Aulds Cove Hindu Temple

Tucked into the small rural community of Aulds Cove near the Canso Causeway in Nova Scotia, this temple grew out of a 1969 Diwali gathering among the roughly twenty Hindu families then living in the area, many drawn to the region by academic and engineering work. Physicist Yogi Joshi and Krishan Lekhi were among the founding organizers who turned that gathering into a standing place of worship; Lekhi donated the marble murti of Krishna that remains the temple’s central deity. The temple formally opened during Diwali in 1972, and is counted among the oldest continuously operating Hindu temples in North America.

As the original founding families aged and moved away, the temple’s local congregation shrank, but in recent years it has found new life through Indian students studying at nearby St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish and other institutions in the region. Its 50th-anniversary Diwali celebration in October 2022 — a pooja, communal meal, and the lighting of 51 lamps under the guidance of Pandit Ravi Dogra — drew both longtime community members and a new generation of student devotees, underscoring the temple’s continued role as a gathering place for Hindus in rural Nova Scotia.