Scholars in Conversation l Professor Gitanjali Surendran with Dr Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav

The ‘Scholars in Conversation’ series features interviews with academics across diverse disciplines and geographies. Anchored by NLSIU faculty members, these conversations explore the work of leading voices in their fields—to bring academic insights to bear on public discourse.

We have been publishing a special edition of this column, which features discussions with scholars who were part of the Indian Political Thought Conference held at the university. In this interdisciplinary gathering, academics explored the historical foundations of Indian political thought, assessed its contemporary relevance, and envisioned its future trajectories. This online edition expands on these conversations for our readers. 

The second interview in this special series features Professor Gitanjali Surendran in conversation with NLSIU faculty member Dr Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav. At the conference, Professor Surendran was part of a panel on Religion/Secularism, in which she discussed her recent book Democracy’s Dhamma: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c. 1890–1956 (Cambridge University Press 2024), among other things. The below edited excerpt of an email exchange between Professor Surendran and Dr Bhargav expands on her talk at the panel to discuss Buddhism, its links to South Asian ideas of nationalism, universalism, modernity, social justice and democracy, the Buddhist engagements of Sri Lankan activist Anagarika Dharmapala and a host of major and minor Buddhist activists from Japan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and China, major Indian political figures like BR Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru and Swami Vivekananda, and the Buddhist search for a community in international, national, and Dalit terms, among others.

In your talk you spoke about how Buddhism functioned as a ‘veiled element’ in the development of South Asian ideas about modernity, nationalism, and democracy. Could you elaborate on this?

I derive the idea of Buddhism serving as a ‘veiled element’ in public life from David McMahan’s work on Buddhist modernism. He argues that in the West, during the 19th and 20th centuries, Buddhism was infused into a world of modern ideology and that these were mutually formative, though this process went largely unrecognised. I argue that Buddhism is often a similarly veiled, overlooked element in the development of South Asian ideas about modernity, nationalism, democracy, and much else. If anything, colonial South Asia’s engagement with Buddhism was even more political. Activists across the political spectrum in colonial South Asia infused Buddhism into discussions about the distinctiveness of Indian modernity (that it must not ignore the spiritual even while pursuing the material); nationalism (that Buddha and Buddhism were India’s great gifts to the world and that Buddhism’s spread in Asia represented Indian civilisational diffusion); socialism (that the Buddha believed in common ownership of land and that Buddhism was anti-capitalist); or anti-caste radicalism (Buddhism was the original religion of equals). Of course, a long line of thinkers argued that Buddhism’s emphasis on rationality, independent thinking, self-control, and ethical behaviour could also provide a firm basis for democracy.

Your talk focussed at length on the Sri Lankan Buddhist activist Anagarika Dharmapala. You argue that Dharmapala saw Buddhism as enabling the creation of a ‘spiritualised democracy’. What do you mean by this? And did Dharmapala engage with ideas from other Indian religions as he made the case for Buddhism?

Anagarika Dharmapala’s main mission in India was to ensure the return of the Mahabodhi Temple to Buddhist control, to safeguard Buddhist pilgrimage sites, and to convert India to Buddhism. To this end, he started the Mahabodhi Society with its headquarters in Calcutta. Dharmapala was not particularly interested in other religions despite his early exposure to them. His schooling in Christian schools influenced his ideas about sin, good and evil, and religious organising. His experience as a colonial subject in Ceylon shaped his critiques of colonial culture and British influence. A young member of the Theosophical Society, for a time he was close to the founders, Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky encouraged Dharmapala to study the Buddhist Pali canon, the Tripitaka. After her passing, Dharmapala eventually drifted from Olcott, partly owing to Olcott’s  later turn away from Buddhism. Despite displaying a personal predilection for Buddhism in Colombo, in Adyar (Madras), under pressure from other Theosophists who accused him of bias toward Buddhism, Olcott increasingly adopted a more neutral stance. Dharmapala’s diary entries also reveal his disdain for later Theosophist Annie Besant’s Hindu turn.

