturally roams.” Manu urges members of the higher classes to dwell in the
land that extends as far as the eastern and western oceans, for this is the land of the
Aryas, the land that is “fit for the performance of sacrifice” (Manu Smrti 2: 22–24).
Manu notwithstanding, the process of emigration has continued for several cen-
turies. In this essay I will examine how some Hindu emigrants in the last quarter of
the twentieth century transformed a land where there are no obvious svayam-
vyakta(self-announced) deities (and where one is hard pressed to see the black an-
telope) into a sacred place where the lord graciously abides. The essay’s focus will
be the Srivaisnava temple at Penn Hills (near Pittsburgh) and its development as a
religious and cultural center of a large South Indian Hindu urban professional im-
migrant population. I will investigate how this temple seeks to replicate the rituals