Forty years ago, when there were about 40 Washington area Sikhs instead of 13,000, and when they prayed in one small home rather than a half-dozen temples, a man named Shamsher Singh had a dream.
"We looked on Embassy Row and saw all the religious places and asked ourselves: 'Will the day come that we'll have a place on Massachusetts Avenue?' We wanted to be counted among the others," said Singh, an elfin 77-year-old retired World Bank economist.
Now, 25 years after a Singh-led group that local Sikhs call "the early settlers" bought a plot of land a block north of Washington National Cathedral, it's finally happening: the opening of the first official gurdwara , or temple, in the District.
"Didn't I tell you? He is a little man, but he is a strong little man!" enthused Satwant Bell, a 55-year-old former flight attendant from Singapore who chairs the board of the new National Gurdwara and Sikh Cultural Center. Like seemingly everyone else, she credits the project's success to Singh, who sat on a recent morning in the gurdwara's basement wearing a gray-and-maroon-striped suit, a silk scarf, a pink turban, ankle-high tennis socks on his shoeless feet and a grin.
"Sikhs say, 'If you adhere to truth, victory is yours,' " he said, his blue-gray eyes lighting up.
The gurdwara is marking its opening this weekend with a 48-hour, nonstop reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, the 1,430-page Sikh holy book. Made up mostly of hymns and poetry, the book is read once through like this on special occasions, such as a wedding or the birth of a child. The reading started at 11 a.m. yesterday and ends at 11 a.m. tomorrow, when regular services will begin. Both events, like all Sikh services, are open to the public.
For Singh and other Sikhs who came to the area in the 1950s and 1960s, the opening of the 21,000-square-foot, $2.1 million gurdwara is as much miracle as dream come true. Barely able to cover the taxes on the land while they were raising funds to build the temple, the group endured litigation from neighborhood groups worried about traffic; environmental protesters who bound themselves to trees; graffiti and egg yolks on a trailer at the site after Sept. 11, 2001; and even challenges from other Sikhs who questioned whether the investment and location made sense.
After all, in the decades since Singh and a few dozen others, mostly from India, first crammed into a house on Military Road NW for prayer, the community has gone suburban.
Sikhs in the region started moving to the suburbs in the 1970s and are now concentrated in Fairfax and Montgomery counties. There are gurdwaras in Silver Spring, Fairfax and Burke as well as Sterling, Rockville and Gaithersburg.
But the early settlers feel confident that their standing and the prominence of Embassy Row will attract people from the suburbs, young Sikhs working and studying in Washington and tourists from around the world who might be curious about Sikhism, a 500-year-old faith. There are about 14 million Sikhs in India and a half-million in the United States.
Calling the temple the National Gurdwara can't hurt, the founders said, acknowledging that other gurdwaras across the country did not have a part in deciding on the name.
"This is the national capital anyway," said Surendr Singh, a 71-year-old retired accountant who came to Washington in 1965 as an Indian diplomat.
"Let me ask you this," said Shamsher Singh, "How do you get to be the 'National Cathedral'? It's the same thing."
(Sikh men traditionally take the last name Singh and women take the name Kaur, a practice meant to equalize Sikhs living in caste-oriented India.)
The National Gurdwara is decorated in the traditional style, with a large, bright and simple prayer room -- nothing but a white sheet on the floor for the 100 or so people who have been coming on Sundays since services began informally a few months ago.
At the front of the room, on a raised platform before which people bow and make offerings of money, is a covered copy of the Guru Granth Sahib. Beside it is another platform for musicians who play the tabla, or drum, and a keyboard instrument called the harmonium, as the Sikh services are mostly musical.
The services here will be traditional, which means mostly readings of hymns and prayers in Punjabi. The gurdwara recently hired a 42-year-old from India as its granthi -- the scholar who leads services and teaches classes. He speaks little English, but Bell and Shamsher Singh said they believe younger people will be able to relate to him.
Other gurdwaras have taken a different approach to making services relevant to young Sikhs, many of whom don't speak Punjabi. Rajwant Singh, a Potomac dentist who helped start the Guru Gobind Singh Foundation, the Rockville temple that opened in the fall, said its granthi pauses frequently during prayer to offer explanations in English and weaves in such contemporary topics as the Super Bowl and Hurricane Katrina.
"Young people like the singing, but with more explanation so they can understand. Some people feel that disturbs the prayer, but we try and mix it up," said Rajwant Singh, 45, who grew up in Calcutta. "It's time people got the message."
Older Sikhs agree that their main challenge is explaining their culture and faith to a younger generation that often does not even follow the basic Sikh tenet of "keeping hair" -- letting hair grow without cutting it.
At this point, Surendr Singh said, the National Gurdwara doesn't have enough children to fill the early part of the service, which is traditionally led by the young.
"We want [young people] to at least come to prayer. It keeps your mind away from ill feelings of humanity," Singh said. "If they can spend time meditating, it will keep them from unsocial, unlawful activities and give them mental stability."
Back To Homepage Homepage