01Vivekananda and the Vedanta Societies
Swami Vivekananda’s speech at Chicago in September 1893 made him known across America overnight. He stayed on, lectured from Boston to Detroit, and in 1894 founded the Vedanta Society of New York, the first Hindu body in the West. Swamis of the Ramakrishna order followed him, and in 1905 the Vedanta Society in San Francisco built a temple on Webster Street, often called the first Hindu temple in the Western world. Paramahansa Yogananda came in 1920 for a congress of religions in Boston and stayed, founding the Self-Realization Fellowship; his Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) is still in print.
02Bhaktivedanta Swami in New York
In September 1965 A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, then sixty-nine, landed at Boston from the cargo ship Jaladuta with a trunk of his Bhagavatam translations and very little money. In July 1966 he registered the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in a rented shopfront on Second Avenue, New York, and chanted the Hare Krishna mahamantra under a tree in Tompkins Square Park. Within a decade ISKCON had temples on every continent. In 1973 George Harrison gave the society a manor in Hertfordshire, now Bhaktivedanta Manor, where tens of thousands gather at Janmashtami.
03The great migrations
Large Hindu settlement in the West came after 1947. Gujarati and Punjabi families reached Britain in the 1950s and 60s, and in 1972 Idi Amin expelled the Asians of Uganda; many of the twenty-eight thousand or so who came to Britain were Gujarati Hindus who settled in Leicester and north London. In the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended the old quotas, and doctors, engineers and students followed. Canada and Australia opened their doors in the same years. The Gulf drew a different stream from the 1970s: workers from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra on contracts, who could not settle but kept faith in rented rooms.
04Sri Venkateswara at Pittsburgh
The first temples in America built to the Agamas, with consecrated murtis and trained priests, rose in the 1970s. In the hills of Penn Hills outside Pittsburgh, a society of Telugu and Tamil engineers and doctors raised a temple to Sri Venkateswara with help from the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, and it was consecrated in 1977. Its gopuram, carved by sthapatis from Andhra, was a strange sight on a Pennsylvania hillside. Devotees soon called it the Tirupati of America, and families drove from three or four states away for a child’s first tonsure.
05Neasden: stone in London
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir at Neasden opened in August 1995 under Pramukh Swami Maharaj. It was built to the Shilpa Shastras without structural steel, from Bulgarian limestone and Italian Carrara marble that were shipped to India, carved by hand in Gujarat and Rajasthan, numbered, and assembled in London like a puzzle. Volunteers from the community, many of them families from East Africa, raised much of the money and did much of the work. For British Hindus it was the first time a mandir in their country looked like the ones their grandparents knew.
06Akshardham at Robbinsville
BAPS took the same method much further in New Jersey. Swaminarayan Akshardham at Robbinsville was dedicated on 8 October 2023 under Mahant Swami Maharaj. Its stone was quarried in Europe and India, carved by hand in India, and set by volunteers, more than 12,500 of whom gave time over the years of building. It is among the largest Hindu temples built in modern times anywhere. In the same years the Hindu Temple Society of North America at Flushing, the Malibu Venkateswara temple and hundreds of smaller mandirs settled into American life.
07A mandir in the Gulf
Hindu traders from Sindh and Kutch had kept small temples in Muscat and Bahrain for generations, but the Gulf had no great stone mandir until 2024. The UAE government gave BAPS land at Abu Mureikhah, between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The mandir, of pink sandstone from Rajasthan and Italian marble, with seven shikharas for the seven emirates, was consecrated by Mahant Swami Maharaj and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 14 February 2024. Months later, in October 2024, a new Hindu temple opened at Jebel Ali in Dubai.
The 2021 censuses counted 10,32,775 Hindus in England and Wales, 8,28,195 in Canada and 6,84,002 in Australia, each a fast-growing community. Diwali is lit on Leicester’s Golden Mile and in Trafalgar Square, and Janmashtami, Navratri garba and Ganesh Chaturthi now fill halls from Toronto to Sydney.
