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><ref>The village is reported inconsistently: Chudal and Joshi give Pandaha, near Kanaila, whereas Bhartiya (2025), "Rahul Sankrityayan and His Contribution to Indian Buddhism", describes him as born in the Uttar Pradesh village of Kanaila.</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> According to Ober, the Arya Samaj's own text, the ''Satyarth Prakash'', obliged members to master a chapter refuting Buddhism, and a document of 1926 records him at the Maha Bodhi temple committee as "Sadhu Ramodar Das".<ref name="Ober2023">Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press.</ref> In 1917, in Lucknow, he encountered the Indian Buddhist Society founded by Bhadant Bodhanand Mahastavir, and Ober dates his lasting Buddhist engagement from this meeting, before his Sri Lankan sojourn or his journeys to Tibet.<ref>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. The identification of this Bodhanand with other figures of the same name in the literature (see the discussion of the Adi-Hindu movement) is unsettled.</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" /><ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," pp. 64–66, n. 6, gives the dates as arrival at the Vidyalankara Pirivena on 16 May 1927 and departure for Tibet via Nepal on 1 December 1928. The sequence of his ordination is reported differently in Ober's own writings: Ober (2013) and an earlier article state that he took full ordination as a bhikkhu at the Vidyalankara Pirivena in 1930, while Ober (2023), pp. 241–243, has him become a bhikkhu only after his first major trip to Tibet in 1929–1930. This page therefore does not date his ordination.</ref> The Vidyalankara Pirivena, which Ober describes as a more radical, anti-imperialist counterpart of the Vidyodaya Pirivena where [[Dharmanand Kosambi]] had studied, formed several of his Indian contemporaries in the same years, among them the poet Kavi Nagarjun (Vaidyanath Mishra), the monk and writer Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan, and Jagdish Kashyap.<ref name="Ober2013">Ober (2013), "Like Embers Hidden in Ashes", pp. 134–148; Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne''. Ober draws on Seneviratne (1999) for the pirivena's milieu of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, in which Pali manuscripts circulated alongside the works of Marx and Robert Ingersoll.</ref> 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" /><ref>Corroboration from a Hindi source: Narendra Deva, ''Bauddha-Dharma-Darshan'' (1956), p. 169, records that Sankrityayan brought photographs of the original Sanskrit manuscript of Vasubandhu's ''Abhidharmakosha-bhashya'' from Tibet. Ober counts four major manuscript-hunting expeditions between 1929 and 1938.</ref>

[[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> The Rana authorities censored his writings, and Chudal reports that his later political books were banned in Nepal while his Buddhist titles remained available.<ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," pp. 62–63, 82.</ref> His Buddhist scholarship also took him to Europe as a delegate of the Maha Bodhi Society in 1932–33, where he shared his manuscript discoveries with scholars including Sylvain Lévi, and later to Japan, Korea, China, and Central Asia.<ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," pp. 64–66, n. 6; Ober (2013), "Like Embers Hidden in Ashes".</ref>

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 [[Russia and the Soviet Union|Soviet Union]] for the first time that same year, and in 1937–38 spent an extended period at Leningrad teaching Buddhist philosophy and Indology at the invitation of the Buddhologist Fyodor Stcherbatsky, in the intervals learning Russian and Mongolian; according to Ober, Soviet attitudes toward Buddhism had by then turned to condemnation.<ref name="Joshi2009" /><ref>The dates of his Soviet stays are reported differently. Joshi (2009) gives 1935, 1937, 1944, and 1962 (the last for treatment of his amnesia); Ober (2023), p. 244 and n. 19 (p. 331), gives a first journey in 1935 and a Leningrad stay in 1937–38, and has him leave the Soviet Union in 1939 after marrying Ellena Narvertovna Kozerovskaya and giving up his monastic vows. An earlier version of this page dated further visits to 1947–48; no source in hand confirms this. The statement that he left in 1939 sits uneasily with Narendra Deva's speech of 9 April 1939, which condemns an assault on Sankrityayan in police custody in Saran district, Bihar (Nauriya (2015), p. 34 n. 148), so the 1939 departure should be treated as unsettled.</ref> 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''. Sahajanand's ambivalence toward religion (he called it "the illusion of dharma") is reported in Ober (2023), p. 246. Nauriya (2015), pp. 65 nn. 255–256, second-hand, names Sankrityayan among the founders of the Bihar Socialist Party in July 1931.</ref> He was arrested in February 1939 in a peasant campaign and again in 1940 after addressing a peasant meeting at Motihari, part of the colonial government's crackdown on the Communist Party; roughly a year's detention at the Deoli internment camp produced two major works of popular Marxist philosophy, ''Manav Samaj'' (1942) and ''Darshan-Digdarshan'' (1944).<ref name="Joshi2009" /><ref>The crackdown is characterized in Overstreet and Windmiller (1959), pp. 183–184; Chudal (2015), p. 62 n. 3, lists his imprisonments as 1922, 1923–25, 1939, and 1940–42. Across three arrests he spent a total of about twenty-nine months in jail.</ref> 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. Chudal glosses the speech, delivered at the Tundikhel before King Mahendra, as December 1956 in one place and November–December in another; the conference opened on 14 November 1956.</ref> [[BR Ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]]'s conversion at Nagpur a month earlier had received his approval: Ober reports that Sankrityayan wrote an approving pamphlet in 1957 comparing it to Kublai Khan's conversion.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', citing Sankrityayan ([1957] 1978), p. 18.</ref> He taught at the University of Ceylon in 1959 and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1963. His essay "Buddhist Dialectics", a concise statement of his reading of Buddhist philosophy as proto-dialectical materialism, appeared in the 1970 anthology ''Buddhism: The Marxist Approach'' (a first publication in ''New Age'' in 1956 is reported by Ober).<ref name="OberBD">Ober (2023), n. 22 (p. 332), says the essay "was first published in 1956 in New Age" and was republished under other titles, such as "Buddhism and Marxism"; Ober's bibliography lists it as [1956] 1994, in Chattopadhyaya, Alaka (Ed.), ''Essays on Indology'', pp. 1–9. The anthology is undated internally and its first edition is January 1970; the essay reads as a translation, with no translator named.</ref>

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" /><ref>Chudal (2015), "Buddhism of Nepal," pp. 82–83, names the brother as Shyamlal and the Newar monk as Mahanam.</ref>