Temple in the Sea (Sewdass Sadhu Shiva Mandir)

About Temple in the Sea (Sewdass Sadhu Shiva Mandir)

The Temple in the Sea — officially the Sewdass Sadhu Shiva Mandir — stands on a small platform in the Gulf of Paria at Waterloo, Carapichaima, on the west coast of Trinidad. It is one of the most moving symbols of the Indo-Trinidadian community: a temple built by an indentured labourer who, denied land to worship on, built his temple in the sea.

Today a causeway leads to the octagonal white temple, where murtis of Shiva, Ganesha, Hanuman, Durga and Krishna are consecrated. Families come to pray, to perform rites by the water and to enjoy the views over the gulf, especially at sunset.

The temple is often visited together with two nearby sites: the Indian Caribbean Museum of Trinidad and Tobago, also in Waterloo, and the Dattatreya Temple in Orangefield, Carapichaima, with its towering Karyasiddhi Hanuman statue — the tallest Hanuman statue outside India.

History

Sewdass Sadhu was born in 1901 in present-day Uttar Pradesh and came to Trinidad aged four on the SS Mutlah with his indentured parents. In the 1930s he built a small Shiva shrine on land of the Waterloo sugar estate; the estate had it demolished and he was jailed for 14 days and fined. Believing no one owned the sea, from 1947 he carried stones, sand and cement by bicycle to build a path into the gulf, and completed a temple there in 1952. After his death in 1970 the temple decayed; it was rebuilt under Randolph Rampersad and reopened in 1995, marking 150 years since the first indentured Indians arrived in Trinidad.