The Akshardham temple in New Jersey, the worlds largest modern Hindu temple outside India, opened on Saturday and will start welcoming devotees from Monday. Artisans and volunteers worked for about 4.7 million hours to hand-carve about two million cubic feet of stone, to build the temple, which has been made out of four varieties of marble from Italy and limestone from Bulgaria. The marble was first brought to India from where it was taken more than 8,000 miles across the world to New Jersey.
The temple is one of many built by the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a religious and civic organisation within the Swaminarayan sect. The sect, which will celebrate its 50th year in North America next year, oversees more than 1,200 temples and 3,850 centres around the world.
The US temple 3rd one after in Delhi & Gujarat
The temple in the US will be the third Akshardham or abode of the divine after the ones in Delhi and Gujarat, where BAPS is headquartered. The former is the largest Hindu temple complex in the world.
The temple has been embroiled in controversies. It faced criticism after a 2021 civil lawsuit alleging forced labour, meagre wages and grim working conditions. The complaint alleged that those exploited were Dalits or members of the former untouchable caste in India. However, 12 of the 19 plaintiffs later retracted their allegations and the lawsuit is on hold pending an investigation.
Yogi Trivedi, who supervised the temple project, was quoted in the media as saying that Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the sects fifth spiritual successor, who envisioned such a temple campus in the US, was a progressive guru who cared deeply about social equality. Caste and class do not divide us, he said.
