Editing India (section)

== Radical Buddhism in India ==

This section covers the Indian cases in which Buddhism was joined to anti-caste politics, to socialism or Marxism, or to both, between the 1890s and the 1970s. Its spine is a chronology that runs from the early revival, through the years of nationalism and the Left, to Ambedkar's conversion and its aftermath, and the people and movements that have pages of their own are summarized and linked and not retold. The history of Buddhism among the former untouchable communities over the whole century, from the Tamil societies before 1900 to the Dalit Panthers and the Triratna movement, is treated on the page [[Dalit Buddhism]], which does not fit under one chronological heading. Marxist readings of Buddhist history are covered on [[Marxist Interpretations of Buddhism in India]]. Research on the decades after about 1960 is an acknowledged gap, and the entry is correspondingly thin there.

=== The Early Revival, c. 1890–1930 ===

{{Main|Tamil Buddhist Movement}}
{{Main|Maha Bodhi Society}}
{{Main|Adi-Hindu Movement}}

The earliest of the anti-caste Buddhist movements arose among [[Tamil Buddhist Movement |Tamil]]-speaking communities classed as untouchable. In 1898 the physician and journalist [[Iyothee Thass]] (1845–1914) founded the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras, and from 1907 he 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), the author of ''The Essence of Buddhism'' (1907). M. Singaravelu (1860–1946), later a founder of the communist movement in Madras, was an early officer and lecturer of the Society's Madras branch, although his family said he was not himself a Buddhist. The movement was loyalist toward the British, and its conference resolutions and Thass's own surviving texts contain no socialist content; its hostility was directed at Brahmanical nationalism. G. Aloysius argues that it was the ideological forerunner of the Dravidian movement and one of the factors that moved Ambedkar to Buddhism, but thesis is contested.

The [[Maha Bodhi Society]] (founded 1891) is the institutional setting of many of these contacts. It was not a radical body. It sheltered the young Marathi scholar [[Dharmanand Kosambi]] (1876–1947), employed [[Rahul Sankrityayan]] (1893–1963) as a missionary, clashed with Thass over caste and with Narasu in a lawsuit that took sixty years to settle, and pressed in the early 1920s for the return of the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, which had been in the hands of a Hindu mahant since 1590, to Buddhist control. A resolution to that effect, drafted by Sankrityayan, went to the Gaya session of the Indian National Congress in 1922.

In the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) a movement of untouchable castes, the [[Adi-Hindu Movement|Adi-Hindu movement]], grew from the late 1910s. Its leaders held that the untouchable castes were the original inhabitants of India, conquered by Aryan invaders. Its religion was bhakti and not Buddhism according to Nandini Gooptu, and Sarah Beth Hunt places the entry of Buddhism into Adi-Hindu thought mainly after 1956. A Buddhist wing existed alongside it: the monk Bodhananda (1874–1952) founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Samiti in Lucknow in 1916, and with Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu wrote Buddhist books for Dalit readers. Ober sees affinities between their thesis of original inhabitants and Ambedkar's ''The Untouchables'' (1948). The identity of Bodhananda is unsettled in the sources, which describe a "Swami Bodhanand" and a "Bhadant Bodhanand Mahastavir" without saying that they are one person.

==== The Kerala and Malabar Movement ====

A less documented movement arose in Kerala among the Izhava (Thiya) community in the 1920s. Ober, on whom the account depends, describes a Calicut Buddhist temple, the first in Kerala, founded in 1927 by C. Krishnan (1867–1938), a former high-court advocate and the editor of the Malayalam newspaper ''Mitavadi'', and a Kerala Buddhist Association that grew out of the All-Kerala Buddhist Conference of 1925, which the Brahmin temple-entry leader Manjeri Ramier (1877–1958) helped to organize. The movement did not last: by 1961 only seventeen people in Calicut district identified as Buddhist. Ober gives four causes: the Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936, the absorption of the cause by Narayana Guru's Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, Gandhi's campaigning against conversion on his tour of 1927, and funding through the industrialist J.K. Birla and the Hindu Mahasabha, which denied the movement an independent identity.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 196–204.</ref>