But Dharmapala was careful about how he put across his ideas about Buddhism before Calcutta’s upper-caste, sacred-thread-wearing bhadralok. He had had a distinct Theravada tilt in his early career but he presented a much less doctrinaire position when he met with other Asian Buddhists of various denominations in pursuit of his larger goal of bringing together an international Buddhist community.

On his concept of a ‘spiritualised democracy’, he suggested that politics or political systems in India could not just be isolated domains.  It was not possible to strictly separate religion and politics as in the West. Dharmapala argued that India would fall prey to the excesses of Western modernity such as alcoholism, loss of tradition, and materialism. He insisted that, in the form of Buddhism, the Indian subcontinent offered the world a perfect spiritual tradition. Buddhism’s inherent rationality, respect for science and humane-ness, and respect for equality, liberty, and fraternity could provide a code of values and ethics that could undergird democracy and balance the excesses of Western modernity. He did not reject modernity or democracy, but offered Buddhism as an antidote to their dangers.

In what way did Nehru’s view of Buddhism as a civil religion differ from Ambedkar’s view of Buddhism as the crucial foundation of true democracy? How did these relate to Dharmapala’s vision?

In deploying Buddhism as civil religion, Nehru sought to evolve a set of symbols, rituals, and performances as well as a set of values that could unite the nation. Central to his efforts was the Mauryan emperor Ashoka who, uniquely in world history, renounced war to propagate a faith of non-violence, peace, tolerance, and asceticism, that is, Buddhism (though historians have since complicated this popular image of Ashoka). Nehru found many aspects of Ashoka’s statecraft attractive, such as his communication with people through simple language via rock edicts and sending missionaries around the subcontinent and in Asia to propagate Buddhism. Nehru felt Buddhism had much to offer to a new nation recovering from the brutal violence of the Partition and to a world reeling from the spectre of global annihilation via World War II and the atom bombs. So, while he frowned on Rajendra Prasad attending the inauguration of the rebuilt Somnath temple in 1951, he attended every major Buddhist gathering in the 1950s, including the return of the relics of the Buddha’s two disciples to Sanchi, the inauguration of the Namgyal Institute of Buddhist Studies, and the state-sponsored celebrations of the 2,500th anniversary of Buddha Jayanti. There were moments of tension too. For instance, the plan for that Nehruvian ‘temple of modern India’, the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam across the Krishna in the late 1950s, included flooding the Nagarjuna Konda archaeological site, widely hailed a significant Buddhist find. As parliamentarians questioned the government on these plans, Nehru responded with a compromise: the site would be excavated post-haste at considerable public expense and moved to higher ground so the development project could proceed.

Some argue that Nehru’s interest in Buddhism was a superficial one, but I find clear evidence to the contrary. He wrote on India’s Buddhist history. He repeatedly mentioned Buddhism as a shared heritage on visits to former colonies and potential Non-Aligned Movement allies in Buddhist Asia. The actions of the government under him, including naming key foreign policy initiatives after Buddhist principles and organising the 1955–56 Buddha Jayanti celebrations, indicate Nehru’s deep interest in Buddhism, pride that it was a part of India’s heritage, and his use of it to support his goals.

Ambedkar’s emotional and intellectual investment in Buddhism was even greater. He spent the years between the completion of his work on the Indian Constitution in 1949 and his death in late 1956 pursuing a Buddhism that could liberate Dalits. He travelled to India’s Buddhist neighbours, Sri Lanka and Burma, to see Buddhism in practice, attend international Buddhist gatherings, and seek support for Dalit conversion in India. In these years, Ambedkar also embarked on an intense intellectual journey to understand Buddhist philosophy and history and write tracts on how it may help Dalits find liberation from ‘constitutive listlessness’ (to use V Geetha’s phrase) and from political and social subjugation. For Ambedkar, democracy was not merely a political arrangement but a mode of ‘associated living’ that enjoined ‘respect and reverence’ towards fellow-citizens. So, while his work on the Constitution focused on legal safeguards for Dalits to ensure their liberty and equality in the new republic and achieve the goals of fraternity and justice, a new moral code embodied in a ‘religion of principles’ had to replace the immoral ‘religion of rules’—Hinduism. Without this, democracy would enjoy a merely formal existence and not a substantive one and would therefore remain in danger. Dhamma (the Pali word for the Sanskrit dharma) based on Buddhism was his answer. He conceived of Buddhism as the solution to the potential problems of Indian democracy in various ways, but his division of dhamma itself into ‘dhamma’ and ‘sadhamma’ is particularly useful to understand his goals. Dhamma was about right conduct and right thinking. But saddhamma was the underlying philosophy placing the mind at the centre of all evaluations. ‘Not-dhamma’ was his category for all the ills that he thought plagued other religions like caste, oppressive rituals, blind belief, corrupt priests, etc.

