Growing Pains: Harvard Dharma Searches for New Space as Attendance Increases

In the basement of Canaday Hall B lies a small prayer space designated for Hindu students, dedicated in 2006. The area, home of Harvard Dharma, is not only for weekly prayers but also a place where Harvard’s Hindu students and affiliates can gather together.

But, Hindu students say the space’s size has become a recent struggle.

“We’ve had significantly increased engagement in the Dharma community, both in past years and particularly this year,” said Vishnu S. Emani ’26, Dharma’s co-president.

“Right after Covid, the community saw a sudden downturn in engagement, and it took a little while to pick up again,” he added.

At this year’s first aarti, a weekly prayer hosted in the Canaday space, there were over 60 attendees. The space, however, “does not hold more than 25, 30 people comfortably,” Emani said.

“People were lined up outside the doors,” said Drima P. Patel ’27, a Dharma board member.

During Dharma’s first event for Ganesh Chaturthi — a festival where attendees build clay statues of the Hindu god Ganesha and dipped them in a body of water — Amiya E. Tiwari ’26, the other Dharma co-president, said they were “trying to have people, paper plates, and clay all in one room.”

“Vishnu and I were literally tiptoeing over people just trying to fit,” she added.

Given the increase in engagement, and the “new class of super engaged freshmen,” former Dharma co-president Krisha T. Patel ’25 agreed that “it’s really difficult to accommodate all the students that are actually interested in attending weekly in the prayer space alone.”

“If this keeps up next year, there will be no way we can actually keep up with the level of engagement that we now have,” she said.

As a result, Dharma has begun restricting weekly aartis to only undergraduate students, leaving Hindu graduate students without an alternative space.

“If someone wants to pray, there’s just not as many temples in the area that are easily accessible,” Tiwari said.

In addition to weekly prayers, Dharma hosts three big events throughout the year for Hindu holidays: Hungama, which drew a crowd of several hundred participants last week, Diwali, and Holi. While the events are hosted in other spaces other than the Canaday basement, Dharma does not have a storage space outside of its prayer space.

“So now you have this space with many more people than it can actually accommodate, and then on top of that, you have all the decorations for three really, really big events all in one,” Krisha Patel said.

In April, Dharma reached out to an administrator to see if the organization could store some of its items in the SOCH. In an email obtained by The Crimson, the administrator wrote back that the SOCH does not provide personal storage for student organizations and the organizational storage was already divided.

He instead suggested having the religious items and clothing placed with the Harvard Archives office to save space.

However, Krisha Patel said that they can’t be archived because “we need these things pretty regularly.”

In a statement, Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo confirmed that the limited organizational storage space in the SOCH has already been claimed, adding that there is no other available space in the building.

In addition to recent issues with limited storage space, there have been previous conversations about relocating the Muslim and Hindu prayer spaces out of Canaday Hall. Critics of the spaces’ basement location have expressed concerns over its invisibility and inequality compared to the more established, elaborate spaces for other religious groups on campus.

Last year, amid a reported increase in Islamophobia on campus, Harvard added an additional prayer space for Muslim affiliates in Sever Hall.

This year, Dharma’s efforts to find a better space have been more concerted.

Emani explained that previous Dharma presidents had talked about the limitations of the Canaday space, saying that “the demand was kind of there but in the background.”

“It wasn’t so blatantly obvious as like, ‘Oh my gosh. We literally have people overflowing in this room every single week,’” he said

Now, the crowded space sometimes poses a barrier to attendance.

Drima Patel said she’s heard from other students that they didn’t want to come. “Why would they come just to stand outside?” she said.

But Rahul A.J. Yates ’27, one of the worship chairs, argued that the cultural and religious significance of the space “supersedes and outweighs any potential slight discomfort.”

Temples in India are often warmer and more uncomfortable, he added.

Other students agree that the limits to the space have not stopped them from enjoying Dharma’s community.

“Amiya and Vishnu do a great job of making the prayer space feel like home,” Saranya Singh ’28 said.

That said, most students said a bigger space would better serve the organization’s needs.

Due to Hinduism’s diversity as a religion, including many deities and regionally-specific rituals, Krisha Patel explained that “accommodating and tailoring to every kind of tradition or religious practice that people are used to practicing when they’re at home is really tough when the space is limited to begin with.”

Additionally, the current space in the basement does not have windows, which are “important religiously to Hinduism,” because certain holidays and rituals involve nature and natural light, Yates explained.

“We can’t really get that from a basement,” he said.

Tiwari and Emani explained they are hoping to move to a space above ground with windows and the capacity for over 70 people. They also emphasized the need for a central location, as one benefit to the current space in Canaday is its proximity to freshman and undergraduate life.

Another obstacle in expanding the Hindu prayer space is Dharma “relatively recently built-up” alumni network, Emani said.

This lack of financial support from alumni leads Dharma to look towards the University for funding and a potential new location.

“We are kind of dependent on the College for where we’re going to be located, just because we haven’t built up the scaffolding that maybe we will have in another 30 years with an alumni network,” Tiwari said.

Palumbo wrote in a statement that Harvard “affirms our support for students practicing and exploring their faith while enrolled and will continue to work with student leaders to identify opportunities to create meaningful connections across our community”.

But Tiwari and Emani are optimistic about future discussions with the university about the space.

“There is an effort, I think, from the Dean of Students Office, to hear more from students from faith-based groups,” Tiwari said.“I think that's great.”

Despite the challenges in expansion, the co-presidents emphasized that the faith, friendship, and family students find in Dharma is not broken by the small confines of their prayer space.

“It really speaks to the fortitude of our community that the space has not impacted the growth of our community,” Tiwari said.

“It’s not a matter of, the space is preventing our community from growing — it’s just our community is growing so much that we need a new space,” she added.

—Staff writer Rachael A. Dziaba can be reached at rachael.dziaba@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @rachaeldziaba.

—Staff writer Aisatu J. Nakoulima can be reached at aisatu.nakoulima@thecrimson.com.