India: Difference between revisions

From The Radical Buddhism Project
← Older edit

Lajos (talk | contribs)

3 user groups
996 edits
undo
 
(One intermediate revision by the same user not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
{{Provisional Entry}}
{{Provisional Entry}}
India was the birthplace of Buddhism, the tradition's home for roughly a millennium before a slow decline left it, by the thirteenth century, largely extinguished on the subcontinent even as it flourished elsewhere in Asia. Buddhism's twentieth-century revival in India was driven overwhelmingly by a single event: the mass conversion of Dalits, led by B. R. Ambedkar in 1956, that recast Buddhism as a vehicle of anti-caste liberation rather than a residual regional tradition. The resulting Navayana, or "New Vehicle," Buddhism is today the dominant form of Indian Buddhist identity, concentrated especially in Maharashtra, and its history is inseparable from the broader currents of Indian socialism, Gandhian reformism, and Dalit political mobilization from which it emerged. The central tension running through modern Indian Buddhism is the degree to which it functions as a private soteriological path versus a comprehensive program of social and political transformation.
India was the birthplace of Buddhism, the tradition's home for roughly a millennium before a long decline left it largely absent from the subcontinent's mainstream by the thirteenth century even as it flourished elsewhere in Asia. Douglas Ober argues that it did not simply vanish, since small communities and networks survived at the margins, and that the modern revival grew out of colonial scholarship, new Buddhist associations, and caste politics. The revival's largest outcome was the conversion of about half a million Dalits (former "untouchables") under [[BR Ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]] at Nagpur in 1956, which produced the movement known as Navayana ("New Vehicle") and the country's largest Buddhist community. Around that event stand other currents that this entry summarizes and that have their own pages: an anti-caste Tamil Buddhism from the 1890s, the Maha Bodhi Society, an Adi-Hindu strand in the north, Marxist readings of Buddhist history, and the militant Dalit Panthers. Scholars disagree about whether Ambedkarite Buddhism is a break from the Buddhist tradition or a continuation of it.<ref name="Gokhale2021">Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). ''Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste''. London: Routledge.</ref>


== Buddhism in India ==
== Buddhism in India ==


Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was born and lived in the Himalayan foothills of a region now shared between India and Nepal. The monastic and lay community that formed around his teaching flourished across the subcontinent for roughly a thousand years, gaining significant royal patronage — most famously under the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE — and producing major centers of learning such as the Nalanda monastic university. From roughly the seventh century CE onward, Buddhism entered a prolonged decline on the subcontinent, driven by a combination of resurgent Brahmanical and devotional Hindu movements that absorbed much of its lay following, the loss of royal patronage, and the destruction of major monastic centers amid the Muslim conquests of northern India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By the thirteenth century, institutional Buddhism had effectively disappeared from most of the subcontinent, surviving mainly at its Himalayan periphery, in regions bordering Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, where it remained continuous with Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist traditions rather than reflecting any distinctly Indian revival.
Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was born and lived in the Himalayan foothills of a region now shared between India and Nepal. The monastic and lay community that formed around his teaching flourished across the subcontinent for roughly a thousand years, gaining significant royal patronage, most famously under the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, and producing major centers of learning such as the Nalanda monastic university. From roughly the seventh century CE onward Buddhism entered a prolonged decline on the subcontinent. It had effectively disappeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries, owing mainly to the loss of royal and mercantile patronage to a resurgent Hinduism.


