Rahul Sankrityayan

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Rahul Sankrityayan (राहुल सांकृत्यायन, born Kedarnath Pandey, 1893–1963) was a Hindi-language polymath, former Buddhist monk, and Marxist activist and historian who became the single most influential figure in linking the twentieth-century Indian revival of Buddhism to the communist movement. Trained as a Tripitakacharya in Sri Lanka and a repeated, clandestine traveler to Tibet in search of lost Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts, he combined rigorous textual scholarship on Buddhism with an explicit commitment to dialectical materialism from the mid-1930s onward. As a peasant organizer, Kisan Sabha president, and long-time Communist Party of India member, he read the sangha's communal economy, its rejection of caste, and its theory of dependent origination as anticipations of, or at least compatible with, Marxist thought, while subjecting Buddhism as a historical institution to a materialist class critique. He never fully resolved the tension between his enduring reverence for the Buddha and his rejection of organized Buddhism. His Hindi writings on Buddhist philosophy, his role in recovering Buddhist manuscripts from Tibet and Nepal, and his synthesis of Buddhist rationalism with revolutionary politics make him a foundational figure for the study of radical Buddhism in South Asia.

Biography

Rahul Sankrityayan was born Kedarnath Pandey on April 9, 1893, at his maternal grandfather's house in Pandaha village, Azamgarh district, in what was then the North-Western Provinces of British India. Raised in an orthodox Bhumihar Brahmin household after the early death of his mother, he received only a middle-school education and was thereafter self-taught, eventually mastering some thirty languages. He left home repeatedly as a child and, from about 1910, took up a wandering life, moving through a series of religious identities: he was initiated as a Vaishnava sadhu at Chhapra in 1912 under the name Ramodar Das (also recorded as Baba Ram Udar Das), before drifting toward the reformist Arya Samaj around 1914–1917, where he first encountered Buddhist philosophy as a rival doctrine to be refuted. According to Ober, the Arya Samaj's own text, the Satyarth Prakash, obliged members to master a chapter refuting Buddhism, and a document of 1926 records him at the Maha Bodhi temple committee as "Sadhu Ramodar Das". In 1917, in Lucknow, he encountered the Indian Buddhist Society founded by Bhadant Bodhanand Mahastavir, and Ober dates his lasting Buddhist engagement from this meeting, before his Sri Lankan sojourn or his journeys to Tibet.

Sankrityayan's political awakening began during the Non-Cooperation Movement, in which he organized peasants in Chhapra district, Bihar, in 1920–1921, and for which he was jailed in 1922 and again in 1924; it was during this second imprisonment that he wrote his first, unpublished novel, the utopian Baisvin Sadi ("The Twenty-Second Century"), later published in 1945. In 1922, newly active in Congress politics, he also drafted a proposal calling for the Maha Bodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, then in the hands of a Hindu Saiva mahant, to be restored to Buddhist control, forwarded to that year's Congress session at Gaya on behalf of Anagarika Dharmapala's Maha Bodhi Society; this drew him into sustained contact with the Buddhist monastic world even before he had committed himself to Buddhism as a scholarly vocation. His serious study of Buddhism intensified through the late 1920s: he studied Pali and Buddhist texts in Ladakh in 1926, and in 1927 he traveled to Sri Lanka, where he spent nineteen months at the Vidyalankara Pirivena studying under Buddhist monks and eventually earned the titles Tripitakacharya and Mahapandit. The Vidyalankara Pirivena, which Ober describes as a more radical, anti-imperialist counterpart of the Vidyodaya Pirivena where Dharmanand Kosambi had studied, formed several of his Indian contemporaries in the same years, among them the poet Kavi Nagarjun (Vaidyanath Mishra), the monk and writer Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan, and Jagdish Kashyap. Renaming himself Rahul after the Buddha's son and taking the surname Sankrityayan from his family's gotra, he made the first of at least four clandestine journeys to Tibet (1929–30, 1934–35, and 1936, sometimes disguised as a Tibetan lama), from which he recovered and photographed several thousand Buddhist Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscripts lost to India since the destruction of Nalanda and Vikramashila.

