 |
||
|
||
|
||
[Caption] The Hindu temple in Lemont is framed by the temple's entrance. A $4.5 million community center is being built nearby. Construction at Chicago-area Hindu temples is booming, with two established temples expanding and new structures in the works. (Tribune photo by Ed Wagner)
The sign outside warns he is entering a hard-hat area, but the earthmovers are silent as Bharat Shah slips off his shoes and walks inside the Lemont house of worship.
As he waits to worship, Shah looks over the sprawling complex. Stacks of bricks are piled beside two ornate temples, the building blocks of a rising $4.5 million community center.
There are plans for Indian language classes, history lessons-even a gift shop with traditional Hindu wares.
"There were no temples when I got here," said Shah, a certified public accountant from Aurora who arrived in America 28 years ago. "Now, we are bringing India here."
Fueled by a growing and increasingly affluent Indian population, construction at Chicago-area Hindu temples is booming, with two established temples expanding and new ones in the works.
In Bartlett, crews recently finished an almost 100,000- square-foot Indian community center, the first phase of a three-part plan to build one of the largest Hindu facilities in the country.
In Aurora, just south of Interstate Highway 88, workers have painstakingly renovated the towers atop the crumbling Balaji Temple.
Soon, they will knock down two walls and expand the facility by 10,000 square feet an attempt to keep up with the demands of growing crowds.
A fundraiser has been scheduled for construction of another Hindu temple in DuPage County, and one observer says there is initial interest in six more.
The structures, elaborate and expensive, are perhaps the most visible symbol of the Indian-Americans' growing influence in the Chicago area. According to census figures, there were about 58,000 Indians living in the area in 1990. Experts now place the number as high as 150,000.
"If you look at the profile of the Indian community, they're one of the wealthiest, most educated immigrant groups," said Joseph Alter, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. "They have been extremely successful in going the mainstream, integration route.
"These temples provide a place where they can reclaim their heritage and identity while at the same time becoming Americans in a very real sense."
The temples can be stunning-and costly.
The architecture, based on Hindu tradition, is exacting. For the most intricate work carvings on temple towers or in wooden poles and balconies workers are flown in from India, where temple building is an art form handed down through generations.
To build the $12 million community center in Bartlett, the BAPS Swaminarayan sect brought over 45 artisans from India, men who spent months carving peacocks and swans, elephants and flowers into pillars of Burma teak.
Grand balconies overlook tall arches, the deep brown wood engraved top-to-bottom with tattoo-like symbols, the relief cut 1-inch thick.
In Aurora, 12 Indian workers spent six days a week restoring cracked artwork atop the Balaji Temple, creaky scaffolding surrounding 20-foot-tall "gopurams," multi- layered towers white-washed like wedding cakes that rise above statues of deities inside.
Armed with flat steel knives and small buckets of mortar, the temple builders carved the heads of lions and petals of flowers into drying cement, symbols too small to be seen from the ground, details lost on commuters who whiz by on nearby I-88.
"It's not like building a house or an office building," said Velu P. Shunmugavelu, project manager for the Balaji Temple, surrounded by homes on three sides, a small cornfield and the interstate on the other. "It takes a lot of effort and a lot of knowledge."
The Balaji expansion project, set to start this year, will cost about $1.5 million. The three-phase BAPS facility in Bartlett will cost about $30 million, including a visitor center and a temple with more than a dozen marble spires.
All of the projects are funded by contributions from area Hindus, a combination of established families and newcomers lured across the ocean, often by high-paying jobs in information technology.
In Lemont, temple officials said they have received individual contributions from wealthy Chicago Indians of up to $300,000. A one-day fundraiser for the BAPS temple brought in $3.5 million.
"People very clearly are putting a lot of money into these temples," said Jacob Kinnard, assistant professor of Indian religion at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. "It's part of the very basic Hindu beliefs. Giving to the temple is selfless giving."
Most Indian immigrants arrived in the U.S. after 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration Reform Act, loosening restrictions on Asian migration. Many were professionals or scholars, engineers or scientists looking for a better opportunity.
Niranjan Shah arrived in 1970, so poor he had to live in subsidized housing. There were only a handful of Indians in the Chicago area, and few were particularly wealthy. For years they worshiped in homes or storefronts, their numbers not large enough to support a large temple.
Shah took a factory job to earn money for college at Harvard, then earned a master's degree.
By 1977, there were enough Indians in the area to form the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago, a not-for-profit organization designed to raise money for construction of the facility in Lemont.
By then, Shah and others who arrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s were beginning to hit their stride financially.
Shah co-founded Globetrotters Engineering Corp., a Chicago-based firm that has worked on O'Hare International Airport and the Deep Tunnel project. Friends were established as doctors and pharmacists, business owners and engineers.
Now, assimilated and successful, they are giving back.
"The Indian community has been very generous," Shah said. Shah has contributed "in kind" donations to the BAPS temple in Bartlett.
"We are able to do good for ourselves because most of us have a master's degree," he said. "We're settling in, and most of us want to do something for the next generation."
The growing temples have also been helped by the information technology revolution, which has boosted the number of wealthy Indians in the Chicago area.
Responding to pressure from high-tech companies, the federal government has increased the number of temporary work visas issued per year from 65,000 in 1997 to 195,000 in 2001.
Because India has been more successful in training computer experts, American companies have begun to recruit employees overseas, luring Indian workers with high-paying jobs.
According to Immigration and Naturalization Service figures, 40 percent of all temporary work visas are issued to Indians, who are flocking to the Silicon Valley and Seattle, New York and Chicago.
"Let's face facts, we're in a war for talent," said Bob Jerich, a spokesman for Lucent Technologies in Lisle, which has recruited workers from Pakistan and India. "It is a difficult challenge to recruit and hire technical people."
Rajinder Bedi, chief editor of the Indian Reporter and World News, a national Indian affairs newspaper based in Chicago, said the push for information technology workers has created a community of Hindus along the I-88 corridor in the western suburbs, where most of the temples have been built or are planned. Combined with the children of Indian immigrants from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the group has formed a strong base for growth.
Bedi said he has heard of six other Hindu groups that would like to build large temples and are looking for funding.
While area temples generally include shrines to several deities, traditional Indian temples are usually devoted to just one.
Part of the push to build new temples in the Chicago area, experts say, is driven by the desire to have separate facilities in which to worship individual deities.
Not everyone agrees more temples are needed-or that the elaborate structures are the best use of money.
R.S. Rajan, director of the Indo-American Center in Chicago, said he believes there already are enough temples in the Chicago area.
"These are very costly structures," he said. "Once they are built, it costs a lot to keep them running."
In her book "Namaste America," a study of Indian migration to the Chicago area, author Padma Rangaswamy writes that there are concerns in the Indian community about whether the huge temples will be supported by younger members in the future.
Others say they are essential, not just for religious reasons but to teach Indian children their heritage.
Back in Lemont, Parul Patel stands in the temple's reception area, talking to friends and preparing to worship.
The Aurora nurse immigrated 27 years ago, and has two small children.
When the community center is complete, she will enroll her kids in classes to learn traditional Indian values.
"A lot of our children don't know
how to speak the language," Patel said. "It's very important for me."
|
||
|
||
|
||