In significant ways, both Nehru and Ambedkar drew from the work of Buddhist activists like Dharmapala. Nehru’s interest in Ashoka and what Buddhism could bring to the new nation if adopted as a civil religion drew from discussions in the journals of Buddhist activist societies like the Mahabodhi Society and the Bengal Buddhist Association and from the writings of Buddhist activists like Dharmapala, Rahul Sankrityayan, and Dharmanand Kosambi. Nehru was exposed to Buddhism early in his life through a Theosophist tutor, and he later met activists like Rahul Sankrityayan. He attended significant Buddhist gatherings like the opening of the Mulagandhakuti Vihara in 1931 where the Taxila relics were interred in Sarnath at the behest of the British government and the Mahabodhi Society that built it.

Ambedkar was also in touch with many Buddhist activists who had ties with Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Society, like Bodhanand Mahasthavir and Anand Kausalyayan. Associates recall seeing him read Kosambi’s work in Marathi on Buddhism. He chose to publish his first programmatic essay on Buddhism in the Mahabodhi Society journal even though the president of the society was at the time his arch rival in the Constituent Assembly, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. The Mahabodhi Society played a significant role in his conversion ceremony in October 1956. His relationship with the Society was somewhat fraught but he kept it going. It was Bodhanand Mahasthavir who gave him a copy of Lakshmi Narasu’s Essence of Buddhism, a long essay on the necessity of Buddhism for democracy. He called this the best book he had read on Buddhism and republished it with his own preface. He also drew on Bodhanand’s ideas like the rejection of the 4 Noble Truths. So entanglements between Nehru and especially Ambedkar and the Buddhist activists I track in my work are many.

Why did Ambedkar ultimately find it necessary to search for a religious foundation for his liberal-democratic vision? What would you say are the implications of this for Ambedkar as a secularist, or for secularism in general?

According to Aishwary Kumar, Ambedkar recognised the theologico-political basis of modern state and society. I agree with Kumar that unlike many thinkers of the time though, Ambedkar wished for a theologico-political impulse based on equality, fellowship, and justice to spring from among the people rather than the state. Ambedkar’s answer to Hinduism was ‘no-Hinduism’ but not ‘no-religion’. In fact, in 1935, he famously taunted the keepers of Hinduism by publicly declaring that he would not die a Hindu and was looking to convert to another religion that could sustain ‘true democracy’. His choice, more than 20 years later, was Buddhism.

For Ambedkar, the secularism debate was too closely tied to the Hindu-Muslim question, and neglected Dalits and the question of caste. Scholars like Shabnam Tejani have argued that secularism was a bulwark for Hindu upper-caste nationalists against challenges from minorities like Dalits and Muslims. Others hold that Buddhism itself had secularist potential and that Buddhism was more a philosophy than a religion. Interestingly, after his conversion, Ambedkar stated that he did not wish for only Dalits but the whole country to convert.  This truly mass conversion would spiritually undergird civic equality and democratic fraternity. With that, justice, conceived of as maitrii or love of fellow humans, could be achieved in India. For him, the solution for caste—a ‘division of labourers’, anti-democratic in spirit—lay in a redefined religion and dhamma. So, secularism as the state’s equidistance from Hinduism and Islam isn’t important for him if that secularism failed to meet the needs of democratic fraternity. He often said the Constitution was secular, but thought of the Constitution as only one solution to the problems that plagued Indian society.

