In India of the 1940s and 1950s, democracy was itself the revolution. After two centuries of oppressive and unjust colonial rule and thousands of years of monarchical rule before that, the makers and thinkers of the newly minted republic thought democracy to be the appropriate political form with the possibility of peaceful revolutionary change embodied within it. After the tremendous violence of the Second World War, the spectre of the atom bombs in Japan and the brutal massacres accompanying the partition of the Indian colony into India and Pakistan, many felt it necessary to enact a peaceful revolution. Democracy was to be the means and end of that peaceful revolution. In order, however, to make sense of and to justify what seemed at first glance to be an imported political form, Indian thinkers dug deep to find native resources that could help the process of democratization of the polity. A striking solution was located in that ancient faith that was not quite separate from the universe of Hindu thought but which contained an attractive history of subversion and dissent against upper-caste Vedic religion, that heterodox 6th-century BCE sect of Buddhism. In the last century of British rule, the struggle to produce an appropriate Buddhism for a modern nation reveals a secret history undergirding the rise of the republic itself in 1950. Buddhism played its own role in the making of modern India just as both Buddhism and India were in-the-making.
In the following pages, I present to you an intellectual genealogy of Buddhism in modern India. Like all modern religions on the subcontinent, Buddhism too was reimagined and reconfigured in the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of British colonialism. In the historiography of modern South Asia, Hinduism and Islam have got the lion's share of attention. Buddhism's story is unique for the extent of its re-imagination in India, where its followers were insignificant in number and politically marginalized. A host of British and European orientalists, archaeologists and Indologists are credited with discovering 'Buddhism' and India's Buddhist heritage in this period. And yet Indian and more broadly South and Southeast Asian activists, pilgrims, politicians, bhikkhus (Buddhist monks and mendicants) and scholars contributed immensely to the re-emergence of Buddhism and grappled with Buddhist ideas and history .
in their various social and political projects. For practising Buddhists in broader South Asia, an older conception of monkhood was declared to be outmoded and a new figure of the bhikkhu erected as more worldly, activist and nationalist, occasionally violently so. Consequently, the tale of modern Buddhism is peppered with figures who crossed colonial territories and oceans and reconfigured the maps to argue for Buddhism's universalism, its global history, its kinship with ideas of democracy and socialism, and its support of movements for social justice as a kind of 'socially engaged religion' and 'a doctrine of love and fellowship'. This book is about these people, their ideas and their political projects.
But there was a very material side to Buddhism in this period too. Scholars wrote new histories of Buddhism, archaeologists unearthed Buddhist remains and relics, and philologists traced the movement of Buddhism across Asia following textual and linguistic trails. This set the stage for a new material culture around Buddhism. This period is marked by the tremendous circulation of Buddhist relics, artefacts, models of temples and other Buddhist things. There emerged a new sense of Buddhist place best represented by the emerging pilgrimage circuit of places associated historically with the Buddha and Indian Buddhism. This was also a time of significant building activity including new Buddhist temples, rest houses, site museums, parks, commemorative monuments and Buddhist statues. While discussing Buddhism in the making of modern India and modern India in the making of Buddhism we must take into account the role of this new Buddhist material culture.
Ancient, historical Buddhism, in turn, provided a language and a vocabulary for the discussion of modern political, social and religious ideas and issues. Whether it be the idea of nibbana (release or salvation), dukkha (human suffering), communal ownership of property and the role of bhikkhus (mendicants), values of compassion and maitrii (fellowship and love) or Buddhist spirituality or dhamma (religion or moral order), Buddhist ideas were debated and discussed in terms of their modern relevance. This was not without its dissenters, but for the most part, Buddhism found an audience in India and abroad and became in this period a 'veiled' presence in public life.
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