Nepal, which he visited repeatedly beginning in 1920 and came to regard as something close to a second home, served as his essential gateway to Tibet. Traveling disguised as a Hindu pilgrim sadhu during the Sivaratri festival, one of the few occasions on which the Rana government allowed Indians into the Kathmandu Valley, he cultivated close relationships with the Newar Buddhist merchant Dharmaman Sahu, whose houses in Kathmandu and Lhasa sheltered him and eased his passage into Tibet, and with the rajguru (royal priest) Hemraj Sharma, a Sanskrit scholar and manuscript collector whose library he drew on in his search for a complete text of Dharmakirti's Pramanavarttika. Although he never joined the underground Theravada revival then taking shape among Newar Buddhists, several of its leading figures, including the future monks Dharmalok and Anirudha, counted him among their formative influences. The Rana authorities censored his writings, and Chudal reports that his later political books were banned in Nepal while his Buddhist titles remained available. His Buddhist scholarship also took him to Europe as a delegate of the Maha Bodhi Society in 1932–33, where he shared his manuscript discoveries with scholars including Sylvain Lévi, and later to Japan, Korea, China, and Central Asia.

From the mid-1930s, Sankrityayan's Buddhist and Marxist commitments developed together. It was in Lhasa, on August 28, 1935, that he completed the preface to his first sustained work of political writing, Samyavad hi Kyon? ("Why Communism?"), a popular Hindi primer on communism dedicated to the memory of the Tibetan king Mune Tsenpo, whom he described, on the basis of Tibetan chronicles, as an early "martyr of communism" for having thrice redistributed wealth in his realm before being poisoned by his mother. He visited the Soviet Union for the first time that same year, and in 1937–38 spent an extended period at Leningrad teaching Buddhist philosophy and Indology at the invitation of the Buddhologist Fyodor Stcherbatsky, in the intervals learning Russian and Mongolian; according to Ober, Soviet attitudes toward Buddhism had by then turned to condemnation. Back in India, he became a leading figure in the Bihar peasant movement associated with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati's Kisan Sabha, presiding over the fifth annual session of the All India Kisan Sabha at Palasa, Andhra Pradesh, in March 1940. He was arrested in February 1939 in a peasant campaign and again in 1940 after addressing a peasant meeting at Motihari, part of the colonial government's crackdown on the Communist Party; roughly a year's detention at the Deoli internment camp produced two major works of popular Marxist philosophy, Manav Samaj (1942) and Darshan-Digdarshan (1944). He formally joined the Communist Party of India in 1939 and remained a member for nine years, until his membership was revoked in 1948 over his defense of Hindi (as opposed to Sanskritized or Persianized alternatives) as the national language, a position his comrades regarded as majoritarian; he rejoined the party in 1955. Alongside this activity, he continued to publish prolifically in Hindi across history, philosophy, fiction, grammar, and travel writing, including the multi-volume autobiography Meri Jeevan Yatra (1944–1967) and the widely read travel manifesto Ghumakkar Shastra (1948).

In his later years, Sankrityayan continued to divide his energies between Buddhist scholarship and Marxist commentary, publishing Bauddh Darshan (1948), a major materialist study of Buddhist philosophy, and receiving the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958 for his two-volume Madhya Asia ka Itihas ("History of Central Asia"). In November 1956 he took part in the Fourth General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Kathmandu, telling delegates in an impromptu speech that Nepal and India shared "one culture" and that neither he nor his hosts should think of themselves as meeting on foreign soil. B.R. Ambedkar's conversion at Nagpur a month earlier had received his approval: Ober reports that Sankrityayan wrote an approving pamphlet in 1957 comparing it to Kublai Khan's conversion. He taught at the University of Ceylon in 1959 and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1963. His essay "Buddhist Dialectics", a concise statement of his reading of Buddhist philosophy as proto-dialectical materialism, appeared in the 1970 anthology Buddhism: The Marxist Approach (a first publication in New Age in 1956 is reported by Ober).

He married three times, his third wife being the writer and scholar Kamala Sankrityayan. Afflicted in his final years by a debilitating amnesia, he died in Darjeeling on April 14, 1963, at seventy; his funeral rites were performed according to both Hindu and Buddhist custom, at the insistence of his youngest brother and of the monk Bhikkhu Mahanam respectively, neither of whom would concede that Sankrityayan had wholly left the other's tradition behind.

