Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:47:03 +0000

It is midday and the deities are enjoying a brief respite from the world’s attentions. Krishna and his brother, Lord Balarama — as embodied in two spectacularly costumed statues — are concealed by a curtain which has been pulled across the entrance to the altar that represents their earthly home. In order that they might extend it their blessing, they have been left with a vessel containing a sample of today’s organic vegetarian lunch. After 20 minutes, a stocking-footed chef returns the deities to public view and shuffles off to the nearby kitchen to reintegrate the now sanctified sample with the main body of the meal that he is preparing.

This ritual is played out — as it is every day — within the setting of a diminutive Hindu temple, a white marble-faced structure built by a team of Rajasthanian craftsmen. Sitting on the floor of the darshan, the worshippers’ area in front of the altar, we can cast our eyes over scenes drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, carved all around us in high relief.

And what of the world beyond these walls? Well, the fact that we are not in India but in the London suburb of Harrow is perhaps not so very extraordinary. The 40,000 Hindus who live in the area — the highest concentration to be found anywhere in the UK — have lent their support to the construction of a number of local temples including one at Neasden that ranks as the largest outside India. Ours is a good deal smaller, and yet for Britain’s Hindus it has a significance out of all proportion to its size. This is because of the institution of which it forms the central part — Krishna-Avanti, a newly opened primary school that adopts a pedagogy based on the teachings of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Iskcon), also known as the Hare Krishna movement. In a country that already provides state funding for Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Sikh faith schools, Krishna-Avanti is the first Hindu example of the type.

The demands that Iskcon — a minority strand within Hinduism — makes on its followers have informed the school’s admissions policy. All pupils follow a strict vegetarian diet while their parents are required to abstain from alcohol. Hindu teaching also provided a strong guiding hand in the development of the school’s design. That is not to say that the whole complex follows the language of the temple. As can be gathered from the names shortlisted for the commission — Marks Barfield, Walters & Cohen and the eventual competition winner Cottrell & Vermeulen — Krishna-Avanti’s governors always envisaged that the school would present an essentially contemporary and western expression, an outcome that the reliance on DCSF funding might, in any case, guarantee. However, they also wanted the design to communicate the school’s very particular educational philosophy and indeed to follow the principles of the Vastu Shastra, the traditional Hindu “science of construction”. Reconciling these ambitions has not always proved easy, but in Cottrell & Vermeulen, Krishna-Avanti fortunately found an architect fleet-footed enough to conjure something of real conviction from its competing demands.