23
The Religions of the South Asian Diaspora in Canada
According to the 1991 census, where are some 420,000 South Asians in Canada, most of whom have arrived since the 1960s. The breakdown in terms of religions is as follows: Sikhs 135,000, Hindus 120,000, Muslims 90,000, Christians 55,000, Buddhists 3,000, Jews 70 and 16,930 assorted others, including Jains and Parsis. The vast majority came to Canada directly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; however, significant groups also arrived from Fiji, East Africa, Guyana and Trinidad. In Canada, South Asians have settled mainly in Ontario (131,000), British Columbia (104,000), Alberta (40,000) and Quebec (30,000), with the remainder spread across the other provinces and a few even locating themselves in the far north (the Yukon and North West Territories). Most South Asians are to be found in the cities of Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Ottawa.
Although they comprise less than 1 per cent of the total Canadian population, the South Asians, by virtue of their distinctive dress, food, culture and religion, are a high-profile element in Canada's multicultural mosaic. Table 23.1 offers a demographic profile of the Hindu and Sikhs components of the South Asian community (figures for South Asian Muslims are not available). The median age group is 25–44 years, lower than that of the Canadian population, and where are fewer people over 65 years. Other characteristics of this community include an excess of males and higher proportions of married people and of persons in professional employment than the wider population [6]. They have developed the reputation of being hard-working and self-sufficient, many of them well-educated professionals or successful businesspeople. Their temples, gurdwaras, mosques and community centres have added a rich diversity to Canadian cities. South Asian classical music and dance has established itself as a part of Canada's cultural life. South Asian authors such as Michael Ondaatje (winner of the 1992 Booker Prize for his novel, The English Patient) and Rohinton Mistry (winner of the 1991 Governor-General's award for his novel Such a Long Journey)are ranked among the best of Canada's creative writers. In spite of its sometimes inhospitable climate, Canada has proved to be a place where South Asian immigrants have flourished. Unlike other immigrant groups such as the Chinese, South Asians usually arrive with some knowledge of the English language. In addition, many South Asians have come from Commonwealth countries where the legal and political institutions bear a marked similarity to their counterparts in Canada. This has enabled them to adapt quickly and successfully to life in Canada [1: 55–65].
Source: Statistic Canada, Religions in Canada, Ottawa, Industry, Science and Technology Canada, 1993, table 2. Comparable figures for South Asian Muslims and Parsis are not available because Statistic Canada totals for those groups include Middle Eastern as well as South Asian immigrants.
History
Around 1900 Sikhs began to arrive in British Columbia, mostly single males who proved themselves hard workers in lumbering and farming. By 1908 where were 5,000 Sikhs in the province and, together with the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, they were perceived as a threat by the relatively small Anglo-Samson population. The Sikhs responded to this hostility by establishing gurdwaras under the auspices of the Vancouver Khalsa Diwan Society. As British subjects, they had been able to vote; but the British Columbia legislature removed that privilege, denying South Asians municipal and federal voting rights and excluding them from serving as school trustees, on juries or in public service, holding jobs resulting from public works contracts, purchasing Crown timber or practising the professions of law and pharmacy.
By passing the ‘continuous journey’ legislation in 1908, the federal government effectively banned further South Asian immigration by requiring South Asians to purchase a ticket for a through passage to Canada from their country of origin. Since no shipping company covered both the India – Hong Kong and the Hong Kong – Canada legs of the journey, the purchase of a continuous ticket was impossible, effectively cutting off immigration to Canada from India. A celebrated text case occurred in 1914 when a ship chartered by Sikhs in Hong Kong, the Komagata Maru, arrived in Vancouver with 376 Indians on board. In Vancouver, the Immigration Department allowed only twenty-two, who were returning to Canada, to land. The remainder were held on board for two months and then were deported to India. In the aftermath of this event, many Sikhs either returned to India or left for the United States, so that by 1918 the Sikh population in British Columbia had dwindled to 1,000.
Between 1919 and 1924, however, wives and children of men living in Canada were allowed to immigrate from India. This established a basis for family life; now, with existing gurdwaras, Sikhs finally had a place of their own in Canada – but not the vote or full rights. In spite of hostility and rejection from a community that saw them as Indians in Canada rather than Indo-Canadians, these pioneer Sikhs established themselves by focusing on their own religious and cultural foundations [3: 67]. For the newt twenty years, the community remained static: a small group of Sikhs, constantly called ‘Hindus’ by the Canadian public of the day. In spite of these difficulties, the established Sikhs families flourished economically and maintained their religious foundation through the Khalsa Diwan Society and its gurdwaras, which exerted continual pressure on provincial and federal politicians to cancel the ‘continuous journey’ rule and restore the vote to South Asian Canadians.
After Britain gave independence to India in 1947, the Indian government pressed Canada to institute an annual immigration quota such as had been established in the United States. In 1951 only 2,148 South Asians lived in Canada, 1,937 of them in British Columbia [3: 105]. Giving in to pressure from the government of India without, and from the Khalsa Diwan Society within, the Canadian government initiated a quota system for South Asian immigrants. In 1957 a new immigration agreement between Canada and India raised the Indian quota from 150 to 300 per year, of which one-half was to be preferentially filled by relatives of South Asians who were already Canadian citizens. By the end of 1961, under this new policy, 2,338 immigrant visas had been issued and 2,000 others came to Canada as dependent relatives – mostly professors, engineers, doctors, teachers and technicians [3: 106]. This pattern continued throughout the 1960s as Canada was then experiencing a shortage of professionals. Thus, while the earliest South Asian immigrants to Canada had been well-off Sikhs farmers, the second influx, of their relatives arriving in the 1950s and 1960s, were well-educated professionals.
