Lotus Temple
Bahá'í House of Worship in Delhi, India
The Lotus Temple, also known as the Baháʼí House of Worship, New Delhi, is a Baháʼí House of Worship at Bahapur in south Delhi, India. Designed by the architect Fariborz Sahba, it takes the form of a half-open lotus of 27 free-standing marble-clad concrete petals, arranged in three rings of nine around a central hall. It was dedicated on 24 December 1986 and opened to the public on 1 January 1987.
Baháʼís in India first sought permission for a House of Worship in 1920, and the land at Bahapur was bought in 1954 under a plan set by Shoghi Effendi. On 1 April 1974, the Universal House of Justice led plans for its development as part of a Baháʼí Five Year Plan. Construction by the ECC Construction Group of Larsen & Toubro, to a structural design by the London engineers Flint & Neill, ran from 1980 to 1986.
The temple is among the most visited sites in India, drawing more than five million visitors a year and, by 2014, more than 100 million in all. Reviewers compared it with the Sydney Opera House on its completion, and it received awards from bodies including the Institution of Structural Engineers and the American Concrete Institute. India placed it on its World Heritage tentative list in 2014.
History
In 1920, Baháʼís in Bombay petitioned ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, son of the religion's founder Baháʼu'lláh and then its leader, for permission to build a Baháʼí House of Worship, a Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, in India.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lotus Temple” is bahá'í House of Worship in Delhi, India. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lotus, Temple and Bahá'í, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “bahá'í House of Worship in Delhi, India” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q940843. VIAF identifies the subject as 124455991. The Library of Congress control number is n89146257. Authority coordinates are 28.553, 77.259. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1987, 1920 and 1954.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lotus Temple” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.