Purohita | The Swiss Cantons

Twenty-Two Temples, and Why a Priest Still Travels

Who the Hindus of Switzerland actually are, why a country full of temples still needs a household priest, how the fire is handled across twenty-six cantons, and the one article of the Civil Code that fixes the order of your wedding.

The fire established where the family is, which is what the Gṛhya rites have always asked.

Written by Pandit Sahadev, Vedic priest and pandit in charge of ceremonies at Radha Govinda Math, Traiskirchen

Engaging a Hindu Pandit in Switzerland is usually described as a problem of distance: a scattered community, no temple, a priest who must travel. Half of that is right and half of it is not, and the half that is wrong is worth correcting first, because it changes what a family should actually be looking for.

Switzerland has temples. It has roughly twenty-two of them. What it has rather less of is priests who conduct the domestic rites in the home, and those are two different offices rather than two grades of the same one. This page sets out who the community is, why that distinction matters, how the sacred fire is handled across a country of twenty-six separate cantonal jurisdictions, and the provision of Swiss law that decides the sequence of a wedding before any other planning begins.

Who the Hindus of Switzerland are

Around fifty-four thousand people in Switzerland identify as Hindu, roughly six in every thousand of the population. The overwhelming majority, something on the order of forty-two thousand, are Sri Lankan Tamils who arrived as refugees and labor migrants through the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and their tradition is predominantly Śaiva. Alongside them sit perhaps eight thousand Indian Hindus, several thousand adherents of international guru organizations, and a number of Swiss practitioners. Zurich holds the densest concentration, with something like twenty thousand Tamils in that canton alone, followed by Bern, Basel and the western cantons.

This is a very different picture from the one usually painted, in which the community is described as a professional Indian diaspora attached to pharmaceuticals in Basel, finance in Zurich and the international agencies in Geneva. That layer is real and it is served, but it is the smaller part by a wide margin. Any account of Hindu Switzerland that does not begin with the Tamil Śaiva community has begun in the wrong place.

Temple and household are different offices

From the nineteen-nineties onward the Tamil community built its own religious infrastructure, and it built quickly: some twenty-two temples across the country, often in converted factories and warehouses. The Sri Sivasubramaniar temple at Adliswil in the canton of Zurich, founded in 1994, is the largest and best known, and others followed at Glattbrugg, Dürnten and elsewhere. These are functioning temples with resident priests and a full annual cycle of festivals. Notably, the Indian Hindu population founded cultural associations rather than temples, which tells you something about how the two communities have organized themselves.

Here is why a country with twenty-two temples still needs a traveling priest. The Arcaka or Kurukkaḷ of a Swiss temple holds an office that belongs to that temple and its deity, and the Āgamic worship he conducts there, an installed image served through a fixed daily cycle, is a different stream from the Gṛhya rites of the home. A family in Zug keeping a Nāmakaraṇa, or an Indian household in Basel with no temple of its own tradition within reach, is not badly served by geography; it needs a different officiant, and always did. The full account of the household rites is set out in the treatment of the sixteen Saṃskāras.

The cantons, and what each holds

The German-speaking north around Zurich, Winterthur and Zug carries the largest share of households, Tamil and Indian both, and the greatest density of temples. Basel adds a substantial professional population tied to the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Bern holds a long-settled Tamil community and the federal administration. In the French-speaking west, Geneva and Lausanne combine an international and diplomatic layer around the United Nations agencies with a settled residential population, and Vaud extends it along the lake.

Beyond the cities lies the other kind of occasion entirely. The lake and mountain country around Lucerne, Lugano and the Bernese Oberland receives a steady season of destination weddings each year at historic villas, mountain hotels and country estates, with families gathering from across Europe. A priest working Switzerland moves between the two registers through the year: a naming kept quietly in a Zurich flat on a Saturday morning, and a canopy raised above a lake for two hundred guests a month later.

What a household calls a Purohita for

Across the years a household calls on a Purohita for the Saṃskāras, from the naming of a newborn to the Vivāha; for the blessing of a new home; for the rites of remembrance by which it honors its dead; and for the festivals and fire offerings it chooses to keep. Each is described on its own page under Samskara Ceremonies and Pujas and Homas. All of them can be kept in a Swiss flat, chalet or garden: the priest brings the Mantras and most of the materials, and none of them requires a return to Bhārata.

The fire, across twenty-six jurisdictions

Switzerland has no single national rule on open flame at events. Fire safety and building regulation sit largely with the cantons and communes, which means the answer to whether a contained fire may be lit differs by where you are standing, and a permission granted in Zug tells you nothing about Vaud. This is the practical peculiarity of the Swiss setting and the reason the question must be put to the specific property rather than answered in general.