There was, however, another important dimension of this later group of South Asian immigrants: not all were Sikhs. Gradually, during the 1950s and 1960s, other ethnic/religious groups began to arrive: Muslims from Punjab and Pakistan; Hindus from Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Bengal and Madras; and a few Buddhist Sinhalese from Sri Lanka. They spread out across Canada, establishing settlements in Toronto, Montreal and other cities. No longer could the South Asians in Canada be equated with the Sikhs communities in British Columbia. Like the Sikhs, most of the Hindus and Muslims arriving during this period were professional people; many of them settled in the Toronto area.
Further changes in Canada's regulations during the 1960s resulted in a sharp increase in South Asian immigration. The government removed almost all racial, national and ethnic restrictions and instead focused on economic and social criteria. As a result the annual rate of South Asian immigration increased rapidly to over twelve times what it had been in the 1950s and, rather than being focused in British Columbia, spread into cities right across Canada: Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton. This pattern continued through the 1970s, although the occupational range broadened in these years to include many more skilled blue-collar workers. The countries of origin of these immigrants also became more varied, as South Asians came from Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa) as well as from Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana and the Caribbean. Many of those from Africa were political refugees [3: 121–45]. In the late 1970s and early 1980s economic recessions in Canada resulted in a general restriction on immigration; family-sponsored immigrants took priority, making it difficult for independent South Asian migrants to come to Canada. However, South Asians have established such a strong base population in Canada that family-sponsored immigration alone means that South Asians will never comprise less than 10 per cent of Canada's new immigrants each year. While the rapid expansion of the period 1965–82, during which over 250,000 South Asians arrived, is over, the Canadian South Asian community has now reached a size suitable for the establishment of a solid foundation for life in Canada. This large size also makes it a very visible community, which has drawn some backlash from Anglo-Canadians and French Canadians.
Sikhs in Canada
Development and Debate
From 1900 to 1950 one could fairly say that the South Asian community in Canada was the Sikhs of British Columbia. In the 1950s a major rift occurred within Canadian Sikhs communities over the cutting of hair and beard and wearing of the turban. While where have always been those within Sikhism who did not find it necessary to undergo initiation into the Khalsa and wear the five karkars (i.e. the Nanakpanth or followers of the teachings of Nanak, the first Guru), many Sikhs have insisted on complete conformity to the Khalsa discipline. While the Wearing of the turban in India is widely practised and has a long and respected historical legacy, no such understanding was present in Canada. Consequently, many Sikhs felt pressured to shave, cut their hair and discard the turban so as to fit better into Canadian society. This resulted in a conflict over what Sikh practice requires. In 1952 the election of a clean-shaven man to the executive of the Vancouver Khalsa Diwan Society led to a split, with those insisting on the beard and turban leaving to form the Akali Singh Society with its own gurdwaras in Vancouver and Victoria [17: 13].
A rupture of a different kind occurred in 1984 when the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent troops into the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Until then Sikhs and Hindus in Canada had usually seen themselves as part of the same community, often sharing the same facilities. Events in India now shattered this sense of community, Sikhs withdrawing from association with Hindus. The invasion of the Golden Temple and the events that followed – namely, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, the crash of an Air India flight from Toronto, continuing controversies over Khalistani separatism and alleged Sikhs terrorist activity – created formal disruptions in Canada – India trade and diplomatic activity, and internal delays in Sikhs developments within Canada. For example, plans for a Chair of Sikhs Studies at the University of British Columbia, funded equally by the community and the government of Canada, were put on hold by the government until relations between India and Canada normalized again in 1987 with the signing of a treaty of extradition. Only then did the Canadian government release its portion of the funding, making the appointment of Dr Harjot Oberoi to the Chair possible [20: 120]. Sikh studies in Canadian universities, particularly at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto (where Professor W. H. McLeod of New Zealand has been teaching one term each year) have resulted in Sikh sacred texts being placed under the close examination of modern historical and critical scholarship. This has led to yet another rift in the community. Some Sikhs with deeply held convictions find the suggestion that certain of those convictions lack historical truth to be profoundly upsetting. In response they have mounted attacks against Harjot Oberoi and the many writings of Hew McLeod, as well as those of the Canadian Sikhs students he has supervised at the University of Toronto (e.g. the doctoral thesis of Pashura Singh). As Gurinder Singh Maw has noted, this diaspora scholarship and the negative reaction to it is symptomatic of the coming of age of Sikhs studies [18: 108].