Ideas

Sankrityayan's engagement with Buddhism was never confined to doctrinal exposition; from his earliest scholarly writing onward, he treated the Buddha's teaching as a historically situated response to social conditions and read Buddhist philosophy through a dialectical-materialist lens without ever fully resolving the tension between the two frameworks. His position is best described as a Marxist-leaning interpretation of Buddhist doctrine and history, combined with an institutional engagement with Buddhism early in his career and a lasting personal reverence for the Buddha, rather than as a settled Buddhist identity: Chudal herself concludes that his aim in Tibet was "not mainly to propagate and practise Buddhism as the religion leading to nirvana", even though he stated that he sought books in order to "propagate Buddhism in India".

Long before he joined the Communist Party, Sankrityayan had already identified the Buddhist monastic sangha as a historical precedent for communal economics. In Samyavad hi Kyon? (1935), he argued that the Buddha, seeing the material needs of his monks and nuns, did not merely mandate equal distribution but sharply reduced the sphere of individual property while greatly expanding the property held in common by the community, comparing this arrangement to the Mazdakite movement in fifth-century Iran and to the legendary wealth redistributions of the Tibetan king Mune Tsenpo. He returned to this argument more systematically decades later in "Buddhist Dialectics" (1970), describing the Buddha's monastic communism in detail: aside from eight permitted personal items, all property was held by the samgha in common, a system that persisted for several centuries before eroding as monks began accumulating private wealth, as attested by donative inscriptions at Sanchi and Bharhut. The same view appears in Bauddh Darshan, where he writes that the Buddha, aware of the evils of individual property, wished within his own monastic sangha to abolish it and establish complete communism in enjoyment. He likewise stressed the Buddha's preference for the republican gana polities of his day over monarchy, and his theory that kingship itself originated historically from the growth of private property and consequent class division, rather than from divine sanction.

Sankrityayan applied the same class-functional analysis to the religious traditions around the Buddha, and then to Buddhism itself. In Bauddh Darshan he described Vedic religion as having upheld the existing order and helped the state, established "by crushing the people with bloody hands", to protect the propertied class and to keep slaves and laborers in check. He credited the Buddha's original philosophy of dependent origination with a profoundly revolutionary character, but argued that the doctrines of karma and rebirth-linking were strengthened within the community because they reassured propertied and ruling classes, and that, "seen from a class perspective", Buddhism acted as an intermediary of the ruling class, presenting itself as on the side of justice without removing that class's basic interests. He also criticized the Buddha for locating both suffering and its remedy in the individual rather than in society, while adding that the conceptual and institutional tools for a social remedy did not yet exist in the Buddha's time. Yet his own argument reproduces an individual-centered logic: he held that belief in a life-stream extending beyond a single body is necessary for social progress, since only it can produce enough people willing to sacrifice themselves for a high ideal, so that individual self-sacrifice and self-restraint remain "indispensably necessary to make the world better".

Sankrityayan's most sustained philosophical claim was that Buddhist metaphysics anticipates, in embryonic form, the categories of dialectical materialism. He read the doctrine of impermanence (anicca) as a philosophy of universal process rather than static being, the law of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) as an early theory of causality that rejects any single, sufficient cause in favor of the "collectivity of causes" (hetu-samagrivada), and the Buddhist "criterion of reality" as capacity for objective, practical action (artha-kriya-samartham) as a proto-materialist, almost verificationist standard of truth close to modern scientific method. At the same time, he insisted that Buddhism, particularly in its idealist Yogacāra form, remained closer to Hegelian idealism than to materialism proper, since it held consciousness (vijnana) rather than matter to be primary; he suggested that "inverting" this formula, treating mind as an evolutionary product of matter rather than matter as a transformation of mind, would spare Buddhist idealism "the trouble of standing on its head," an explicit echo of Marx's own image for his inversion of Hegel. He also cautioned that it would be erroneous to say Buddhism helped Marx or came near his fundamentals, though students of Buddhist philosophy would find Marxist philosophy easier to grasp. This ambivalence, Buddhism as dialectical without being straightforwardly materialist, was itself later contested from within the same Marxist milieu: in the same 1970 volume, Ram Bilas Sharma argued that Sankrityayan's own scholarship, particularly his Bauddh Darshan, showed Buddhist philosophy to be fundamentally idealist and metaphysical, and that Buddhism's social radicalism had always been constrained by its dependence on the patronage of merchants and princes, whose underlying economic order it left unchallenged. Ramkrishna Bhattacharya likewise later challenged Sankrityayan's characterization of Buddhism as historically status-quoist, counterposing it with Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's and D.D. Kosambi's arguments that early Buddhism represented a form of "primitive communism" with genuine transformative potential. He also read Vinaya detail against social background: the rule against ordaining debtors, he argued, closed an escape route from debt-slavery, a reading that Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya cites in Lokayata from Darshan-Digdarshan (Hindi), p. 541.

