Dharmanand Kosambi

From The Radical Buddhism Project

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Dharmanand Kosambi (धर्मानंद कोसंबी, Dharmānand Kosambī; 1876–1947) was a Marathi Pali scholar, former Buddhist monk, and Gandhian nationalist from Portuguese Goa. He studied Pali in Sri Lanka, was ordained there as a novice and in Burma as a full monk, and later taught at Calcutta, Pune, Harvard, Ahmedabad, Leningrad, and Kashi. Writing almost entirely in Marathi, he argued from 1910 that the early Buddhist sangha rested on collective ownership and collective decision making, a thesis that Douglas Ober counts among the most enduring arguments of modern Indian Buddhism, and in 1935 he wrote that Marx's analysis of capitalism was right as far as it went but had to be joined to non-violence. He helped to found the Bauddhashram in Madras (1903) and directed the Bahujan Vihara in Bombay (1937–39). His rationalist life of the Buddha and his play on the Buddha's renunciation are among the sources of Ambedkar's account, although the size of the debt is contested. Kosambi combined personal Buddhist commitment and institutional activity with a socialist strand in his reading of Buddhism; he was a Gandhian and not a Marxist, and he remained within the Congress.

Biography

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Kosambi was born on 9 October 1876 at Sankhwal (Sancoale) in Salcete, Goa, the youngest of seven children in a Gaud Saraswat Brahmin family, and he was married at fourteen.[1] According to Ober, a Marathi children's magazine and a Marathi adaptation of Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia awakened his interest in the Buddha, and at twenty-three he left his wife and child to look for knowledge of Buddhism, studying Sanskrit with pandits in Pune, Gwalior, and Benares.[2] In February 1902 he travelled to Kathmandu, where he found no learned Buddhist and was saddened to see Tibetan fortune-tellers and a goat carcass at a stupa, and then to Bodh Gaya, where an unnamed monk told him to learn Pali in Ceylon and to apply to the Maha Bodhi Society in Calcutta.[3] The Society sheltered him in Calcutta and gave him letters of introduction, one of them to M. Singaravelu (1860–1946) of Madras, who hosted him for a day on 16 March 1902.[4] At the Vidyodaya Pirivena in Colombo he studied Pali under Hikkaduve Sumangala, the monk who had given Iyothee Thass the Five Precepts in 1898, and he was ordained as a novice; his full ordination followed in Burma in 1903 or 1904.[5]

Between late March and mid-October 1903 he spent about six and a half months in Madras. His memoir describes a Maha Bodhi Sabha, with a Professor Lakshminarasu Naidu (possibly P. Lakshmi Narasu) as president and Singaravelu as secretary, and a separate group of recent Paraiyar converts led by a Pandit Ayodhidas (possibly Iyothee Thass), and says that the two groups did not get on. Kosambi brought them together in a rented house at Royapettah, the Bauddhashram, where he read a Pali sutta every Sunday evening, Singaravelu lectured in Tamil, and Narasu came on Fridays to teach him comparative study.[6] He quarreled with Singaravelu and left by steamer for Burma. He gave up the monastic life in 1906, taught Pali at the National College and the University of Calcutta until 1908, and then accepted a monthly stipend from Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda.[7] In 1910 the Harvard Sanskritist James H. Woods invited him to help edit Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, and he stayed at Harvard until January 1912.[8] He then taught Pali at Fergusson College in Pune, and Ober reports that R.G. Bhandarkar asked him in 1912 to set up a Pali curriculum at Bombay University.[9] Whether he ever received a Harvard doctorate is contested. Ober (2013) followed Eleanor Zelliot in giving a doctorate of 1929, but Ober (2023) reports that Kosambi's great-grandson denies that the degree was ever awarded.[10]

After a second Harvard stay (1918–22) he joined Gandhi's Gujarat Vidyapith at Ahmedabad in 1922.[11] Stcherbatski invited him to the new Institute for the Study of Buddhist Culture in Leningrad, where he worked in 1929–30 and again in 1932 or 1933.[12] Back in India he joined the salt satyagraha, was arrested in October 1930, and served about five months of a year's hard labor.[13] While teaching at Kashi Vidyapith under Narendra Deva he wrote Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa (1935).[14] In 1936 Ambedkar approached the Bombay Buddha Society, of which Kosambi was honorary president, and said that Bombay needed a vihara; Kosambi asked Gandhi and the industrialist J.K. Birla for funds and on 26 January 1937 inaugurated the Bahujan Vihara in the mill-workers' district of Parel.[15] He directed it until the end of 1939, when he withdrew after Birla objected to opinions in Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa; the Maha Bodhi Society then took over the vihara.[16] Kosambi did not break with Gandhi personally. He returned to teaching at Sarnath and died on 4 June 1947 at Gandhi's ashram at Sevagram, after a fast that he had begun on 4 May.[17]

