Editing India (section)

=== 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]].