Influential Sikhs leaders in North America have lined up in support of such historical scholarship. While some of McLeod's books have been published in Punjabi translation by Guru Nanak Dev University in India, it is in diaspora settings such as Canada that the revolution in Sikh studies is taking place. In order to be credible in the modern West, some Canadian Sikhs have felt the need to put their own tradition under the microscope of critical scholarly analysis so that it will be in a position to hold its own alongside other religions which have exposed themselves to modern scholarship and not only survived but been able to reassert themselves more effectively in the modem world as a result. In Gurinder Singh Mann's view, work by Canadian Sikhs scholars such as Harjot Oberoi and Pashura Singh is helping ‘the Sikhs community to understand that a distinction can and must be made between the teaching of Sikhsism in a university and its promotion at the gurdwara level’ [18: 108]. Yet these are not completely separate activities, for the teaching of Sikhism in Canadian universities, it is maintained, is allowing Canadian students and society to understand Sikhism better, and Sikh students who take these courses to understand and interpret their tradition better to their Canadian peen. At the level of the gurdwaras, however, debate continues as to the wisdom of allowing the sacred tradition to be exposed to critical academic analysis. On balance, Canadian Sikh communities, and especially the predominance of university-educated professionals in their membership, seem to be pleased to have their tradition fully represented in the university curriculum alongside the other great religions.
Gurdwaras and Home Life
For Sikhs in Canada, it is their religion, centred in the gurdwara, that provides a sense of identity and community solidarity [5: 142]. Thus, wherever Sikhs have settled, gurdwaras have rapidly appeared: first in Vancouver, Victoria and other British Columbia locations, then in Toronto and cities such as Windsor, Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton. In 1969 the first gurdwara in Ontario was opened in a converted warehouse in Toronto. Now there are some twenty-five gurdwaras in Ontario, the most recent being a new building in Malton (a Toronto district) that seats 15,000 people and is the largest gurdwara in North America [14: 65]. As the centre of the Sikh community, the gurdwara is a meeting-place for worship, religious and cultural education, the celebration of festivals, the collection of funds for charitable projects, and the discussion of issues important to Sikhs. When the Sikhs community needs to respond to events in mainstream Canadian life, political or otherwise, it is at the gurdwara that such responses are organized. The gurdwara is also the place where family events such as births, weddings and deaths are shared with the community. While Sikhs have dally prayers and scripture readings at home, Sunday worship in the gurdwara brings the whole community out to worship and eat together. This Canadian pattern follows the practice established in India: a priest or granthi reads from scripture, the Adi Granth, preaches on the text which has been read, and leads in prayers and the singing of hymns or kirtans. The Indian Sikh pattern of worship has required little adaptation to fit its new Canadian setting. After the service, families take turns in providing the common meal in which everyone, including any visitors, shares.
One major change in the gurdwara's function has occurred. In the early British Columbia Sikh communities, the gurdwara was not only the religious centre but also the locus of social service, political and cultural activities. Canadian public policy has adopted multiculturalism (The Canadian Multicultural Act 1990). This policy, however, has increasingly separated out the religious from these other activities and placed the latter into an ethnic rather than a religious context. While consistent with Canada's stated commitment to multiculturalism and religious pluralism, this policy has resulted in new government or government-supported institutions being established on an ethnic basis to provide social and cultural services in a non-religious context. Thus, whereas Canada's first gurdwaras provided food and shelter for homeless Sikhs, helped with immigration and employment, and offered educational and cultural programmes, these functions have now largely been taken over by government agencies or semi-governmental organizations like the Immigrant Services Centre and various ethnic health services organizations. Also, with the establishment of community groups such as the Punjabi Cultural Association, the Punjabi Literary Association and independent Punjabi schools, ethnic cultural and educational activities no longer belong exclusively to the gurdwaras [8: 89]. Now, gurdwaras are more closely focused on religious concerns and function increasingly like Western-style ‘houses of worship’. Support for this differentiation between ‘religion’ and ‘ethnicity’ is especially strong among two groups: Canadian-born second- or third-generation Sikhs and a small but vocal group of white, non-South-Asian, Sikhs converts.
Second- or third-generation Canadians of Punjabi Sikhs ancestry are now a sizeable group and are marked by their strong ethnic identity. By and large they have not married outside their own group. While they have responded aggressively to increasing anti-South-Asian hostility in recent years, they have in the main kept their distance from recent Sikhs religious revivalism, ‘regarding it as an unfortunate return to aspects of life in “village India” with little relevance to, or positive implications for, the community's situation in Canada’ [8: 90]. Many second- and third-generation Sikhs are comfortable in identifying more closely with ethnic cultural and political institutions than with religious organizations from which they may feel estranged. Thus, as Dusenbury observes, the idea arises that in Canada one can be ‘ethnically Sikhs’ without being ‘religiously Sikhs’ [8: 90]. This is, of course, consistent with Canadian public policy, where religious practice is seen as a matter of individual preference and quite separate from one's ethnicity. Equally, it is just such a ‘Canadian’ or ‘Western’ way of living that may properly cause concern among those who judge Sikhsism to be a total way of life, not separable into religious and secular ethnic components.