Ideas

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Kosambi's socialism had its start in America, and he said so himself: in a clarification of 1937–38 he wrote that until May 1910 he had no idea what socialism was.[18] The first result was a letter to the nationalist Kesari of 1910, written at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in answer to an editorial that found no representative system in Buddhism. Kosambi argued that the Buddhist sangha rested on "collective ownership which is the highest stage of democracy": monks owned only eight requisites, the viharas belonged to the whole sangha, offences were tried by the whole sangha, and the Buddha, who "never showed respect for monarchy" (in the translator's words), could not have built such a body had he not been born in a republic.[19] Ober reads the thesis as one of the most persuasive and enduring arguments about modern Indian Buddhism, but also as a modernist claim comparable to Dayananda Sarasvati's claim that the Vedas contained modern science; he adds that Kosambi, unlike some contemporaries, never held that Buddhism was identical to Marxism or superseded it.[20] In a four-part article of the same year Kosambi advocated reform and not revolution: compulsory free primary education, municipal housing and meals, and appeals to the capitalists who gave to temples while workers lived in chawls.[21] His editor argues that his writings of 1910–16, including a lecture on Karl Marx in Pune in May 1912, make him the first to explain Marx and socialism to Maharashtra in Marathi, ahead of Tilak's reproductions of 1881 and the communists of the 1920s; this priority claim is the editor's own argument and was not checked.[22]

The fullest statement is Part V of Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa (1935), translated by Meera Kosambi as "Civilization and Non-violence". Ober describes the book as following a Marxist scheme of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, within which Buddhist and Jain non-violence is the thread of progress.[23] In the last chapter Kosambi asks why India could not follow the Bolsheviks, who had freed Russia's workers by destroying aristocrats and landowners, and he takes Marx's economic analysis to be right as far as it goes; he congratulates the followers of Marx on their treatment of women, defends the Soviet maternity provisions, calls the collective ownership of land, factories, banks, and railways the only thesis that benefits mankind, and rejects Gandhi's trusteeship as handing the keys of the safe to a thief.[24] He also criticized Marx. Marx, he wrote, never considered the usefulness of non-violence and was limited by a European culture that demands an adversary, and the class struggle merely replaces hostility between nations with hostility between bourgeoisie and workers, "removing a thorn with another thorn".[25] Only a non-violence accompanied by the wisdom of the socialists, he concluded, would lead to the welfare of mankind. He also read the Marxist account of exploitation through the Buddhist teaching on craving, explained the decline of the sangha in India by its accumulation of land, women, and slaves, and wrote that if religion is an opiate, "nationalism is liquor".[26] Ober concludes that the loom of Kosambi's thought is Marxist but the final weave a "democratic Buddhist socialism", in which Buddhist non-violence takes precedence over the Marxist emphasis on exploitation, whereas the editor of his collected writings calls his position a new and eclectic doctrine of Buddha, satyagraha, and Marx that changed gradually in view of the violence of the Russian Revolution and of Marxist thinking.[27]

Kosambi's caste-related writing is less developed. In his lectures of 1910 he held that the Buddha made no caste distinction, that the sangha had Brahmins like Sariputta and a Chandala like Sopaka, and that nobody is a Chandala or Brahmin by birth.[28] After hearing that Singaravelu, then secretary of the Madras Maha Bodhi Sabha, had warned Sinhalese laymen that Brahmans of Hindustan were cunning and that Kosambi, however simple he looked, was a Brahmin, Kosambi wrote that this showed how caste distinction (जातिभेद) obstructs the love of country (देशप्रीति) of educated Indians.[29] He defended the Buddhist past against the claim of S.V. Ketkar, in a series in the Kesari of 1913, that the Buddha reinforced caste, and in 1937 against Rajendra Prasad's view that Buddhism was a Hindu sect.[30] He wrote almost entirely in Marathi and Gujarati, which Ober connects with a commitment to "democratizing" and "vernacularizing" Buddhist knowledge.[31]

