A fight to save a Hindu temple for the 'unheard and unseen'

NEW YORK (RNS) — Illuminated by a skylight at the center of a small factory-turned-Hindu temple in Queens sits a murti of the Divine Mother — a 1-ton, 6-foot-tall icon of the South Indian village goddess Mariamman, an incarnation of Kali, the deity of time and death.

Smoke from cigarettes and incense fills the room, and bottles of rum sit next to fruit at the altar. “Our religion is very rural, very villagelike,” said Chandni Kalu, 31, a priestess at the Richmond Hill temple. “It’s very raw.”

Even other Hindus might find Sunday worship services at the Shri Shakti Mariammaa temple unfamiliar. The mostly Indo-Caribbean congregants worship goddess Kali, who also represents transcendental knowledge that can manifest within, or spiritually possess, her followers. At a recent service, a young male pujari, or lay priest, shook and danced vigorously through the crowd, entranced with Shakti, the feminine energy that inhabits someone possessed by Kali.

“We are a healing temple,” said Sharda Ramsami, one of the original members of the temple when it was founded in 2008. “Whether it’s something physical or something spiritual, we arealways the last resort, and when people come here, they’re desperate for help. I think that’s what’s most powerful: that desperation, and then here’s the answer that no one else could provide for them. Mother knows.”

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