Adi-Hindu Movement

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The Adi-Hindu movement (Hindi Adi Hindu, "original Hindu") was a movement of "untouchable" (Dalit) castes in northern India, strongest in the towns and cities of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) from the late 1910s to the early 1930s. Its leaders, foremost among them Swami Achhutanand (1879–1933), held that the untouchable castes were the original inhabitants of India, conquered and degraded by Aryan and Brahmin invaders (a thesis previously defended by Iyothee Thass), and they built associations, presses, and a pamphlet literature on that claim. The movement belongs to the Radical Buddhism Project only in part. According to Nandini Gooptu, its religion was bhakti (devotion), not Buddhism, and Sarah Beth Hunt places the entry of Buddhism into Adi-Hindu thought mainly after 1956. Yet a Buddhist wing existed in the same milieu: the monk Bodhananda (1874–1952) and the writer Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu produced Buddhist histories and manuals for Dalit readers, and Bodhananda's society made Lucknow a centre of anti-caste Buddhism. This page describes the movement, keeps its Buddhist and non-Buddhist strands apart, and gives its three best-documented figures short sections.

Origins

The movement took its name from the claim that the untouchable castes were the adi (original) inhabitants of India, a claim also expressed in the Hindi phrase mool bharatvasi ("original inhabitants of India"). Gooptu locates the origin of Adi-Hindu ideology in the early 1920s, among literate untouchables who left the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement that had at first attracted them. She gives several reasons: the Samaj's continued emphasis on the Vedas and the varna order; its practice of shuddhi (ritual purification), which implied that untouchables had been impure; its image as an army of high-caste Hindus; and the 1919 reforms, which gave representation by population and so encouraged the Samaj's purification campaigns. She traces the theory of a pre-Aryan population to British ethnography and census-taking and to Christian missionary teaching, and finds no evidence of links to the Adi Dravida or Ad Dharm movements in their early stages. Hunt describes Achhutanand's achievement as uniting the untouchable jatis (castes) as descendants of India's original inhabitants, inverting the contrast between "indigenous" and "foreign". She adds that he was influenced by Jotiba Phule but did not direct his attack at Brahmins alone, and that he kept the Arya Samaj's institution of itinerant preachers (upadeshaks).

Hunt also describes an earlier tradition that the Adi-Hindu writers displaced. The first Dalit pamphlets, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were caste histories that supported petitions to be classed as Kshatriya in the census; Hunt argues that Dalit pamphlet literature proper begins with the Adi-Hindu writers, who rejected caste and varna and presented themselves as non-Hindu.

Organization and Politics, 1919–1932

The movement's organizations multiplied through the 1920s. The sources record an Adi Hindu Samaj in Lucknow in 1919, an Adi Hindu Mahasabha in Kanpur in 1923, and a body in Allahabad in the 1920s; Hunt notes Adi Hindu Sabhas in Kanpur, Lucknow, Banaras, and Allahabad by 1924. At the Kumbh Mela at Allahabad in 1928–29 the movement made what Gooptu calls its most strident proclamation, and a police report of 1922 had already recorded a spirit of revolt. Ram Charan (1888–1938), a Lucknow leader who had studied law after night school and worked in the Railway Audit Office, co-led demonstrations in the city in November 1928; Gooptu does not describe him as a Buddhist. In 1931–32 Adi-Hindu leaders campaigned against Gandhi and stressed the "double servitude" of untouchables to the higher castes and to foreign rule; Gooptu argues that this earlier movement blunted Gandhi's harijan programme. By the early 1930s, she shows, most leaders had turned to bargaining in the new representative institutions.

Bhakti and Buddhism

The religious position of the movement is contested in the sources. Gooptu reports a genealogy that the untouchables claimed for their egalitarian, formless (nirguna) bhakti, running through Mahavir, the Buddha, Kabir, Ravidas, Dadu, Paltu, and Sattakop; in that list, the Buddha is one name among several. Hunt, citing Gooptu, likewise holds that the true religion of the original inhabitants, in Adi-Hindu thought, was bhakti.

Hunt argues that Buddhism was added to the Adi-Hindu narrative only later, as the original religion of the Dalits, after Ambedkar's conversion of 1956 initiated a sudden popularity of Dalit pamphlets on Buddhism. The result, in her account, was a single Dalit stream of Buddhism and bhakti that merged Kabirpanthis, Ravidasis, and Buddhists without difficulty. Against this stands the evidence of Bodhananda's and Jigyasu's own books of 1930 and later, which already carried Buddhist content (see below). The sources do not reconcile the two accounts. Hunt's chronology describes the broad Adi-Hindu field, while the Buddhist wing was a smaller, earlier current within it.

