GBHO World Peace Mahayagya (2025)

The Vishwa Shanti Gyan Mahayagya (World Peace and Wisdom Mahayagya) was a seven-day Hindu religious ceremony held from 16 to 23 July 2025 at the Om Center Divya Dham in Galion, Ohio, organised by the Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization (GBHO). Drawing an estimated 50,000 attendees from across the United States and abroad, it was the largest gathering of Bhutanese Hindus in the diaspora and one of the most significant Bhutanese-American religious assemblies in recent history. The event combined Vedic rituals with memorials honouring the 67 individuals killed or disappeared during Bhutan's mass expulsions of the early 1990s, serving simultaneously as an act of devotion, collective healing, and cultural preservation.^[1]

The Hindu American Foundation described the event as transforming the small town of Galion into a "spiritual epicentre" as Bhutanese Hindu refugees from across the globe gathered for the Great Spiritual Offering for World Peace and Wisdom. For a community scattered across eight resettlement countries following two decades in refugee camps in Nepal, the Mahayagya represented a rare moment of collective reunion, with families travelling from as far as Australia and Europe to participate.^[2]

Om Center Divya Dham

The Om Center Divya Dham is a 150-acre religious and cultural complex in Galion, Crawford County, Ohio (4270 State Route 309), acquired by GBHO for approximately two million US dollars. The land was purchased by GBHO President Kamal Dhimal and 108 founding members with the vision of establishing a permanent centre for spiritual practice, cultural preservation, and community healing. The centre serves as GBHO's world headquarters and is described by its founders not merely as a physical structure but as "a monument carved from pain, faith, and unbreakable spirit" — a sanctuary for Bhutanese who have survived exile, refugee life, and the dislocations of resettlement.^[3]

The centre's name, Divya Dham ("Divine Abode"), reflects its intended function as a sacred space for the practice of Sanatan Dharma (Hinduism) within the Bhutanese diaspora. GBHO, founded as a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation, had articulated a vision in 2022 of developing the 150-acre property into a comprehensive religious and cultural campus. The 2025 Mahayagya represented the first major realisation of that vision.^[4]

The Ceremony

The seven-day programme combined major elements of Hindu liturgical practice. One hundred and seventy-five priests — including thirty-five women — led the ceremonial proceedings, which included:

• 108 recitations of the Srimad Bhagavat Mahapurana, the foundational Hindu scripture narrating the life and teachings of Lord Krishna
• Daily Vedic recitations of the Rudri, Chandi, and Bhagavad Gita
• Panchakundiya Havan (fire ceremony) and Rudrabhishek (ritual bathing of Shiva)
• Morning recitations of the Vishnu Sahasranama (thousand names of Vishnu), led by hundreds of children — a deliberate effort to transmit religious knowledge to the younger generation
• Lighting of 1.5 crore (15 million) oil lamps, honouring the souls of those lost during Bhutan's conflict and symbolising the community's collective prayer for peace

The ceremonial programme was complemented by two permanent symbolic installations at the Om Center Divya Dham grounds, both of which have remained on the site as lasting features of the campus and both of which carry deliberate narrative weight tying the celebratory ritual of the Mahayagya to the harder history of displacement out of which the community emerged.

Maha Kalash

The Maha Kalash — a monumental consecrated kalash, the traditional Hindu ceremonial vessel that represents abundance, auspiciousness and the presence of the divine — stands eleven feet tall and is described by GBHO as the largest kalash in the world. A formal Guinness World Records application for recognition is in progress, with assistance from the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a Washington DC-based 501(c)(3) Hindu civil rights and education organisation founded in 2003. The submission process is still open as of 2026 and this article treats the "largest" claim as an in-progress submission rather than an adjudicated record.

The Maha Kalash was consecrated with waters gathered from all eleven countries in which Bhutanese refugees have lived since the expulsions of the early 1990s. The full set of inaugural waters came from:

• Bhutan — the community's country of origin
• Nepal — site of the seven eastern-Nepal refugee camps (Beldangi, Sanischare, Khudunabari, Goldhap, Timai, Pathri and Maidhar) where the community lived for roughly two decades from 1992 onwards
• India — transit country and home to a smaller residual Lhotshampa population
• United States — the largest third-country resettlement destination, with approximately 92,000 refugees resettled between 2008 and 2016
• Canada
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Denmark
• United Kingdom

Together these eleven countries trace the geographic footprint of the Lhotshampa diaspora from the original homeland through the camp years to the eight third-country resettlement destinations of the 2008–2016 UNHCR-led programme. The act of mingling waters from all eleven into a single consecrated vessel at the ritual centre of the Mahayagya was intended to symbolise the unification of a community that had been deliberately scattered across three continents, and to honour each country that had offered refuge.