Across both his Buddhological and his explicitly Marxist writing, Sankrityayan prized the Buddha's rejection of the authority of scripture, caste, and priestly ritual, his refusal to speculate on unanswerable metaphysical questions (the Buddha's celebrated silence on the ten unanswered, or avyakata, questions concerning the eternity and spatial extent of the world, the identity of the life force with the body, and the post-mortem status of an enlightened being), and his insistence that individuals test truth-claims by reason and experience rather than by appeal to tradition. He read the Buddha's four "unstated" positions, no creator god, no eternal soul, no scriptural authority as final proof, and no confinement of the mental life-stream to a single body, as together constituting a coherent, this-worldly philosophy of liberation distinct from both orthodox theism and vulgar materialism. This rationalism extended into a broader, sharper critique of organized religion as such: in Samyavad hi Kyon? he devoted an entire chapter to arguing that priesthoods across religions manipulate belief in God and the afterlife to secure the loyalty and the surplus labor of the poor, and in Tumhari Kshaya (1939) he wrote that "the sickness of religions is natural; there is no cure for it short of their death."

Yet this hostility to religion as an institution coexisted, without full resolution, with a lasting personal reverence for the Buddha himself, whom he described in 1956 as the one fully perfected human being that humanity's entire history had produced, while explicitly declining to call himself a follower of the Buddhist religion, since for him "culture" (sanskriti) and "religion" (dharma) were not the same thing. In Ghumakkar Shastra (1948), he singled out Buddhism as "the gem amongst" world religions precisely because its rejection of caste-based purity taboos made it uniquely compatible with his own ideal of unrestricted human wandering and fellowship, a reading of Buddhism as embodied cosmopolitanism that a recent study analyzes as a satirical, quasi-scriptural critique of religion more broadly. His disciple Jagdish Kashyap recalled that Sankrityayan dismissed meditation as something best left to old age, preferring missionary and political work in the present.

Sankrityayan's Buddhism-Marxism synthesis has been read alongside, and against, B.R. Ambedkar's contemporaneous turn to Buddhism as a vehicle of Dalit emancipation. Where Ambedkar stripped Buddhism of most of its metaphysics to foreground it as a social doctrine of equality, Sankrityayan retained a far more textual and historical engagement with Buddhist metaphysics even as he tried to fuse it with Marxist materialism, and he wrote for a broad Hindi readership across caste and class lines rather than constructing a specifically Dalit religious identity. He nonetheless shared with Ambedkar an emphasis on the Buddha as social reformer, praising the Buddha's grant of formal equality to the lowest castes within the monastic order and his practice, memorialized in Sankrityayan's own retelling of the Buddha's rebuke to a wealthy foster-mother who wished to give him a robe rather than the sangha as a whole, of directing his followers toward "the good of the many" rather than individual salvation alone. His interpretation of anatta (non-self) likewise doubled as social critique: he read the doctrine's dismantling of a permanent, unchanging self as a philosophical rejection of the caste- and class-based hierarchies that, in his view, depended on essentialist claims about fixed human natures and inherited status.

Writings

This list emphasizes works bearing on Buddhism, Marxism, and radical social critique; it omits some of Sankrityayan's numerous purely philological, grammatical, and travelogue writings. Bibliographers credit him with about 148 books and 71 articles in total.

• बुद्धचर्या Buddhacharya (1931). Kashi Vidyapeeth. [An early biographical and doctrinal account of the life of the Buddha, produced around the time of Sankrityayan's ordination in Sri Lanka; later reissued in a third edition by the Bharatiya Bauddha Samiti, Lucknow, in 1995. Ober's bibliography dates the work to 1930 and lists a 2011 reprint.]