Field studies with Sikhs living in Canada show that changes are occurring in their experience of scripture, the Adi Granth. The many distractions and pressures of modern Canadian society militate against the experience of ‘village India’. The individualistic and rationalistic nature of modem society emphasizes intellectual study rather than the devotional approach to scripture. The crucial importance of being immersed in learning the singing of scripture as a child poses a major challenge to Sikh parents in Canada. Canadian Sikhs report that the pressures to amass material possessions, to drink and eat meat, and the fast pace which leaves little time for devotions, results in a life, as one respondent put it, which is 20 per cent Sikhs and 80 per cent the other life [10: 29]. He feels himself pulled apart by the pressures towards egoism, selfishness and competition – all of which go against the teachings of the Adi Grant. Some respond by taking amrit or baptism and joining the Khalsa in the hope that that this commitment with its outward symbols will call forth a more complete dedication.
Sikhs are also experimenting with ways to make their Sunday services more attractive to their Canadian-born children. Although most children can understand some Punjabi, many cannot read the prayers in the original. Therefore English translations are sometimes offered, and at least one group is experimenting with home worship in which the prayers are said in English and Punjabi [14: 66]. Sikh youth camps are also common across Canada as one- or two-week summer events where Sikhs traditions are taught to the young.
In recent years clashes between Sikhs practice and Canadian public policy have achieved a high profile in the media. The red-coated Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer is a cherished Canadian symbol. Problems arose when the RCMP set out to recruit members of Canada's ethnic minorities. Sikhs selected for service wished to wear beard and turban, in conformity with Khalsa requirements, rather than the flat-brimmed stetson required as regulation dress by the force. Because they wished to recruit ethnic minorities and because they realized that the regulation requiring wearing of the Mountie dress hat would probably not withstand a court challenge based on the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms which forbids religious discrimination of any kind, the Canadian government relaxed the regulation, allowing Sikhs in the RCMP to wear turbans. A subsequent court challenge of this ruling was brought by a group of RCMP veterans but was lost.
Such incidents are testing both the determination of Canadian Sikhs to participate fully at all levels in Canadian society – without sacrificing their religious beliefs – and the validity of the Canadian claim to a multicultural policy which respects ethnic and religious differences. An interesting consequence of these debates is the desire of some non-Khalsa Sikhs to make clear to Canadians that not all Sikhs are required by their religious beliefs to wear turbans in public. Media focus on Sikhs wearing turbans in the RCMP has misled Canadians into thinking that all Sikhs must wear turbans. This, the non-Khalsa Sikhs point out, applies only to a particular group of Sikhs, namely those initiated into the Khalsa; other Sikhs are not required by religion to wear the turban [15]. Whereas all Khalsa are Sikhs, not all Sikhs are Khalsas. This distinction, while correct, is certain to create further confusion among non-Sikh Canadians.
The above discussion of the Sikhs in Canada has been more lengthy and detailed than will be offered for the two other major religious groups of the South Asian diaspora in Canada, the Hindus and the Muslims. The reason for this is twofold. First, the Sikhs, historically, were the South Asian diaspora in Canada from 1900 to 1950, and they are still the largest group. Secondly, because of the distinctive appearance of the Khalsa Sikhs, they provide, in many ways, the ‘acid test’ as to how effective Canada's official policy of multiculturalism is in practice – as evidenced in the turban debate, discussed above.
Hindus in Canada
Unlike the Sikhs, who are virtually all ethnic Punjabis, Canadian Hindus have a variety of ethnic backgrounds. The earliest Hindus were also Punjabis and they came along with the Sikhs migration. The next largest group of South Asians who came directly from India were Hindus from Uttar Pradesh and surrounding regions in northern India. They are Hindi speakers, largely from an urban middle-class background, and came as part of the large group of South Asian professionals who arrived in Canada as independent migrants in the 1960s. During the same period some Tamil Hindus from the Madras area came to Canada as teachers. Bengali Hindus began to arrive during the 1970s. Also during the 1960s and 1970s, substantial numbers of Hindus – as well as Muslims – arrived in Canada from former British colonies that were achieving independence and discriminated against South Asians, including East Africa, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana and Trinidad. While Hindus from East Africa tended to be professionals and businesspeople, those arriving from the other areas were mainly blue-collar workers [3: 212–47]. In Canada, Hindus spread themselves across the country, settling mainly in larger cities.
Unlike Sikhs, Hindus do not have a unified set of beliefs and practices shared by all believers. Nor is their religion so heavily focused on a community temple with weekly congregational worship. Hindu religious practice is more individual in nature and centred on the home and family. Thus Canadian immigrant Hindus at first felt no pressure for a public place of worship. However, by 1970 Hindus had extended their individual worship to include group prayer services held in one another's homes – especially if a visiting teacher from India was passing through. Such meetings, however, often remained specific to particular ethnic groups. In the 1970s secular issues surrounding marriage and death in Canada led Hindu groups to begin to think of erecting temples. In Canada, unlike India, marriage or death rites were public occasions, and a Hindu community without a temple had nowhere to celebrate them. This need drew diverse groups of Hindus together in the larger centres and buildings were constructed. One of the first was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of Vancouver, which in 1974 opened a multi-use temple [3: 190]. As Hugh Johnston observes, ‘The members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who have been raised in many local Indian traditions, have made practical compromises to create a religious community in Canada; and they have created a place of worship which is as much a church or gurdwara as it is a temple’ [17: 11]. Worship is congregational, taking place between 12 noon and 1.00 p.m. on Sundays, with people arriving and leaving on time in Protestant fashion, unless where is food in the kitchen below provided by a family, Sikhs-style, for which people remain after the worship service.
