From 'Akká to Bombay: Jamál Effendi's Mission to India

The Bahá'í Chronicles archive, which compiles biographical accounts of believers from across the Bahá'í history, devotes a chapter to Sulaymán Khán-i-Tunúkábání — known to the community by the title Bahá'u'lláh Himself bestowed on him, Jamál Effendi.

Jamál Effendi was, by birth, a Persian of noble family and considerable means. He had been one of the early believers in Tihrán; he had attained the presence of Bahá'u'lláh during the Adrianople and the early ‘Akká years. He had served the community in a series of administrative and travelling capacities through the 1870s.

In 1875, by the explicit appointment of Bahá'u'lláh, he was charged with a particular mandate: to travel to India, to establish there the foundation of a Bahá'í community, and to teach openly to whatever audience he could reach. The appointment is preserved as one of the earliest and most deliberate of Bahá'u'lláh's interventions in the geographical extension of the Cause beyond its Persian and Ottoman heartland.

Jamál Effendi sailed from Bushire to Bombay. He arrived in 1876. He was, the Chronicles record, alone — no community awaited him; no introductions had been arranged; the language of the city was not his own. He took rooms in the Persian quarter and began the work.

The pattern of his teaching is preserved in the Chronicles in some detail. He travelled extensively. From Bombay he extended his journeys to Poona, to Hyderabad, to Madras, to Calcutta. He stayed in each place for as long as the early work required. He spoke to whomever would listen — Persian merchants, Indian Muslim scholars, Hindu philosophers, Parsi families, the British colonial administrators when they showed an interest.

He kept up an extensive correspondence with 'Abdu'l-Bahá and, in the early years, with Bahá'u'lláh Himself in 'Akká. The letters from the Holy Land — Tablets of guidance to the emerging Indian community — were carried back by hand and read in the small gatherings he had begun.

In 1878 he was joined by a younger collaborator, Sayyid Muṣṭafá Rúmí, who had come to him from Baghdád on 'Abdu'l-Bahá's instruction. The two men together extended the work substantially. By 1880 small communities of believers had been established in Bombay, in Calcutta, and in several of the smaller cities of the south.

In May 1878, the Chronicles record, the two travelled together — together with Hájí Sayyid Mihdí — across the Bay of Bengal to the city of Rangoon in British Burma. Sayyid Muṣṭafá Rúmí would, in the decades that followed, become the founding figure of the Burmese Bahá'í community; Jamál Effendi continued the work in India and in the surrounding countries.

Jamál Effendi died in 1898 in the city of Madras. He had lived twenty-two years in India. He had laid, by the Chronicles' record, the foundations on which the substantial Indian Bahá'í community of the twentieth century — and the House of Worship at Bahapur near Delhi, completed in 1986 — would in due course be raised.

Source: Bahá'í Chronicles archive on Jamál Effendi (Sulaymán Khán-i-Tunúkábání); see https://bahaichronicles.org for full text.

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/