• तिब्बती बाल-शिक्षा Tibbati Bal-Shiksha [Tibetan Children's Education], पाठावली Pathavali (3 vols.), and तिब्बती व्याकरण Tibbati Vyakaran [Tibetan Grammar] (1933). [A set of Tibetan-language primers and a grammar, compiled with his Ladakhi collaborator Tsetan Phuntsog for use in Himalayan Buddhist schools.]

• तिब्बत में बौद्ध धर्म Tibbat Mein Bauddha Dharma [Buddhism in Tibet] (1934). [A study of Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and institutions based on Sankrityayan's first two journeys to Tibet, and on manuscripts, block-prints, and oral instruction he obtained there.]

• साम्यवाद ही क्यों? Samyavad hi Kyon? [Why Communism?] (1935; 2nd ed. 1938, 3rd ed. 1943). Kitab Mahal. [A popular primer on communism, its preface signed in Lhasa on August 28, 1935, and dedicated to the memory of the Tibetan king Mune Tsenpo as an early "martyr of communism"; it argues that the Buddhist sangha's communal property system anticipated modern communism, several years before Sankrityayan formally joined the Communist Party of India.]

• तुम्हारी क्षय Tumhari Kshaya [Your Decay] (1939). [A polemic against religion as such, source of the often-quoted line on the incurable "sickness of religions".]

• मानव समाज Manav Samaj [Human Society] (1942). [The second volume of Sankrityayan's "Vaigyanik Bhautikvad" (scientific materialism) series, tracing the evolution of human society through a dialectical-materialist lens; composed largely during his detention at the Deoli internment camp in 1940–41.]

• वोल्गा से गंगा Volga se Ganga [From Volga to Ganga] (1942). Kitab Mahal. [A collection of twenty historical short stories tracing Indo-European migration from the Volga to the Ganges from 6000 BCE to 1942; its later stories are explicitly shaped by Marxist historiography and stage an encounter between an Indian revolutionary and Marx and Engels. In one story the Buddha is shown wanting a "revolution" to make the world better.]

• दर्शन-दिग्दर्शन Darshan-Digdarshan [A Survey of Philosophy] (1944). Kitab Mahal. [A comparative history of world philosophy, composed during Sankrityayan's imprisonment, which frames the central conflict in Indian philosophy as one between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical (notably Buddhist) systems and argues for the latter, subjected in turn to Marxist critique. The Bauddh Darshan of 1948 is described in its preface as a part of this work.]

• जय यौधेय Jay Yaudheya [Victory to the Yaudheyas] (1944). [A novel set in an ancient republic imagined as a Buddhist-style communist polity.]

• मेरी जीवन यात्रा Meri Jeevan Yatra [My Life's Journey] (Vol. I, 1944; Vol. II, 1950; Vols. III–IV, 1967). Radhakrishna Prakashan. [A multi-volume autobiography narrating Sankrityayan's successive religious and political identities, from Vaishnava sadhu through Arya Samajist and Buddhist monk to Marxist activist; the final volumes appeared posthumously.]

• बाईसवीं सदी Baisvin Sadi [The Twenty-Second Century] (written 1924, published 1945). Kitab Mahal. [A utopian science-fiction novel written during Sankrityayan's imprisonment for participation in the Non-Cooperation Movement, envisioning a future communist world order; it predates his formal turn to Marxism by more than a decade.]

• घुमक्कड़ शास्त्र Ghumakkar Shastra [The Treatise of the Wanderer] (1948; 2nd ed. 1957). Kitab Mahal. [A programmatic and satirical manifesto for a life of perpetual travel, which frames Buddhism as the most congenial of world religions to the wanderer's ethic because of its rejection of caste-purity taboos.]

• बौद्ध दर्शन Bauddh Darshan [Buddhist Philosophy] (2nd ed. 1948; 1st ed. 1944). Kitab Mahal. [Sankrityayan's major treatise on Buddhist philosophy, offering a systematic materialist and rationalist reading of Buddhist metaphysics, the doctrine of anatta, the theory of dependent origination, and Buddhist ethics; later cited by critics as evidence of the persistence of philosophical idealism within his account of Buddhism. Its first chapter, on the Buddha's original teachings, is reported to be a piece written in 1932 and added to the second edition.]