His life of the Buddha is a rationalist and this-worldly retelling. Bhagavan Buddha (1940) holds that the Buddha's name was Gautama and never Siddhartha, that he was a landowner's son and not a king, that the story of the palaces is a myth, and that he left home out of distaste for violent quarrels like the dispute of the Sakyas and Koliyas over the river Rohini; in the lectures of 1910 Kosambi had still accepted the three palaces but denied that they were a prison.[32] His play Bodhisattva (published in 1949) invents a Koliya character, Subhadra, to dramatize the Rohini dispute, and Ober remarks that it shows the renunciation as caused by imminent war and not by the sights of sickness, old age, and death.[33] Ober also reports that Kosambi supported the Gandhian thesis that India fell because it failed to live up to the Buddha's message of non-violence, not because it accepted it.[34]

Kosambi's Bahujan Vihara shows how Hindu leaders absorbed Buddhist revival into the Hindu fold. When Gandhi asked B.G. Kher to oversee Birla's donations, Kher replied that he could not serve on a Buddhist vihara committee and asked whether all the participants were going to become Buddhists, and Gandhi answered that the vihara was no different from a temple of Rama or Krishna and part of the Hindu revival.[35] Ober suggests that Ambedkar's distance from the vihara may have stemmed from his reluctance to accept anything financed by the Birlas and from Kosambi's being a Brahmin and a committed Gandhian.[36]

The question of Kosambi's place in Ambedkar's Buddhism is contested. Geetha describes him as being as resolute as Ambedkar in humanizing the Buddha, and Gokhale reports that Ambedkar accepted the account of the renunciation that Kosambi constructed from the Pali canon; the Samata Sainik Dal staged plays based on Kosambi's Buddhalila in the 1940s.[37] The editor of his writings states that Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957) accepts Kosambi's reading of the renunciation without naming him or any other source, and that Ambedkar's lost Introduction may have contained a reference, as Kasbe suggests. Moon's list of sources (1995), as reported by the editor, cites Kosambi's Bodhisattva for the life of Gautama only, and Anand Kausalyayan says that the two men covered different ground.[38] The sources do not settle how much Ambedkar owed to Kosambi.

Writings

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Kosambi wrote almost entirely in Marathi and Gujarati, and Meera Kosambi's volume of translations is the most accessible collection; its chronological bibliography lists his Marathi and Gujarati publications. Selections are listed below by the date of first publication.

  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1910). बुद्ध, धर्म आणि संघ Buddha, Dharma ani Sangha [The Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha]. [Three of five lectures given at Baroda in 1909, printed with a grant of Rs 500 from the Gaekwad. The lectures treat the sangha, caste, and the councils, and an English translation of part of the text is in Selection 4 of Meera Kosambi's volume.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1910). Vajjinche Mahajanasattaak Rajya [The Republican State of the Vajjis]. Kesari, 25 October 1910. [A letter from Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the republican and collective structure of the early sangha. It is translated in Selection 5 as "Ancient Indian republics, the Buddhist sangha and socialism".]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1910). Hindi Kamagaranchi Sthiti Sudharanyas Upaya [Measures for Improving the Condition of Indian Workers]. Subodha Patrika, 23 October–4 December 1910. [A four-part article on education, housing, and the duties of employers. It is translated in Selection 6.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1914). Buddhalila [The Buddha's Life]. [A work on the Buddha's life named by Ober as the basis of the Samata Sainik Dal's plays; it is probably the work that the memoir cites as Buddhalilasarsangraha, but this was not established.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन Nivedan [Statement]. Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali. [His autobiography, which covers his life up to his stay in America and was serialized in Bharat from 1912. Selection 1 of Meera Kosambi's volume translates it, and it is the only first-hand account of the Madras Buddhist circle of 1903.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1926). बौद्ध संघाचा परिचय Bauddha Sanghacha Parichay [An Introduction to the Buddhist Sangha]. [According to the editor of his writings, Part III gives life sketches of two monks from the oppressed castes.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1935). हिंदी संस्कृति आणि अहिंसा Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa [Indian Civilization and Non-violence]. [His fullest work of political theory, in which a Marxist scheme of history is tempered by Buddhist and Jain non-violence. Its last chapter is translated in Selection 7, and a Hindi translation of the whole book is cited by Ober.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1937–38). Khulasa [A Clarification]. [Excerpts, translated in Selection 2, in which he recalls his work at Harvard, his first encounter with socialism, his conversations with Gandhi, and the satyagraha and imprisonment of 1930.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1940). भगवान बुद्ध Bhagavan Buddha [The Blessed Buddha]. Suvichar Prakashan Mandal (4th reprint 1989). [A rationalist life of the Buddha based on the primary sources. It was issued in a thirteen-language edition by the Sahitya Akademi in 1956 and was, according to Sukhathankar as reported by the editor of Kosambi's writings, regarded by Ambedkar as the standard book.]
  • Kosambi, Dharmanand (1949). बोधिसत्त्व Bodhisattva [The Bodhisattva] (play). [A play on the Buddha's renunciation, with a preface of 1945 and a foreword by Kalelkar; it is translated in Selection 8.]
  • Buddhaghosa (1950). Visuddhimagga. Edited by Henry Clarke Warren; revised by Dharmananda Kosambi. Harvard Oriental Series 41. [The critical edition on which Kosambi worked during his Harvard stays and completed in 1926. He also prepared a Devanagari edition.]
  • Kosambi, Meera (Ed.) (2010). Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings. Permanent Black. [English translations of his autobiography, essays, lectures, and the play, with the editor's Introduction (see below).]

