With less than an hour to go before the newly formed Hindu temple choir would make its debut, there was time for only a few final run-throughs of the hymn that had been prepared.“Don’t rush!” implored the conductor, Michael Sample, as the singers surged ahead of the accompanying keyboard’s programmed beat.
About 50 singers had gathered on Sunday morning in the senior center across the street from the Ganesha Temple, operated by the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, Queens. They would be performing on the busiest day of the temple calendar — the first day of the festival dedicated to Ganesha, the elephant-headed god.
Ganesha is revered as the remover of obstacles, and his festival is considered an auspicious time to begin new endeavors, not least an experiment in adapting an old religion for a new land. And of the singers, most of whom grew up in India, none had ever heard of a Hindu choir before.
“For us as Indians to learn a whole new thing is wonderful,” said Raji Samant, a member of the choir who runs a bookkeeping business in the city. She said she was drawn by the choir’s novelty.
Choirs are virtually unheard of in temples in India because worshipers tend not to cohere into anything resembling an attentive congregation, said Vasudha Narayanan, a professor of religion and the director of the Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions at the University of Florida.
“People come and go as they please within the temple hours, and it’s more individual prayers,” she said in a telephone interview.
While there are numerous musical traditions that have sprung from Hinduism, they tend to favor solos and improvisation, in keeping with the individualistic and free-flowing nature of Hindu worship, Professor Narayanan said.
She sees the choir as a “gentle process of Americanization” — a kind of adaptation of Hindu traditions to be more “recognizable” to the children of Hindu immigrants and the broader American public.
In Queens, there was a little skepticism at first, said Uma Mysorekar, the president of the temple, one of the largest and oldest Hindu temples in the country. “In the beginning people were a little bit upset with this word ‘choir,’ ” she said. “ ‘Choir — what is this?’ It’s not generally used among Hindus; it’s connected to a Christian choir.”
Resistance quickly faded as Chandrika Tandon, the choir’s founder, who grew up in South India, communicated the joy she had encountered in the gospel choirs of Harlem and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Nearly 200 people showed up after fliers advertising auditions were posted in the temple and on its Web site in March.
On Sunday, after a final pep talk from Ms. Tandon, the singers, men dressed in kurtas — collarless cotton tunics — in varying shades of cream, and women swathed in embroidered fabrics of deep maroon, padded across Bowne Street in their socks or bare feet and joined the devotees pouring into the temple.
The choir stood crowded into a corner at the rear of the temple near the door, a sea of devotees’ backs between them and the temple’s holiest space, the ornate chamber that houses an image of Ganesha.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the keyboard’s beat came to life, soon joined by the tabla and harmonium. The choir launched into song: “Om! Ganesha Sharanam!” the choristers sang, in praise of the deity.
Some devotees turned to look over their shoulders. A few began clapping in time. Others started mouthing along to the words. Not everyone was rapt: some continued their conversations, and two bare-chested priests standing nearby chatted and joked.
Nine minutes after they began, the choristers came to a sudden climax with a final “Sharanam Ganesha!”
There swiftly followed another sound rarely heard in the temple: applause. But not for long. Dr. Mysorekar, the temple president, hushed it as soon as she could. “In this temple, the Lord has supremacy,” she explained afterward.
The audience response was politely approving. “I was not expecting it at all,” said Navin Mithal, a retired flight engineer. But he said he liked it: “I was singing along inside me.”
A priest came over and said he had never heard anything like it, in a good way. Then came a clamoring of bells, drums and a woodwind as a palanquin bearing another garlanded image of Ganesha was lifted high.
Devotees rushed to their feet, some heading for the palanquin’s procession, others for a corner of the temple for private prayer, others still for the exit.
The brief experiment in unison was over for now. The familiar disorder was restored.
With one song already under its belt, the choir will resume rehearsals of another work — a medley of “America the Beautiful” and “Vande Mataram” (“Bow to Thee, Mother”), India’s national song. Its ultimate plan is to become a temple fixture. “First,” Ms. Tandon said, “we need to expand our repertoire.”