What was the ‘Buddhist search for a community’ in international, national, and Dalit terms? Did these endeavours sometimes converge and sometimes conflict with each other?

At first, Dharmapala lead a fairly successful effort to bring together an international Buddhist world. At the centre of this effort, he placed his campaign for Buddhist control of the Mahabodhi Temple and to safeguard Buddhist pilgrimage sites as they were being discovered and excavated in India. In the 1940s, long after Dharmapala lost a series of Mahabodhi Temple court cases in which he tried to gain management of the temple at Bodh Gaya from a Hindu Saivite sect for Buddhists, India’s first prime minister, Nehru, was regularly questioned on the status of the temple during his tours in Buddhist Asia. [The court cases had captured the imagination of Buddhist publics in other Asian countries] By the 1940s, ,the Mahabodhi Temple had also become a major pilgrimage site for the Buddhist world. It was Dharmapala who first encouraged Asian Buddhists to come on pilgrimage to India and occasionally managed railway concessions from the colonial authority for pilgrims from Burma and Sri Lanka. Similarly, news of Buddhist relics and spectacular ceremonies for the interment of these relics at pilgrimage sites like Sarnath, Calcutta, and Sanchi captured the imagination of Asian Buddhists. These ceremonies had an international quality to them, with the presence of Buddhists of different nationalities and denominations. Even today, the same pilgrimage towns are marked by the presence of Buddhist temples, monasteries, and rest houses from the Asian Buddhist world. Dharmapala, though, remained slightly bitter that he never got as much support as he wished from other Asian Buddhists, especially financially.

The Mahabodhi Society sometimes found itself in a quandary on issues where their projected Buddhist internationalism clashed with their specific location in India. When the Peshawar relics were unearthed in 1909 and British officials debated what to do with these, a gathering at Calcutta’s Presidency College demanded that the relics remain in India and questioned why other Asian Buddhists should have more of a claim on the ‘relics of a great Indian teacher’. The Mahabodhi Society had always claimed a universalist, internationalist position for itself on such matters but was, practically speaking, based in Calcutta. Dharmapala eventually put the question of the fate of the relics to Hikkaduve Sumangala, the head of the sangha (monks) in Ceylon. Sumangala suggested the relics be housed in a holy Buddhist spot in India as it would be wrong to divide the relics into portions. Eventually, the British decided to send them to Burma declaring that, after all, Burma was a part of India!

Indian nationalists are at the heart of the creation of national community based on a long and glorious history, in which Buddhism, and especially India’s Buddhist history, played an important part. But there are many tensions here. For instance, in the 1920s, a Congress committee was appointed under Rajendra Prasad to investigate the Mahabodhi Temple issue and propose a solution. The Hindu Mahasabha too set up a committee and submitted a report suggesting that a new temple management board be created consisting of equal numbers of Hindu and Buddhist members. At this time, the Mahasabha wished to keep Buddhists within the larger Hindu umbrella and their annual sessions were marked by the presence of Buddhist delegates from around South Asia. U Ottama, the early Burmese nationalist, was even president of the 1935 Mahasabha session. Rajendra Prasad later recalled a warning from Lala Lajpat Rai about ‘foreign’ Buddhists and Buddhist-Hindu tensions over the management of temples in Ceylon. Similarly, VD Savarkar was against Buddhists (and Dalits) being recognised as separate from Hindus, and exhorted Hindus to assist their ‘brother’ Buddhists during the 1938 Buddhist-Muslim riots in Burma. Nehru projected Buddhism and Buddhist symbols as important for the new nation in ways I have referred to above. He always drew attention to Buddhism’s Indian roots while emphasising the ‘silken bonds’ of Buddhism between India and the rest of Buddhist Asia.