Swami Achhutanand

Swami Achhutanand (1879–1933) is the founder of the movement in the accounts of both Hunt and Gooptu. Hunt gives his early name as Harihar. He came from a Chamar family and was raised in a military cantonment and educated by missionaries; Hunt gives his birthplace as Umari village in Mainpuri district in one place and as Farrukhabad elsewhere. From the age of fourteen to twenty-four he travelled with mendicants, and he read the Guru Granth Sahib, Kabir's Bijak, and the verses of Dadu Dayal, Ravidas, and Namdev. He worked for the Arya Samaj's shuddhi campaign under the name Harihar before breaking with it. In 1917 he composed the poems in which, according to Hunt, Adi-Hindu thought first appeared, and the All India Achhut Caste Reform Sabha dates from 1919. He opposed the Non-Cooperation Movement and called the Congress Brahmanical, and he ran a press at Kanpur that issued a monthly, Achut, in the early 1920s, a daily, Adi Hindu, until 1932, and a monthly, Usha, from 1928. Chamar panchayats (caste councils) in Kanpur acknowledged him as leader, and he presided over sweepers' meetings in 1925; in a statement Gooptu quotes, he claimed for the untouchables a prior, natural, and superior claim to the nation.

On religion, Hunt locates his philosophy in the bhakti tradition. Gooptu reports, second-hand through Jigyasu's biography of him, that he discussed religion with Theosophical missionaries and with Jain and Buddhist sadhus; this is the only Buddhist contact for him that Gooptu records, and she draws no Buddhist conclusion from it. V. Geetha's account of Achhutanand rests on Gooptu and adds nothing independent. His place in the RBP that of a boundary figure: a Dalit leader of the same anti-caste, anti-Brahmin movement as the Buddhist wing, but not a Buddhist himself. His drama Ram-rajya Nyaya, from the late 1920s or early 1930s, was edited and published by Jigyasu and reached a second edition in 1964.

Bodhananda and the Buddhist Wing

Identity and Sources

The sources name the monk differently. Ober and the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism write "Bodhananda", the latter listing "Bodhananda Mahastavir (1874–1952)" among the pioneers whose example Dalit Buddhist organizations invoke. Hunt and Gooptu write "Swami Bodhanand". No source consulted states that the "Swami Bodhanand" of Hunt and Gooptu and the "Bhadant Bodhananda Mahastavir" of Ober are one person. Ober, however, quotes Hunt on the same book and the same collaboration with Jigyasu, which indicates that he treats them as one man, and this page follows that reading while noting that it is an inference. Much of what follows rests on Ober, with Hunt and Gooptu as independent partial accounts; Geetha's account is drawn from Ober's earlier dissertation and is second-hand.

Life

According to Ober, Bodhananda (1874–1952) was born Mukund Prakash Lahiri to a Bengali Brahmin family and was orphaned young. He passed through Brahmoism, the Arya Samaj, Theosophy, Christianity, and the life of a Vaishnava sadhu (as "Nil Bodhananda") before turning to Buddhism after meeting Sinhalese monks at Sarnath during the famines of the 1890s. He took full ordination in Calcutta, in the Ramanna Nikaya, under Kripasaran and Gunalankar, possibly with Anagarika Dharmapala present. The year of his conversion is uncertain: Geetha, following Ober's dissertation, says he became a Buddhist in 1916, while Ober's book dates his conversion to the 1890s and gives 1916 as the year he founded his society.

In 1916 he founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Samiti (Indian Buddhist Society) in Lucknow, and in 1924–25 its vihara at Risaldar Park. Ober describes the Samiti as the organizational centre of anti-caste Buddhism in the United Provinces, serving oilmen, ropemakers, betel-nut sellers, porters, boatmen, and potters, and reproduces its nine founding goals. Geetha lists among its aims the removal of casteism and of feelings of hierarchical difference, and the comparative study of Buddhism in relation to present-day science. Hunt describes the Lucknow mission, with its library and newspaper, as continued after his death by his adopted son, Mahathera Pragyanand, and as co-edited with G.P. Prashant in the late 1950s; her wording does not make clear whether this period follows or overlaps his lifetime.

