The Indian Pilgrimage of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, were garlanded upon arrival in New Delhi on February 10, 1959. (Photograph by R. Satakopan © AP Images)

During a short visit to the United States in 1956, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru Nehru said he wished he had met Martin Luther King, Jr. Indian representatives followed up, as did former U.S. Ambassador to India Chester Bowles, to bring about a journey to India for King.

“While the Montgomery boycott was going on, India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change. So as soon as our victory over bus segregation was won, some of my friends said: ‘Why don’t you go to India and see for yourself what the Mahatma, whom you so admire, has wrought?’ ” King said, according to “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” edited by Clayborne Carson of Stanford University in California.

In the end, King, his wife, Coretta, and Alabama State College professor Lawrence D. Reddick, King’s biographer, spent just under a month in India. Because of flight problems, they landed on February 9, 1959, in Bombay, spent the night at the Taj Mahal Hotel and flew the next day to Palam Air Base in New Delhi.

According to King, Reddick had told him at the outset of the India trip “…my true test would come when the people who knew Gandhi looked me over and passed judgment upon me and the Montgomery movement.” He described the ensuing, so-called hurricane tour as “one of the most concentrated and eye-opening experiences of our lives.”

He spoke to thousands, was greeted by name as he walked the streets or traveled in trains, planes and cars, was besieged for autographs, welcomed into the poorest village homes and the most palatial. He said that his wife “ended up singing as much as I lectured.”

The American Friends Service Committee (or Quakers, a pacifist Christian denomination) co-sponsored the trip, along with the Gandhi National Memorial Fund. James E. Bristol, director of the Quaker Centre in New Delhi, acted as guide throughout the journey. The Indian government did not host the visit, but Nehru sent a welcoming note and had dinner with King on his second night in India.

February 10 was spent in greetings, garlanding and interactions with reporters to whom King commented, “To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”

The Kings saw a good deal of India. They got used to rising early in the morning to make connections, nevertheless arriving late, sometimes eating from banana leaves, cross-legged on the ground, walking through villages, interacting with students and academics, taking a swim in Kerala, viewing the Taj Mahal, enjoying the cultural richness of Gaya and Shantiniketan, and watching the sun set and the moon rise at the same time off Cape Cormorin on India’s southern tip. The beauty of that scene, with two heavenly lights shining, affected King so profoundly that he later used it in a sermon.

His pilgrimage would not have been complete, however, without passing time at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, which Gandhi founded upon his return to India from South Africa, and where he had lived for 18 years, “working out his way for the freedom of the country and the new social order,” as Swami Vishwananda put it. He described his travels with the Kings in a very descriptive and personalized memoir published by the Gandhi National Memorial Fund. It was at the ashram, of course, that Gandhi’s closest associates were trained for nonviolent action, where the march to the seashore began. “The Kings had a great experience going round the hallowed place and meeting in prayer the 600 or so inmates—most of them Harijans,” wrote Vishwananda. “We came back much refreshed mentally and feeling grateful for the purity and the strength we had gained by the visit.”

Here are some glimpses of the visit.

The Kings spent March 9, 1959, their last Indian evening, at the home of Acharya J.B. Kripalani, an interpreter of Gandhi’s teachings (third from left). Others are (from left) Kripalani’s secretary, Shanti; Barbara Bristol and James E. Bristol of the Quaker Centre. (Photograph © AP Images)

The Kings and Lawrence Reddick, in prayer at the Gandhi memorial in New Delhi. (Photograph courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum)

The Kings met President Rajendra Prasad. (Photograph courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum)

The Kings met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. (Photograph courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum)

The Kings met a longtime Gandhian, Amrit Kaur, soon after their arrival. (Photograph courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum)

Coretta Scott King with Indian women. (Photograph courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum)

R.R. Dewakar, chairman, Gandhi National Memorial Fund, sponsors of the King’s visit to India, presents a gift of books. (Photograph courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum)

Originally published in the January/February 2009 edition. Click here to read the full article

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