She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Democracy's Dhamma: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c. 1890–1956, and reported the following:
Page 99 of this book is about an interesting episode in India's modern tryst with Buddhism. It describes the English East India Company's first effort to reach out to the political leadership in Tibet in 1774-5. A man named George Bogle with the help of an Indian trader monk named Purangir became friendly with the Panchen Lama. But before any sort of trade or diplomatic agreement could be signed, the Panchen Lama died of small pox on a visit to the Qianlong emperor in Beijing and Bogle drowned in Calcutta. Thereafter, Tibet remained closed to British entreaties for almost a century until a British Indian secret agent named Sarat Chandra Das made his first trip to Tibet in 1879. He made friends in high places including the then Panchen Lama's prime minister. He studied Tibetan and Buddhism and in turn taught his Tibetan friends arithmetic, Hindi, about scientific instruments and camera and telegraph technology. The subsequent pages of this section tell the story of Das and his influence on thinking about Buddhism in modern India.Learn more about Democracy's Dhamma at the Cambridge University Press website.
I think this page encapsulates reasonably well what I try to do with the book. Usually, Buddhism is said to have died out in India by around the 12th century and then returned to India in the 19th and 20th century through the activities of a succession of British (or at any rate colonial) Indologists, Orientalists, archaeologists and historians and later through mass dalit conversions to Buddhism in the 1950s sparked by B.R. Ambedkar, better known as the chief architect of independent India's Constitution. I try to show in the book that Buddhism in modern India is not merely a British project but one involving educated Indians across the country in emerging universities, institutes of learning, studies circles and eventually in the highest echelons of anti-colonial politics. Indians took up Buddhism across the political spectrum too as Buddhism had something to offer them all. It is through their endeavours in the arena of nationalism, religious universalism, socialism, Gandhianism and anti-caste radicalism that Buddhism emerges as a religion of democracy, or the 'dhamma' of democracy, 'dhamma' being the Pali word for the Sanskrit 'dharma' which in turn means a code that guides moral, ethical and spiritual conduct (loosely 'religion').
Page 99 reveals a crucial aspect of this journey of modern Buddhism in India and that it was deeply entangled with its Buddhist neighbours and more broadly with Buddhist Asia. While India, both the colony and the independent nation had only a small number of people who referred to themselves as exclusively Buddhist, Burma, Sri Lanka and Tibet were all primarily Buddhist societies. As were Thailand, China, Korea, Japan and Cambodia further afield. But by the 19th century, academic investigation had definitively revealed that the Buddha had been born, lived and died in India which refocused the spotlight on India's Buddhist heritage but also on Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India as they were being unearthed by colonial archaeologists. So we have the well known Sri Lankan Buddhist activist Anagarika Dharmapala establishing the Mahabodhi Society in Calcutta to promote Buddhism in India and Buddhist pilgrimage to India. We have Burmese, Japanese and Chinese monks coming to India as pilgrims, spies, scholars and more, often carrying back to their communities different ideas about Buddhism.
Here Das is important because his was an early foray into a forbidden Buddhist land which was very present in the global imagination of Buddhism. In gathering information on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, he became a prime informant for Calcutta's literati which was fascinated by Buddhism and by Tibet. He was a close associate for a time of Anagarika Dharmapala too whom he advised on the latter's campaign to revive Buddhism in the land of its birth. But if you want to know how all this ties together, you’ll have to go past page 99!
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
