The Diaspora and Global Sri Vidya

On Friday 5 October 1979, a full-moon day, in a house in Lusaka, a Sri Lankan Tamil whom the temple’s own page calls Haran Aiya, and his wife, sat for eight hours while a physicist from Bombay, then teaching in Lusaka, gave them sixteen Sri Vidya mantras, the Maha Shodasakshari among them.

Neither man was in India. Neither man was from the tradition’s heartland. The one giving the initiation, Amritananda Natha Saraswati, was a Tata Institute of Fundamental Research physicist on a two-year professorship at the University of Zambia, and would not found Devipuram for another four. The one receiving it was a government architect who had emigrated from Jaffna in 1971, and he was not a Brahmin.

Everything this chapter can document about a Sri Vidya institution outside India runs through that night.

It was not the beginning of his practice. He had been holding public pujas every Friday in Lusaka, with the Lalita Sahasranama, the thousand names of the goddess, chanted at them as a regular offering, since some point after he arrived in 1971, and he had taken an earlier mantra initiation in Sri Lanka from a woman ascetic, Srilasri Sivasatchidananda Mataji. What 1979 gave him was Sri Vidya.

What the numbers actually say

Start with the scale, because the usual account of diaspora religion gets it the wrong way round.

The largest concentration of Indians outside India is in the Gulf. On the Indian Ministry of External Affairs’ own tables, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia together hold just over six million, and roughly ninety-nine point nine per cent of them are non-resident Indians, that is, Indian nationals rather than people of Indian descent. The United States, by the same tables, holds about four and a half million, of whom some three point two million are persons of Indian origin. In Canada the settled proportion is about eighty-nine per cent and in the United Kingdom about eighty.

The tables themselves deserve a word. They carry no date, no reference period and no statement of method, and a second version circulates giving 35,421,987, which this chapter could not retrieve from the ministry’s own site and has only at second hand. That version’s United Kingdom figure is 1,864,318, which is the England and Wales census count for the Indian ethnic group in 2021 to the person, and would mean the ministry is importing host-country census data.

What the asymmetry means is simple. Institutions follow settlement, not headcount. Six million Indians in the Gulf have built very little, because most of them are there on work visas and cannot build. The most prominent recent Hindu foundation in the region, the BAPS mandir at Abu Dhabi, was consecrated on 14 February 2024 and has seven shrines: Akshar-Purushottam, Radha-Krishna, Sita-Rama, Parvati-Shankar, Jagannath, Padmavati-Shrinivas, Ayyappa. There is no Sri Chakra in it and no Lalita.

In the settled countries the story is different, and still not what the chapter used to claim. The Immigration and Nationality Act that President Johnson signed on 3 October 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas; the Indian quota before it had been a hundred a year, and ninety-nine people were admitted in 1965. By 1970 the figure was 9,712. In the 2023 financial year, beneficiaries born in India received 279,386 of 386,318 approved H-1B petitions, 72.3 per cent of them. Pew’s analysis of census data puts about 4.9 million people of Indian origin in the United States on Pew’s pooled estimate for 2021 to 2023, sixty-six per cent of them immigrants, down from seventy-three per cent in 2000. The community is settling.

But the temples that generation built were not Sakta. The Sri Venkateswara Temple at Pittsburgh, consecrated on 8 June 1977 and described by the Pluralism Project as the first Hindu temple consecrated in the United States, was dedicated to the Venkateswara of Tirupati, funded by more than six thousand mostly first-generation immigrants, and built with a loan from the Tirupati temple trust that was repaid in two years. The Ganesha temple at Flushing in Queens was consecrated on 4 July the same year. One is Vaishnava and one Ganapatya.

Nothing this chapter found puts Sri Vidya in the founding generation of American Hinduism.

The one place it did take root

Haran Aiya moved to the United States in 1980 and set up a peetam in his own house. In 1981 he received the name Sri Chaitanyananda Natha Saraswati. In 1992 he was asked to take over the regular worship of a granite image of Sri Rajarajeswari, the goddess of the Sri Chakra. In 1998 he opened the Sri Rajarajeswari Peetam at Rush, in upstate New York, after what the temple describes as a lengthy search for a suitable location.

He is known to everyone as Aiya.

What goes on there has been described twice in print by academics, one of whom took initiation from him in the course of the work, and that makes it, so far as this chapter can establish, the only Sri Vidya institution outside India that anybody has studied.

The temple’s own account of itself: its pujaris include men, women, young and old; visitors may approach the deities and perform abhishekam at the weekly Saturday programme; people of every ethnic and national background are encouraged to learn and perform the pujas after initiation. Its phrase is that all have an equal right to worship her.

Note the clause at the end of that sentence. The openness at Rush is real and it has a gate. The sanctum is open to lay people, which is not normal in Hindu temples; women hold ritual office; devotees handle the deities. But the Sri Vidya rites themselves are gated by initiation, and the anointing of the goddess is screened from the uninitiated. What has been removed is caste and gender. What has not been removed is diksha.

Two scholars, and the state of the field

Corinne Dempsey published The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York with Oxford in 2006, after five years of participant observation. Oxford’s own description calls Aiya “an exuberant Sri Lankan guru” and says the temple and its guru “defy convention by training and encouraging non-brahmans and women to publicly perform priestly roles, and by teaching the secrets of Srividya, a highly exclusive Tantric tradition.” Eliza Kent, reviewing the book, calls him a non-Brahman originally from Sri Lanka; the Tamil identification comes from Kumar.

She took a mantra from Aiya in the course of writing, and did not hide it. Her reviewer Eliza Kent records that Dempsey remains a Roman Catholic with sympathies toward liberation theology, that she was initiated into the Sri Vidya path, and that she reports experiencing the goddess’s grace during temple rituals. Kent places her among self-reflexive anthropologists and argues that attending to her own responses is what keeps the book from being about herself.

