With Sunday marking the grand opening of Greater Sudbury’s first-ever Sikh temple, the region’s Punjabi community now has a home away from home.
“If you ask anyone here, even though they have homes, this is their home,” co-ordinator Harshpreet Batra told Sudbury.com during Sunday’s grand opening celebration.
Batra is also a local real estate agent and helped the local Sikh community secure their new property, at 131 Regent Street, which she said has proven an ideal, central location for them to converge.
Fellow co-ordinator Karanbir Badhesha told Sudbury.com that the temple has been in the back of the community’s collective mind for years, and that everything came together with the help of the Canadian Khalsa Darbar organization and financier Manjit Mangat within the past year.
“It’s always a dream for any Sikh to have a cultural place to practise their religion,” he said, adding that the community came together to make this dream a reality.
It took a volunteer team of approximately 50 people five days to clean up the property. Although more renovations are on the horizon, Batra said they were too excited to open the space to put off a grand opening until they were completed.
“It was a miracle,” Mangat said of the community’s willingness to come together to prepare the space so quickly.
The first Sikh man is believed to have come to Sudbury to work at a local mine 56 years ago, Badhesha said, adding that as the community has grown they’ve taken to meeting at each other’s homes for religious purposes.
Now that they have a Sikh temple to call their own, he said the community can feel more at home and will have greater opportunities to host events.
Approximately 80 per cent of the local Sikh community is composed of international students, whom Badhesha said face a number of stressors when they arrive in a foreign land lacking the same support they receive back home.
“They miss the connection of their homeland, they miss their culture, they don’t have any place they can go,” he said, adding that this is no longer the case.
“This place is going to be a home away from home.”
With the Sikh temple offering a place for international students to come together under a shared cultural umbrella, Batra said that it’s also more likely they decide to remain in Sudbury upon graduation.
It’s not only the Sikh community that will be welcome at the temple, but also the broader community, Badhesha said, adding that they will be offering daily meals and a place for people to warm up, which might benefit the city’s homeless population.
“This is a place where everyone can meet each other now.”
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com
