Hindu Priest From Guyana Is Mourned in Queens

By Sewell Chan

Vijai T. Singh/The New York Times Mourners attended a viewing on Tuesday for Prakash Gosain, a Hindu priest who founded temples in Brooklyn and Queens and was active in politics in his native Guyana. He died on Monday at age 56.

Hundreds of members of the Indo-Caribbean immigrant community based in Richmond Hill, Queens, have turned out to mourn Pandit Prakash Gosain, a Hindu priest who founded a popular temple in New York City in 1987 and was active in politics in his native Guyana. Mr. Gosain died on Monday morning after suffering a heart attack at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where he had been flown in for treatment and tests, his family said. He was 56.

Mr. Gosain founded the Bhuvaneshwar Temple in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 1987. The temple moved to Ozone Park, Queens, in 2004.

At funeral services this week at the temple and at the Grace Funeral Chapels in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, the air was filled with the hoarse voices of Mr. Gosain’s followers, who prayed for him, many of them in tears. Mr. Gosain’s body was cremated on Thursday.

“He is a servant of humanity,” said the priest’s brother Bankim Gosain. “His life belonged to the world, not to him.”

Khemnauth Sookram, a follower of Mr. Gosain, said the priest helped members of the Indo-Caribbean community — descendants of South Asian migrants who arrived in Guyana and Trinidad in the mid-19th century, many of them as indentured servants following the end of slavery — to preserve their culture. “It’s an amazing journey and he’s the captain of the ship,” Mr. Sookram said.

Natasha Kumar Warikoo, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who studies immigrant assimilation, estimated that the Indo-Caribbean community in New York City totaled 50,000, including immigrants and their children, though precise estimates are hard to come by. Most came to the United States from Guyana and Trinidad, and some from Jamaica.

The migration started in the 1970s and gained steam in the 1980s, spurred in part by political turmoil in Guyana in the 1970s and, later, by the collapse of the oil industry in Trinidad in the 1980s.

Dr. Warikoo, who has studied the New York-born children of Indo-Caribbean parents, described the community’s religious worship as “incredibly syncretic,” combining different forms of belief or practice.
“Religion is an important part of their lives, but it’s very syncretic,” she said.

Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at Hunter College who studies Caribbean migration to the United States, noted that the Indo-Caribbean population includes Muslims, Christians, Hindus and adherents of other faiths.

“For a long time in the Caribbean, actual religious practices among South Asians were fairly syncretic,” he said. “They were not the most traditional.”

But “improvised folk religion,” he said, has shifted in recent years toward “a revival of more recognizably traditional practice among Indo-Caribbeans, both in the United States and in the Caribbean. There has been more interest in traditional Hinduism, more contact with India, and also a rise of stricter interpretations of Islam. People have become more focused on religious traditions as the ethnic group has become more self-defined.”

Mr. Gosain, who was also known as Prakashji among his followers (and whose family name was occasionally spelled as Gossai), moved back to Guyana in 2007 to serve as an adviser to its president, Bharrat Jagdeo, but maintained close ties to his followers in the United States.