Manawatu Hindu Temple and Community Centre

Opened as the first Hindu temple and community centre in Palmerston North — and, by the operating society’s own description, in the wider Manawatu-Wanganui region of New Zealand’s lower North Island — the Manawatu Hindu Temple and Community Centre serves the region’s Hindu community from its site at 19 Purdie Place in the Milson suburb. Its regular religious programming centers on devotion to Hanuman, through a weekly Tuesday-evening recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa (a devotional hymn to Hanuman), and on Vishnu in his Satyanarayana form through periodically scheduled Sri Satyanarayan Swami Pooja and Katha ceremonies — a ritual combining worship with recitation of Satyanarayana’s legendary stories.

As the first dedicated Hindu worship space in a region without one previously, the centre represents the kind of “first of its kind” civic milestone increasingly common as New Zealand’s Hindu population expands beyond its traditional Auckland, Wellington, and Waikato concentrations into smaller regional centers.