For over six centuries thereafter, Buddhism existed in India chiefly as an object of antiquarian and archaeological interest rather than as a living, organized religious community of any scale. This changed dramatically in the twentieth century, primarily through the efforts of B. R. Ambedkar, discussed below, whose 1956 mass conversion movement created what is today by far the largest Buddhist community in India. According to the 2011 census, India's Buddhist population stands at approximately 8.4 million, and the great majority — some three-quarters of the national total — are Marathi Buddhists concentrated in the state of Maharashtra, overwhelmingly converts or descendants of converts from Ambedkar's Navayana movement. Significant populations also exist in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, as well as among the older, ethnically distinct Himalayan Buddhist communities of Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Darjeeling, whose Buddhist practice predates and remains largely separate from the Ambedkarite revival. This bifurcation — a small, continuous Himalayan Buddhist population alongside a much larger, recently converted Dalit Buddhist population — remains a defining structural feature of Indian Buddhism today.
For over six centuries after the decline, Buddhism existed in India mostly as an object of antiquarian interest. Ober qualifies this picture. He marshals evidence of continuous but diminished and marginalized practice into the colonial period: Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley, Buddhism in Chittagong, the persecutions in sixteenth-century Odisha (which imply a population to persecute), bronzes from Nagapattinam, and a wandering tantric figure named Buddhagupta-natha.<ref name="Ober2023">Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, pp. 19–64.</ref> His point concerns degree and geography. Survival was marginal, and it was not continuous mainstream practice.
 
The nineteenth century then rediscovered Buddhism as a subject. Lancelot Wilkinson published the ''Vajrasuchi'', an anti-caste Sanskrit tract attributed to Ashvaghosha, in 1839, with a Brahman pandit's rebuttal appended, and the tract became reading for later anti-caste activists. Raja Sivaprasad's Hindi schoolbook of 1864–74 compared the Buddha's anti-caste message with Lincoln's abolitionism. The Asiatic Society, the short-lived Buddhist Text Society (1892), and the Archaeological Survey, which located Buddhist sites, institutionalized the field.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 38–105 (the ''Vajrasuchi'' at pp. 38–64; Sivaprasad at p. 70).</ref> The first Buddhist voluntary associations followed. According to Ober, the Chittagong Buddhist Association (1887) was the first, and the Bengal Buddhist Association (Calcutta, 1892) was founded by Kripasaran (1865–1926); a Bangladeshi source gives 1897 for the Chittagong body, and the discrepancy is unresolved. The [[Maha Bodhi Society]], founded in 1891 by the Sri Lankan layman Anagarika Dharmapala (see [[Sri Lanka]]), became the leading institution of the revival and the setting for much of what follows.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', chs. 2–3 (Chittagong Buddhist Association: pp. 121–123; Kripasaran: pp. 128–135).</ref>
 
According to the 2011 census, India's Buddhist population stands at approximately 8.4 million, and the great majority, some three-quarters of the national total, are Marathi Buddhists concentrated in Maharashtra and overwhelmingly converts or descendants of converts from Ambedkar's movement. Significant populations also exist in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and among the older, ethnically distinct Himalayan Buddhist communities of Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Darjeeling, whose practice predates and remains largely separate from the Ambedkarite revival. This division, a small continuous Himalayan population beside a much larger recently converted Dalit population, remains a structural feature of Indian Buddhism.


== Radical Buddhism in India ==
== Radical Buddhism in India ==


The emergence of an explicitly socialist current within modern Indian Buddhism cannot be separated from the broader history of Indian socialism, which arrived from Europe and Russia in the early twentieth century and became deeply entangled with the movement for independence from British rule. The earliest known published reference to Marxism in India appeared in 1912, in a biographical sketch of Marx written by Lala Har Dayal (1884–1939), who would later combine Bakunian anarchism with formal scholarship on Buddhist doctrine. The Communist Party of India was founded in Tashkent in 1920, and Indian socialism was subsequently shaped by the competing influences of Jawaharlal Nehru's explicitly secular, sometimes anti-religious socialism and Mohandas Gandhi's pan-religious agrarian vision, which drew on Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist sources alongside Tolstoy and Christianity. Indian Buddhism's twentieth-century political engagement developed within, and against, this broader field.
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 ===


=== Precursors to the Buddhist Revival ===
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.