Writings and Ideas

Bodhananda's best-known work is Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya ("The Original Inhabitants of India and the Aryans", 1930), which argues that the Dalits and Shudras were the original Buddhist inhabitants of India, oppressed by conquering Aryans and Brahmins. It includes a chapter that recasts the medieval sant poets Kabir, Nanak, Dadu, and Namdev as Bodhisattvas carrying on the Buddha's mission. Hunt calls it "the most important historical text of the Adi Hindu movement". Ober also records a Hindi translation of the Dhammapada (c. 1928), a life of the Buddha, Bhagavan Gautam Buddh (1933), and a manual of Buddhist practice, Bauddhacharyapaddhati (1947). According to Bhagwan Das, as reported by Hunt, the Bauddhacharyapaddhati was among the first Hindi books to instruct Dalits in Buddhist festivals and rituals. Geetha, following Ober, reports that he presented the Buddha as the founder of the old and true religion of the subcontinent, destroyed by the Brahmins, which makes his position the Buddhist counterpart of Achhutanand's anti-Vedic, anti-Brahmin history of the original inhabitants. In the sources read, Bodhananda's writing shows no Marxist or socialist element.

Relations with Others

Ober reports that Bodhananda met Ambedkar in 1920 at the Kolhapur Non-Brahmin Conference. Geetha adds that Ambedkar stayed in touch with him and discussed his plan to convert. The claim that Ambedkar had hoped Bodhananda would officiate at the conversion of 1956 rests on a single second-hand report by Shanti Swarup Bauddh, relayed by Ober; Bodhananda died in 1952, and U Chandramani administered the precepts at Nagpur. Hunt says that Bodhananda introduced Jigyasu to Ambedkar. Ober also dates Rahul Sankrityayan's meeting with Bodhananda in Lucknow in 1917 as the trigger of Sankrityayan's lifelong Buddhist engagement, and records that Yashpal acquired much of his knowledge of Buddhism from him in Lucknow. From 1935 he wrote for Dharmadoot, the Hindi Buddhist journal of the Sarnath branch of the Maha Bodhi Society, alongside Har Dayal, Sankrityayan, Jagdish Kashyap, P.C. Bagchi, Narendra Deva, and Jigyasu.

Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu

Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu was born in Lucknow in 1899, according to Hunt, to a relatively prosperous low-caste family; his father was headmaster of the American Mission School, and his own schooling ended at class ten when his father died. His death date is not given in the pages of Hunt read, and the sources conflict: 1974 or 1978. His early career was in Hindu reform and nationalist publishing: he wrote a first book at sixteen, translated the Bhagavad Gita from Urdu, founded a Hindu Samaj Sudhar Karyalay, and had published more than thirty titles by 1931, including a proscribed pamphlet on Nehru that, Hunt reports, went through twelve editions in a year. The British raided his press five times and jailed him for several months. He first met Achhutanand in 1926 and later met Bodhananda, through whom he met Ambedkar; the meeting left him, in Hunt's account, disenchanted with Hindu reform. He renamed his press Bahujan Kalyan Prakashan, a date that Hunt gives as the early 1930s and that her notes leave open. At an October 1931 meeting of two to three thousand untouchables in Lucknow, which he addressed with Ram Charan, he is quoted as saying that to call themselves Adi Hindus was to assert a natural right over India.

His writing on history and Buddhism includes the Adi-Hindu histories Bharat ke Adi-Nivasiyon ([Devanagari]; "The Original Inhabitants of India") and a volume on the origins of human society, which Hunt dates variously to 1937 and 1938, with a third edition in 1941; Gooptu cites what appears to be the same work, which carries the word for socialism (samajvad) in its title, as a source for the Adi-Hindu self-image, and she says nothing about Marxism or Buddhism in connection with it. The title is not evidence of its content. With Bodhananda he is credited with the co-authorship of Buddhist books, among them Bhagavan Gautam Buddh (1933) and Bauddhacharyapaddhati. He also issued Ambedkar pamphlets, among them a life of Ambedkar, Baba Saheb ka Jivan Sangharsh (1961), which reached sixteen editions by 1995, and he published Hindi translations of Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste, Who Were the Shudras?, and The Untouchables. He also wrote a Hindi life of E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar), in 1973, which Hunt describes as toned down; five years earlier, in 1968, Periyar Lalai Singh's Kanpur press had issued a Hindi version of Ramasamy's Sacchi Ramayana that was banned and litigated. Hunt reads his career as showing the false promise of inclusion held out by the mainstream Hindi public sphere. Whether he became a Buddhist is not clear, so his Buddhist activity is established only as authorship and collaboration. His press ran from the 1930s until the mid-1960s, and in 2004 was run by his son and grandson.

