The Traveler Who Was Sent to India

A retelling for children, based on the Bahá'í Chronicles account of Jamál Effendi (Sulaymán Khán-i-Tunúkábání).

The ship pulled into the harbor at Bombay, and a man stepped off onto the crowded docks of a country he had never seen before. His name was Sulaymán Khán, but everyone called him by a special name — Jamál Effendi — a name that Bahá'u'lláh Himself had given him.

He looked around at the new city. He did not know a single person here. No friends were waiting to greet him. Nobody had set up a place for him to stay. He could not even speak the language people were using all around him. He was completely on his own.

Now, Jamál Effendi did not have to be there at all. He had been born into a wealthy, important family in Persia, and he could have stayed home and lived a comfortable life. But years before, he had become one of the early believers in Bahá'u'lláh. He had even traveled to meet Bahá'u'lláh and stay near Him. And when Bahá'u'lláh gave him a task, he was ready to go anywhere.

The task was this: Bahá'u'lláh had asked him to travel all the way to India, a land far across the sea, and to begin a Bahá'í community there where there was none. He was to speak to anyone who would listen and help the very first believers in that whole part of the world find one another. So Jamál Effendi had sailed from a port called Bushire, crossed the water, and arrived in 1876 — alone, in a strange place, with a very big job to do.

He did not give up because it was hard. He rented some simple rooms in the part of the city where other Persians lived, and he got to work.

And the work meant traveling — a lot of traveling. From Bombay he set out to other cities: to Poona, to Hyderabad, to Madras, to Calcutta. Some were hundreds of miles apart. In each place he stayed as long as the new friends needed him, and then he moved on to the next.

Wherever he went, he talked to all kinds of people. He did not only speak to people who were like him. He spoke with Persian merchants and Indian scholars, with Hindu thinkers and Parsi families, and even with the British officials who governed India back then, whenever they wanted to learn more. To Jamál Effendi, everyone was worth talking to.

All this time, he never felt completely alone, because he kept writing letters. He wrote to 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and in the early years he wrote to Bahá'u'lláh Himself in the Holy Land. And letters came back — special letters of guidance for the new believers in India. People carried these letters all the way from the Holy Land by hand, and Jamál Effendi would read them aloud in the small gatherings he had started. Imagine being one of those new friends, sitting together in a little room, listening to words that had traveled across the world just for you.

In 1878, something wonderful happened: he got help. A younger man named Sayyid Muṣṭafá Rúmí came to join him, sent by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Now there were two of them working together, and they could do twice as much. They traveled and taught side by side, and the little communities began to grow. By 1880 there were groups of believers in Bombay, in Calcutta, and in several smaller cities, too.

The two friends even sailed across the Bay of Bengal — together with another believer named Hájí Sayyid Mihdí — all the way to the city of Rangoon, in a land called Burma. Later on, Sayyid Muṣṭafá Rúmí would help start the whole Bahá'í community of Burma, while Jamál Effendi kept right on working in India and the lands around it.

Jamál Effendi never stopped. He lived in India for twenty-two whole years — longer than most of you have been alive, probably longer than your parents have known each other. He passed away in 1898, in the city of Madras, far from where he had been born.

But think of what he left behind. From one tired traveler who arrived alone, unable to speak the language, knowing no one, there grew a community that kept growing for a hundred years and more. Many years later, a beautiful House of Worship would even be built near Delhi — and it all began with the seeds that Jamál Effendi had planted, one conversation and one journey at a time.

That is the gentle secret of his story. You don't have to do everything at once, and you don't have to do it where it's easy. Sometimes the greatest things grow because one person is willing to go far away, stay a long time, and keep on serving, even when no one is there to thank them.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "From 'Akká to Bombay: Jamál Effendi's Mission to India".

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