A steady stream of Babis and Baha’is brought the Faith to India. One of the Bab’s Letters of the Living, Shaykh Sa’id-i Hindi, reached Multan—in today’s Pakistan—as early as 1844. Multan was a center of Islamic mystical practice.
One of the converts to the new faith was Basir-i-Hindi, a blind man of the Multan area who had great spiritual and intellectual qualities.
For a tour of the Islamic sites of Multan, Pakistan, click below
The Bab’s uncle Siyyid Ali’s cloth business had made many contacts in Bombay, India. It was probably in 1870 that a business by the name of “Haji Siyyid Mirza Mahmood Afnan & Co.,” was founded and, later, a printing press, the Nasiri Printing Press, to publish the Babi and Baha’i holy writings. The new teachings could now be spread from Bombay to the rest of India and Burma. It became the first major center of Baha’i activity in the Indian subcontinent.
For a street scene in Bombay filmed a few decades after the arrival of the Babis there, click below:
In 1889, Tahirih’s work was first mentioned in India in a compilation of Persian poetry edited by ‘Abdulghafur Nassakh, and published in Calcutta. The first academician to write about her was Prof. M Hidayat Hossein who was the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta.
For background on the importance of the Royal Asiatic Society