Person · Baháʼí teacher & traveller

Jamál Effendi

Also known as Jamal Effendi, Sulayman Khan Tunukabuni

Date

c. 1810 – 1898

Function

Learning & scholarship

Tradition

Bahaʼi histories; Jamal Effendi travel narratives

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

He travelled as a dervish and taught rulers and princes where he could get an audience, including in Rampur, Hyderabad and the hill states. The first substantial Indian Bahá'í community, however, grew a century later among Adivasi and Dalit villagers in Madhya Pradesh rather than among anyone he met.

Connections (2)

• TransmissionLotus Temple, Delhi

  Jamál Effendi reached Bombay about 1872 and travelled for twenty-five years through India, Burma, the Andamans and beyond, which is where organised Bahá'í teaching in South Asia begins. The Lotus Temple, built more than a century later, serves a community whose growth came not from the princes and scholars he approached but from villagers in Madhya Pradesh in the 1960s.

• Institutional successionThe Bahá'í Faith

  The organised teaching in India dates from one traveller. Jamál Effendi arrived at Bombay in 1872 on Bahá'u'lláh's instruction and spent years crossing the subcontinent — Calcutta, Madras, Kashmir, Burma, and on to the Andamans — establishing the first Indian communities. The growth that made India the largest Bahá'í population anywhere came a century later, in the villages of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar in the 1960s, and it rested on presenting Bahá'u'lláh as the Kalki avatar the Puranas promised.

On these journeys

• Bahá’í India

Sources

Wikipedia, “Jamál Effendi”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Baháʼí Faith in India