Hindus in the Pilgrim House: Caste Crossed at Haifa

In Issue 3 of Volume 5 of the Star of the West, dated the twenty-eighth of April, 1914, the editors reprinted, from a recent article in the London Christian Commonwealth by M. Holbach, an observation about the pilgrim community at Haifa that had begun to attract notice in European religious journalism.

Holbach was not himself a Bahá'í. He had visited Haifa as a journalist with broad sympathy for religious reform movements, and had written up what he had seen with the careful eye of a visitor who is not committed in advance to praising what he finds. The detail that he chose to highlight was a small one, but its implications, for any reader familiar with the social structure of nineteenth-century India, were enormous.

The pilgrim house at Haifa — the small lodging the Master had maintained for the use of the believers who came from many countries to attain His presence — typically held, at any one time, ten or fifteen visitors. They came from Persia, from India, from Burma, from Egypt, from Europe, from America. They were of every religious background a long Eastern history could produce: Shí'í Muslims and Sunni Muslims, Persian Zoroastrians, Persian and Iraqi Jews, Indian Hindus of various castes, Indian Sikhs, the occasional European Christian.

In the pilgrim house, by the household discipline of the place, they all ate at the same table, slept in the same room arrangements, and shared the same simple service of the visit.

For the Hindu pilgrims, this was the most remarkable experience. Holbach captured it in a single sentence:

Young Hindu of high caste — by crossing the sea and living in the pilgrim house with Zoroastrians, Jews, and Mohammedans — have crossed the rubicon.

The high-caste Hindu of 1914 was, by the customs of his own home, forbidden to eat with members of lower castes — to say nothing of outcastes, or of foreigners, or of members of the mleccha peoples (the Western unbelievers). The crossing of the sea itself was an act that, in some Hindu legal opinions, required ritual purification afterwards. To have crossed the sea and arrived at Haifa was already significant. To then sit down at a common table with Zoroastrians, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and one's own coreligionists, and to share food and prayer and the work of the pilgrimage, was a renunciation of the older caste discipline that no political reformer in Calcutta or Bombay had been able to accomplish.

Holbach saw at once what it meant. The Bahá'í Faith, he was suggesting to his English readers, was not merely teaching the unity of mankind. It was, in a small house at Haifa, enacting that unity in a way the rest of the East had not yet been able to imitate.

The Star of the West, in reprinting Holbach's observation, let the testimony of the outside witness do its work. The American friends, reading it in their parlours, were given a small picture of what the Cause they had joined was already doing in India.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 5, Issue 3 (April 28, 1914), reprint of M. Holbach in the Christian Commonwealth. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1914). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1