As the Bahá’í community gets together to celebrate their New Year, V. Shoba meets Bahá’í families in the city and listens in to their stories of faith

Gathered at Mallikarjuna Rao’s house on Thursday evening in Aali Village, near Badarpur border, are a dozen people of sundry ages and origins—from a Keralite who has lived most of his life in Gujarat to a retiree from Madhya Pradesh. If there is something in their manner to suggest they are purveyors of Bahá’u’lláh’s message of unity and peace, it is their simplicity and warmth. They are not pretentious mystagogues or sacramental middlemen, but unassuming followers of the Bahá’í faith, which they all “embraced” rather than converted to.

The Bahá’í Month of Loftiness, Ala—the 19 days of which constitute the stipulated period of fasting from dawn to dusk—draws to a close on March 20, making way for Naw Rúz, the advent of the 166th New Year of the Badi calendar of the Báb. The fast being a period of “spiritual recuperation”, as Rao puts it, invoking God is important. “You are welcome to say a prayer to Lord Krishna, Jesus or Allah,” offers Rao, who edits books for the Bahá’í Publishing Trust. His four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Kirtana sings a brief prayer in English, and the others, their eyes shut, take their turn saying theirs in muted mumbles and modulated songs. At 6:32 p.m., as the sun sets, it is time to break the day’s fast—today, with soft drinks, samosas and sweets.

Rao, originally from Hyderabad, has been a Bahá’í for over two decades. After he married Gayatri, she too chose to embrace the faith, and they spent their first years together at the Bahá’í World Centre in the holy land of Israel. “Religion is not a label to be born into. It is a system of knowledge,” says A.K. Merchant, chairman of the Spiritual Assembly of Bahá’ís in Delhi. The “core activities” of the Bahá’ís include devotional gatherings, children’s classes, spiritual education of young adults and participatory studies of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892)—his works have been translated from Persian and Arabic into several languages.

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