ONTARIO, CANADA, April 12, 2007: The Niagara River, which leads to Niagara Falls, could become Canada’s stand-in for the sacred Ganga in India. As the tradition of sending ashes back to India’s holy rivers becomes less popular with second- and third-generation Canadian Hindus, Ontario’s Hindu community wants a waterway designated for traditional burial rituals. The chosen river or lake would also be used to dispose of flowers and leaves offered to the Deities by the faithful. “Currently, people are depositing the ashes in bodies of water, in Lake Ontario and other places, but they are doing it in a very unceremonious manner — with fears in their minds that they may be doing something wrong,” said Roopnauth Sharma, the president of the United Hindu Federation and the spiritual leader of the Shri Ram temple in Mississauga. There is no law in Canada preventing one from depositing ashes in a lake or river. He speaks on behalf of most of the large temples in Ontario and has spearheaded the designated river project for the past 30 years. He insists that this is not just a local concern: “This is a Canada issue. Our objective is to establish some kind of a precedent here and then, of course, template this across the country.”
Besides India, the only other country that has designated rivers for Hindu burial ceremonies is England. That country’s Hindu community scatters ashes of their loved ones in the River Aire near Bradford in Yorkshire and the River Soar in Leicester. Designating a river does nothing to limit the access of the public to the body of water, but rather ensures a standardized approach to the burial practice, said Ron Banerjee, director of public relations with the Hindu Conference of Canada. “It’s not going to be a private river where only Hindus can go and nobody else can,” he said. “It means that the Hindu people, within the temples, will be informed of this river and they will be asked to go to that river to do this tradition, instead of just going to any river that they find. It’s just a standardized spot.”
Canada is home to almost 300,000 Hindus, including more than 200,000 in Ontario, according to data from the 2001 census. British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec have the largest communities outside Ontario. The Hindu communities from those three provinces said they don’t have enough members to justify having their own river.