P. Lakshmi Narasu

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P. Lakshmi Narasu (పోకాల లక్ష్మీ నరసు, Pōkāla Lakṣmī Narasu; 1861–1934) was a Madras science professor, Buddhist rationalist, and leader of the Tamil Buddhist movement. The son of a Madras advocate, he taught at Madras Christian College and Pachaiyappa's College. After the death of Iyothee Thass in 1914 he became the leading figure of the Shakya Buddhist Society, and from 1917 to 1932 he presided over the general conferences of its successor, the South Indian Buddhist Association. His books The Essence of Buddhism (1907), What is Buddhism? (1916), and A Study of Caste (1922) present Buddhism as a rational and this-worldly teaching, attack caste and the religion built on it, and describe the spirit of Buddhism as "essentially socialistic" in an ethical and cooperative sense. B.R. Ambedkar republished The Essence of Buddhism in 1948 with a preface that calls it the best book on Buddhism to that date.

Biography

Narasu was born in 1861 and died on 14 July 1934. According to Douglas Ober, he was the son of a prominent advocate in the Madras courts and a product of colonial schools; he studied the physical sciences at Madras University, was appointed assistant professor at Madras Christian College, moved in 1908 to Pachaiyappa's College, and taught there until his retirement in 1924. Aloysius, whose introduction to Narasu's posthumous collection is Ober's main biographical source, writes that Narasu came from a "backward" community but that his family had risen to respectable positions under colonial rule; he also reports a Telugu background and only a rudimentary command of Tamil.

Narasu took part in the Buddhist societies of Madras from about the turn of the century. Aloysius lists him with M. Singaravelu among the lecturers of the Madras Buddhist programme from about 1898 to 1900 and calls him an early companion of Thass. In 1903 the Marathi Buddhist Dharmanand Kosambi found in Madras a Maha Bodhi Sabha whose president, a Professor Lakshminarasu Naidu, was probably Narasu; he was Kosambi's teacher in comparative religion and sometimes lectured at the Sunday gatherings of the Bauddhashram in Royapettah. Murugesan and Subramanyam name Narasu and Singaravelu as the principal speakers at the meetings of the Madras Maha Bodhi Society. Accounts of his relationship with Thass differ. Ayyathurai calls Narasu an associate of Thass; V. Geetha writes that the two worked together briefly and then "parted ways", Narasu being the more rationalist and Thass the more esoteric; and Kosambi's account of 1903 shows the Maha Bodhi circle and Thass's followers as separate groups that did not get on.

Narasu's first book, The Essence of Buddhism, grew out of essays that he had contributed to South Indian magazines, and it appeared in 1907 with an introduction by Dharmapala. After Thass's death in 1914, Ober writes, the leadership of the Shakya Buddhist Society turned to Narasu, who became its president and, according to Ober, opened new branches, lectured at national conferences, and presided over conversions and over reformed marriage ceremonies that did without brahmin priests. Aloysius adds that the movement regarded him as Thass's successor, although members from the Kolar Gold Fields elected M.Y. Murugesam general president. Narasu presided over the first four General Conferences of the (South Indian) Buddhist Association, held at Madras on 4 November 1917, at Bangalore on 21 November 1920, at Madras on 6–8 April 1928, and on 21 May 1932. The resolutions passed at them included, in 1928, a membership test that rejected idol worship, ritual customs, and caste discrimination; marriage reform, including a wedding badge (thali) bearing the Bodhi tree and the wheel of the Dharma, and equal inheritance for men and women on the Burmese model, on motions of Narasu; requests for a separate Buddhist column in the census and separate seats in the legislatures; and, in 1917 and 1920, expressions of loyalty to the British government. The 1928 conference authorized him to present its resolutions to the government and to brief the Simon Commission; its guests included E.V. Ramasamy Naicker (Periyar) and M. Singaravelu, but the source does not record what they said.

Narasu's relations with the Maha Bodhi Society worsened as his materialist reading of karma and rebirth and his criticism of the sangha became known. The Society had helped to fund the Perambur vihara of the Shakya Buddhist Society, completed according to Ober in 1920, and it published a report of a South Indian Buddhist conference at Bangalore that omitted key sentences of Narasu's presidential message. In the four years before his death the rift became open, and the Maha Bodhi Society sued Narasu in a civil court, claiming that he had illegally occupied the vihara premises; Ober reports that the case was resolved only sixty years later in the Madras High Court.

