Desi WI: The India Religious Society and Hindu Temple
Early Indian immigrants to Milwaukee felt a strong need to pass on their culture and religion to their children despite the lack of a temple. One way this was accomplished was through the India Religious Society: meeting in homes, doctors' offices, and church basements, these families worked together to impart their beliefs and values to their children.
On the founding of the India Religious Society: “That (preserving Indian heritage) was one of the concerns for everybody here. That ‘how are we going to educate our children? How do we implant and invite some Indian values or things we think are good and so on.’ And so some of the few friends got together, and we thought maybe we should have something like Bible school. Similar to Bible school, we can have something like Indian cultural school, so that we can tell our children and teach some of the values, Indian values that we consider very dear to us. And so that’s how we started.
We called it ‘India Religious Society’. It wasn’t a Hindu religious society, it was not a Buddhist religious society, not a Jain or Sikh, but India Religious Society. So all the religions that were there in India, we wanted to give them an exposure to each one’s different ideology and values. So we will meet every fortnight, at one of the place, which may be in some doctor’s office, basement, or somebody’s house...we didn’t have any Indian temple built in those days. And most of our children, even now, miss not having that type of program.’
-Dr. Sanath Gandhi, Desi WI Oral History Project, UWM Archives Special Collections
“And since we didn’t have temples, we realized that people were taking their children to Chicago to go to the temple. So that’s when we thought maybe we can come together and build a temple...and that temple would have a community center, a community hall. And the Indians, by that time, we had over I think the Indian population was over 1000, maybe more (in the late 1980s)...so we floated that idea, and we started a group to see the feasibility of this. By that time we had collected in the early part we collected donations from everybody...and we had collected over $300,000, and some members who were there were in real estate, and they said “hey, we can buy this land over here”. And I said, if you buy land, that is a good start, then we can, we have something, it is not something up in the air. We say “look, here we have the land. Now we have to build”. We bought the land, and that was the crucial part because there was something to show off to our community...and it took us three years to collect enough money so that we could build, of course we had to get loan, but banks were willing to knowing the community at large, they could see that we could afford a temple, and that’s how we started. So it was a risky move for many of us, but we felt it was necessary, and this would really help and gel the entire Indian community to come together.”
-Dr. Sudhakar Wagle, Desi WI Oral History Project, UWM Archives Special Collections