Ambedkar and the Adi-Hindu Movement

The relation between the movement and Ambedkar runs in two directions in the sources. Ober sees in the movement's thesis of the original inhabitants clear affinities with, and possible influence on, Ambedkar's The Untouchables (1948). Gooptu suggests, with a hedge, the opposite: that the Adi-Hindu inclusion of the Shudras through the Chandravamsi warrior story probably drew on Ambedkar's strategy of broad alliances. She also finds that by 1930 Ambedkar himself had come round to the need for political leverage. In Uttar Pradesh the Scheduled Castes Federation opened a branch in 1944 and the Republican Party of India was formed in 1957; Hunt says the Republican Party proposed radical land redistribution and agricultural reform, and that Chamars and Jatavs dominated it. The Adi-Hindu movement itself had mostly declined by then, but Hunt argues that its ideology survived in the pamphlet field long after the Sabhas faded. For the later militant Dalit organization of 1970s Bombay, see Dalit Panthers.

The Pamphlet Field after the Sabhas

Hunt's study follows the Adi-Hindu argument into later Hindi Dalit literature. Narratives of the Aryan invasion run from Achhutanand's drama and poetry of the 1920s to Jigyasu's history of 1937, which she describes as more "scientific" in method, and later to S.L. Sagar. In G.P. Prashant's Mul Vansha Katha (1994) the Buddha appears as an early opponent of the caste system, and Hunt reads this as a sign that Buddhism had gained legitimacy as a Dalit trope. A few later texts bear on the left, though they stand outside the Adi-Hindu movement proper. The drama Shambuk Vadh (1962), by Periyar Lalai Singh and Ram Avtar Pal, presents its hero as reminiscent of a Marxist revolutionary, with a militia, and concludes that any state in upper-caste hands acts against the lower castes. Two later Hindi Dalit writers, Bechain and Tej Singh, were first politicized by Marxist groups and have since, Hunt reports, denounced Marxists as unwilling to address caste. These are Hunt's characterizations. The contemporary Hindi Dalit literature falls outside the scope of this article.

Literature in English

• Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [Chapter 5 gives the fullest account of Bodhananda's life, the Bharatiya Bauddha Samiti, and the Risaldar Park vihara, and argues that Ambedkar drew on existing Buddhist networks, of which the Adi-Hindu Buddhist wing was one.]

• Geetha, V. (2021). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Palgrave Macmillan. [Brief accounts of Achhutanand and Bodhananda (pp. 264–270), drawn from Gooptu and from Ober's dissertation respectively; useful as a summary, but second-hand.]

• Hunt, Sarah Beth (2014). Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation. New Delhi: Routledge. [A study of Hindi Dalit pamphlet and autobiographical literature whose first chapter is the best account of the Adi-Hindu writers and of Jigyasu's press; it treats Buddhism as a late addition to the Adi-Hindu field.]

• Gooptu, Nandini (2001). The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India. Cambridge University Press. [A history of Kanpur and Lucknow labour and caste politics whose pp. 152–184 are the independent scholarly account of the Adi-Hindu movement; it treats the movement as bhakti and Buddhism as marginal.]

Literature in Hindi

• Bodhananda, Bhadant ([1930] 2009). Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya [The Original Inhabitants of India and the Aryans]. Samyak Prakashan. [The central historical text of the Adi-Hindu movement. It was not consulted for this entry and is listed on the authority of Ober and Hunt.]

• Ottama, U, Bhadant Bodhananda, & Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu (1933). Bhagavan Gautama Buddha: Jivani aur Updesh [The Lord Gautama Buddha: His Life and Teaching]. Calcutta: Kishkamitra Press. [A life and teaching of the Buddha, written for Hindi readers; listed on the authority of Ober's bibliography and not consulted.]

• Bodhananda, Bhadant (1947). Bauddhacharyapaddhati [The Path of Buddhist Practice]. Lucknow: Buddh Vihara. [A manual of Buddhist festivals and rites for Dalit readers; listed on the authority of Ober and Hunt and not consulted.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Adi-Hindu Movement". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Adi-Hindu_Movement.