Editing Dalit Buddhism (section)

== Before Ambedkar, c. 1890–1950 ==

Douglas Ober argues, against the common view that Ambedkar built his Buddhism from scratch, that Ambedkar had been in contact with existing Buddhist networks for decades before 1956.<ref name="Ober2023">Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, ch. 5 (the common view is cited there to Vajpeyi 2012).</ref> The ''Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism'''s chapter on India likewise lists a set of pioneers whose example Dalit Buddhist organizations invoke: Mahavir (1833–1919), [[Iyothee Thass]] (1845–1914), Kripasaran Mahastavir (1865–1926), [[Dharmanand Kosambi]] (1876–1947), Bodhananda Mahastavir (1874–1952), [[Rahul Sankrityayan]] (1893–1963), Anand Kausalyayan (1905–1988), and Jagdish Kashyap (1908–1976).<ref>Geary and Mukherjee (2017), "Buddhism in Contemporary India", p. 50 (the list is given there as quoted; the Handbook notes that several of them spent formative years in [[Burma]] and [[Sri Lanka]]).</ref> Four strands in the period are summarized here. A common theme shared by many of these strands is the thesis that the Dalits are the descendants of the original inhabitants of India, marginalized by the Aryan/Vedic/Brahmanic immigrants. (Whether this idea was developed independently several times or that there was mutual influence in this regard is unclear.)

=== The Tamil Buddhist Movement ===

{{Main|Tamil Buddhist Movement}}

The earliest of the strands was among Tamil-speaking communities classed as "untouchable". In 1898 the Siddha physician and journalist [[Iyothee Thass]] (1845–1914), born a Parayar, founded the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras and from 1907 edited the weekly ''Oru Paisa Tamilan''. From 1917 the movement was organized through the South Indian Buddhist Association, whose first four general conferences were chaired by [[P Lakshmi Narasu|P. Lakshmi Narasu]] (1861–1934). Dickens Leonard describes Thass as the first to develop an anti-caste narrative by espousing Buddhism.<ref>Leonard, Dickens (2021). "Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–1914)". ''South Asia Research'' 41.3: 349–368, p. 351.</ref> G. Aloysius argues that the Tamil Buddhist Movement influenced both the Dravidian movement and Ambedkar, but this is his thesis, resting largely on inference and oral testimony, and Ayyathurai finds no direct archival evidence of Thass's influence on Ambedkar.<ref>Aloysius, G. (1998). ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism''. New Age International, pp. 187–189, 191–193; Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2011). ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India''. PhD dissertation, Columbia University, p. 136 n. 211.</ref> Narasu's ''The Essence of Buddhism'' was reprinted by Ambedkar in 1948 with a preface calling it the best book on Buddhism to that date; Ambedkar says there that he had never met Narasu.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', App. 10, pp. 230–232.</ref> Omvedt's claim that Navayana "follows Iyothee Thass" is hers, and Thass's own surviving texts, as the page on him shows, contain none of the socialist vocabulary that some later readings attribute to the tradition.

=== The Adi-Hindu Strand in North India ===

{{Main|Adi-Hindu Movement}}

In the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) the Adi-Hindu movement of the late 1910s to the early 1930s held that the untouchable castes were the original inhabitants of India, conquered and degraded by Aryan invaders. Its religion, according to Nandini Gooptu, was bhakti and not Buddhism, and Sarah Beth Hunt places the entry of Buddhism into Adi-Hindu thought mainly after 1956.<ref name="Gooptu2001">Gooptu, Nandini (2001). ''The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India''. Cambridge University Press, p. 152; Hunt (2014), ''Hindi Dalit Literature'', pp. 34, 45–47.</ref> A smaller Buddhist wing existed in the same milieu: the monk Bodhananda (1874–1952), who in Ober's account founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Samiti in Lucknow in 1916 and wrote ''Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya'' (1930), which argues that the Dalits and Shudras were the original Buddhist inhabitants of India, and the writer Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu, who is credited with co-authoring Buddhist books with him.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 205–214. The identity of the Bodhananda of Ober and the Handbook with the "Swami Bodhanand" of Hunt and Gooptu is an inference, discussed on the page on the movement.</ref> Ober reports that Bodhananda met Ambedkar in 1920 at the Kolhapur Non-Brahmin Conference. The report that Ambedkar had hoped Bodhananda would officiate at the conversion of 1956 rests on one second-hand statement, and Bodhananda died in 1952.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 214.</ref> Hunt's chronology, in which Buddhism arrives late, and the evidence of Bodhananda's and Jigyasu's earlier books are not reconciled in the sources, and the page on the movement keeps the two apart.

=== Dharmanand Kosambi and the Bahujan Vihara ===

{{Main|Dharmanand Kosambi}}

In 1936, according to Ober, Ambedkar approached the Bombay Buddha Society, whose honorary president was the Marathi Pali scholar [[Dharmanand Kosambi]] (1876–1947), and said that Bombay needed a vihara. Kosambi raised funds from Gandhi and the industrialist J.K. Birla and on 26 January 1937 inaugurated the Bahujan Vihara in Parel, the mill-workers' district of Bombay.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 215–216 and n. 47 (p. 327); Kosambi, Meera (Ed.) (2010). ''Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings''. Permanent Black, Introduction. M. Kosambi's edition places the completion of the vihara in 1936 and Ober's account dates it to 1937.</ref> The name "Bahujan" (not "Buddha") reflected its focus on mill workers and its aim of ending caste discrimination among them. Ambedkar apparently never took part in its events; Ober suggests that this was because of its Birla financing and Kosambi's Brahmin and Gandhian affiliations.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 216 (the reasons are described there as unclear).</ref> Gandhi, replying to a Congress leader who objected to serving on a Buddhist vihara committee, said that the vihara was no different from a temple of Rama or Krishna and was part of the Hindu revival.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 182–183 (citing ''Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi'' 69: 318–319).</ref> Kosambi withdrew at the end of 1939 after Birla objected to opinions in ''Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa''. He also has a second claim on the history of Dalit Buddhism: his life of the Buddha and his play on the Buddha's renunciation are among the sources of the account in Ambedkar's ''The Buddha and His Dhamma'', although the extent of the debt, and whether Ambedkar failed to credit it, are contested (see the page on [[BR Ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]]). The Harvard doctorate sometimes attributed to Kosambi is also contested.

=== The Maha Bodhi Society ===

{{Main|Maha Bodhi Society}}

The Maha Bodhi Society, founded in 1891, was the main institutional network of Buddhist revival in India in this period and the setting of many of the contacts described above, including the Madras branch of 1900 and its quarrels with Narasu. After 1956 it petitioned Nehru over the loss of reservation benefits for converts and, according to Ober, distributed 50,000 copies of Bodhananda's ritual manual to new converts.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 7. See also the page on [[BR Ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]], where the same passage is cited.</ref>