Permanent multi-use facilities now also exist in Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto. In other locations, Hindus depend upon temporary arrangements, for example, renting the halls of Christian churches, for their religious celebrations. Unlike the Sikhs, where fund-raising to build a gurdwara involved an appeal to a single ethnic community, Hindus have had to span many different ethnic and religious groupings in order to raise the required funds. This has often been a difficult diplomatic task. Once a temple is established, its use is allocated by rime to the various Hindu groups. General prayer services and religious lectures designed to serve all usually occur on Sundays; individual families book the temple for marriages, funerals and other special occasions. As Buchignani observes, ‘This multi-use concept is a brilliant solution to the difficulties posed by divergent Hindu practice and belief’ [3: 190]. It has helped draw Hindus together so that Hinduism has an organizational basis upon which to be recognized as a formal religion within Canada. Towards this end the Vishwa Hindu Paris had of Vancouver in 1983 organized a national conference to develop the constitution for a Hindu Council of Canada [3: 190]. Not all Hindus have been satisfied with this unifying approach, and in Toronto, where Hindu numbers are sufficiently large, various ethnic groupings have established their own institutional organizations and obtained their own buildings.
Milton Israel reports that where are now more than fifty Hindu temples and organizations in Ontario, most in the Toronto area. The oldest Hindu temple where, the Prarthana Samaj, was established in 1967 when a former church was purchased. Immigrants from Guyana and Trinidad under the leadership of Dr Budendranauth Doobray, a cardiovascular surgeon who also served as priest, purchased a building on Yonge Street in 1981 that became their temple – the Vishnu Mandir. A new temple was built in 1984 and another in 1990. It draws 600–700 people to a Sunday service which is followed, Sikhs-style, by a congregational meal sponsored by a family. The temple staff consists of six priests from India and Dr Doobray who preaches the sermon. The service proceeds in Sanskrit, Hindi and English. A variety of images are present in the temple and the front altar holds statues to the gods Durga, Hanuman, Ganesh and Rama; discussion is under way regarding the possible inclusion of the Buddha and Lord Mahavira of the Jains. The eclectic nature of this very successful Hindu temple is evident.
A contrasting pattern is evident in the Ganesh temple established by Tamil immigrants from south India, South Africa, Singapore and Malaysia and refugees from Sri Lanka. The emphasis of this group is on the purity of the building and its rituals from a Tamil perspective; for example, it celebrates the festival of Lord Murugan, the patron god of the Tamils. Building of the Ganesh temple complex (it also contains a senior citizens' facility, living apartments for priests, a wedding hall and a cafeteria) began in 1984 and is still continuing. Rather than adapting to a Canadian congregational style, as the Vishnu temple has done, the Ganesh temple attempts faithfully to recreate south Indian Hindu worship in Canada – as the Sri Venkateswara temple has done in Pittsburgh. Around the large hall are fourteen altars where murtis or images of individual gods such as Ganesh, Shiva, Durga and Murugan are installed, each with ‘their own space where individual worshippers may come and pray, alone or with the mediation of a priest’ [14: 57]. Thus several activities involving different worshippers, priests and gods may be going on simultaneously, producing the general cacophony of sound typical of a south Indian temple. Unlike the Vishnu temple, Sunday is not a special day at the Ganesh temple. Festival days, however, are, and on these occasions 10,000–15,000 people may attend [14: 58].
A third example of the variety of Hindu practice in the Toronto area is provided by the Arya Samajis. Followers of Dayananda Saraswati, they reject the use of images in worship and instead focus on a simple Vedic fire ritual which any member of the Samaj can perform. They also reject caste. Arya Samaj followers came to Canada mainly from East Africa and the Caribbean as well as from India. In Toronto where are two Arya Samaj communities which are part of a North American network with congregations in more than seventy cities including London, Windsor, Calgary and other in Canada. Linguistic differences separate the two Toronto groups. One is made up of mainly Hindi speakers from East Africa or India and conducts worship in Hindi. The other is made up of immigrants from the Caribbean who do not know Hindi and conduct their services in English. Both groups, however, chant the Vedas in Sanskrit [14: 60].
The Toronto area, with its large concentration of close to 100,000 Hindus, offer a magnification of the patterns that exist in more or less developed form in other Canadian cities. While a multi-use temple with Canadian Protestant-style congregational worship may satisfy communities with smaller numbers of Hindus, ethnic and sectarian differences seem to manifest themselves once the population of Hindus becomes large enough to support such divisions. Ethnic languages play a major role in such separations, and it is an open question as to how successful these first-generation communities will be in passing their languages on to their children.
Another aspect of Hindu religion that was present in India, and has assumed increased importance in religious practice in Canada, is the role of the guru. Sucholars have concluded that the enlightened guru is the dynamic sacred centre of Hinduism – that the guru's interpretation of scripture, tradition and experience is more sacred than the sacred texts or rituals themselves. At the home altar, photos or images of an individual's or family's guru often occupy centre stage in addition to the deities one would find in the temple. The role of the guru has been to restructure the traditional puja and ritual of village India to meet the challenge of modern life in both India and Canada [11]. However, modern Indian gurus such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Prabhupada, Rajneesh and Sathya Sai Baba have attracted more occidental followers than South Asian Canadians.
