Editing Rahul Sankrityayan (section)

== Biography ==
Rahul Sankrityayan was born Kedarnath Pandey on April 9, 1893, at his maternal grandfather's house in Pandaha village, Azamgarh district, in what was then the North-Western Provinces of British India.<ref name="Sarao2017">Sarao, K.T.S. (2017). "Sankrityayan, Rahul". In: Sarao, K.T.S., & Long, J.D. (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Indian Religions: Buddhism and Jainism''. Springer.</ref> Raised in an orthodox Bhumihar Brahmin household after the early death of his mother, he received only a middle-school education and was thereafter self-taught, eventually mastering some thirty languages.<ref name="Chudal2016">Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2016). ''A Freethinking Cultural Nationalist: A Life History of Rahul Sankrityayan''. Oxford University Press.</ref> He left home repeatedly as a child and, from about 1910, took up a wandering life, moving through a series of religious identities: he was initiated as a Vaishnava sadhu at Chhapra in 1912 under the name Ramodar Das (also recorded as Baba Ram Udar Das), before drifting toward the reformist Arya Samaj around 1914–1917, where he first encountered Buddhist philosophy as a rival doctrine to be refuted.<ref name="Joshi2009">Joshi, Maya (2009). "Rahul Sankrityayan's Journeys of the Self: Nation, Culture, Identity". ''Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences'' 16(1&2): 119–147.</ref>

Sankrityayan's political awakening began during the Non-Cooperation Movement, in which he organized peasants in Chhapra district, Bihar, in 1920–1921, and for which he was jailed in 1922 and again in 1924; it was during this second imprisonment that he wrote his first, unpublished novel, the utopian ''Baisvin Sadi'' ("The Twenty-Second Century"), later published in 1945.<ref name="Joshi2009" /> In 1922, newly active in Congress politics, he also drafted a proposal calling for the Maha Bodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, then in the hands of a Hindu Saiva mahant, to be restored to Buddhist control, forwarded to that year's Congress session at Gaya on behalf of Anagarika Dharmapala's Maha Bodhi Society; this drew him into sustained contact with the Buddhist monastic world even before he had committed himself to Buddhism as a scholarly vocation.<ref name="ChudalNepal">Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2015). "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal". ''European Bulletin of Himalayan Research'' 46: 62–87, pp. 64–65.</ref> His serious study of Buddhism intensified through the late 1920s: he studied Pali and Buddhist texts in Ladakh in 1926, and in 1927 he traveled to Sri Lanka, where he spent nineteen months at the Vidyalankara Pirivena studying under Buddhist monks and eventually earned the titles Tripitakacharya and Mahapandit.<ref name="Joshi2009" /> Renaming himself Rahul after the Buddha's son and taking the surname Sankrityayan from his family's gotra, he made the first of at least four clandestine journeys to Tibet (1929–30, 1934–35, and 1936, sometimes disguised as a Tibetan lama), from which he recovered and photographed several thousand Buddhist Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscripts lost to India since the destruction of Nalanda and Vikramashila.<ref name="Joshi2009" />

Nepal, which he visited repeatedly beginning in 1920 and came to regard as something close to a second home, served as his essential gateway to Tibet. Traveling disguised as a Hindu pilgrim sadhu during the Sivaratri festival, one of the few occasions on which the Rana government allowed Indians into the Kathmandu Valley, he cultivated close relationships with the Newar Buddhist merchant Dharmaman Sahu, whose houses in Kathmandu and Lhasa sheltered him and eased his passage into Tibet, and with the rajguru (royal priest) Hemraj Sharma, a Sanskrit scholar and manuscript collector whose library he drew on in his search for a complete text of Dharmakirti's ''Pramanavarttika''.<ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," pp. 66–70, 79–80.</ref> Although he never joined the underground Theravada revival then taking shape among Newar Buddhists, several of its leading figures, including the future monks Dharmalok and Anirudha, counted him among their formative influences.<ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," pp. 69–70, 75–77.</ref> His Buddhist scholarship also took him to Europe as a delegate of the Maha Bodhi Society in 1932–33, and later to Japan, Korea, China, and Central Asia.

From the mid-1930s, Sankrityayan's Buddhist and Marxist commitments developed together. It was in Lhasa, on August 28, 1935, that he completed the preface to his first sustained work of political writing, ''Samyavad hi Kyon?'' ("Why Communism?"), a popular Hindi primer on communism dedicated to the memory of the Tibetan king Mune Tsenpo, whom he described, on the basis of Tibetan chronicles, as an early "martyr of communism" for having thrice redistributed wealth in his realm before being poisoned by his mother.<ref name="SHK">Sankrityayan, Rahul (1935). साम्यवाद ही क्यों? [''Why Communism?''] (Kitab Mahal, 3rd ed. 1943), pp. 3–6 and dedication page.</ref> He visited the Soviet Union for the first time that same year, and returned in 1937–38 and 1947–48 to teach Buddhist philosophy and Indology at Leningrad University at the invitation of the Buddhologist Fyodor Stcherbatsky, in the intervals learning Russian and Mongolian.<ref name="Joshi2009" /> Back in India, he became a leading figure in the Bihar peasant movement associated with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati's Kisan Sabha, presiding over the fifth annual session of the All India Kisan Sabha at Palasa, Andhra Pradesh, in March 1940.<ref>Chudal (2016), ''A Freethinking Cultural Nationalist''; on the 1940 Kisan Sabha presidency, cf. the conference table in the Wikipedia article "All India Kisan Sabha" (accessed 2026), which lists Rahul Sankrityayan as president of the 5th session.</ref> He was jailed later that year in the colonial government's crackdown on the Communist Party, and it was during roughly a year's detention at the Deoli internment camp that he composed two major works of popular Marxist philosophy, ''Manav Samaj'' (1942) and ''Darshan-Digdarshan'' (1944).<ref name="Joshi2009" /> He formally joined the Communist Party of India in 1939 and remained a member for nine years, until his membership was revoked in 1948 over his defense of Hindi (as opposed to Sanskritized or Persianized alternatives) as the national language, a position his comrades regarded as majoritarian; he rejoined the party in 1955.<ref name="Joshi2009" /> Alongside this activity, he continued to publish prolifically in Hindi across history, philosophy, fiction, grammar, and travel writing, including the multi-volume autobiography ''Meri Jeevan Yatra'' (1944–1967) and the widely read travel manifesto ''Ghumakkar Shastra'' (1948).

In his later years, Sankrityayan continued to divide his energies between Buddhist scholarship and Marxist commentary, publishing ''Bauddh Darshan'' (1948), a major materialist study of Buddhist philosophy, and receiving the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958 for his two-volume ''Madhya Asia ka Itihas'' ("History of Central Asia"). In November 1956 he took part in the Fourth General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Kathmandu, telling delegates in an impromptu speech that Nepal and India shared "one culture" and that neither he nor his hosts should think of themselves as meeting on foreign soil.<ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," pp. 81–82.</ref> He taught at the University of Ceylon in 1959 and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1963. His chapter "Buddhist Dialectics", a concise statement of his reading of Buddhist philosophy as proto-dialectical materialism, appeared posthumously in the 1970 anthology ''Buddhism: The Marxist Approach''. 

He married three times, his third wife being the writer and scholar Kamala Sankrityayan. Afflicted in his final years by a debilitating amnesia, he died in Darjeeling on April 14, 1963, at seventy; his funeral rites were performed according to both Hindu and Buddhist custom, at the insistence of his youngest brother and of the monk Bhikkhu Mahanam respectively, neither of whom would concede that Sankrityayan had wholly left the other's tradition behind.<ref name="Sarao2017" />