Narasu appeared in public life outside the Association as well. A "Lakshminarasu" described as a Buddhist scholar and friend of the Adi Dravidas criticized Annie Besant in New India on 17 November 1916 for saying that a Paraiyar must work out his karma, and in an address to the South Indian Buddhist Association reported in Kudi Arasu of 29 March 1931 he is reported to have called the Buddha's creed the oldest samadharmic creed in existence. The Association's conference of 1932 recommended his Essence of Buddhism in Tamil as its authoritative book. In 1934, according to Aloysius, Narasu rejected the argument of C.K. Kuppusamy that Buddhism and world communism do not differ. A sympathetic Bombay journalist who visited several branches of the Society in 1936 regretted that its leadership had not followed either Thass or Narasu.

Ideas

Narasu presented Buddhism as a religion of reason and experience that does not rest on authority. He described The Essence of Buddhism as the humble offering of a disciple, laying no claim to originality, and accepted nothing as the Master's teaching that is not in strict accord with reason. Ober connects this rationalism with the Kalama Sutta, which Narasu took to set aside "all recourse to authority or revelation", and reports that in a presidential message he declared that even the words of a Buddha must be rejected if they do not accord with reason. His reading was also materialist. He denied the soul and held, on the basis of the doctrines of non-self and impermanence, that the karma of a sentient being passes to others in this life only; he called karma a fatalism that blinds believers to the injustice of social conditions and has consecrated the division of society into castes, and he added that those forms of Buddhism that accommodated themselves to transmigration eventually succumbed to the caste regime. He did not reject religion as such: the Foreword of A Study of Caste aims at religion "whose life-blood is caste", and a chapter of the same book argues that the denial of soul and God does not imply the denial of all religion, defining religion as a plan of action for realizing the human hope of a life free from suffering. His criticism extended to the sangha, in which Ober says he saw the same obscurantism and dogma that he despised in other religions, and which he thought had to change and become more socially engaged.

Caste was Narasu's central target, and he treated it as inseparable from Hinduism. He presented the Buddha as a Kshatriya who rejected caste and the sacrificial system, and he argued, with a long passage attributed to the Buddha and with a summary of Asvaghosha's Vajrasuchi, that Brahmin and Chandala do not differ by birth. Among the Buddha's lay followers, he wrote, caste distinctions had no religious significance, and perhaps social conditions prevented the Buddha from preaching a general crusade against caste. He held that Brahminical civilization had barely penetrated South India by about 700 CE, so that the South Indian Brahmin was a newcomer and hence more exclusive. He was also critical of non-Brahmin Hindus: the non-Brahmin, he wrote, had not budged an inch to throw off caste, and even the despised classes were prepared to enter the caste system if its doors were opened to them. Caste, in his account, had made India a pleasant place for the Brahmin at the cost of suffering and destitution for the depressed classes.

Narasu's economic critique is the strand in his work that is closest to the left, and it is ethical and cooperative, not Marxist. In the chapter on the morality of Buddhism he wrote that the spirit of Buddhism is "essentially socialistic", meaning that it teaches concerted action (samanartha) for social ends, and that it is opposed to an industrialism driven by the struggle for wealth. He then argued that the accumulation of capital in a few hands has no ethical justification, that capital is not the product of individual saving but surplus seized from producers, and that this differs little from theft; he drew on Herbert Spencer's Social Statics for the origin of landed property in violence and fraud, called modern imperialism a manifestation of a robbing propensity, and still held that even extreme need cannot justify seizing the goods of others. In A Study of Caste he wanted labor to have a share in the management of industry, with joint responsibility of laborer and capitalist, and he noted that seven tenths of the world's wealth and the control of the means of production were in the hands of a few; among the measures that create real opportunity he listed the abolition of special privilege and a wider and more equal distribution of wealth. These passages contain no class-struggle language and no program. Ober groups Narasu with Thass and Singaravelu as anti-caste writers who portrayed early Buddhism as a religion of the oppressed, and adds that these portrayals made no explicit reference to Marxist doctrine.

Narasu's politics combined hostility to Hindu nationalism, a limited criticism of colonial rule, and a faith in education. He attacked the nationalists who boasted that India's social system had been perfected in antiquity, and he held that foreign conquest had been possible only because of the country's spiritual and social slavery. He also criticized the colonial government for ruling India for its own prestige and for spending more on the police, the magistracy, the secret service, and the military than on education. The remedy that he proposed was mass education and not electoral reform, though he also wrote that revolutions had historically given the masses their chances of cultural progress and praised Japan's abolition of caste. The record of the Buddhist Association under his presidency was loyalist and constitutional, and its resolutions did not go beyond demands for caste-based social justice, women's property rights, and rural housing and land. His treatment of women was reformist in the same way: he wrote that the Buddha placed man and woman on an equal footing in theory but that in practice woman "stands much lower", he blamed this on later brahmanical influence, and he cited Burma as showing what equality could achieve.