The Maha Kalash sits at the centre of a parikrama path — the clockwise circumambulation route that Hindu devotees walk around a sacred object as an act of veneration. The flags of all eleven countries line this path alongside the vessel, so that a devotee completing the parikrama passes in turn through the full diaspora cartography: from the flag of Bhutan, through Nepal and India, out across the western resettlement countries, and back again to the flag of Bhutan at the start. The installation places the kalash in the vicinity of the central Brahmasthan position marked in the forthcoming Om Center Divya Dham master plan by Jon Lipman, AIA, consistent with the vastu shastra convention that a consecrated kalash anchors the energetic centre of a Vastu-compliant site.

The numerical resonance of the installation — eleven feet tall, eleven countries of waters, eleven national flags along the parikrama — is deliberate, reflecting the community's own framing of its eleven-country footprint.

Refugee camp hut replica

Alongside the Maha Kalash, GBHO constructed a full-scale bamboo-and-thatch refugee camp hut replica on the Galion grounds in preparation for the Mahayagya. The replica was built using the traditional construction techniques of the eastern-Nepal refugee camps that housed the Lhotshampa community between the early 1990s expulsions and the 2008–2016 resettlement programme — split bamboo framing, thatched roofing and the rudimentary shelter form that defined camp life at Beldangi, Sanischare, Khudunabari and the other settlements in Jhapa and Morang districts. At a site otherwise dedicated to the celebration of the community's post-resettlement consolidation, the hut functions as a permanent architectural reminder of the camp years.

The replica was one of the major visitor attractions during the 2025 Mahayagya and continues to serve as a commemorative and educational installation on the site. Attendees — many of whom had themselves lived in similar structures for much of their pre-resettlement lives — described visits to the replica as occasions for remembrance and for introducing US-born children and grandchildren to the physical conditions of the camp years. The installation is the built precursor to the larger refugee-camp memorial area planned under the Om Center's phased master plan, and is intended to anchor that future memorial precinct as the organisation's twenty-five-year development horizon advances.

Community and Humanitarian Activities

The Mahayagya extended beyond religious observance to encompass community health and civic engagement. Health assessments were conducted for over 300 attendees, and a blood donation drive yielded 49 pints of blood, with 41 of the donors giving blood for the first time. These activities reflected GBHO's broader mission of serving the holistic needs of the Bhutanese Hindu community in the diaspora.^[1]

The Global Campaign to Release Political Prisoners in Bhutan (GCRPPB) used the gathering as a platform to raise awareness about Bhutanese citizens who remain imprisoned for advocating for their cultural and citizenship rights during the 1990s. On 19 July, the organisation set up an educational booth, conducted interviews with former political prisoners as part of a documentation project, and hosted a Facebook Live conversation with Reynoldsburg City Council member Bhuwan Pyakurel, a Bhutanese-American elected official.^[5]

Significance

The Mahayagya held profound significance for the Bhutanese Hindu diaspora on multiple levels. As a religious event, it preserved and transmitted the rituals of Sanatan Dharma to a generation born or raised in Western countries, addressing the cultural crisis that scholars have identified as a central concern of the Bhutanese Nepali diaspora. As a memorial, it honoured the dead and acknowledged the suffering of a community that had endured ethnic cleansing, statelessness, and serial displacement. And as a social gathering, it reunited a diaspora that had been deliberately scattered across eight countries and dozens of cities, allowing families and communities fractured by resettlement to reconnect.

The event's organisers emphasised its inclusive character, noting that the Mahayagya was intended to serve "everyone — Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Kirat, and all who call Bhutan home." This ecumenical framing reflected the broader Lhotshampa community's multi-faith character and the organisers' aspiration for the Om Center to function as a unifying space for all Bhutanese in the diaspora, regardless of religious affiliation.^[3]

See Also

• Bhutanese Diaspora in the United States
• Bhutanese Refugee Crisis
• Hinduism in Bhutan
• Lhotshampa

References

1. "Faith, Unity, and Legacy: The Mahayagya That Brought a Diaspora Together." Bhutanese Literature, 2025.
2. Hindu American Foundation. Post on X (Twitter), 2025.
3. "From Maidhar to Galion: The Bhutanese Journey Beyond Forceful Eviction Toward Justice, Healing, and Unity." Bhutan News Network, July 2025.
4. Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization (GBHO). Official website.
5. "GCRPPB Raised Awareness on Bhutanese Political Prisoners During Vishwa Shanti Gyan Mahayagya." Bhutan News Network, August 2025.
6. "Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization." GuideStar.