Indians are flocking to a “sacred site” by the banks of the Port Adelaide River where Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists can scatter ashes into the water after cremation.
The council-approved location at Snowden Beach is named Harishchandra Ghat after a religiously significant riverbank on the Ganges in Varanasi, India, and is managed and maintained by the World Hindu Council’s South Australian chapter.
The City of Port Adelaide Enfield council allocated $75,000 to build stairs leading down to the beach in 2024 after chapter President Rajendra Pandey lobbied for a dedicated place for “water ceremonies” and obtained local government permission.
The site is reserved for use by Hindus on weekdays between 6am and 11am, and this week had a surge of publicity and positive reviews on Google Maps after an Indian community leader called for more support.
Mr Pandey, who is also President of the Hindu Economic Forum Australia, told The Australia Today that Google had marked the Harishchandra Ghat as “permanently closed” as it had only one review, which gave the site one star and stated: “Complete lie, as the Enfield Port Adelaide Council does not allow it.”
“I request the community to please help counter the false and negative review on our Harishchandra Ghat Adelaide page,” he said.
“Someone is calling it a lie and has managed to get it marked as closed. Unfortunately, in two years of operation and numerous users from our community, no one cared to leave positive feedback, but those who don’t use it have the time and motivation to do so.”
That negative review has since been deleted, and at the time of writing the site had a star average of 4.8 from 26 reviews.
Mr Pandey told SBS News after the Harishchandra Ghat opened that some Hindu families had previously waited months or even years to return the ashes of their loved ones to India so they could carry out the religious ritual, while others immersed the ashes in secret.
“Some of them were doing late at night because they were worried about what people would say and that discomfort and uncertainty and also that guilt made it really hard and it was just sad that we were not able to bid farewell for our loved ones while thinking just about them,” he said.
During the same year Hindus in Melbourne requested new cemeteries provide open-air wooden funeral pyres so they can cremate their dead in accordance with religious tradition.
A traditional Hindu funeral pyre uses up to 600kg of timber and burns for six hours. The custom is responsible for the consumption of 50 to 60 million trees a year in India while sending 8 million tonnes of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Header image: Harishchandra Ghat (Vishva Hindu Parishad South Australia).
