Hindu Temple of Greater Chicagoਗ੍ਰੇਟਰ ਸ਼ਿਕਾਗੋ ਦਾ ਹਿੰਦੂ ਮੰਦਰ, ਲੇਮੋਂਟ

On a wooded bluff above the Des Plaines River valley in Lemont, Illinois, two white temple towers rise over a suburban road about 25 miles southwest of downtown Chicago. The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago, opened with a kumbhabhishekham consecration on 4 July 1986, is one of the oldest traditional Hindu temple complexes in the American Midwest. Its campus holds not one temple but two, built in two different classical styles of India: a Rama temple in the Chola style of the South, and a Ganesha Shiva Durga temple in the Kalinga style of the East, joined by a community centre and a spiritual centre named for Swami Vivekananda. For the Hindu families of Chicagoland it has been a place of daily worship, festivals, classes and weddings for nearly four decades.

What is the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago?

The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago (HTGC) is a Hindu temple complex at 10915 Lemont Road, Lemont, Illinois, United States. The Rama temple houses images of Rama, Sita and Lakshmana together with Ganesha, Hanuman, Venkateswara, Mahalakshmi, Krishna and Radha. The Ganesha Shiva Durga temple, across the connecting community centre, houses Shiva, Ganesha, Durga, Subrahmanya, Parvathi, Nataraja, Ayyappa and the Navagraha, the nine planetary deities. A fourth building, the Swami Vivekananda Spiritual Center, hosts yoga, meditation and spiritual lectures. The temple is a not for profit organisation, founded in 1977, and its stated purpose is to promote Hindu dharma, religion and traditions, and culture. It serves devotees from across the Chicago metropolitan area and the wider Midwest.

How did a community in rented halls build this temple?

The temple began in 1977, when a group of South Indian community leaders in the Chicago area formed the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago organisation. They chose Rama as the main deity of the future temple because of his wide appeal among Hindu immigrants in the United States. After looking at around thirty sites across the metropolitan area, the organisation bought eighteen acres of undeveloped bluff land near Lemont, judging it on accessibility, seclusion and cost. Fundraising and loans paid for the work. Through 1982 and 1983 the growing congregation still had no building of its own, holding rituals and gatherings in a home and in rented halls in Downers Grove and Romeoville. The road was not smooth: in 1983 and 1984 a group of Telugu professionals, frustrated by slow progress, left to build their own Venkateswara temple in Aurora, a split that scholars of American religion have used to show how hard it was for a young immigrant community to unite the regions and traditions of India behind one project. Those who stayed laid the Rama temple's foundation stone in June 1984, and two years later, on 4 July 1986, the temple was inaugurated and opened to the public.

Two temples, two styles: Chola and Kalinga

The campus is a small lesson in Indian architecture. The Rama temple was built by master artisans and sculptors brought from India, working to the authentic style of the Chola dynasty, with an 80 foot gopuram, the carved gateway tower of South Indian temples described in Jugti's guide to Dravida temple architecture. The second temple took shape in 1994, when the original building on the site was converted into the Ganesha Shiva Durga temple and consecrated with its own kumbhabhishekham that summer. It is built in the architectural style of the Kalinga dynasty of eastern India, so a visitor can walk in a few minutes from a South Indian tower to an eastern Indian shrine, a pairing that reflects the temple's founding aim of serving Hindus of every region under one roof. Read alongside the other early American temples on Jugti, the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh and the Malibu Hindu Temple in California, Lemont shows how the first generation of temple builders in the United States each solved the same question, how to build India faithfully in a new land, in a different regional language of stone.

Why is there a statue of Swami Vivekananda at Lemont?

On a hillock in the temple grounds, overlooking the main entrance, stands a 10 foot bronze statue of Swami Vivekananda. It was installed on 12 July 1998 and unveiled by J. C. Sharma, then Consul General of India in Chicago, at a ceremony led by Swami Atmasthanandaji of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission before more than 2,000 devotees and admirers. The standing figure is modelled on a photograph of Vivekananda taken in Chicago after his celebrated appearance at the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893, the visit that first introduced Hindu thought to a wide American audience. The Commons record describes it as the first statue of Vivekananda installed in a public place in the United States. The temple's Vivekananda Spiritual Center, beside the statue, carries that link into daily life with lectures, yoga and meditation, tying a suburban Illinois temple back to the city where Vivekananda spoke more than a century earlier.

A working temple, not a monument

Lemont is a living religious and cultural centre rather than a showpiece. The temple's own calendar runs daily poojas and archanas alongside the full festival year, from Navaratri and Diwali to Skanda Shashti, with Ram Katha discourses, children's Saraswathi pooja, cultural programmes, dance and music, and fireworks for Dussehra and Diwali. Around worship sit education and community life: Sunday school, Gita lessons, language and music classes, youth activities, seniors' programmes, meditation workshops, health screening and humanitarian projects. A canteen serves South Indian food, and the auditorium and dining hall host the lectures and celebrations of the wider Indian community of the southwest suburbs. Tens of thousands of devotees and visitors pass through in a year, many of them families for whom the bluff at Lemont is the nearest thing to the temple town they left behind.

Visiting the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago

The temple stands at 10915 Lemont Road, Lemont, Illinois 60439, southwest of Chicago and reached by car from Interstate 55. The temple's own site lists opening hours of 9 in the morning to 9 in the evening daily, with the last archana at 8:30 in the evening. Entry is free, and visitors are welcome as guests at a working temple: dress modestly, remove footwear where asked, and follow the priests' and volunteers' directions during rituals. Festival days bring the crowds, the music and the food; a quiet weekday morning best shows the two white towers against the woods of the Des Plaines valley. Combine a visit with Jugti's other American mandir entries, from Pittsburgh in the east to Malibu in the west, to trace how Hindu temple building took root across the United States.