Introduction
In the final weeks leading up to Indian Independence, the country's top political brass met regularly to discuss, debate, and finalize the details of the upcoming transition. Amid the many other meetings that were called in those final weeks were those of a subcommittee whose only duty was to finalize the design for the new national flag. In a decision made on 22 July 1947, just three weeks prior to formal Independence, the Gandhian carkhā, or spinning wheel, was replaced by the Buddhist dharmacakra, or dharma wheel, as the flag's central symbol. When the Constituent Assembly approved the decision, there was little dissent.Footnote 1 Indeed, it was just the beginning of the Republic of India's fetish for the images and ideals of an imagined Buddhist past. A year later, the Lion Seal, the ancient emblem of the Buddhist king Aśoka's Mauryan empire, was selected as the state seal to be used on all official government documentation. When the new constitution outlawing Untouchability was unveiled later that year, a prominent Calcutta Buddhist monthly could not resist linking the act with the ancient Buddhist symbols now representing the new nation: ‘Sometimes, truly, the road forward is the road back, in this case a return to the high level of consciousness attained in India when Buddhism prevailed and caste discrimination was condemned.’Footnote 2 By January of 1950, when Rajendra Prasad was sworn in as the first president of India beneath a mammoth sandstone image of Buddha carved in Mathura some 1,800 years before, the central government's new leanings were becoming increasingly obvious.Footnote 3
Public spaces took on names with Buddhist overtones—Gautama Hall, Buddha Park, Kanishka House, Lumbini Lane—while the state and central governments poured substantial funds into restoring and revitalizing India's ancient Buddhist sites at places like Bodh Gaya, Sanchi, Shravasti, Lumbini, and Nalanda.Footnote 4 Alongside restored ruins rose new state-sponsored Buddhist institutes and educational centres. The government made large contributions to projects to publish Buddhist texts in vernacular languages, including the sponsorship of the editing and publication of a 46-volume series of the complete Pali Tipiṭaka, or words of the Buddha, in Devanagari script.Footnote 5 By 1956, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had even produced a full-length feature film on the Buddha that later won an award at the Cannes Film Festival for its ‘exceptional artistic and moral beauty’.Footnote 6 This was an age, as one writer put it, when ‘the Buddha spirit swept the nation’.Footnote 7 The pinnacle of this newfound confidence in, and support for, Buddhism were the grand Buddha Jayanti celebrations of 1956, a more than year-long event of festivals, conferences, art exhibitions, and international gatherings to mark what was deemed the two-thousand and-five-hundred year anniversary of Buddha's birth.
All of this activity formed part of the Nehruvian state's promotion of Buddhism for secular purposes. Nehru's projects are best understood as consisting of a two-pronged approach, one concerning the uses of Buddhism in the domestic sphere—that is, for domestic consumption by citizens of the new nation—and one concerning the uses of Buddhism as an instrument of foreign policy. While each of these prongs entailed disparate sets of strategies, they relied equally on two simplistic, but powerful arguments. First, in the nationalist mode, Buddhism is an essentially Indian religion.Footnote 8 Not only is Bodh Gaya the ‘centre of the Buddhist universe’, the place where all Buddhas, cosmic or otherwise, gain enlightenment, but in the humanized Buddhist history, the Indo-Gangetic plain is where Gautama spent his 80 summers and from where all Buddhism begins. Second, Buddha's teachings are inherently universal, applicable to anyone and everyone. Although not averse to using Buddhist symbols to generate emotional appeal, Nehru's Buddhism fully adhered to a Buddhism as the modern ‘religion of reason’, a scientific, moral code that did not require any form of formal, institutional commitment.Footnote 9 This is visible in two remarkable statements made by Nehru, first in his early writings and later in front of a crowd of international leaders. In The Discovery of India, he declares:
Buddha had the courage to attack popular religion, superstition, ceremonial, and priest craft. . .he condemned also the metaphysical and theological outlook, miracles, revelations, and dealings with the supernatural. His appeal was to logic, reason and experience, his emphasis was on ethics, and his method was one of psychological analysis. . .it is remarkable how near this philosophy of the Buddha brings us to some of the concepts of modern physics and philosophic thought.Footnote 10
Nearly a decade later, during a massive Buddhist ceremony in Sanchi, where Nehru presided over the installation of Buddhist relics in a new Buddhist vihara, or monastery, constructed with state funds, he added, ‘All that is necessary is not this Vihara in stone and brick but some kind of a temple in each one's mind and heart which will enshrine those eternal truths and which will guide us along the right path which we forsook so long ago.’Footnote 11 The ‘truths’ which Nehru and other state leaders regularly invoked were by no means unique to Buddhism, but they were adamant that Buddha was the first great universalist, an undeniable proponent of reason, non-violence, and ethics. They took great pride in the fact that the Buddha was an Indian and that an Indian tradition had given so much shape to the world. Buddhism was, as Nehru put it before the Constituent Assembly in 1947, proof that India was not just ‘a tight little narrow country’, but was once an ‘international centre’ that guided the world.Footnote 12
Yet only in rare cases have scholars recognized what an important role Buddhist symbols and rhetoric played in the making of the Nehruvian state. For instance, in Judith Brown's major biography of Nehru, Buddhism is absent.Footnote 13 Likewise, in an otherwise insightful essay on the transformations of the Indian national flag, the political scientist Srirupa Roy has argued that ‘the replacement of the [Gandhian] charkha with dharmacakra is a literal indication of the wider reorientation of political and economic philosophy under way at the time, as Gandhi's vision of a decentralized, economically self-sufficient India of village republics was replaced by the Nehruvian commitment to an industrialized and centralized polity’.Footnote 14 Roy's analysis is astute but her vision of the symbol as tied to a purely mechanical enterprise underestimates the historical and aesthetic significance of the revitalized Buddhist symbol. For it needs to be recognized that it is not just the bureaucratic modes of production that demonstrate state authority but the ‘poetics of power’ or theatrical performances that serve political interests as well.Footnote 15 Political success has always relied upon strong emotional, public appeal and Nehru's new cabinet, from B. R. Ambedkar and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to Rajendra Prasad and S. P. Mukherjee, recognized well the latent potency of Buddhist symbols and ideas. Nehru's use of Buddhism may be best understood as an attempt to provide a model of modern civilized existence, following Clifford Geertz's idea that the act of invoking an ‘exemplary center. . .[such as Buddha or Aśoka's India]. . .creates not just a center of power. . .but a standard of civilization’.Footnote 16 As he argues further: ‘By the mere act of providing a model, a paragon, a faultless image of civilized existence, the court shapes the world around it into at least a rough approximation of its own excellence.’Footnote 17 When Nehru handled the cremated remains of Buddhist saints and passed them on to neighbouring rulers, who installed them in their own royal halls and constitutional assemblies, he was linking these different polities to India's history and modern mode of being, both in the past and the present. It sent an unequivocal signal: love Buddha, love India.