=== Nationalism, the Left, and Buddhism, 1920s–1950s ===

Ober documents at length the attempt of the Hindu Mahasabha and of Hindu nationalists to claim Buddhism as part of "Hindu" India. V.D. Savarkar's ''Hindutva'' (1923) declared the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha to be "all ours."<ref name="Ober2023ch4">Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 4: Savarkar at p. 159; Dharmapala's shifting statements on Hindu–Buddhist unity at pp. 151–152; Birla's financing of Buddhist temples, tabulated at pp. 165–167.</ref> The industrialist J.K. Birla (1883–1967) financed Buddhist temples across the country for decades, with the avowed aim of folding Buddhism into an "Arya Dharma," and Syama Prasad Mookerjee was president of the Maha Bodhi Society from 1942 to 1953 while he founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Birla's money also reached figures who wrote against the Mahasabha, among them Sankrityayan, Jagdish Kashyap, Dharmanand Kosambi, and Anand Kausalyayan, a tension that Ober notes without resolving. Sankrityayan attacked the Birla-funded Dharmashala at Kushinagar (1939) as an attempt to turn anti-caste, atheist Buddhists into Hindus.

==== The Left and Caste ====

Socialism and communism reached India in the early twentieth century and became entangled with the movement for independence. V. Geetha's study of Ambedkar and socialism shows how the early Marxists understood caste. S.A. Dange described it as a feudal survival, M.N. Roy expected it to dissolve into class as capitalism advanced, and Bhupendranath Dutta read ancient religious controversy as coded class struggle; Buddhism enters Geetha's survey only as a field of class struggle in Dutta's reading.<ref name="Geetha2021">Geetha, V. (2021). ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India''. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 117–119, 159–160 (Dutta at p. 118; Roy at p. 75).</ref> Ambedkar worked with the Communist Party of India on specific causes in Bombay in the 1930s, but the communists, Geetha writes, were unwilling to join him in exploring the connected worlds of labor, caste, and class. The [[Dalit Panthers]] later faulted the party for the same failure. Anil Nauriya argues that the history of Indian socialism has neglected a vigorous Marxist tradition outside the Communist parties, represented by the Congress Socialist Party that Narendra Deva helped to found in 1934; that is Nauriya's argument and is not treated here as established.<ref>Nauriya, Anil (2015). ''Non-violent Action and Socialist Radicalism: Narendra Deva in India's Freedom Movement''. NMML Occasional Paper, History and Society, New Series 70. New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.</ref>

==== Marxist Readings of Buddhism ====

{{Main|Marxist Interpretations of Buddhism in India}}
A separate line of writers read Buddhist doctrine, the sangha, and Indian history in Marxist terms, most of them without becoming Buddhists. The earliest example found is the Marathi Pali scholar and former monk [[Dharmanand Kosambi]] (1876–1947), who in 1910 described the sangha as an instance of collective ownership. [[Narendra Deva]] (1889–1956), a founder of the Congress Socialist Party, wrote ''Bauddha-Dharma-Darshan'' (1956), and others have credited him with a synthesis of Marxism and Buddhism that the sources do not show him arguing himself. The "Marxist Interpretations of Buddhism in India" page also discusses the later tribal-sangha thesis of D.D. Kosambi and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya and the anthology ''Buddhism: The Marxist Approach'' (1970).

==== Rahul Sankrityayan ====

{{Main|Rahul Sankrityayan}}
Rahul Sankrityayan (born Kedarnath Pandey, 1893–1963) was a Hindi polymath, Buddhist monk by training in [[Sri Lanka]], and communist who is the best-known figure to join Buddhist scholarship to Marxism in India. A Kisan Sabha organizer and a member of the Communist Party of India from 1939 to 1948 and again from 1955, he argued in ''Samyavad hi Kyon?'' (1935) and ''Bauddh Darshan'' (1948) that the sangha limited private property and anticipated communal ownership, and he read Buddhist metaphysics as proto-materialist. He did not settle into a Buddhist identity: he declined to call himself a follower of the Buddhist religion, even as he revered the Buddha. He recovered Buddhist manuscripts from [[Tibet]] and [[Nepal]], took part in the Kathmandu conference of 1956 (see [[Nepal]]), and, with Kosambi, worked at the Leningrad institute described under [[Russia and the Soviet Union#Soviet Indology and Its Indian Connections|Soviet Indology]].

