Journey
Bahá’í India
The Bahá'í presence in India goes back to the Bábí period in the 1840s, but the organised teaching dates from Jamál Effendi's arrival at Bombay in 1872 and his journeys across the subcontinent afterwards. The Lotus Temple of 1986 is what most people know of it. The Lotus Temple's twenty-seven marble petals have no images, no sermons and no ritual inside them.
Stops (3)
- Lotus Temple, Delhi · The Lotus Temple, Delhi — 1986
Fariborz Sahba's house of worship at Kalkaji: twenty-seven marble petals in nine groups of three, around a hall seating some two and a half thousand. Bahá'í houses of worship admit anyone of any religion and hold no sermons, no images and no clergy — only readings from any scripture. It is among the most visited buildings in the world.
- Jamál Effendi · from 1872
The organised teaching in India begins with one traveller. Jamál Effendi arrived at Bombay in 1872 on Bahá'u'lláh's own instruction and spent years crossing the subcontinent — Calcutta, Madras, Kashmir, Burma and on to the Andamans — establishing the first Indian communities by conversation rather than by mission station. The village growth that made India the largest Bahá'í population anywhere came a century after him.
- The Bahá'í Faith · two million, mostly in villages
The largest Bahá'í community anywhere, and almost none of it urban: some two million people, gathered mostly in the villages of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar from the 1960s. The growth rested on a claim that fitted an expectation already there — that Bahá'u'lláh was the Kalki avatar the Puranas promised — which is why the Indian community grew by village teaching rather than by the professional and mercantile conversion the faith saw elsewhere.