A cathedral in stone

The BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville, New Jersey, was inaugurated on 8 October 2023, after the nine-day Akshardham Mahotsav. It is, by the organisation's account, the largest Hindu mandir in the Western Hemisphere and the second-largest in the world. The central mandir rises 191 feet, stretches 255 feet by 345 feet, and is crowned by a 213-foot spire — a scale closer to a medieval cathedral than a suburban temple.

Carved by hand, across the world

What sets it apart is how it was made. More than 12,500 volunteers worked on it between 2011 and 2023. Some two million cubic feet of stone were hand-carved — not by machine, but in the old temple-building way, by artisans. The logistics were staggering: stone quarried in Europe was shipped to Rajasthan to be carved by Indian craftsmen, then shipped again — some 12,500 miles — to New Jersey to be assembled like a vast puzzle. The materials read like an atlas: marble from Greece, Turkey and Italy; pink sandstone from Rajasthan; limestone from Bulgaria and Turkey.

The movement behind it

The mandir is the work of BAPS (Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha), a global Hindu denomination with deep roots in the Gujarati diaspora. It was envisioned under Pramukh Swami Maharaj and completed under his successor, Mahant Swami Maharaj — the same organisation behind the famous Akshardham complexes in Delhi and Gandhinagar, and the Neasden mandir in London that this series will visit later.

Not without controversy

An honest account must note the shadow. In 2021, a lawsuit alleged forced-labour and wage violations in the temple's construction, involving workers brought from India. BAPS denied wrongdoing; twelve of the plaintiffs withdrew from the suit by July 2023, several citing their religious conviction and devotion to the project. The episode sat uneasily beside the temple's spiritual ambitions, and it remains part of its story.

A coming of age

For the Indian diaspora in America — long worshipping in converted houses, strip-mall halls and modest community mandirs — a structure on this scale is a milestone. It says the community is no longer provisional. Like the cathedrals that announced the settlement of earlier migrant faiths, the Robbinsville Akshardham plants something permanent and unmistakable in the American landscape: a declaration, in carved limestone, that the diaspora has arrived.

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Next in the series: the BAPS mandir at Neasden, the temple that did the same for Britain a generation earlier.

Sources: Wikipedia: Swaminarayan Akshardham (New Jersey).