Howard Thurman’s 1935 pilgrimage of friendship brought an African American delegation into sustained conversation with people in South Asia about religion, race, and colonial power. Its encounters did more than expose the contradictions between Christian teaching and Christian societies: in India, a meeting across religious traditions became, for Thurman, a watershed experience of spiritual unity.

Purpose and Passage

In 1935, the World Christian Student Federation asked Thurman to chair a delegation of African Americans visiting as guests of the Student Christian Movements of India, Burma, and Ceylon. The party consisted of Thurman and his wife, and African American minister Rev. Edward Carroll and his wife, Phenola. Their journey was framed as a pilgrimage of friendship, but obtaining permission to travel was not straightforward. A British government representative argued that allowing four Black Americans to travel and speak throughout the country could create difficulties for British rule. The visas were eventually issued, and the delegation proceeded.

The itinerary opened in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, before continuing to India. Thurman anticipated serious religious and theological conversations, and the trip brought him into direct contact with challenges that linked Christian belief to the history of slavery, racial segregation, and colonial rule. Rather than treating those questions as incidental to his faith, he engaged them as central to what Christianity meant.

The Challenge in Ceylon

After Thurman lectured at the Law College in Ceylon, its principal invited him to his office for coffee. He asked why Thurman had undertaken the journey and confronted him with the history of the slave trade: Africans had been taken from the continent by people who called themselves Christians, and Christian ministers had invoked Paul to sanction slavery. He also pointed to segregation, lynching, and racial violence in the United States, including within its churches. He challenged Thurman to explain why he had not rejected Christianity.

The conversation lasted more than five hours. Thurman did not set out to defend the Christian faith as historically practiced. Instead, he distinguished that record from what he called the religion of Jesus. He argued that his own condemnation of slavery and racial prejudice was more devastating than his host’s, while also noting that some Americans understood the spirit of Jesus as a demand for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. The exchange made the journey’s central tension unmistakable: a faith associated with liberation could also be used to justify oppression.

A Meeting Across Traditions in India

In India, Thurman spoke with the head of an university’s Division of Oriental Studies about the spiritual life in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Their morning conversation, as Thurman later described it, had been shaped by each man defending his own religious position. As Thurman prepared to leave to meet students, both men recognized the sparring in which they had been engaged. They agreed to return that afternoon and approach the discussion more wisely.

Thurman later remembered the afternoon as the most unguarded fusion of religious experience he had known with another person. He felt that both men had stepped outside social, political, and cultural frames and encountered one another on a ground not marked by separation, while remaining distinct individuals. He described the experience as a watershed in his life: the two men had, in a profound sense, become part of each other without ceasing to be themselves. The movement from debate to shared spiritual recognition gave the pilgrimage its most intimate account of interreligious encounter—not an erasure of difference, but a bond experienced through it.

The Conversation with Mahatma Gandhi

One of the journey’s high points was Thurman and his wife’s meeting with Mahatma Gandhi. They were taken to an open field, where a flag of the Indian National Congress flew above a bungalow tent. Gandhi greeted them, and the meeting continued for three hours in a large room where they sat on the floor. He questioned Thurman closely about the racial situation in the United States, including voting rights, lynching, discrimination, public education, and the churches.

Thurman asked Gandhi what posed the greatest obstacle to Jesus Christ in India. Gandhi’s answer placed the problem not simply in a failure to accept Christian teaching but in Christianity’s identification with Western culture, civilization, and colonialism. The journey thus brought together questions raised in Ceylon and India: Christian institutions could speak of justice while remaining entangled with systems of domination, and religious credibility depended on how faith acted in society. Gandhi’s criticism sharpened the pilgrimage’s challenge to American churches, which, in Thurman’s account, had not yet succeeded in transforming the society around them.