In practice, country estates, chalets and mountain hotels accommodate a contained fire in a garden or courtyard without much difficulty, given sensible provision: a vessel raised off the ground, a cleared area, water at hand, and the property’s own watch. Indoors is stricter everywhere, and an apartment or hotel ballroom requires explicit written permission, real ventilation for the smoke of ghee and wood, and attention to the smoke detection the building carries. Get the permission in writing before the contract is signed, naming the exact place agreed, and name the covered fallback too. Materials are well provisioned through the Indian shops of Zurich, Geneva and Basel, supplemented by what the priest carries. The meaning of the offering itself is set out in the account of Homa and the sacred fire.

Article 97, and why it fixes your order

This is the provision that decides the shape of a Swiss wedding, and very few families planning one have heard of it. Article 97 paragraph 3 of the Swiss Civil Code states that no religious wedding ceremony is permitted prior to the civil ceremony. Not merely that the religious rite lacks legal effect, which is true everywhere in Switzerland, but that it may not come first. A religious marriage celebrated before the civil one is treated as void.

This is worth stating against its neighbor for contrast. Germany carried the same prohibition until 2009 and then abolished it, so a family there may hold the Vedic rite whenever it wishes. Switzerland did not follow, and the rule stands. The consequence is direct: the civil marriage before the Zivilstandsamt, or the office of the état civil or the stato civile, must be completed first, and only then may the Vivāha be kept.

For couples resident in Switzerland the sequence is straightforward. Open the preparatory procedure at the registry office of your commune, complete the civil marriage, and hold the Vedic ceremony afterward, whether the same day or weeks later. For couples traveling in, the Swiss civil route means apostilled documents, certified translations and a residence connection, so the practical answer is almost always to register at home before flying, which also satisfies the sequence Article 97 requires, since a marriage validly concluded abroad is recognized in Switzerland. Swiss requirements do change, so confirm the current position with the Zivilstandsamt of your commune or a qualified professional before relying on it; this is general information, not legal advice. For how other European countries treat a Hindu wedding, see Hindu wedding legal recognition in Europe.

Reaching the cantons

Switzerland is among the easiest countries in Europe in which to bring a properly trained priest to a household, precisely because it is small, central and superbly connected. The rail network reaches nearly every town with a reliability few countries match, so the journey from Zurich to Geneva, or Basel to Lucerne, or out to a Bernese Oberland estate, carries none of the uncertainty distance introduces elsewhere. From a base elsewhere in central Europe the country is a short flight or a comfortable train away.

Because the journey is easy, a Swiss family need not settle for whoever happens to live closest; it can choose a priest for his training and for his fitness for the rite in question. For a wedding or any larger rite the priest comes the day before, so that he is rested and has walked the venue before the fire is lit. Travel, lodging, and which materials he brings as against what is bought locally are best agreed in the first conversation, not discovered on the day.

Choosing whom to engage

A priest is asked into the home for the hours a family will remember longest, so it is worth putting a few plain questions before engaging one. From whom did he receive his training? Formation in this tradition is long and oral, passed from teacher to student, and a qualified priest names his line without hesitation. Does he serve as a temple Kurukkaḷ or as a domestic Purohita? The two hold different offices. And has he kept rites in Swiss venues, where fire permissions differ from canton to canton and commune to commune?

Ask too whether he will explain the rite as it unfolds. In Switzerland this matters more than almost anywhere, because many households now include a second generation raised here with little Sanskrit, or a partner meeting the tradition for the first time. Speaking the Mantra in its proper form and then making its sense clear is no concession; the tradition asks that a rite be understood as well as kept. For the wider work of a Vedic priest across the continent, see the account of the Vedic Pandit in Europe.

A community with temples of its own and households that still need the fire brought to them. The two are not the same work.

The Sāmanasya Sūkta is addressed to a household rather than to an individual, and its request is modest and very hard: that the people under one roof be of one heart and hold no grudge. That is what every observance kept in a home is finally in service of, and it is why the rites belong in the house rather than at a distance from it. A flat in Zurich, a chalet above the Bernese valleys, a villa on Lake Lucerne or Lake Geneva, becomes for the hours of an observance a place of full sacred dignity. The Swiss cantons hold many such roofs now, and going to them is the work rather than an interruption of it.

The verse cited above is from the Sāmanasya Sūkta of the Atharvaveda; on the domestic rites in their textual form, the Pāraskara Gṛhya Sūtra; with primary texts gathered at Sanskrit Documents and scholarship on Hindu communities in Switzerland and on the household rites through the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.