India

⚠  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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Precursors to the Buddhist Revival

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.

B. R. Ambedkar

➣ Main article: B. R. Ambedkar

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

➣ Main article: Rahul Sankrityayan

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.

Contemporary Ambedkarite Movements

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.

Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale

➣ Main article: Namdeo Dhasal

➣ Main article: 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.

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.

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.

Literature in English

• Omvedt, Gail (2003). Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste. Sage Publications. [A comprehensive treatment situating Ambedkar's Buddhist turn within the longer history of anti-caste and anti-Brahmanical thought in India.]
• Ambedkar, B. R. (1957). The Buddha and His Dhamma. People's Education Society [posthumous]. [Ambedkar's own foundational reinterpretation of Buddhist doctrine, primary rather than secondary, but essential reading for the Navayana tradition it inaugurated.]

Literature in Hindi

• Sankrityayan, Rahul (1942). Meri Jeevan Yatra [My Life Journey]. [Sankrityayan's own multi-volume autobiography, a major source for his intellectual formation and his synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism.]
• Bodhananda, Swami. Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya [The Original Inhabitants of India and Aryans]. [A revisionist history arguing for Buddhism's roots among India's original, pre-Aryan inhabitants; influential on Ambedkar's own historical thinking.]

How to Cite This Article

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