Kent’s summary of the argument is worth having, because it explains the gate. Aiya grounds his authority in agamic standards transmitted through his guru lineage, and that orthodoxy is precisely what licenses him to break the social rules elsewhere.

P. Pratap Kumar, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, published on the same temple in South Asian Diaspora in 2014. His method could hardly be more different. He went looking for somewhere to take a class of his Hinduism students, was invited by a woman he met, and visited twice while a visiting professor in New York State: a Navaratri festival in October 2012 and an ordinary midday ritual in April 2013. He says plainly, “I was not there to experience Ayya’s power and authority,” and discloses no initiation anywhere in the article, its notes or its acknowledgements.

What he observed: that Aiya is neither Brahman nor Smarta nor, in his phrase, a traditional Hindu; that most of his followers are of non-Brahmanical background; that the inner sanctum is open to lay people; that a woman performed the midday ritual; and that a woman barred from chanting the Lalita Sahasranama in South India chants it there, which he notes the Smarta tradition restricts to men. His frame is Bourdieu, and his conclusion is that transgression is what puts Aiya at the centre of ritual power.

Two readings, then. Dempsey’s Aiya is making a home. Kumar’s Aiya is accumulating ritual capital by breaking rules. And Kumar draws Aiya’s biography chiefly from Dempsey, supplementing it from the temple’s own website, and refers his readers to her for the rest.

One long insider account, and one short outsider account built on it. That is the whole of the scholarship on diaspora Sri Vidya. Saying so is more useful than a list.

What this chapter used to claim, and cannot

The earlier version of this chapter described three waves of migration, institutions across six countries, and a bidirectional flow of teaching between the diaspora and India. None of it survives checking.

The three waves are nobody’s periodisation. The 1965 Act and the H-1B figures support something like two stages, professional and then technological, but the third wave the chapter described, of students travelling to India for training and returning, is not migration at all. It is movement by people who already live where they live.

The institutions across six countries could not be found. Searching turned up one substantial diaspora Sri Vidya body, at Rush. Devipuram’s own notice names two affiliated organisations, the Sri Vidya Temple Society at Rush and a body called IAIRE in the United States, which that page identifies only by its country and two contact persons, Alok Baveja and Aravind Srinivasan. Searching the open web and the American exempt-organisations records for IAIRE turned up nothing further, which is a limit of this chapter’s search. For the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Singapore and the Gulf it found nothing, which is a limit of the search and not a finding that nothing exists.

Four of the organisations the chapter used to list are not Sri Vidya bodies at all. The Vimarsha Foundation, which Sthaneshwar Timalsina founded in San Diego in 2019, teaches Sarvamnaya, the full Kaula revelation, through the Nepalese Krama system. Paul Muller-Ortega’s Blue Throat Yoga teaches a meditation he derives from Svatantra. Christopher Wallis’s Tantra Illuminated, created in 2019, describes itself as Classical Tantra; Abhinavagupta and the Krama texts appear on that page in the titles of his books rather than in its account of itself. The Lakshmanjoo Academy in Oregon preserves the Kashmiri material. Three of the four never mention Sri Vidya on the pages this chapter read; the fourth names it once, in the alt text of a photograph of a Sri Yantra, where it is called the Srividya Kaula tradition. Vimarsha describes itself as Saiva-Sakta; the other three as Saiva. They share a tantric genealogy with Srividya and an overlapping Western audience, and they are not the same lineage.

The Srividya Learning Center, which the chapter used to count as diaspora, is in Kanchipuram.

As for the bidirectional flow, what can be documented is one initiation in Lusaka in 1979 and an undated affiliation notice. The nearest thing to a counter-current runs the other way: Sri Guru Karunamaya, whom Devipuram’s founder mentored, runs an India-based peetham in Kanchipuram and has also founded a nonprofit in the United States that supports it.

What travels

Something does change when a tradition crosses an ocean, and the documented changes are not the ones usually named.

Festivals get rescheduled around the host country’s calendar; the Pittsburgh temple’s own adaptations include a puja on Mother’s Day. Sacred geography gets transplanted by name and by patronage. Pittsburgh’s temple is dedicated to the Venkateswara of Tirupati, was built with a loan from the Tirupati temple trust that it repaid in two years, and now draws tens of thousands a year from Chicago, Michigan, Toronto, New York and California, which makes it a pilgrimage site rather than a congregation. And ritual standardises through networks rather than through texts: the Pittsburgh temple became a model for others and sends its own priests to officiate at their consecrations.

None of that is about Sri Vidya. It is the water the one Sri Vidya institution swims in.

The inversion

The previous chapter looked at an institution in Andhra Pradesh whose trust says it wants Sri Vidya accessible without limits of gender, caste, creed or faith, and found one piece of outside support for the gender half, and no count at all behind the caste half in any source it could reach.

Here is the thing that makes this chapter worth writing. The best-documented case of that openness is not in Andhra Pradesh. It is in upstate New York, and the man at its centre is a Sri Lankan Tamil who is not a Brahmin, whose followers are mostly not Brahmins either, whose sanctum is open to laymen, and a woman who had been barred from chanting the thousand names in South India chanting them there, which Kumar notes the Smarta tradition reserves to men. Two scholars have written about it. One of them took initiation while doing so.

That is not a periphery receiving a transmission from a centre. It is two nodes of the same reformist impulse, one in Andhra Pradesh and one in upstate New York, joined by a single night in Zambia in 1979 when a physicist gave sixteen mantras to an architect.

The next chapter stays with the people who write the books.

The tradition did not spread. It landed, once, a long way from home, and put down roots where the soil would take it.