The Dalit-Buddhist community came with Ambedkar’s conversion. In fact, the first recorded lower-caste/Dalit conversion in the modern period took place in 1898 at the behest of Iyothee Thass in Madras who asked Henry Olcott to preside over a conversion of Paraiyars. In the 1920s, Bodhanand Mahasthavir, a close associate of Dharmapala’s, carried out lower-caste/Dalit conversions in United Provinces. Ambedkar’s conversion in 1956 finally created a political community which would argue for its rights and entitlements as Buddhists. But, as we know, this was not without criticism both within the Dalit community and outside. As with all attempts at community creation, tensions abounded.

Somewhat related to the previous question, how did Swami Vivekananda’s insistence that Anagarika Dharmapala not interfere in ‘Indian matters’ fit with his belief in religious universalism? Could you elaborate on this tension in the way figures like Vivekananda and Dharmapala understood the relationship between religion, nation, and universalism?

First, we must note that after meeting at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, they were friendly and had an interlocutory relationship through the rest of that decade. Vivekananda’s sharp response mentioned in your question came after learning of Dharmapala’s Mahabodhi Temple campaign, which sparked off a decades-long fight with its Saivite mahant. Vivekananda’s response emphasising the ‘Indian-ness’ of the Mahabodhi Temple issue stood in contradiction with his religious universalism and the applicability and ownership of true religion to one and all (though to be fair, he thought true religion to be Vedanta). He was often on record saying that all religions when distilled to their basics were true. Of course  his audience mattered too. So, while Vivekananda was in the US, he took a softer approach to Buddhism (he appears to have been asked often to speak on Buddhism rather than Vedanta) but in India, after his return in 1897, he was more dismissive of Buddhism. While he made his name at the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893 and had successful lecture tours around the US in the years that followed, his goal was really to set up the Ramakrishna Mission in India and to project a Vedantic Hinduism capable of meeting India’s future challenges. He thought, in contrast to the noisy, self-destructive West, India was quiet but filled with purpose after centuries of labour (especially of the sages) to attain spiritual freedom. This ‘nectar’ enabled India to confidently take on the ‘poison’ of Western modernity like materialism and disillusionment. The insider-outsider, Indian-foreigner axes in the Indian politics of this period informed his thinking too. So too Dharmapala’s. Depending on their audiences, they emphasised either their universalist goals or national revitalisation through religion.

There was an invented-ness to both Vivekananda’s universal Vedanta and Dharmapala’s universal Buddhism. Cemil Aydin argues that the universalisms of this era, that is, Pan-Islamism and Pan-Asianism, were essentially anti-Western. While Vivekananda was explicitly against politics, Dharmapala was strongly anti-colonial. But both their universalisms were partly a response to the challenge of Western modernity and colonialism. With regard to their national audiences in India and Ceylon too there were similarities. Vivekananda projected ‘practical Vedanta’ that rejected the separation of religious and worldly life. Dharmapala too advocated a kind of ‘practical Buddhism’ that enjoined Buddhists to adhere to a set of pared-down Buddhist principles in everyday life. Both were critical of existing clerics and stressed the need for monks, religious ascetics, and renunciates to engage rather than disengage with the world. Importantly, both saw religious revitalisation as crucial to national revival (in his tours around Ceylon, Dharmapala exhorted Sinhalas to remember their roots and work toward national revival based on a nationalised Buddhism). Both are remembered in similar ways too. Vivekananda is the symbol of ABVP [Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad], the RSS [Rashtriya Swayam Sevak] youth wing in India. Dharmapala was upheld as a symbol of the Sinhala Buddhist exclusivist movement in the 1950s, decades after his death. Neither ever advocated violence against minorities, though Dharmapala used aggressive language towards non-Sinhala, non-Buddhist groups. Yet, in placing reshaped native religions at the heart of new enterprises of national revitalisation, both unleashed the risk that the muscularity of these new religions could be appropriated to violent ends.

 

About the Authors

Gitanjali Surendran is an intellectual and cultural historian focused on South Asia and is a professor at Jindal Global Law School.

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of South Asia and is an assistant professor at NLSIU.