On an overcast morning this month, a dozen or so people, most of them Hindus, gathered in a circle on the shore of Jamaica Bay and bowed their heads as a priest invoked the deities.

The location they had chosen, next to Cross Bay Boulevard in southern Queens, has for years been a popular site for New York’s Hindus to conduct rituals that involve the casting of religious offerings into the water, including food, statuary and fabric. Many of the items later wash ashore as flotsam.

But on this particular morning, the group was seeking divine inspiration for a countervailing reason: to clean up the debris left by their fellow Hindus. “This beach, this water, is our mother,” said the priest, Arjunen Armogan, who leads a temple in Jamaica, Queens. “We’re supposed to keep it clean, just as we look after our mother.”

The effort was part of a campaign by Sadhana, a four-year-old Hindu group based in New York, to spread environmental awareness and best practices among fellow believers.