Restructuring is especially evident in the ritual function of sacred language. In India, sacred Hindu texts were learned passively by being heard over and over again as part of one's daily activity until they were internalized and became part of one's consciousness. By this means, passages from the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Ramayana, etc. were memorized by oral repetition at a young age and through repeated rehearsal in ritual became a foundational part of the individual's mature consciousness. To some extent, audio and video presentations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata attempt to replace the traditional ways of learning these texts.
In Canada everything is different. No longer do the children rise at five in the morning to chant Sanskrit texts with parents and grandparents as they did in India. Some adults confess that they now do their morning chanting while running for the bus or while walking or driving to work. Gone is the leisurely pace of rural India. In Canada it is replaced by the Protestant work ethic. Within the home it is hard to find a time in either the morning or the evening when the whole family can gather for worship. Sometimes Saturday is set aside for family devotional practice. Often the absence of grandparents or other members of the extended family further reduces the power of the family to transmit the sacred tradition. Outside the family, Hindus live as a minority group in a secular, materialistic culture, and so the contextual reinforcement of family practice, experienced in India, is simply absent in Canada. In the face of these difficulties a new practice, introduced by gurus, is appearing. It responds to the complexities and rime problems of Canadians by simplifying home worship into a pattern which, in essence, consists in chanting a guru's name or mantra 108 times, two or three rimes a day [11: 103]. Whereas in India practice involved both traditional Sanskrit texts chanted in rituals and observances relating to a guru, in Canada much of this is collapsed into one simple flexible and efficient practice – chanting the guru's name or mantra.
While the guru mantra may prove effective for Hindus living in Canada, it does raise questions. The very simplicity of the approach and the ‘blind faith’ in the guru that is required may well produce a Hinduism with more dependence upon a priestly group (i.e. the gurus) than was the case in India. If Hindus no longer learn their scripture and ritual in childhood, the possibility of home religious practice independent of the guru may be largely lost; and without the foundation of daily worship at home, temple worship may rapidly become a shell of what it once was. Dependence upon a guru, however, may be the only way of continuing daily Hindu worship in the modern Canadian context.
Following the lead of the Sikhs, Canadian Hindus also took advantage of the federal government's matching grant programme to establish a Chair of Hindu Studies at Concordia University in Montreal in the mid-1980s. The first appointment to the Chair was Dr Krishna Sivaraman, an internationally known scholar who had previously served McMaster University in Canada and Banaras Hindu University in India. This Chair gave Hindu studies a high profile.
Muslims in Canada
According to the 1991 census where are 253,000 Muslims in Canada, of which about 91,000 are South Asians. Of the South Asians, the largest groups came from Pakistan, Gujarat via East Africa, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. In Canada they are mostly concentrated in the urban centres of Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. The majority of South Asian Muslims came to Canada during the period of open immigration in the 1960s and 1970s. A great many are well-educated professional people.
By far the best organized of all the South Asian Muslims in Canada are the Isma'ilis. They are Shi'i Muslims who follow the Agha Khan, whose headquarters are in France. Originally from Gujarat in India, the Isma'ilis moved to East Africa, where they prospered; expelled from East Africa, they came to Canada, where they refined and modernized their organization in a complex hierarchical structure that links small local groups, with individual prayer halls (jamat khana), into a national structure with headquarters in Toronto. Perhaps more than any other South Asian religious community, the Isma'ilis have successfully transferred a religious life of daily practice to Canada. Most families pay a tithe of 10 per cent of their income, so the community has flourished financially. Rather than building large central mosques, the Isma'ili pattern is to have small jamat khana within neighbourhoods to facilitate attendance at daily prayer meetings. The most important weekly meeting is on Friday, but in Canada it has been shifted from midday to the evening to accommodate Canadian work schedules [3: 187].
In Ontario where are jamat khanas in Unionville, Markham, Toronto and Brampton [14: 74]. Montreal has one jamat khana near the city centre and a small one on the West Island [19: 321]. In British Columbia there are thirteen jamat khanas; Alberta has five in Calgary and several in Edmonton. Most jamat khanas are open every day in the early hours of the morning for dhikr or personal meditation, and in the evenings for family prayers. In her study of Isma'ili worship patterns in Canada, Parin Dossa finds that there has been a significant change from the community's practice in East Africa. There, 80 per cent of families attended the jamat khana daily, whereas in Canada, with the faster pace and greater complexity of life, only 44 per cent of families manage dally attendance, with 23 per cent going two to three times per week and 33 per cent appearing on festive occasions only [7: 56]. An equally important aspect of Dossa's analysis is the added stress living in Canada has put on Isma'ili women. whereas in East Africa women were at home all day and had ample time to prepare dinner and organize the family for attendance at evening prayers, in Canada most women work outside the home. As prayers at the jamat khana usually begin at 7.00 p.m., this means that Isma'ili women who go out to work typically have the following stressful schedule: simple meals are prepared the night before; a phone call is made from work to remind the children to take a bath (baths must be taken before going to prayers); on arrival home, the children are fed first and then the husband (who eats by himself while his wife gets herself ready to go out); after 7.00 p.m. prayers the wife eats alone [7: 57]. While this rigorous and highly organized schedule makes it possible for families to attend evening prayers, it is too hectic for many families to maintain daily; hence the decline from 80 per cent to 44 per cent in daily attendance at evening prayers since coming from East Africa. The shared family dinner, a highlight of life in East Africa, seems no longer possible. Isma'ili adaptation to life in Canada, while successful, has been at a cost to women and to family life. Its rigid hierarchical structure is also proving an irritant to the young, some of whom are shifting to the more democratic approach of the Canadian Sunni Muslims.
