Abstract:
In 1956, B. R. Ambedkar publicly converted to Buddhism raising questions about his turn from constitutionalism to religion. The answer lies in Buddhism itself. In the late colonial era, the struggle to produce an appropriate Buddhism for a nation-in-the-making reveals a secret history foundational to modern India. Thinkers, activists, reformers, pilgrims, and monks from around South, Southeast and East Asia discussed universalism, nationalism, modernity, democracy, and caste radicalism and advocated an Indian return to Buddhism and the Buddha. This book traces this genealogy through the Buddhist itineraries and political projects of figures like Anagarika Dharmapala, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vinayak D. Savarkar, Rahul Sankrityayan and Ambedkar, to reveal how Buddhism emerged as democracy’s dhamma, the religion of democracy.
Speaker Bio:
Gitanjali Surendran is a professor of history and executive director of the Centre for Research in History at Jindal Global Law School, where she has been teaching since 2013. Her work has been published in edited volumes and in the media. Her research interests include modern South Asian cultural and intellectual history, environmental and gender history. She is also interested in public history and is exploring ways to bring academic history into public discourse. Her latest book, Democracy’s Dhamma: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c. 1890-1956, came out in July last year with Cambridge University Press.