Place · Bahá'í house of worship · India
Lotus Temple, Delhi
The Lotus Temple is the Bahá’í House of Worship in Delhi, one of the best-known modern sacred landmarks in India. It belongs in this repository as a living example of a faith that arrived in India in the nineteenth century and developed a large Indian community.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.553, 77.259
Connections (5)
- TransmissionJamál Effendi
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.
- Architectural modelChandigarh Capitol Complex
The Lotus Temple and the Chandigarh Capitol are the two buildings by which post-independence India is most often represented abroad, and both were designed by foreigners — an Iranian Bahá'í and a Swiss-French modernist. One is a concrete assembly in raw geometry, the other a marble flower computed petal by petal, and both refuse every Indian architectural precedent on purpose.
- Companion in the same setSacred Heart Cathedral, Delhi
Delhi's twentieth-century religious architecture runs from Henry Medd's Italianate Sacred Heart of 1934, built for a congregation that was by then mostly Indian, to the Lotus Temple of 1986, built for a religion with no clergy and no sermon and open to anyone of any faith. Between them they mark how far the idea of a purpose-built religious building in the capital travelled in fifty years.
- Shrine within cityThe Bahá'í Faith
The Lotus is the faith's argument in a building. Twenty-seven marble petals, nine doors, no images, no pulpit, no altar and no clergy — a house of worship with nothing inside to worship, because the Bahá'í principle is that scripture of any religion may be read there and nothing else may happen. It is among the most visited buildings on earth, which makes the emptiest religious interior in India also one of its busiest.
- Site withinDelhi
Lotus Temple, Delhi sits inside Delhi and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Bahá’í community of India
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