Secondary Literature in English

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  • Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [Chapter 6 ("When the Buddha Met Marx", pp. 230–241 on Kosambi) is the fullest recent account of his socialism and of Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa; pp. 215–216 and 182–183 treat the Bahujan Vihara, and n. 7 (p. 330) reports the dispute over the Harvard degree. Ober is the only author who takes up the question of how Kosambi's Buddhism and his Gandhism relate to Marxism at length.]
  • Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. Routledge. [Gokhale's chapter 13 (p. 268) reports that Ambedkar accepted Kosambi's account of the renunciation, and Bagade's chapter 9 (p. 162) describes Kosambi's defense of the Buddhist past against Hindu attacks.]
  • Geetha, V. (2021). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Palgrave Macmillan. [Note 46 places Kosambi and his play among Ambedkar's sources and says that Kosambi was drawn to socialism and spent time in the Soviet Union. The remark belongs to a larger argument about Ambedkar's socialism.]
  • Kosambi, Meera (Ed.) (2010). Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings. Permanent Black. [The editor's Introduction is the fullest biography in English and the source of the dates of his Harvard stays, the evidence on the doctorate, the account of the Bahujan Vihara, and the argument on Kosambi's priority in explaining Marx in Marathi. The Introduction's priority claim and its account of Ambedkar's debt are the editor's arguments.]
  • Ober, Douglas (2013). "'Like Embers Hidden in Ashes, or Jewels Encrusted in Stone': Rāhul Sāṅkṛtyāyan, Dharmānand Kosambī and Buddhist Activity in Colonial India". Contemporary Buddhism 14.1: 134–148. [An earlier account that pairs Kosambi with Rahul Sankrityayan. It gives the Harvard doctorate as fact, which Ober (2023) withdraws.]

Secondary Literature in Other Languages

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(none identified)

How to Cite This Article

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Brons, Lajos (2026). "Dharmanand Kosambi". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Dharmanand_Kosambi.