When the 2,500-year-old remains of Sāriputta and Moggallāna, two of the Buddha's most respected disciples, arrived in Calcutta in January of 1949, more than half a million people, sitting in ‘utmost reverence and orderliness’, watched Nehru receive two reliquary urns and place them above his forehead.Footnote 18 Surrounded by a sea of Buddhist monks adorned in red and yellow robes, Nehru's arrival on the 20-foot high platform where the relics rest, coincided with a shower of yellow rose petals (he too wore one). Throughout the day, foreign delegates and government officials gave speeches, all of which were broadcast live on All India Radio, on why Buddhist teachings were necessary for India and the world's well-being. Nehru himself stressed the importance of the Buddha's teachings on reason and compassion alongside Aśoka's ideals of tolerance. He described Buddhism as ‘a bond of the spirit’ that did not require political attachments and called on the audience to once again renew that ‘silken bond’.Footnote 19 One speaker compared Nehru to the esteemed Aśoka himself (dharmika dharmarāja), arguing that the government was following the same ‘lofty principles’ of ‘righteous rulership based on benevolence and equality of rights. . .You have given the followers of all religions and all denominations the opportunity not only to enjoy freedom of religious belief but also to live together in harmony and take an equal share in promoting the national welfare.’Footnote 20 Throughout the day, several of the speeches linked Buddha to Gandhi, submerging the two leaders in an underlying ‘rhetoric of peace and harmony’.Footnote 21 The message was clear: like Bapu, Buddha too was the father of the nation and, with the former's tragic assassination, Buddha was no less capable of healing the wounds of the nation.Footnote 22
Over the course of the next month, an estimated 400,000 people visited the Maha Bodhi Society's Śrī Dharmarājikā Vihara where the relics had been moved for public viewing (darśan). Celebrations of India's Buddhist heritage and speeches on the contribution of Buddhism to world peace continued to be held throughout the month at select sites across the city. Although sporadic violence across Calcutta cancelled several of the planned public processions, most continued unabated in private spaces like the Bengal Buddhist Association, the Japanese Buddhist Temple (Saddharma Vihara), the Burmese Temple, and the Ramakrishna Mission. Photos and descriptions reveal military guards of the Gurkha Rifles standing attentively alongside long processions of military bands, Buddhist monks, decorated elephants, canopies of white silk, Rolls Royces, and the latest model of Hindustan motor cars. Amid the highly charged communal atmosphere following the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 and tragic events of partition, associating India with the moral sovereignty of Aśoka and Buddha was, as several scholars have noted, a ‘safe’ means by which to heal and unify the nation.Footnote 23 Yet it was also about invoking the assumed rational core of religion, ‘the common faith of mankind’, a secular religion liberated from dogma and hate.Footnote 24 ‘For the sake of national interest,’ the governor of West Bengal proclaimed at a public speech, ‘Buddhist morality should spread in the country.’Footnote 25 When state officials praised Buddhist doctrines in India, they rarely discussed its soteriological or deeper philosophical dimensions. Instead, they focused on its ethical spirit and historical significance. As Nehru explained at Sanchi, there were two paths ahead: ‘the way of the sword and the way of Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. . .we have to remember. . .the lesson of equality and service of society and compassion that Buddha taught’.Footnote 26
In a Cold War world, Pan-Asian unity based on Buddhist principles and Indian civilization were the themes of the day. In a letter congratulating Sri Lanka on its independence in 1948, Nehru recalled that the seed of Buddhism that ‘has flourished in Ceylon. . .[is] a symbol of that great gift which India gave to Lanka and the world so long ago. . .[it] is therefore a symbol of India and Lanka being together, for our mutual advantage and for the freedom and advantage of the world’.Footnote 27 A decade later and these ideologies permeated foreign affairs. At the Buddha Jayanti celebrations in 1956, Nehru invited more than 200 royal dignitaries, heads of states, foreign ambassadors, and Buddhist leaders from across the world to celebrate ‘twenty-five hundred years’ of Buddhism. During the state-sponsored celebrations, helicopters and airplanes showered villages and towns with lotus flowers and government pamphlets praising Buddhist non-violence, while Nehru and other officials stressed the ancient connections between India and the rest of Asia. Non-violence, religious tolerance, Pan-Asianism, and Indian civilization: these were the central themes, repeated time and time again throughout the extraordinary events. The underlying ethos was implicit. The teachings of Lord Buddha were capable of transcending any differences—cultural or political—that existed between India and the rest of Buddhist Asia. In February of 1956, when the government was considering the transfer of Buddhist relics to Burma, the Indian ambassador in Rangoon wrote a letter to Nehru explaining that, ‘I am convinced that nothing brings us so close to the Burmese as concrete evidence of our common spiritual heritage. . .it would be a fine gesture on our part if we send the relics to Rangoon by a special plane accompanied by some of our high-ranking monks in the Buddhist hierarchy.’Footnote 28 Nehru followed through and in an elaborate ceremony attended by several thousand Indians and Burmese, the Burmese prime minister U Nu (1907–1995) received them, despite attending his father-in-law's funeral on the same day. In a classified document on how to improve India's image in Ceylon, composed by the Indian high commissioner in Colombo just one year later, the same thinking was explicit, only now equated with demographic figures:
India is the land of the Buddha. The Buddhists of Ceylon who number more than 60 percent of the population look to India for religious inspiration. It is said to be the dying wish of every Buddhist to be reborn in India, the land of the ‘Dhamma’. . .friendliness can be strengthened by emphasizing cultural and religious affinities. The press generally attaches tremendous importance to material on Buddhist activities in India. . .the Mission can, whenever possible, cull out all such comments from the Indian press and hand them out unofficially for local consumption.Footnote 29
The high commissioner went on to recommend the development of a ‘Cinema-cum-Library van’ or ‘mobile film unit’ that could screen popular documentaries in all accessible parts of the island. As is apparent by these examples, a concern for promoting Buddhism was deeply enmeshed in the culture of the governing elite.