The sources diverge on Narasu's place between Thass and Ambedkar. Ober, drawing on Aloysius, stresses that Narasu's family had risen in colonial society, that he knew English and French well, and that his scientific training gave him access to the circle of men of consequence in Madras; Ober adds that some of the Society's members found his Buddhism too "strange" and "scientific", while Kesava Kumar, following Aloysius, attributes that judgment to Thass, who is said to have rejected a Buddhism that did not make anti-casteism central. Ambedkar's preface of 1948 says that he never met Narasu and took his biographical details from Dr. Pattabhi Sitaramayya; it describes him as an iconoclast and social reformer who fought caste in the 1890s and calls The Essence of Buddhism "the best book on Buddhism that has appeared so far". Geetha lists Narasu with Dharmanand Kosambi and Haraprasad Shastri among the writers who appealed to Ambedkar because they treated the Buddha's presence in Indian history as consequential and his teaching as radical, and she writes that Ambedkar learned of the South Indian movement chiefly through Narasu's writings and the contacts of the Scheduled Castes Federation at Madras, but she also doubts that he knew Narasu's work on caste. Ayyathurai finds no direct archival evidence for a link between Thass and Ambedkar and treats Narasu as the main indirect bridge. Contemporary reception was mixed. Devapriya Valisinha, writing in 1946, called Narasu's interpretations of karma and rebirth "alarmingly materialistic", and Ober cites a critical review of The Essence of Buddhism by Louis de la Vallée Poussin (1913).

Writings

• Narasu, P. Lakshmi (1907). The Essence of Buddhism (Asian Educational Services, 1993). [Based on essays first contributed to South Indian magazines, with an introduction by Anagarika Dharmapala, and containing chapters on the morality of Buddhism, on caste, and on the position of women. Later editions appeared at Madras in 1912 and at Bombay in 1948 with Ambedkar's preface.]
• Narasu, P. Lakshmi (1916). What is Buddhism? (Samyak Prakashan, 2009). [A shorter statement of Narasu's rationalist presentation of the doctrine, which Ober says went through more than fourteen editions and was translated into German, Japanese, and Slovak. The 2009 edition reprints an introduction by Devapriya Valisinha of 1946; an edition of 1964 was published by the Maha Bodhi Society of India at Calcutta.]
• Narasu, P. Lakshmi (1922). A Study of Caste. K.V. Raghavulu. [His fullest argument against caste, based on articles that appeared in an unnamed Madras social-reform weekly. The Foreword is dated 2 January 1922, the book gives no references, and its chapters deal with the Buddhist critique of caste, Hindu reform movements, race and heredity, economics, and the doctrines of karma, soul, and God.]
• Narasu, P. Lakshmi, & C. Manickkam (1924). பௌத்த தர்மமும் இந்து மதமும் Pauththa Tharmamum Indu Mathamum [The Buddhist Dharma and the Hindu Religion]. [A Tamil work listed in the Tamil bibliography of Aloysius (1998, p. 236).]
• Narasu, P. Lakshmi (2002). Religion of the Modern Buddhist. Edited and introduced by G. Aloysius. Samyak Prakashan. [A posthumous collection that Aloysius connects with a manuscript that Ambedkar collected from Narasu's family and promised to publish. Ober cites it for Narasu's account of karma and for his reformed marriage ceremonies.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [Chapter 3 gives the fullest recent account of Narasu's career, his presidency of the Shakya Buddhist Society, and his conflict with the Maha Bodhi Society, with notes on the sources. It treats him as a rationalist among several rival Buddhist revivals.]
• Geetha, V. (2021). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Palgrave Macmillan. [Places Narasu among the writers who shaped Ambedkar's Buddhism and discusses the preface of 1948. Its remarks on Narasu are brief and belong to a larger argument about Ambedkar's socialism.]
• Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. Routledge. [Several chapters name Narasu as a predecessor of Ambedkar. The chapter by Bimalendra Kumar quotes the sentence on the "socialistic" spirit of Buddhism but cites it to a 1912 edition, page 7, which does not match the reprint consulted here (page 45).]
• Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2011). Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India. PhD dissertation, Columbia University. [Mentions Narasu only as an associate of Thass and as the main indirect link to Ambedkar; footnote 307 (p. 214) is a short biographical note. The dissertation finds no direct archival evidence of a connection between Thass and Ambedkar.]
• Aloysius, G. (1998). Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism. New Age International. [The standard monograph on the Sakya Buddhist Society and the South Indian Buddhist Association. It records Narasu's presidency of four conferences, translates their resolutions, and reprints Ambedkar's preface of 1948 (App. 10).]

Secondary Literature in Other Languages

(none identified)

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "P Lakshmi Narasu". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/P_Lakshmi_Narasu.