The Pakistani Sunni Muslim community is comparable in size to the Isma'ili. A few Punjabi-speaking Muslims arrived in Vancouver in 1904 with the first Sikhs; most, however, have migrated since 1967, settling mainly in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. They are generally well-educated professionals, including doctors, university professors and teachers. Rather than remaining insular, they have joined together with Sunni Muslims from the Middle East in mosques and Islamic centres in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver [17: 19]. This same pattern has been followed by other South Asian Sunni Muslims arriving from Bangladesh, Fiji and the Caribbean, who either supported mosques already in existence or joined with other Sunnis to start mosques – as is the Sunni practice around the world. Ethnic divisions tend to surface only for special annual South Asian religious celebrations. In most of the above cities, permanent Sunni mosques have now been built. In addition to regular worship, Sunni organizations devote careful attention to educating the young in the Arabic language and the Qur'an. However, since South Asian Sunnis differ in language and culture from other Sunnis, and from each other, such teaching is usually carried on in ethnic associations rather than through mosques [3: 188].
Yet another group of South Asian Muslims should be noted in passing. The Ahmadiyyas, a nineteenth-century sectarian movement of Islam which began in India, claims some 10,000 adherents in Canada. About half of them are in Toronto with smaller groups in cities such as Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. The Canadian Ahmadiyya headquarters is located in Maple, Ontario. There they have built the largest mosque in North America, which has prayer rooms with large television screens on which their leader's sermons are broadcast live from London (where he lives) by satellite [14: 75]. A trademark of the Ahmadiyyas across Canada is the inter-faith discussions on contemporary issues which they regularly sponsor.
Yvonne Haddad has concisely summarized the stresses and adaptations that life in Canada has caused for South Asian Muslims [12]. For Pakistani Muslims in Canada, the ideal of contiguity between religion and state (basic to the establishment of Pakistan as separate from India) seems an unlikely prospect in their new country where they are but a tiny minority. Despite the government policy of multiculturalism, Canada, like the whole of the Western world, seems hostile to those who are attempting to be faithful to the traditional practice of Islam. There are no minarets to call the faithful to prayer, nor is time provided for the performance of prayer during working hours. Interviews with Canadian Muslims indicate that those who had been faithful in spiritual practice in their home counter often became negligent in their performance in Canada. Long working hours and television tend to keep people up later in the evening, making the early rising for prayers, which is customary in the Arab world and Pakistan, difficult. As a result, Muslim law has provided alternative times for prayer. But it appears that once Muslims begin to compromise on this they become less assiduous, and prayer is reduced to once or twice a day [12: 75]. Canada's northern geographical location adds an extra problem if Ramadan comes in the summer, for the dawn-to-dusk fast period can then be very long – from 4.00 a.m. until 11.00 p.m. in June in Edmonton; in the far north, night may never arrive. Some Muslims solve this problem by observing rimes of sunrise and sunset as they would be on the latitude of Mecca.
Like other Canadians, Muslims borrow from the bank to start businesses, to buy houses and, in at least three cases in Calgary, London and Windsor, to build mosques. Yet the practice of usury is banned in the Qur'an. Explanations offered to justify this practice include the idea that dealing with a bank is not the same as dealing with an individual, and that it is necessary for modem living. Other areas of stress for Muslims living in Canada include the sexual freedom of Canadian society, the presence of pornography, the difficulty in obtaining properly slaughtered meat, dating practices among young people and conflict between Canadian and Islamic inheritance and marriage laws. Muslim girls have had problems in Canadian schools; dress codes have ruled out the traditional head covering and required the wearing of shorts (thus exposing the legs) for gym. The courts, however, have decided against the schools and in favour of Muslim traditional dress for those who wish to wear it. Even in the mosque where is a sense of separation. Muslims of South Asian background tend to keep separate from Muslims of Middle Eastern origin. As one Pakistani leader put it, ‘We worship together, but then the Pakistanis go back to their curries and the Arabs to their kebabs’ [12: 80]. One wonders if this sense of separation will persist in young people of the second and third generation. As to the relationships between the three Muslim communities, they get on by ignoring each other. At the theological level, the Ahmadiyyas are not recognized as real Muslims by either the Sunnis or the Isma'ilis.
Other South Asian Religious Groups
In addition to the large groupings of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, South Asian immigrants to Canada have included Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Jews and Christians. By far the largest of these groups are the South Asian Christians, numbering 31,385 Roman Catholics and 22,750 Protestants in the 1991 census. The Roman Catholics, like other Christian immigrants, have blended into local Canadian congregations. Some of the Protestants, however, especially those from Kerala, have created their own Malayali-language churches wherever sufficient numbers were present. For example, the first such Toronto congregation was established in 1968 and today where are eleven congregations in the city. In addition, the Canadian Mar Thoma Church and the New Grace Covenant Pentecostal Church have their own churches [14: 80]. The Mar Thoma Church claims to descend from Thomas the disciple of Jesus who, according to Indian tradition, arrived on the Malabar Coast from Palestine in the first century CE. The Mar Thomas have congregations in the other major Canadian cities of South Asian immigration.