Ambedkar and Rahul Sankrityayan were the most consequential figures in this history, but they built on an earlier network of activists and scholars who had already begun to fuse Buddhist thought with anti-caste politics. Iyothee Thass (1845–1914), founder of the Shakya Buddhist Society, was arguably the first modern Indian to articulate Buddhism as a radical anti-caste alternative, producing an extensive body of Tamil-language writing that challenged the Brahmanical interpretation of Indian history more thoroughly than Ambedkar's later work would. Swami Bodhananda (1874–1952), a Bengali Brahmin who took ordination as a bhikkhu, spent his final decades among the urban poor of Lucknow and significantly influenced Ambedkar's own thinking; he is widely believed to have been Ambedkar's first choice to preside over the 1956 conversion ceremony, a role his unexpected death prevented him from filling. Dharmanand Kosambi (1876–1947), a Pali scholar and father of the Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi, attempted an early Buddhist-Marxist synthesis that subordinated Marx to the Buddha rather than treating the two as equivalent frameworks. Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan (1905–1988) served as a bridge between Sankrityayan and Ambedkar, holding Buddhism and Marxism together as genuinely complementary systems rather than ranking one beneath the other. Together, these figures built the intellectual and institutional infrastructure — translations, revisionist histories, and transnational Buddhist networks — that made the mid-century mass revival possible.
==== The Left and Caste ====


=== B. R. Ambedkar ===
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>
{{Main|BR Ambedkar}}
 
==== 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).


Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), principal architect of the Indian Constitution and the most prominent Dalit leader of his era, came to see Buddhism as offering something Marxism, in his assessment, could not: a doctrine of radical equality resting on both ethical principle and soteriological possibility, capable of addressing caste as a form of "graded inequality" that class-based economic transformation alone could not dissolve. On October 14, 1956, Ambedkar led an estimated 500,000 Dalits in a mass conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur, an act of collective religious and political self-assertion that hundreds of thousands more followed before his death two months later. His posthumously published ''The Buddha and His Dhamma'' (1957) reinterpreted Buddhist doctrine to foreground its social ethics — the Buddha's rejection of caste, his admission of women and outcastes to the sangha, and his concern with the reduction of suffering in this world — while minimizing elements such as rebirth and karma as cosmic justice that Ambedkar regarded as later accretions. This reinterpretation, generally known as Navayana Buddhism, remains controversial among more traditionalist Buddhists but underlies the religious identity of the great majority of India's Buddhist population today.
==== Rahul Sankrityayan ====


=== Rahul Sankrityayan ===
{{Main|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]].


Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963), born Kedarnath Pandey, took a markedly different path to a comparably radical synthesis. A polymath scholar of Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan who made repeated expeditions to Tibet to recover Buddhist manuscripts, and an explicit member of the Communist Party of India, Sankrityayan argued in works such as ''Darshan-Digdarshan'' that Buddhism and Marxism shared a fundamental commitment to materialism, empiricism, and the reduction of human suffering, and that capitalism's structural inequality was directly incompatible with Buddhist ethics. Where Ambedkar approached Buddhism through the lens of Dalit liberation, Sankrityayan approached it as a philosophical system to be read alongside, and reinforced by, Marxist economic analysis; his recovery and popularization of Buddhist texts supplied much of the scholarly foundation on which the wider mid-century revival depended.
=== Ambedkar and the Conversion of 1956 ===


=== Contemporary Ambedkarite Movements ===
{{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.


Ambedkar's legacy continues to shape both Indian Buddhism and Dalit politics. The Bahujan Samaj Party, founded in 1984 by Kanshi Ram and later led by Mayawati, mobilized Dalit communities electorally while drawing on Ambedkarite ideology, though it is not an explicitly Buddhist organization. A more militant strand of Ambedkarite politics emerged with the Dalit Panthers, founded in 1972 and explicitly modeled on the Black Panther Party.
==== State Buddhism as Foil ====


==== Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale ====
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.
{{Main|Namdeo Dhasal}}
{{Main|Raja Dhale}}