Notes

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  1. ↑ Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन Nivedan [Statement] (Marathi). Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali, p. 9. The memoir was serialized in the Goa weekly Bharat from November 1912 to 9 February 1916, its last chapters were written in 1916 or 1917, and the book edition carries a preface dated 5 July 1924. See also Kosambi, Meera (Ed.) (2010). Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings. Permanent Black, Introduction and endnote 2. The e-edition of 2012 consulted has no printed page numbers, so notes to it cite selections and endnotes, and printed pages are given only where Ober supplies them. Selection 1 is Nivedan; Selection 2, the Khulasa (1937–38); Selection 4, the lectures of 1910; Selection 5, the Kesari letter of 1910; Selection 6, the article on workers of 1910; Selection 7, Part V of Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa; Selection 8, the play Bodhisattva. Spellings: "Dharmanand" (Ober; M. Kosambi; used here), "Dharmananda" (Geary and Mukherjee in Jerryson (Ed.) (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, Oxford University Press, pp. 42, 50; Gokhale), and "Dhammanand" (Kausalyayan). The family name was originally Shenai Lotlikar, then Kosambe, and Kosambi himself changed it to Kosambi. Brandist, Craig (2022). "Soviet Indology and the critique of colonial philology: the work of Aleksei Barannikov in the light of Dalit studies". Language & History 65.3: 201–219, prints 1878 as his year of birth; every source on Kosambi himself gives 1876, and the 1878 is probably a slip.
  2. ↑ Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press, p. 231; M. Kosambi (2010), Essential Writings, Introduction. Kosambi left Goa at the end of 1899.
  3. ↑ Kosambi (1924), निवेदन Nivedan, pp. 74–75, 83–85.
  4. ↑ Kosambi (1924), निवेदन Nivedan, pp. 95–97, 103. Singaravelu appears in these pages without office; the memoir predates any communist role, and the identification of this Singaravelu with the later communist rests on a gloss by Aloysius, G. (1998). Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism. New Age International, p. 58.
  5. ↑ Kosambi (1924), निवेदन Nivedan, pp. 108–110, 119; Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 231 and n. 16 (p. 331), which notes that his vows in Ceylon were those of a novice and that the full ordination was in Burma. The memoir does not date the novice ordination; it falls between Vesak of 22 May 1902 and his departure from Colombo on 26 March 1903. M. Kosambi (Introduction) dates the full ordination to 1903–04.
  6. ↑ Kosambi (1924), निवेदन Nivedan, pp. 114–117. The identifications of Lakshminarasu Naidu with P. Lakshmi Narasu and of Ayodhidas with Thass are inferences; the pages name neither Narasu nor Thass in full. Ober (2023), p. 232, has him living at the Shakya Buddhist Society's rest houses from 1902 to 1904 and calls him an early colleague of Thass, Narasu, and Singaravelu; the memoir gives one day in 1902 and six and a half months in 1903. See also the Tamil Buddhist Movement.
  7. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction; Kosambi (1924), निवेदन Nivedan, pp. 185–187. The memoir gives the stipend as Rs 50.
  8. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction; Kosambi (1924), निवेदन Nivedan, pp. 185–187. M. Kosambi dates four Harvard stays to 1910–January 1912, October 1918–August 1922, 1926 (completing the Visuddhimagga work, published in 1950), and 1931–32. Ober (2023), n. 7 (p. 330), gives 1910–12, 1919–22, 1926–29, and 1933–34. The dates differ and are not adjudicated here.
  9. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction (six years at Fergusson College); Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 101.
  10. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, n. 7 (p. 330), citing Zelliot (1979), p. 392; Ober, Douglas (2013). "'Like Embers Hidden in Ashes, or Jewels Encrusted in Stone': Rāhul Sāṅkṛtyāyan, Dharmānand Kosambī and Buddhist Activity in Colonial India". Contemporary Buddhism 14.1: 134–148. M. Kosambi's volume contains no statement that he held a Harvard degree and quotes his remark of 1912 that he had no BA or MA; it records that his son Damodar Dharmanand (D.D.) Kosambi (1907–1966) took a Harvard BA with distinction in 1929, which suggests but does not prove that the "1929" doctorate arose from a confusion of father and son. A Harvard Asia Center seminar abstract by R. Ramaswamy ("Early South Asians at Harvard: Dharmanand, Manik, and Damodar Kosambi, 1910-1932") lists him as Assistant in Indic Philology 1910-12 and 1918-22 and mentions no degree. -->
  11. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction (Gandhi's invitation of November 1922; three years at the Vidyapith); Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 234.
  12. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 235–236; M. Kosambi (Introduction) says that he returned to India in early 1930 and passed through the Soviet Union again in 1932. Geetha dates his Soviet stay to the 1920s (Geetha, V. (2021). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Palgrave Macmillan, n. 46 on pp. 290–291; one source consulted gives p. 290 and another p. 291).
  13. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 2 (§§4–5) and Introduction: he led the satyagraha camp at Shirode in May 1930 and was released in March 1931. Ober (2023), p. 236, says that he was arrested twice, first at the Shiroda satyagraha and again in October; p. 237 reports that police intelligence reports name him more than fifty times between April and October 1930.
  14. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 237.
  15. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 215–216 and n. 47 (p. 327); M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction. The vihara was named "Bahujan" and not "Buddha" Vihara because of its focus on mill workers and its attempt to end caste discrimination among them.
