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Nala In Search of a Way

MArch Thesis
University of Waterloo, School of Architecture
Supervised by Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt
Defended May 2024 (Commended)


The Hindu temple of my youth was bound within a warehouse — a compromise by the aching cloaked as assimilation. At its entrance stood a model, a promise to antiquity; its grooves mimicking the captive temples of a land still at war. This miniature was sculpted as a signal for their future — that what was abandoned would soon be remade in their name. This was now our home. This was our tomorrow. But listen to its walls and the model would whisper to you: what you yearn lies not ahead, but within, amidst our ashes.

Nala: In Search of a Way is a conversation with Canadian-Hindu temples — the invisible guardians that harbour the Eelam-Tamil diaspora. Drawing from Hindu and Tamil storytelling, treading the mythical and the historical, this work interprets this exchange into an epic through prose and illustration. In this work, a second-generation youth is poached by a Goddess to Her domain, and to overcome this exile he must confront his conflicting beliefs on home. As he journeys through childhood protests, wars on memory, and wavering temples, he searches for a familiar warmth that can guide his return home. This pilgrimage is a child’s map to deciphering the bounds of belonging, contending with a displaced generation’s excess and absence of home.




A Temple Within a Temple
Sri Varasiththi Vinaayagar Hindu Temple, Toronto, ON (2021)



Searching as Prose
MArch Thesis Document, UWSpace (2024)



Searching as Illustration
Digital Illustration, 24"w x 108"h (2024)
Illustrations exhibited as Within My Temple Lies a Home at:

© Nilojan Jegatheeswaran 2026