Namdeo Dhasal (1949–2014) and Raja Dhale (1940–2019), co-founders of the Dalit Panthers, fused Ambedkar, Marx, and street-level radical politics, treating Buddhism less as formal doctrine than as revolutionary consciousness and a moral language for militant organizing; Dhale in particular led Buddhist conversion ceremonies explicitly framed as acts of class struggle.
=== After 1956 ===


Contemporary intellectuals and activists continue this tradition in varied forms: the political philosopher Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd (b. 1952) blends Gramscian and Ambedkarite analysis to position Buddhism as a civilizational alternative for India; Dhammachari Lokamitra (b. 1947), co-founder of the Nagaloka education center, has developed a vision of the sangha as a discipline of political transformation; Bhante Surai Sasai (b. 1935) has led campaigns to reclaim the Mahabodhi Temple for Buddhist control; and the poet and publicist S. Anand represents a younger generation combining anti-caste politics with serious Buddhist practice.
{{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.


The rise of Hindu nationalism and the Bharatiya Janata Party since the 1990s has intensified both the pressures on, and the salience of, Ambedkarite Buddhism: continuing anti-Dalit violence — including the widely publicized 2016 Una flogging incident in Gujarat — demonstrates that conversion has not eliminated caste-based discrimination, even as Buddhist identity has become an increasingly explicit platform from which to contest Hindu-nationalist politics. Scholars and activists including Gail Omvedt and Anand Teltumbde have extended Ambedkar's analysis to connect Dalit liberation with broader critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental destruction, while Ambedkarite feminists have in turn challenged patriarchal patterns within both traditional Buddhist institutions and Ambedkarite organizations themselves.
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]].


== Literature in English ==
== Literature in English ==


* Omvedt, Gail (2003). ''Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste''. Sage Publications. {{annotation|A comprehensive treatment situating Ambedkar's Buddhist turn within the longer history of anti-caste and anti-Brahmanical thought in India.}}
* Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press. {{annotation|A narrative history of the Buddhist revival from the colonial period to the 1950s, built around the Maha Bodhi Society, the Hindu Mahasabha, Ambedkar's conversion, and the encounter of Buddhism with Marxism. Its argument that Ambedkar drew on existing Buddhist networks is the organizing source for much of this entry.}}
* Ambedkar, B. R. (1957). ''The Buddha and His Dhamma''. People's Education Society [posthumous]. {{annotation|Ambedkar's own foundational reinterpretation of Buddhist doctrine, primary rather than secondary, but essential reading for the Navayana tradition it inaugurated.}}
* Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). ''Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste''. London: Routledge. {{annotation|Essays from a seminar at Sarnath that debate whether Ambedkar's Buddhism breaks with the tradition and how it relates to Marxism, with a foreword by Gail Omvedt.}}
* Geetha, V. (2021). ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India''. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. {{annotation|The fullest study of Ambedkar's relations with socialism and with the Communist parties, and of how the early Indian Left understood caste.}}
* Omvedt, Gail (2003). ''Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste''. Sage Publications. {{annotation|A broad history that places Ambedkar's Buddhist turn within the longer history of anti-caste thought in India.}}


== Literature in Hindi ==
== Literature in Hindi ==


* Sankrityayan, Rahul (1942). ''Meri Jeevan Yatra'' [My Life Journey]. {{annotation|Sankrityayan's own multi-volume autobiography, a major source for his intellectual formation and his synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism.}}
* Sankrityayan, Rahul (1944–1967). ''Meri Jeevan Yatra'' [My Life Journey]. {{annotation|Sankrityayan's multi-volume autobiography, a major source for his formation and for the move from Buddhist scholarship to communism.}}
* Bodhananda, Swami. ''Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya'' [The Original Inhabitants of India and Aryans]. {{annotation|A revisionist history arguing for Buddhism's roots among India's original, pre-Aryan inhabitants; influential on Ambedkar's own historical thinking.}}
* Bodhananda, Bhadant. ''Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya'' [The Original Inhabitants of India and the Aryans] (1930). {{annotation|The monk Bodhananda's history of the Dalits and Shudras as the original Buddhist inhabitants of India. Ober sees affinities with, and possible influence on, Ambedkar's ''The Untouchables'' (1948).}}


