India

India is presented not through landscape description but through encounters that test how religious traditions meet across cultural and political boundaries. In Howard Thurman’s 1935 pilgrimage, it becomes a setting for conversations about spiritual life, slavery, segregation, and colonialism. In Thomas Merton’s later travels, India belongs to a wider Asian journey of study and dialogue. Across these accounts, the country is not merely a destination: it is where inherited religious positions are challenged and, at moments, shared experience becomes possible without erasing difference.

The 1935 Pilgrimage

In 1935, the World Christian Student Federation asked Thurman to chair a delegation of African Americans on a pilgrimage of friendship. The party comprised Thurman and his wife, another African American minister, the Reverend Edward Carroll, and Carroll’s wife, Phenola. They were invited guests of the Student Christian Movements of India, Burma, and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Before the journey could proceed, the delegation encountered difficulty obtaining visas from Great Britain. A British government representative objected that an American Black tourist might create difficulties for British rule, and that allowing four such visitors to travel and speak across the country would intensify them. The visas were eventually issued. The obstacle made the journey’s political conditions plain even before the delegation reached its destinations: travel and public speech were being negotiated within an imperial order that treated the visitors’ race as a problem of governance.

The pilgrimage was also a serious theological undertaking. Thurman expected conversations that would test his understanding of religion and his own Christian commitments. In Ceylon, after he lectured at the Law College, the principal invited him to his office for coffee and asked why he had come. The principal invoked the history of slavery and the Christian role in it, then confronted Thurman with the contradiction between Christian profession and the enslavement, segregation, lynching, and burning of Black people in the United States. He challenged Thurman to explain how he could represent Christianity to people oppressed by those who claimed it. The conversation lasted more than five hours. Thurman did not defend what he regarded as a declining and disgraced form of Christianity; instead, he distinguished Christianity as historically practiced from the religion of Jesus. He condemned slavery and racial prejudice and pointed to a minority in the United States who understood Jesus as a source of freedom, liberty, and justice. The exchange was tense, and Thurman was anxious to continue the journey, but its challenge sharpened the distinction at the heart of his religious argument.

Conversation and Shared Religious Experience

In India, one memorable encounter took place with the head of the Division of Oriental Studies at an Indian university. Thurman and the scholar spent the morning discussing the life of the spirit in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. At first, each defended his own position: Thurman later described the exchange as a contest conducted from opposing religious strongholds. When they noticed that they were both amused by this sparring, they agreed to return to the conversation that afternoon with greater wisdom.

Thurman described the afternoon discussion as an unusually deep joining of religious experience. He felt that the two men had stepped outside social, political, and cultural frames long enough for their spirits to meet on common ground, while remaining distinct individuals. The importance of the encounter lies in that balance: unity did not require either man to surrender his tradition or cease to be himself. Thurman treated the exchange as a watershed in his life, a concrete example of spiritual kinship arising through dialogue rather than through the defeat of one religious position by another.

The pilgrimage also brought Thurman and his wife into a three-hour meeting with Mahatma Gandhi. They were received in an open field at a bungalow tent flying the flag of the Indian National Congress and sat on the floor in a large room at its center. Gandhi questioned Thurman about conditions for African Americans, including voting rights, lynching, discrimination, public education, and the churches. Thurman, in turn, asked what Gandhi considered the greatest obstacle to Jesus in India. Gandhi identified the association of Christianity with Western culture, Western civilization, and colonialism. The answer connected religious credibility to political conduct: in Gandhi’s view, the churches could not be separated from the power and history with which they had become identified. The discussion also reinforced Thurman’s conviction that religion must be judged by whether it can change society, not simply by what it professes.

Later Religious Encounters

India recurs in the book through other accounts of interreligious engagement. Douglas Steere organized dialogues between Christians and Hindus there, part of a broader interest in conversations across religious boundaries. His work places India within a practical pattern of encounter: traditions were brought into conversation rather than treated only as subjects of study. The account does not detail the dialogues’ content, but their inclusion complements the book’s emphasis on spiritual exchange across difference.

Thomas Merton’s Asian journey likewise included India. The planned itinerary named Calcutta, New Delhi, the Himalayas, Madras, and Ceylon, among other destinations. Merton wanted to meet a wide range of religious teachers, including scholars, Buddhist spiritual masters, Zen masters, monks, sages, gurus, and rōshis. His recorded conversations with the Dalai Lama focused on religion, philosophy, and meditation. Merton discussed personal concerns and his interest in Tibetan mysticism; the Dalai Lama recommended philosophies and books for study and urged him to establish a strong grounding in metaphysics. In a subsequent conversation, they returned to meditation, including its posture and the concentration of the mind. Merton also reflected on solitude and on the value of his hermitage at Gethsemani, while considering whether a more secluded setting might help his study. India thus enters his account as part of an intellectual and spiritual itinerary, not as a backdrop detached from his questions about religious practice and his own monastic life.

Significance in the Book

The Indian episodes place religious dialogue in contact with unequal histories and concrete social questions. Thurman’s encounters move between the indictment of Christian complicity in racial oppression, the possibility of shared spiritual understanding, and Gandhi’s critique of Christianity’s colonial associations. These are not interchangeable conversations: one demands an account of historical injustice, another records an experience of fellowship, and the third asks whether religious belief can alter society. Together they show the book’s interest in both the limits and the possibilities of cross-cultural encounter.

India’s significance is therefore relational. It brings American Christian claims into questioning by interlocutors who speak from different religious and political positions, while also becoming a place where Thurman experienced an unexpected kinship across traditions. Merton’s journey adds a distinct emphasis on study, meditation, and monastic exchange. The accounts do not present a single, uniform meaning of India; they show how travel there opened particular conversations whose consequences lay in changed questions, deeper reflection, and a widened understanding of religious life.