Nilanjan Agarwal (left) during a discussion on multiculturalism with Member for Canberra Alicia Payne. Photo: Alicia Payne MP/Facebook.
When Nilanjan Agarwal arrived in Canberra on 12 January 1979, spotting another Indian on the street was enough reason to cross it.
“If we saw an Indian walking on the other side of the road, we used to cross the road, go and talk to him, because it was a rare thing,” he recalled.
There were no WhatsApp groups or Facebook pages to find people from home. Mr Agarwal remembers initially knowing just five Indian families in Canberra, all of them schoolteachers.
So he opened the telephone directory and began looking for Indian names.
One call led to another. Within two months, he says, his Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays were filling up with people he had only recently discovered lived in the same city.
It was a Canberra with one Indian restaurant he remembers, no Indian grocery store, no Hindu temple and no readily available priest.
The Agarwals travelled to India regularly and returned with spices.
Otherwise, Sydney had an Indian grocery business in Bondi that supplied ingredients Canberra could not.
Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data gives some sense of just how small that migration stream was. Just 218 India-born ACT residents are recorded arriving in Australia between 1971 and 1980.
Mr Agarwal would eventually help build some of the things that were missing – most significantly, a place for Canberra’s Hindu community to worship.
But Canberra had to persuade him to come first.
Mr Agarwal had spent almost nine years in Sydney, initially working as a plant engineer. Ambitious and looking for opportunities in his adopted country, he remembers receiving straightforward career advice: if he wanted to become rich in Australia, there were three good professions – medicine, accounting and insurance.
“I said I can’t be a doctor.”
He tried insurance, where earnings depended on commission, before choosing accounting and studying at the University of New South Wales. He later undertook an MBA at the Australian Graduate School of Management.
It was research into shipping, however, that unexpectedly brought Canberra into view.
Mr Agarwal says his conclusions challenged Commonwealth shipping policy and drew attention after he submitted his work to an international conference.
Officials wanted him in Canberra. According to Mr Agarwal, the first offer was for a Commonwealth Public Service position two levels above his existing rank. He said no.
It was not because he disliked Canberra. He believed they wanted him enough to offer more. “I knew they’d give me more,” he said.
Eventually, he says, the offer climbed four levels. This time he said yes.
On 12 January 1979, the family arrived in the capital.
They settled in Red Hill, close enough to Canberra Grammar School that his son could cycle home during a break, have a glass of milk and something to eat, and return for sport. Three years later, the family moved to Chapman. His younger son became one of the early students at the then newly opened Radford College.
But outside school and work, the Agarwals were part of a small community working out how to preserve its traditions in a city without much of the infrastructure migrants now take for granted.
Religion presented one of the first challenges. There was no Hindu temple. There was no local priest to call when a family wanted to hold a puja (ceremonial worship).
So Mr Agarwal took on the job himself. He began conducting pujas in his home and in other families’ homes. He remembers eventually gathering about 25 Indian couples as the community found each other.
Those living rooms became places of worship and connection. Families came together for festivals including Diwali and Holi, and weekends once spent looking for other Indians began filling with community gatherings.
The Hindu Temple and Cultural Centre in Mawson. Photo: Temple Facebook page.
Then came a bigger idea. In 1979, community members formed a mandir society and began collecting money for a permanent temple.
The early donations were hardly the stuff of major construction projects. Mr Agarwal remembers $5 from one person, $2 from another.
But the money went into an account and the idea stayed alive.
For years, Canberra’s Hindu families continued worshipping without a permanent home. In 1986, the community applied for land.
Mr Agarwal said it was finally secured in 1991. Even then, they still had a long way to go.
The community had to pay for the land, raise money for construction and work out how to build a traditional Hindu temple within Canberra’s planning system.
The project took about four years, supported by community contributions that began with a few dollars.
Asked how they ultimately found enough money to make it happen, Mr Agarwal prefers another explanation: “God built his own temple.”
It marked a considerable change from 15 years earlier, when pujas were held in living rooms because there was nowhere else to go.
Today, when asked about the availability of Hindu priests in Canberra, Mr Agarwal laughs. “Oversupply!”
Gandhi statue in Glebe Park. Photo: ACT Government.
The same man who once knew practically every Indian in Canberra can no longer contemplate doing so.
“Now it is too big.”
His own family grew into Canberra with it. His sons went on to become a neurologist and a corporate accountant. Mr Agarwal left the Public Service after three years and built his accountancy practice.
His wife, with whom he had made the move from Sydney and built their life in Canberra, died about 10 years ago. She was cremated here.
Mr Agarwal’s contribution to Canberra’s cultural landscape also extended beyond the temple.
A committed Gandhian since his university years in India, when an Indian High Commissioner sought his help to establish a Gandhi statue in Canberra, Mr Agarwal simply said, “Yes”, and called then ACT chief minister Kate Carnell.
The ACT Government helped with the location and approvals, and the statue eventually found its home in Glebe Park.
An interesting symmetry links those two telephone stories.
In 1979, Mr Agarwal was using one to find Indians because there were so few around him. Years later, he could use one to speak to Canberra’s chief minister about putting an Indian cultural figure in the heart of the city.
The Census numbers tell an equally dramatic story. The 218 India-born ACT residents who recorded arriving in Australia between 1971 and 1980 compare with 5184 who arrived between 2016 and 2021.
Today, in his 80s, Mr Agarwal is still working. He continues to practise as an accountant while also running Pines Living, an aged care centre and nursing home in Canberra.
For a man Canberra once had to repeatedly improve its offer to attract, the verdict on whether the move worked out is emphatic.
“I have always been saying Canberra is the best place to live in the whole world.”