Buddhists number some 3,000 and have mainly settled in Toronto. The majority are Theravadins from Sri Lanka. They have their own Sri Lankan Centre in Toronto, complete with monks, services on Sunday, and Sunday school classes for the whole congregation. A very small group of Indian Buddhists have formed themselves into the Ambedkar Mission, named after Dr B. R. Ambedkar of India. A Sri Lankan monk leads services for them on Saturdays. A small number of Jains, mainly from Gujarat, are spread across the major cities. To date they do not seem to have formed any separate organizations. Some 300 Baghdadi Jews left India (from the areas of Bombay, Calcutta, Puna and Surat) in the late 1940s to settle in Montreal and Toronto. They have integrated easily into existing Jewish congregations.
The Parsis are Zoroastrians who, oppressed under Islamic rule in their Iranian homeland, fled to north-west India in the tenth century. Although they first settled in Gujarat, they moved to Bombay in increasing numbers from the seventeenth century [13]. Parsis began to arrive in Canada in 1965, the earliest Parsi migrants settling in Montreal and Vancouver, but the major growth in numbers took place in the 1970s and Toronto quickly became the main centre. where are now more than 2,500 Parsis in Canada, the vast majority residing in southern Ontario. Hinnells points out that the backgrounds of Parsis arriving in Canada were quite variable [13]. Many came to Canada via East Africa, and tended to be highly educated professionals or businesspeople. Those in business were more traditional than the professionals; those who migrated from rural Gujarat or from Karachi were more traditional than those from Bombay. Canada is seen by migrating Parsis as a less threatening host than either Britain or the United States due to its multiculturalism policy, which is perceived to encourage individuals and groups to preserve their religious and ethnic identities. For example, a government grant enabled the Toronto association to enlarge their building.
The history of the Parsis of southern Ontario, as reported by Milton Israel [14], may be taken as typical. Many Parsis responded to federal government advertisements in the late 1960s for professional and middle-class families. They established the Zoroastrian Society of Ontario and issued a regular newsletter. They rented halls for religious and cultural occasions. In the 1970s the community, with substantial help from the Iranian businessman Arbab Rustam Guiv, purchased an estate in North York for use as a temple. After a battle with the city over zoning restrictions was settled in favour of the Parsis, the temple was dedicated in 1980. The temple now serves as the religious, cultural and administrative centre for southern Ontario's Parsis. Currently there are fourteen hereditary priests in southern Ontario, six of whom are in active service [14: 76–8].
Hinnells [13: 66] notes that in Canada tensions sometimes arise between South Asians and Iranians in the Zoroastrian community, with the Iranians sometimes claiming to be truer to the tradition. Differences exist at both superficial and deeper levels. At community festivals, Parsis do not enjoy kebabs and Iranians dislike spicy Indian food. The Iranian Muslim environment has led them to emphasize the authority of the revealed words of the Prophet, whereas Parsis from the Hindu context ‘commonly see the priest as a man of spiritual power and complex rituals as points of access to that power’ [13: 66]. This has led to a situation in which many Parsis accept the authority of priests in Bombay but not in Inn, while Iranian immigrants will not accept the priests or leaders in India. To date this tension has not been successfully resolved.
Because many of the Parsis who migrated to Canada were highly educated and Westernized people they adapted quickly. They ensured that their children were highly educated in school and university. The professional nature of a large percentage of the community means that reason has been stressed sometimes to the detriment of religion. A study conducted by Hinnells finds that ‘Those who undertake postgraduate studies in the sciences typically affirm what might be called their “ethnic links” (food, language, music) more strongly, but substantially fewer of them assert their religious links’ [13: 71]. Against this, however, is Hinnells' own observation that a liturgical development is occurring among those in the diaspora. While it may not have the blessing of the Bombay leadership, who would see it as a corruption, the simplification of purity rituals, the making of prayer meaningful and the critical interpretation of the scripture, when combined with the ‘young seeking for their roots’, may well result in a religious revitalization. New Zoroastrian leadership may well be found in diaspora meetings of priests in Toronto, rater tan in pronouncements from India or Iran.
Conclusion
South Asians are a high-profile part of Canada's cultural mosaic. They share an internal awareness of being a strong South Asian presence. A complex of communities embodying seven major religions and many more ethnic communities, South Asians provide a major challenge to Canada's multiculturalism policy. While South Asians have apparently adapted successfully to life in Canada, some signs suggest that this may have occurred at the expense of their religious practices. Changes are definitely taking place as traditional religion engages wit the modem, secular pluralism that prevails in Canada. Judgement as to the positive or negative nature of these changes for the South Asian religious diaspora will be possible only in the second and third generations of these communities in Canada. Because religion provides the meaning and structure which undergirds these communities, the continued vitality of religion, in new or old forms, will be essential to the future viability of South Asian traditions in Canada.
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