== How to Cite This Article ==
== How to Cite This Article ==
<!-- AUTHORSHIP CHANGE LOG
<!-- AUTHORSHIP CHANGE LOG
First version, 24 July 2026. Main: James Mark Shields. Other: Lajos Brons.
First version, 24 July 2026. Main: James Mark Shields. Other: Lajos Brons.
Major revision: October 2026. Main: Lajos Brons. Other: James Mark Shields
-->
-->
Shields, James Mark & Lajos Brons ({{REVISIONYEAR}}). "India". ''The Radical Buddhism Project''. Version of {{#time: j F Y | {{REVISIONYEAR}}-{{REVISIONMONTH}}-{{REVISIONDAY}} }}. <nowiki>http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/India</nowiki>.
Brons, Lajos & James Mark Shields ({{REVISIONYEAR}}). "India". ''The Radical Buddhism Project''. Version of {{#time: j F Y | {{REVISIONYEAR}}-{{REVISIONMONTH}}-{{REVISIONDAY}} }}. <nowiki>http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/India</nowiki>.


== Notes ==
== Notes ==

Latest revision as of 11:15, 27 October 2026

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠

This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

India was the birthplace of Buddhism, the tradition's home for roughly a millennium before a long decline left it largely absent from the subcontinent's mainstream by the thirteenth century even as it flourished elsewhere in Asia. Douglas Ober argues that it did not simply vanish, since small communities and networks survived at the margins, and that the modern revival grew out of colonial scholarship, new Buddhist associations, and caste politics. The revival's largest outcome was the conversion of about half a million Dalits (former "untouchables") under B.R. Ambedkar at Nagpur in 1956, which produced the movement known as Navayana ("New Vehicle") and the country's largest Buddhist community. Around that event stand other currents that this entry summarizes and that have their own pages: an anti-caste Tamil Buddhism from the 1890s, the Maha Bodhi Society, an Adi-Hindu strand in the north, Marxist readings of Buddhist history, and the militant Dalit Panthers. Scholars disagree about whether Ambedkarite Buddhism is a break from the Buddhist tradition or a continuation of it.[1]

Buddhism in India

[edit]

Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was born and lived in the Himalayan foothills of a region now shared between India and Nepal. The monastic and lay community that formed around his teaching flourished across the subcontinent for roughly a thousand years, gaining significant royal patronage, most famously under the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, and producing major centers of learning such as the Nalanda monastic university. From roughly the seventh century CE onward Buddhism entered a prolonged decline on the subcontinent. It had effectively disappeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries, owing mainly to the loss of royal and mercantile patronage to a resurgent Hinduism.

For over six centuries after the decline, Buddhism existed in India mostly as an object of antiquarian interest. Ober qualifies this picture. He marshals evidence of continuous but diminished and marginalized practice into the colonial period: Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley, Buddhism in Chittagong, the persecutions in sixteenth-century Odisha (which imply a population to persecute), bronzes from Nagapattinam, and a wandering tantric figure named Buddhagupta-natha.[2] His point concerns degree and geography. Survival was marginal, and it was not continuous mainstream practice.

The nineteenth century then rediscovered Buddhism as a subject. Lancelot Wilkinson published the Vajrasuchi, an anti-caste Sanskrit tract attributed to Ashvaghosha, in 1839, with a Brahman pandit's rebuttal appended, and the tract became reading for later anti-caste activists. Raja Sivaprasad's Hindi schoolbook of 1864–74 compared the Buddha's anti-caste message with Lincoln's abolitionism. The Asiatic Society, the short-lived Buddhist Text Society (1892), and the Archaeological Survey, which located Buddhist sites, institutionalized the field.[3] The first Buddhist voluntary associations followed. According to Ober, the Chittagong Buddhist Association (1887) was the first, and the Bengal Buddhist Association (Calcutta, 1892) was founded by Kripasaran (1865–1926); a Bangladeshi source gives 1897 for the Chittagong body, and the discrepancy is unresolved. The Maha Bodhi Society, founded in 1891 by the Sri Lankan layman Anagarika Dharmapala (see Sri Lanka), became the leading institution of the revival and the setting for much of what follows.[4]