  16. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction (Birla's and Gandhi's requests that he stay; the plaque names Birla and not Kosambi); Ober (2023), n. 48 (p. 327), which attributes the quarrel to a disagreement over the role of violence in Hindu scriptures and culture and cites Ober (2013), pp. 139–140; Zelliot (1979), p. 393, reported at second hand for the Society's takeover. Ambedkar never took part in the vihara's events (Ober (2023), p. 216).
  17. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction. The Handbook gives 1876–1941 at p. 42 and 1876–1947 at p. 50 (Geary and Mukherjee in Jerryson (Ed.) (2017)); M. Kosambi's date of 4 June 1947 settles the question.
  18. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 2 (Khulasa, 1937–38), §2. He recalled that he first heard of it from a Dutch businessman on the voyage, read about it at Boston socialist societies, and bought books at the Socialist Book Depot; he could not follow Capital but understood its outline from other authors, and he sent basic books on socialism to N.C. Kelkar of the Kesari. Socialism explained to him why Indian princes had failed against the British, and he concluded that real political strength lies in the union of workers.
  19. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 5 (letter of 19 September 1910, published 25 October 1910); the passage is quoted in Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 232–233, who cites Kosambi (2010), pp. 313–15 for it. The letter relies on Rhys Davids for the republics and on the seven conditions of Vajji prosperity, and it defines socialism as establishing national ownership over privately owned property.
  20. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 233–234.
  21. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 6 (Subodha Patrika, 23 October–4 December 1910). The article also cites a 1910 resolution of the American Federation of Labor against Asian immigration and blames Indian workers' ignorance and disunity for their position, a view that a modern reader may question.
  22. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction, endnotes 24–34. The lecture of 1916 on socialism and the war was chaired by Kelkar.
  23. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 237; M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 7 (printed pp. 327–357 according to Ober (2023), n. 12, p. 331). Ober worked from the Hindi translation of the whole book for the earlier parts and cites it by that edition's pages.
  24. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 238, citing Kosambi (1935) 2010, p. 168 in the Hindi translation; M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 7 (the passages on women and on the Communist Manifesto, on collective ownership, and on trusteeship).
  25. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 240–241, citing Kosambi (1909–49) 2010, pp. 355–357; M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 7.
  26. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 238–239, citing Kosambi (1935) 2010, pp. 176, 182–183 (Hindi translation) and Kosambi (1909–49) 2010, p. 354.
  27. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 241; M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction (the editor credits Sadanand More for the point about the gradual change). Ober (p. 236) adds that Kosambi's Soviet visits overlapped with Stalin's turn against religion, which disillusioned him.
  28. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 4 (lectures of 1909, published in 1910 as Buddha, Dharma ani Sangha).
  29. ↑ Kosambi (1924), निवेदन Nivedan, pp. 110–111.
  30. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction (Ketkar's series of August–November 1913 and Kosambi's rejoinders of 26 August and 18 October 1913; the reply to Prasad of 1937). Bagade, in Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. Routledge, ch. 9, p. 162, also describes his defense against attacks of Ketkar's kind.
  31. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 102, citing M. Kosambi (2010), pp. 415–417 for a list of his publications.
  32. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction and Selection 4. The editor dates the change of view to the later works.
  33. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 241 and n. 13 (p. 331), where the translation of the play is placed at Kosambi (1909–49) 2010, pp. 358–408; Geetha (2021), n. 46, gives pp. 348–402. The preface of the play says that scenes 4 and 5 have no basis in the Tripitaka (M. Kosambi (2010), Selection 8).
  34. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 172.
  35. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 182–183 (Kher's letter of 24 August 1936 and Gandhi's reply, both citing the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 69: 318–319); Ober (p. 183) adds that Birla also supported the Buddhist activism of Rahul Sankrityayan, Jagdish Kashyap, Anand Kausalyayan, and Kosambi, who were then writing sharp criticisms of Hindu scriptures and of the Hindu Maha Sabha.
  36. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 216; the reasons are described as unclear.
  37. ↑ Geetha (2021), n. 46 (pp. 290–291); Gokhale (Ed.) (2021), Classical Buddhism, ch. 13 (P. Gokhale), p. 268; Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, p. 218, citing Moon (2001), pp. 127–133.
  38. ↑ M. Kosambi (2010), Introduction, endnotes 70–72 (the editor's assertions); Kausalyayan, Bhadant Anand (1980). An Intelligent Man's Guide to Buddhism. Buddha Bhoomi Prakashan (2nd ed., 1992), pp. 23, 110–111 (Questions 34–35 and 165). The renunciation account in Ambedkar's book is at Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches 11: 24–32.
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