Description: 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.
Brief description: Gitanjali Surendran is Professor of History at O.P. Jindal Global University. Her research interests are 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. She is the author of Anand Bhawan: An Intimate History (Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2018).
Review Quotes: 'Democracy's Dhamma is a lively account of the emergence of what we might call a modern Buddhist cosmos in South and South-east Asia. Through the mapping of pilgrimage and memory circuits, tales of unusual lives and journeys into the dhamma, and a review of ideas to do with Buddhism in the time of democracy and socialism, Gitanjali Surendran has created an unusual diorama-for us to re-examine the making of modern India. Buddhism by the Bay (of Bengal), a formulation that the book invokes, helps situate anti-colonial and anti-caste thought and struggles in India within a wider and older geography.' V. Geetha, feminist historian and writer, author of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India (2021)