BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham, RobbinsvilleBAPS ਸਵਾਮੀਨਾਰਾਇਣ ਅਕਸ਼ਰਧਾਮ, ਰੌਬਿਨਸਵਿਲ

On farmland in Mercer County, New Jersey, a city of carved stone has risen in little more than a decade. BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville is a vast Hindu mandir campus built by the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, the organisation that follows Swaminarayan (1781 to 1830) as the highest manifestation of God. Its great Akshardham mandir, built between 2015 and 2023, is described as the largest Hindu mandir in the Western Hemisphere by a significant margin. Around it stand an earlier traditional mandir opened in 2014, a stepwell, a welcome centre and a research institute, spread across a campus of about 183 acres. It is the American counterpart to the Akshardham BAPS built in India, traced on Jugti at Akshardham, Delhi.

What is BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham, Robbinsville?

BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham is a Hindu temple complex in Robbinsville, Mercer County, New Jersey, in the United States. The central shrine honours Swaminarayan together with his first spiritual successor Gunatitanand Swami, worshipped as Akshar Purushottam Maharaj. The wider campus holds 13 shrines in the main mandir, honouring deities including Radha Krishna, Sita Rama with Lakshman and Hanuman, Shiva Parvati with Kartikeya and Ganesha, and Venkateswara with Padmavathi. It is one of three Akshardham mandirs built by BAPS, alongside those in New Delhi and Gandhinagar in India, and it was conceived both as a place of worship for North American followers and as a place where visitors of any background can meet Hindu spirituality, architecture and peace.

How was the largest mandir in the Americas built?

The project began as a vision of Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the fifth spiritual leader of BAPS, who initiated the campus in 1984. Land was bought in 2008, and in October 2011 he performed the ceremony sanctifying the foundation stones in Mumbai. The campus's first temple, a smaller traditional shikharbaddha mandir built of Italian Carrara marble, opened to the public in August 2014. Construction of the great Akshardham mandir itself began in 2015: its outer wall was finished in the summer of 2020, and the final stone was set in place on 31 May 2023. Between 2011 and 2023 more than 12,500 volunteers helped build the campus, shaping and installing about two million cubic feet of stone. Stone came from many countries, marble from Greece, Turkey and Italy, limestone from Bulgaria and Turkey, pink sandstone from Rajasthan and granite from India, and much of it was carved in Pindwara, Rajasthan, test assembled without mortar, then coded, shipped some 12,500 miles and reassembled in New Jersey by trained volunteers.

Nine shikhars and 10,000 statues

The mandir was designed under the guidance of the ancient Hindu architectural texts, in the broad North Indian tradition explored in Jugti's guide to Nagara temple architecture. It carries nine shikhars, the rising towers that stand as a visual metaphor for reaching towards enlightenment, and nine pyramidal domes called samarans. Its great central shikhar rises about 120 feet, and the building as a whole is recorded at 191 feet high, 255 feet long and 345 feet wide. Inside and out are more than 10,000 statues, statuettes and carved motifs of Indian music and dance, including all 108 poses of the Bharatanatyam dance carved in one structure for the first time, and 548 carved marble pillars, some telling stories from the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana. The central image of Swaminarayan stands 15.5 feet tall, cast in panchdhatu, an alloy of five metals. Around the mandir runs a colonnade of red sandstone some 2,485 feet long, shaped, its builders say, like a garland laid in reverence.

The campus: a stepwell, a plaza and a research institute

Visitors arrive at Nilkanth Plaza, named for the teenage form of Swaminarayan, where a 49 foot bronze image of Nilkanth Varni stands in a yogic posture: the height marks the 49 years of Swaminarayan's life, and the figure recalls his seven year journey across India as a youth. Nearby, the Brahma Kund is a traditional Indian stepwell holding sanctified water gathered from more than 300 sources, among them 108 holy rivers of India and rivers of the United States. A welcome centre built in the haveli style from hand carved Burmese teak leads to a vegetarian cafe serving food prepared on sattvik principles, and in June 2022 the campus opened the BAPS Swaminarayan Research Institute, dedicated to Hindu philosophy, scholarship and the arts. A six acre solar farm supplies electricity to the campus. The whole site was inaugurated over nine days in the autumn of 2023, after a three month Festival of Inspirations: on 8 October 2023 Mahant Swami Maharaj, the sixth spiritual leader of BAPS, performed the consecration and formally opened the mandir.

What should visitors know about the building's contested history?

The mandir's construction also drew legal scrutiny, and an honest guide records it plainly. In May 2021 several artisans from India who had worked on the site filed a lawsuit alleging that temple administrators had violated labour laws, with claims of very low pay and forced labour reported in the press at the time. A BAPS spokesperson denied the allegations, saying the artisans had come as religious volunteers out of devotion rather than as employees. By July 2023, 12 of the plaintiffs had withdrawn from the case, their lawyer saying they believed the claims were false and citing their religious convictions, and the lawsuit was reported on hold pending a federal investigation. The questions the case raised, about how United States labour law treats religious volunteer work, were debated in national coverage as the temple opened.

Visiting BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham

The campus stands in Robbinsville, a township in Mercer County between Trenton and the New Jersey suburbs of New York, and it welcomes visitors of all faiths as well as worshippers. Come as a guest at a working temple: dress modestly, expect to leave footwear before entering the mandir, and allow time for the plaza, the stepwell and the carved halls as well as the sanctums. Devotees of Venkateswara will find his shrine here too, a link across the campus to the great hill temple of Tirumala in India and to the California temple on this run's companion page, the Malibu Hindu Temple.