TORONTO, CANADA, July 7, 2007: (HPI note: Hinduism Today and HPI publisher Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami will be an honored guest at this opening on July 22.) Welcome to the new Canada now taking shape at Highway 427 and Finch Ave., it comes in the form of one of the most extraordinary buildings ever seen in this country. Though the name, Swaminarayan Mandir, won’t mean much to most Canadians, no one could help but notice this remarkable structure. The local Hindu community (there are 191,305 Hindus in Toronto, according to Statistics Canada), which paid for the $40 million building without any public or foundation funding and provided 400 volunteer workers, wants the world to know it has arrived.
Walls and ceilings are embellished with carved figures, both human and animal — everything from dancing women to elephants and peacocks. The fact that every element, big and small, is carved in stone, only makes the effect that much more astonishing. Indeed, the temple is a monument to skills largely lost in our mechanized age. The materials–marble from India and Italy, limestone from Turkey–were shipped first to a series of villages in India where they were sculpted into their final form. The pieces were then transported to Toronto to be assembled. Given that there were more than 24,000 individual parts, this was no mean feat.
As project manager, engineer Naren Sachdev, one of many who have donated their time and expertise to the building of the temple, explains, each piece was marked with a bar code to facilitate construction. This unique combination of ancient techniques and modern technology allowed the complex to be finished in record time. The project started in 2005 and opens officially in two weeks. Because work stopped during winter, actual construction time was only 18 months. Despite the use of computers and high-tech equipment, the building itself could have been constructed several millennia ago. No steel was used in the building at all, it’s stone piled on stone. The columns, of which there are 340, are solid rock. The building, Sachdev points out, will last a thousand years.
Beneath the mandir, at ground level, is the Indo-Canadian Museum of Cultural Heritage. This will be the specifically Canadian addition to what is otherwise a traditional complex, a nod to multiculturalism. “This is a place open to all,” says community leader Suresh Thakrar. “That’s especially appropriate considering that it’s a global project. We also want people to be educated about Indo-Canadians.” “We believe this is a living building, so it has to be built in a certain way,” adds Nitya Vivek Swami, a Hindu monk who has lived in Toronto since the project began.