Hindu Sacred Place
Credit River ritual raises ripple in Peel
Local Hindu leaders lobbying for sacred place to scatter ashes, make offerings
Mar 03, 2007 04:30 AM
Phinjo Gombu
STAFF REPORTER
Adrienne Duff noticed them three years ago, drifting in a Brampton branch of the Credit River.
Clusters of flowers, plastic statues, coconuts – some still wrapped in plastic – even jewellery and money.
"We started receiving calls from landowners, not just on Fletcher's Creek but also in the main Credit area," said Duff, a watershed-monitoring specialist with Credit Valley Conservation.
The mystery was traced to devout Hindus who were making river offerings as a means of conveying blessings, part of their traditional worship.
Worried about the potential environmental impact, the conservation agency, along with Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, which is seeing similar things, began the delicate task of finding a compromise.
Priests and temple elders promised to help by urging community members to limit their offerings to small amounts of flowers.
But that was only part of it.
Devout Hindus hope their cremated remains will be dispersed in moving water. The ritual, a symbolic cleansing of the body, is being quietly practised within a GTA Hindu community of 200,000, as of the 2001 census, that is growing rapidly.
"In any discussion of the issue of river offerings, we cannot avoid discussing the issue of ash remains," said Roopnauth Sharma, president of the Federation of Hindu Temples of Canada and a spiritual leader at Ram Mandir (temple) in Mississauga. Hindus hope to find a safe and sanctioned place where last rites and other rituals can be performed freely.
"Right now this is happening in Ontario," Sharma said. "People are dying and people are depositing ashes (in lakes and rivers). We're not sure whether it's against the law."
The province's environment ministry says it has no problem with the practice so long as it is carried out with "dignity, decorum and consideration of other members of the community." Conservation authorities argue it is not allowed and is subject to local bylaws.
The need for clarity has become acute as the time-honoured practice of flying ashes back to India for immersion in the Ganges River is losing its lustre within a Hindu community that has become increasingly integrated into Canadian life.
Beginning with a small temple in the '70s on Queen St. W., Hindus have founded at least 20 temples around the Golden Horseshoe.
Not only is sending ashes to India expensive, but second- and third-generation Hindu Canadians, whose roots range from Guyana and Trinidad to South Africa and Fiji, often have little if any emotional connection remaining with India.
Immersing ashes in a river, somewhere, is one of the final steps in the elaborate death ritual for a devout Hindu. But in Canada its legality has yet to be confronted head-on.
"We've concluded that we cannot just stop people from doing it," Sharma said.
He and other spiritual leaders are quietly preparing to lobby for a spot, somewhere on a river or lake system, that would be designated as a place to make offerings and scatter ashes.
It's a highly emotional issue for Inderjit Bhagria, a 73-year-old elder and head of the Hindu Sabha temple, whose tower dominates the skyline of The Gore Rd. north of Highway 7.
The former machinist has lived here for 37 years and – though India still tugs at his heartstrings – he believes his home is here alongside his son, daughter, grandchildren, in-laws and wife.
"The time will come when people won't (send their ashes) over there (to India) if there is a nice place here," said Bhagria, a volunteer at the temple.
"My instructions to my family and friends are, Why should we take our ashes there when we are living over here?"
"If we have a proper place, those ashes should be immersed here in a proper way."
"The proper way" is the operative phrase, explained Shastri Abhay Dev Sharma, a priest who leads a congregation of more than 3,000 devotees at the Brampton Hindu Sabha.
Sharma is co-operating with the conservation authority by distributing its flyers, but said it's hard to stop the congregation from practising its beliefs.
"It's the completion of the cycle, the central tenet of Hindu belief," Pandit Sharma, of Ram Mandir, said of the ash ritual.
Mohan Magoo, who sits on the executive of the Hindu Sabha, said the government has yet to offer a solution.
"We can assure you that if we are given a place where we can freely put our offerings in the water, people will not go quietly in the night and make their offerings" (elsewhere), Magoo said.
"We would love to do it properly," he said. "Right now the priest cannot go there (to the water) because it's illegal. If there's a proper place where it can be done properly with (the priest's) blessings, people would love to do it that way."
Duff said the conservation authority is treading carefully, not taking an enforcement-minded approach to the prohibition of religious offerings in the rivers, and not dealing with the issue of human ashes at all.
In India, she points out, the rivers used for such purposes may be large, but streams in the GTA are not. "Our perspective is that anything that is placed in the river that is not naturally found there has the potential to impact the health of the river."
Providing a designated place is not something the conservation authority can address, she said, adding that attempts have been made to connect Hindu leaders with the appropriate private and government agencies.
In England, Hindus have received permission to scatter ashes on the banks of a river in Yorkshire near Bradford and the River Soar in Leicester.
For Pandit Sharma, it is not a question of whether but when.
"When there were only X number of people here, it wasn't a big issue," he said. "But now the demographics show that the community has grown, and there are people who are born here and they don't want to necessarily have their ashes going back to the motherland.
"This is the motherland, and it should be done here."