=== Ambedkar and the Conversion of 1956 ===

{{Main|BR Ambedkar}}
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), jurist, principal architect of the Indian Constitution, and the leader of the untouchable communities, announced at Yeola in 1935 that he would not die a Hindu. Ober argues against the common view that he built his Buddhism from nothing: he met Bodhananda in 1920, studied Pali with Ishwardatt Medharthi, approached Dharmanand Kosambi and the Bombay Buddha Society in 1936, and was helped to attend the World Fellowship of Buddhists in [[Burma]] in 1954 by the monk Dharmarakshita.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 5.</ref> On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur he and his wife took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from the Arakanese-Burmese monk U Chandramani of Kushinagar, and he then administered twenty-two vows of his own composition to the crowd. Sources give the number converted differently, from 200,000 to 600,000. (See the page on [[Dalit Buddhism]].) Ambedkar spoke on Buddhism and communism at the Fourth General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Kathmandu on 20 November 1956, and died on 6 December. His late essay "Buddha or Karl Marx" compares Buddhism with Marxism as rival remedies for social suffering; the secondary debate about it is summarized on the Ambedkar page. Geetha reads him as a critic of Indian communism who did not call himself a socialist, for whom socialism was nonetheless a "spectral presence" in his thought.

==== State Buddhism as Foil ====

The Indian state of the same years used Buddhism for its own purposes, and the two projects only partly overlapped. Ober reports that the dharmachakra replaced Gandhi's charkha on the national flag in 1947, the Ashokan lion capital became the state emblem, the government marked the "2,500 Years of Buddhism" in 1956, it toured relics of the Buddha's disciples through India's border regions and abroad as an instrument of diplomacy, and the Panchsheel Agreement of 1954 was named after Buddhist precepts. Ambedkar, the only nationally prominent Indian politician who called himself a Buddhist, was not invited, according to Ober, to Nehru's relic ceremony at Sanchi in 1952, and Nehru rebuffed his request in 1956 for funds to distribute ''The Buddha and His Dhamma''.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 7, pp. 252–283 (citing Ambedkar 1993: 191–192).</ref> The state's Buddhism came under strain from Ambedkar's conversion, from the [[Tenzin Gyatso|Dalai Lama]]'s flight in 1959, and from the Sino-Indian war of 1962.

=== After 1956 ===

{{Main|Dalit Panthers}}
The Dalit Panthers were founded in Bombay in 1972 by the Marathi poet [[Namdeo Dhasal]] (1949–2014) and Raja Dhale (1940–2019), after the Black Panther Party in the United States. Their ''Manifesto'' repudiates the Republican Party, which Ambedkar's followers had formed, criticizes the Communist Party for neglecting untouchability, and sets out a programme of land redistribution and opposition to capital and to institutional religion. It names Neo-Buddhists as one constituency among several in its broad definition of "dalit" and does not frame its programme in Buddhist terms. Dhasal was among the ex-untouchables who followed Ambedkar into Buddhism, but the sources show a personal identity and not a Buddhist political philosophy, and they do not show how he related the two. Gopal Guru credits the manifesto as the first document to bring Ambedkar and Marx together, a characterization that has not been checked independently. Beyond Dhasal, Dhale is a mention only: no source consulted documents his activities.

Beyond these strands later decades have not yet been researched. The Bahujan Samaj Party, founded in 1984 by Kanshi Ram and later led by Mayawati, mobilized Dalit voters on Ambedkarite themes without being a Buddhist organization, although the ''Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism'' reports that Mayawati has said she intends to convert when it becomes politically feasible.<ref>Geary, [Given name], & [Given name] Mukherjee (2017). "Buddhism in Contemporary India". In: Jerryson, Michael (Ed.), ''The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism'': 36–57. Oxford University Press, pp. 49–50.</ref> The rise of Hindu nationalism since the 1990s, and incidents such as the public flogging of Dalit men at Una in Gujarat in 2016, show that conversion has not ended caste discrimination. The Dalit branch of the Triratna Buddhist Community and the demographic and scholarly questions about the movement are discussed on the page about [[Dalit Buddhism]].