Reflections on India

Buddhistdoor Global, 2021

Rahul Sankrityayan, seated, during his second visit to Tibet in 1934. From researchgate.net Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963) was a traveler and literary polymath who has been referred to as the "father of Hindi travel literature." His interests were incredibly broad and it is difficult to fit him into any one box. While we will focus on his Buddhist side in this article, his seminal work was Volga Se Ganga (Volga to Gangas), a 1943 historical fiction collection of 20 short stories about the spread of Indo-European (referred to as Aryan) peoples into the Indian subcontinen, culminating in 1942. Like his life as an anticolonial political activist and student of Marxismm, his Buddhist beliefs are not enough to define him. He was a translator and a student of world history. He enjoyed politics and art, and pursued religion with a distinct spiritual hunger. He was fluent in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, English, Tibetan, Pali, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. The Kashi Pandit community called him "Mahapandit" (great scholar) for his extraordinary erudition in Indian philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy. As a result, he was known as Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan.

is one of the rare personalities in India who is held in high esteem not only in India but also in the entire world. He has drawn admiration from all classes the society. In the annals of India, Gandhi is a name to reckon with. After reading the account of the splendid sacrifice and heroism displayed by Mahatma Gandhi, who is hailed as Father of Nation, one gets raptured in true sense. It could be said without an exaggeration that no man of modern times had hold on the masses that he had. The devotion that he commanded from thousands of his countrymen during his lifetime was extra-ordinary. He is unquestionably the ideal of the people. He is a story of tremendous will and courage. His thoughts on various issues are of great relevance even today and will remain forever. This is why history gives him due honour.

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018

Contemporary Buddhism: an interdisciplinary journal, 2013

Two of the most important modern Indian Buddhist pioneers are the polyglot explorer and Marxist revolutionary, Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963), and the Pali scholar and Gandhian nationalist, Dharmanand Kosambi (1876–1947). Although best known as scholars of Buddhism, it is their lesser-known personal lives—namely, their political involvement in anti-colonial efforts, social reform projects, and travels abroad—that are of primary focus in this study. Through an examination of their activities and writings, this essay reveals the methods they employed and the networks of support they utilized in order to propagate Buddhism. In particular, it focuses on two features common to both of their lives: first, their relations with transnational Buddhist organizations and Euro-American and other Asian intellectuals, and second, their collaborative efforts with Indian elites whom they shared similar social, educational and national concerns. These two factors, I argue, were essential to their reconfiguration of a modern Indian Buddhism that was relevant to contemporary Indian concerns.

Broadsheet, 2008

Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages, 2024

The Tamil historian, public intellectual, political leader and practitioner of Siddha medicine, Pandithar Iyothee Thassar (1845–1914), inaugurated a millennial anticaste historiography of India. Here I use the term ‘millennial’, following scholarships on Thass, to index the century-long history, between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, of Tamil anti-caste thought. Through scholarly and creative engagement with ancient Buddhist thought, the Tamil language, and the Tamil literary archive, Thass re-conceived India’s history as simultaneously global and local, equally a part of an evolving world community and an intimate vernacular dwelling. His was not only an anti-caste critique but an imagination of an open and egalitarian community, altogether indifferent to the caste provenance. This chapter studies Thass’s idiosyncratic textual experiments with the figurations of the Buddha and Buddhism, with special attention to the ways in which it was distinct from Orientalist and nationalist modes of historicizing the Buddha as a fully integrated aspect of India’s civilizational inheritance.