The meeting between Howard Thurman and Mahatma Gandhi during Thurman’s 1935 pilgrimage to India brought questions of race, colonialism, and Christian responsibility into a sustained face-to-face conversation. Over three hours, Gandhi pressed Thurman about discrimination in the United States, then identified the Western entanglement of Christianity as a central obstacle to Jesus Christ in India.

Setting and Participants

The meeting took place during a pilgrimage of friendship organized by the World Christian Student Federation. Thurman traveled as part of a delegation of African American Christians invited by student movements in India, Burma, and Ceylon; he and his wife were received by Gandhi in India. The encounter unfolded in an open field, where a bungalow tent flew the flag of the Indian National Congress. Gandhi greeted the couple, and they were led to a large room in the tent and invited to sit on the floor.

The setting placed a religious conversation within the political landscape of India’s independence movement. The meeting was not a brief greeting: Thurman and Gandhi spent three hours together, with Gandhi directing a series of questions toward the conditions African Americans faced in the United States.

Questions About American Race Relations

Gandhi asked about voting rights, lynching, discrimination, public-school education, and the functioning of churches. The breadth of these questions made Thurman’s experience in the United States the substance of the exchange. The conversation tested the claims of American Christianity against the realities of racial exclusion and violence, including the segregation Thurman had encountered in church as well as in public life.

The questions also connected domestic racial injustice to the delegation’s wider purpose as a pilgrimage of friendship. Thurman was asked not only to describe American institutions but to account for the religious tradition that had shaped them. The encounter thus turned on the difference between Christianity as a professed faith and the conduct of societies and churches that claimed it.

Gandhi’s Critique of Christianity

Thurman asked Gandhi what he considered the greatest obstacle to Jesus Christ in India. Gandhi answered, “Christianity as it is practiced has been identified with Western culture, with Western civilization, and colonialism. This is the greatest enemy that Jesus Christ has in my country, Christianity itself.” His reply distinguished the figure and teachings of Jesus Christ from the historical forms of Christianity encountered in India, which Gandhi associated with Western power and colonial rule.

The criticism gave the meeting a reciprocal edge: while Gandhi asked Thurman to confront racial injustice in the United States, his answer challenged the wider identification of Christian faith with Western civilization. The book connects this judgment to Gandhi’s belief that religion must be capable of changing society, while observing that American churches had not yet accomplished that transformation. The exchange therefore exposed a tension between religious ideals and institutions whose public practice could undermine them.

Significance of the Encounter

The meeting’s significance lies in the way it joined personal dialogue to a broad moral examination. Gandhi’s questions made American racial conditions answerable to an interlocutor outside the United States; his response to Thurman’s question made colonialism and Western cultural dominance part of the same religious reckoning. Rather than treating faith as a defense of existing institutions, the conversation tested it by the freedom and justice those institutions either advanced or denied.