According to the 2011 census, India's Buddhist population stands at approximately 8.4 million, and the great majority, some three-quarters of the national total, are Marathi Buddhists concentrated in Maharashtra and overwhelmingly converts or descendants of converts from Ambedkar's movement. Significant populations also exist in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and among the older, ethnically distinct Himalayan Buddhist communities of Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Darjeeling, whose practice predates and remains largely separate from the Ambedkarite revival. This division, a small continuous Himalayan population beside a much larger recently converted Dalit population, remains a structural feature of Indian Buddhism.

Radical Buddhism in India

[edit]

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

[edit]
➣ Main article: Tamil Buddhist Movement
➣ Main article: Maha Bodhi Society
➣ Main article: Adi-Hindu Movement

The earliest of the anti-caste Buddhist movements arose among 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 (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, 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

[edit]

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.[5]

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

[edit]

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."[6] 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

[edit]

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.[7] 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.[8]

Marxist Readings of Buddhism

[edit]

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

[edit]
➣ Main article: 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 Soviet Indology.

Ambedkar and the Conversion of 1956

[edit]
➣ Main article: 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.[9] 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

[edit]

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.[10] The state's Buddhism came under strain from Ambedkar's conversion, from the Dalai Lama's flight in 1959, and from the Sino-Indian war of 1962.

After 1956

[edit]
➣ Main article: 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.[11] 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.

Literature in English

[edit]
  • Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [A narrative history of the Buddhist revival from the colonial period to the 1950s, built around the Maha Bodhi Society, the Hindu Mahasabha, Ambedkar's conversion, and the encounter of Buddhism with Marxism. Its argument that Ambedkar drew on existing Buddhist networks is the organizing source for much of this entry.]
  • Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. London: Routledge. [Essays from a seminar at Sarnath that debate whether Ambedkar's Buddhism breaks with the tradition and how it relates to Marxism, with a foreword by Gail Omvedt.]
  • Geetha, V. (2021). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [The fullest study of Ambedkar's relations with socialism and with the Communist parties, and of how the early Indian Left understood caste.]
  • Omvedt, Gail (2003). Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste. Sage Publications. [A broad history that places Ambedkar's Buddhist turn within the longer history of anti-caste thought in India.]

Literature in Hindi

[edit]
  • Sankrityayan, Rahul (1944–1967). Meri Jeevan Yatra [My Life Journey]. [Sankrityayan's multi-volume autobiography, a major source for his formation and for the move from Buddhist scholarship to communism.]
  • Bodhananda, Bhadant. Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya [The Original Inhabitants of India and the Aryans] (1930). [The monk Bodhananda's history of the Dalits and Shudras as the original Buddhist inhabitants of India. Ober sees affinities with, and possible influence on, Ambedkar's The Untouchables (1948).]

How to Cite This Article

[edit]

Brons, Lajos & James Mark Shields (2026). "India". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/India.

Notes

[edit]
  1. ↑ Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. London: Routledge.
  2. ↑ Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press, pp. 19–64.
  3. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 38–105 (the Vajrasuchi at pp. 38–64; Sivaprasad at p. 70).
  4. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, chs. 2–3 (Chittagong Buddhist Association: pp. 121–123; Kripasaran: pp. 128–135).
  5. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, pp. 196–204.
  6. ↑ 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.
  7. ↑ 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).
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, ch. 5.
  10. ↑ Ober (2023), Dust on the Throne, ch. 7, pp. 252–283 (citing Ambedkar 1993: 191–192).
  11. ↑ 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.
Retrieved from "https://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/index.php?title=India&oldid=1337"