KUALA LUMPUR, September 20, 2024 (Malaysia News): The Shree Lakshmi Narayan Mandir, founded over a century ago, has always served as the focal point for a thriving North Indian community in Malaysia. The North Indian community began settling in Malaya during the British colonial rule. The Shree Lakshmi Narayan Mandir began as a place of worship in Kuala Lumpur town center in 1919. It was started by early traders with the pioneers being Kesarmal Khanijow, Amar Nath, Paras Ram Goel and Rakha Ram Sharma. Temple trustee and former president Naveen Chander can still fondly recall his childhood where the community got together during religious festivals by the bank of Sungai Gombak in the 1960s. “So, the devotees would travel to Ipoh for Janmashtami, to Taiping for Maha Shivratri and gather here in KL for Ram Navami. “That’s how the North Indian community intermingled back then in the early years,” Naveen told Malay Mail.


While the temple community was primarily made up of Punjabi Hindus during the early years, the Gujarati and Sindhi communities eventually joined the temple, making it a religious and cultural haven for the largely Hindi-speaking North Indian community. In 1971, the temple was relocated to a smaller rented house at Kampung Kasipillay to make way for major redevelopment plans at the city center. In the late 1970s, the temple’s then president Datuk Makhanlal Saigal helped acquire a plot of prime land in Jalan Kasipillay, where the temple was constructed during 1979-1981 and consecrated in March,1982. Meanwhile, Shree Lakshmi Narayan Mandir president Nirmal Kumar Nandrajog, 71, said the temple aspires to become a socio-cultural and religious center, not just for the North Indian community but also the larger Hindu community. The temple, he said, is currently undergoing a three-phase expansion in line with this aspiration. The expansion and redevelopment works began in 2017 led by late president Sosheel Sharma and funded by generous devotees.

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