Democracy's Dhamma

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).

• List of Figures; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India; 1. Anagarika Dharmapala in India; 2. Dharmapala and Vivekananda in an Age of Universalism; 3. Buddhism and the Bhadralok; 4. The Buddhist Bay: Buddhist Mobility across the Bay of Bengal; 5. Buddhist Relics, the Mahabodhi Temple and the Discourse of a Shared Buddhism; 6. Buddhism as a Civil Religion and Hindutva; 7. Buddhism, Anti-Caste Radicalism and Socialism; 8. Ambedkar, Dhamma and Democracy; Conclusion: The Destinies of Buddhism; Bibliography; Index.

'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)