• मध्य एशिया का इतिहास Madhya Asia ka Itihas [History of Central Asia] (2 vols., 1950s). Bihar Rashtrabhasha Parishad. [A monumental history of Central Asia that won Sankrityayan the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958; it reflects his recurring interest in the transience of civilizations and ideas.]

• कार्ल मार्क्स Karl Marx (1950s). [A biographical study of Marx, part of Sankrityayan's effort to make Marxist intellectual history accessible to Hindi readers.]

• लेनिन Lenin (1950s). [A biographical study of Vladimir Lenin and the development of revolutionary Marxism.]

• स्तालिन Stalin (1950s). [A biographical study reflecting Sankrityayan's engagement with Soviet political history.]

• माओ त्से तुङ Mao Tse Tung (1950s). [A biographical treatment of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolutionary experience.]

• महामानव बुद्ध Mahamanav Buddh [The Great Human Being Buddha] (1956). [A Hindi biography of the Buddha; Ober cites a 2011 edition.]

• "Buddhist Dialectics" (1956?; 1970 in the anthology). In: Buddhism: The Marxist Approach: 1–8. New Delhi: People's Publishing House. [Sankrityayan's most concise English-language statement of Buddhism as proto-dialectical philosophy, covering the sangha's economic communism, the theory of dependent origination, the "collectivity of causes," and the pragmatic Buddhist criterion of reality; published in a jointly authored anthology alongside essays by Debiprosad Chattopadhyaya, Y. Balaramamoorty, Ram Bilas Sharma, and Mulk Raj Anand. It says nothing about his own religious identity or ordination.]

• नवदीक्षित बौद्ध Navdikshit Bauddh [The Newly Converted Buddhists] ([1957] 1975). [Listed in Ober's bibliography, edited by Pragyananda Mahasthavir; the connection of this title with the 1957 pamphlet on Ambedkar's conversion mentioned above is not established.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Bhartiya, Poonam (2025). "Rahul Sankrityayan and His Contribution to Indian Buddhism: With Special Reference to the Teaching and Philosophy". South India Journal of Social Sciences 23(4): 99–102. [An open-access survey of Sankrityayan's interpretation of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Three Marks of Existence, and the Buddha's "unstated" (avyakata) positions, drawing extensively on Darshan-Digdarshan and Bauddh Darshan.]

• Upadhyay, Nishant (2025). "The Wanderer as Becoming: A Satirical Critique of Indian Philosophy and Religions and a Wanderer's Religion". Religions 16(9): 1147. [An open-access analysis of Ghumakkar Shastra, arguing that Sankrityayan uses the figure of the Wanderer to mount a satirical, quasi-scriptural critique of institutional religion, with Buddhism held up as its most congenial exception.]

• Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [The chapter "When the Buddha Met Marx" situates Sankrityayan alongside Dharmanand Kosambi and reconstructs the broader connections between Buddhist revivalism and Marxism in twentieth-century India; it also supplies the account of his 1917 encounter with Bodhanand and of the Vidyalankara cohort.]

• Basu, Sreyanjana (2019). "Rahul Sankrityayan's (1893–1963) Shift from Buddhism to Marxism: Some Reflections". International Journal of Research in Social Sciences 9(2): 319–333. [A focused examination of the transition from Sankrityayan's Buddhist commitment to Marxism, arguing that his later Marxism did not simply erase his earlier Buddhist thought.]

• Joshi, Maya (2019). "Rahul Sankrityayan and Ambedkar as Contrapuntal Contemporaries: Unpacking Their 'Metaphysics and Politics'". In: Lal, Vinay (Ed.), India and Civilizational Futures: Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics II: 182–214. Oxford University Press. [A comparative study contrasting Sankrityayan's textually engaged, metaphysically retentive Buddhism with B. R. Ambedkar's socially oriented Navayana Buddhism.]

• Sarao, K.T.S. (2017). "Sankrityayan, Rahul". In: Sarao, K.T.S., & Long, J.D. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Indian Religions: Buddhism and Jainism. Springer. [A concise reference entry summarizing Sankrityayan's biography, travels, and scholarly output.]

• Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2016). A Freethinking Cultural Nationalist: A Life History of Rahul Sankrityayan. Oxford University Press. [The first, and most substantial, book-length scholarly biography of Sankrityayan, tracing his successive identities as sadhu, Arya Samajist, Buddhist monk, and communist against the backdrop of Indian and Nepali nationalism.]

• Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2015). "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal". European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 46: 62–87. [An open-access study of Sankrityayan's relationship with Nepal and Nepalese Buddhists, including his Tibet-bound journeys through Kathmandu, his friendships with Dharmaman Sahu and Hemraj Sharma, and his oblique but sympathetic relationship to Nepal's underground Theravada movement. Its biographical notes (nn. 3, 6) also give the most precise dates for his imprisonments and his stay in Sri Lanka.]

• Ober, Douglas (2013). "'Like Embers Hidden in Ashes, or Jewels Encrusted In Stone': Rāhul Sāṅkṛtyāyan, Dharmānand Kosambī and Buddhist Activity in Colonial India". Contemporary Buddhism 14.1: 134–148. [An earlier study pairing Sankrityayan with Dharmanand Kosambi as scholar-activists of the Buddhist revival, with a biographical account of the Lucknow encounter with Bodhanand and of the Sri Lankan training.]

• Joshi, Maya (2009). "Rahul Sankrityayan's Journeys of the Self: Nation, Culture, Identity". Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 16(1&2): 119–147. [A close reading of Sankrityayan's autobiography Meri Jeevan Yatra and his travel manifesto Ghumakkar Shastra, tracing his movement from Vaishnavism through Arya Samaj and Buddhism to Marxism and situating this trajectory within debates on Indian nationalism and selfhood.]

• Dhone, Viplov (n.d.). "Two Marxist Perspectives on the Buddha: Rahul Sankrityayan and Debiprasad Chattopadhyay". Sambhāṣaṇ 2(1–2). [A comparative analysis of two Indian Marxist interpretations of Buddhism, useful for situating Sankrityayan within the wider development of Marxist readings of Indian philosophy.]

• Bhattacharya, Ramkrishna (1994). "From Buddha to Marx". In: Chattopadhyaya, Alaka (Ed.), Essays in Indology: Birth Centenary Tribute to Mahapandita Rahula Sankrityayana. Manisha Granthalaya. [A critical engagement with Sankrityayan's characterization of Buddhism as historically status-quoist, arguing instead, with Debiprosad Chattopadhyaya and D. D. Kosambi, for reading early Buddhism as a form of primitive communism with genuine transformative potential.]

Secondary Literature in Hindi

• Budhlakoti, Pushpa (2024). "Sahitya ki Marxvadi Drishti aur Rahul Sankrityayan ke Upanyas" [Marxist Literary Perspective and the Novels of Rahul Sankrityayan]. Hindi Journal 6(2). [A recent study applying a Marxist literary perspective to Sankrityayan's novels and their treatment of social and historical questions.]

• Sharma, Vishnu Chandra (1995). राहुल का भारत Rahula ka Bharat [Rahul's India]. Allahabad: Sahitya Vani. [An assessment of Sankrityayan's vision of India and Indian civilization across his historical, philosophical, and political writing.]

• Mule, Gunakar (1994). राहुल चिंतन Rahul Chintan [Rahul's Thought]. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. [A study of Sankrityayan's intellectual development across his religious and political phases, by a scholar who knew him personally.]

• Sharma, Ramsharan 'Munshi', & Pushpamala Jain (Eds.) (1988). राहुल स्मृति Rahula Smriti [In Memory of Rahul]. New Delhi: People's Publishing House. [A memorial volume of essays and reminiscences by associates and fellow scholars, including the Buddhist monk Bhikshu Jagdish Kashyap's account of Sankrityayan's role in his own conversion to Buddhism and Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan's analysis of Sankrityayan's three-stage philosophical evolution from theism through idealist atheism to materialism.]

• Machwe, Prabhakar (1987). Rahul Sankrityayan. New Delhi: Rajpal. [A short literary biography and critical study of Sankrityayan, useful as an early source-language treatment of his life and literary career; a related English-language study by the same author appeared in the Sahitya Akademi's "Makers of Indian Literature" series in 1978.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Rahul Sankrityayan". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Rahul_Sankrityayan.