A Hindu temple standing at a quarter of a mile into the sea at Waterloo in Trinidad is not just any monument but a testament of the human spirit and one man’s fortitude.
The Shiv Mandir, known as ‘Temple in the sea’ was conceptualised and created single-handedly by Sewdass Sadhu, a Benaras native who set out to create a holy place in the land of his destiny. His parents reached the Gulf of Paria off Trinidad coast as indentured labourers in 1908 with the seven-year-old boy, Sewdass.
After his parents’ demise, Sewdass finished the remaining serving period of the indentureship. From 1926 onwards, with the savings from his meager wages, they came back to India every few years to worship at the holy shrines. But in the 1930s, as the travel costs went beyond his reach, he decided to create a holy place in Trinidad by the calm Gulf of Paria, perhaps making it his holy Ganges.
Sadhu chose a piece of unused swampland next to a sugar factory and built a modest temple. When the sugar company noticed the construction on its land, Sewdass was dragged to court, fined and jailed. When he came out of prison, he decided to build his temple in the sea, as the sea is 'no man’s land’.
With tenacity as his capital, he started collecting broken bricks from a brick factory and dumped them into the sea to make a walkway. He became a familiar figure carrying two buckets in the handlebar of his cycle transporting sand and cement. It took 25 years for him to single-handedly build the temple in the sea surrounded by water. The temple stood as a celebration of Sewdass Sadhu’s mental strength and courage against all odds.
The postscript to this story is astonishing. In 1970 Sewdass visited his homeland where suddenly he breathed his last due to a heart attack. With time, due to sea erosion, the temple was damaged. In 1994, Rampersad, a third-generation Trinidadian of indenture ancestry took the initiative to rebuild Sadhu’s temple. Eighteen months later, on December 10, 1995, the Sewdass Sadhu Shiv Mandir was consecrated, with Sewdass Sadhu’s statue standing on the shore as a witness.