Editing India (section)

=== 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>