Sri Prakash Gossai, MS, April 25, 1953 – June 15, 2009
Sri Prakash Gossai, MS, Special Assistant to the President, Chairman of the National Council on Suicide Prevention and popular Hindu community leader, died on June 15, aged 56.
Prakash Gossai was one of the most popular Hindu leaders in the burgeoning Guyanese diaspora community in New York. He refrained from referring to himself as a ‘pandit,’ which could mean a Brahman scholar or learned man, saying: “I do not like to call myself a pandit because, to me, a pandit is an extremely knowledgeable person in any field and I don’t think that I am that knowledgeable to be classified a pandit.” He was satisfied with the honorific title ‘Sri’ which is one of respect or reverence. To thousands of his admirers, he was both learned and revered.
Prakash Gossai believed that his personal popularity in the Hindu community was derived from his know-how and methodology rather than his knowledge of rituals and theology. He had emigrated to Queens, New York, in the United States of America where he quickly obtained a teaching position in the Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, in 1983. He discovered that many Indian-Guyanese schoolchildren were drifting away from traditional Hindu values. Others showed their unfamiliarity with the faith by asking searching questions about the meaning of ceremonies such as the puja and yajna and sought explanations for other religious objects such as the form of the murti. His community outreach also began in response to these experiences as a teacher. He became active in mandir work, encouraging youngsters to come out on Sundays to sing and contribute to community programmes.
He understood clearly that there was a communication problem. When he started his religious work, many devotees really did not understand Hindi so he adopted the method of explaining abstruse religious concepts in song and simple language. This is what set him apart from others and, he admitted, “It was then that people started to understand the meaning… so I believe that is what made me very popular.”
By meticulously translating the verses of a sacred text, while melodiously chanting a bhajan, he made worship comprehensible to the masses. In so doing, as a university graduate and high school teacher, he had a pedagogical and methodological advantage over other orthodox pandits. He eschewed ritualism and employed his classroom experience and folksy style in the mandir to respond to young people’s queries with clarity and simplicity. It was his unique technique to compose a katha, or religious lesson, based on a sacred text. There was always more to his method than melody.
During the first year after migrating to the USA, he observed that the unsettled lives and unrelenting struggle to survive in an alien urban environment had deprived some Indian-Guyanese Hindus in New York of both the opportunity to practise and access to places for regular worship. As a conscientious devotee of Hinduism who came from rural Demerara and who found himself amidst other migrants of similar circumstances, he yearned for the familiar village mandir like the ones at which he worshipped in his childhood.
He was encouraged to meet other like-minded Hindus and, together in 1984, they started devotions in the basement of a building in Brooklyn. He also had the idea of bringing together small groups of devotees from different locations. When, on occasion, persons scheduled to deliver religious lessons did not show up, Gossai would fill the bill with his chanting to present a simple katha in an entertaining manner. Eventually, both his reputation as a singer and the mandir he founded grew. Out of the basement sprung the Bhuvaneshwar Mandir in Brooklyn, in 1987, which was relocated to a new venue in Queens, in 2004. That mandir became recognised as one of the foremost Indian-Guyanese Hindu temples in the United States.
One thing led to another and, as the demand for his teaching and chanting grew, Gossai turned to recording songs of Hindu holy texts − the Bhagawad Gita, Sri Ramacharitamanas and the Vedas − so that devotees could enjoy the music of Bhuvaneshwar Mandir at their leisure.
As a result of his growing popularity, devotees began to regard him as a religious authority, although he saw himself as only a self-taught votary. Nevertheless, to fulfil the expectations of his congregation, he felt that he needed to learn more. He returned to Guyana briefly before leaving for India, at the age of 40 years in 1993, to spend over a year seeking education in Hinduism with his Guru, Brahmrishi Vishvatma Bawraji Maharaj of Pinjore, in Haryana State in north-west India. Then he returned to New York as a ‘Hindu missionary.’
From that time, Gossai was involved exclusively in religious work, mainly in New York. In addition to being a singer, he was indeed an eloquent orator and lectured extensively to Hindu congregations in Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, the United States and Venezuela. It was while he was involved in community outreach and ‘missionary’ work that President Bharrat Jagdeo invited him to return to Guyana in 2007. He was appointed Special Assistant to the President in the Office of the President and Chairman of the National Council on Suicide Prevention, established by the Ministry of Health
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Prakash Gossai was born on April 25, 1953, at Handsome Tree, a little village up the Mahaica Creek, about 46 km from Georgetown. The sixth of eight children of Pandit Bissondial and his wife Rewti, Gossai grew up in a devout Hindu family. He attended Cummings’ Lodge Government School on the East Coast, taking his GCE ‘O’ level examinations. His first job was a teaching position at Vryheid’s Lust Government School, also on the East Coast. He then entered the University of Guyana where he took a Bachelor of Science degree, graduating as the best student in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. He worked at the Laboratory of the Public Hospital Georgetown and taught at the university for two years before migrating to the USA.
He had started to play the harmonium and learned to chant the bhajan (Hindu devotional song) from the age of five years. As a teenager, he joined the Mahatma Gandhi Youth Organisation in Georgetown where he pursued his interest in religion, music and Hindi songs and won the annual Mukesh Singing Competition, the prize for which was a trip to Canada, in 1981. During his student years at high school and university, he retained his strong religious beliefs and served as President of the UG Hindu Society.
For his religious work, Gossai received several community awards in North America where he became well known over the past twenty-five years. He was honoured by the Devi Mandir in Pickering, Ontario, Canada for his contribution to the Canadian Hindu community, in 2002; by the Premier of Ontario for his contribution to the Hindu community in the Province of Ontario; by the Federation of Hindu Temples for his dedication, commitment and support to the Hindu Temples of Canada; and by the New York City Council and the Tri-state Alliance for his humanitarian services, in 2005, among others. The Government of Guyana also honoured him with the Medal of Service, in 2002, “for long and dedicated service in the field of religion as a social and community worker.”
Prakash Gossai’s partner Leila Singh and his two children, Pratiksha and Arun, survive him.