The nation's tryst with Buddhism and Buddhism in the cabinet
The ways in which Buddhism became pronounced within the new political state was of no small significance. In addition to several formative leaders at the state level whose lives were closely intertwined with various aspects of colonial India's ‘Buddhist revival’, its most critical leadership was found among four members of Nehru's cabinet. The first was President Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963), a trained lawyer from Bihar. Since the early 1920s, ‘Rajen Babu’ had served as the chairman of the controversial Maha Bodhi Temple case. Despite being a conservative politician allied with a firmly Hindu wing of the Congress, Prasad was instrumental in the negotiations that granted partial management of the temple to Buddhists in 1949.Footnote 30
Alongside Prasad was the vice-president (and later second president) Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), a figure whose reputation as an intellectual outweighed that of any other member of the cabinet. A former professor at the University of Oxford, Radhakrishnan's works on Indian philosophy remain central sourcebooks for scholars to this day. He published widely on Buddhist thought and, just three years after Independence, he also produced an influential English translation of the Dhammapada, in which he argued that the Buddha's teachings were derived from the Upaniṣads.Footnote 31 As with his Dhammapada, Radhakrishnan's interpretation of Buddhism was encoded through a Vedantic philosophy in which Buddhist teachings were seen as only mildly different from Hindu thought. Radhakrishnan's philosophical assimilation of Buddhism into Hinduism coincided with his frequent public declarations that Buddhism was simply an ‘offshoot of Hinduism’ and that Buddha ‘did not feel that he was announcing a new religion. He was born, grew up and died a Hindu.’Footnote 32
The third figure was Syama Prasad Mukherjee (1901–1953), a former finance minister in Bengal and veteran of the right-wing Hindu paramilitary group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Mukherjee's brief tenure as the central minister of industry and transport (1947–1950) was marked by serious tensions with Nehru and the Congress more widely. A former president of the All-India Hindu MahāSabhā (1944), Mukherjee's links with the Hindu political right became extremely suspect after Gandhi was murdered by a MahāSabhā ideologue in 1948, leading Nehru to jail thousands of its members and sympathizers.Footnote 33 Relations between the two worsened over the crisis in Kashmir and in 1951, Mukherjee resigned from the cabinet to start the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the political party that later morphed into the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (India's current ruling party). Yet Mukherjee also served as president of India's most well-known Buddhist organization, the Maha Bodhi Society, from 1943 until his death ten years later. This made him indispensable to Nehru's plans, particularly during the late 1940s and early 1950s when Mukherjee himself travelled to Cambodia, Burma, and Ceylon to deliver Buddhist relics on behalf of the Indian government and the Maha Bodhi Society. Thus, despite their severe differences, the two nemeses often held the rostrum together at Buddhist events jointly organized by the Maha Bodhi Society and the central government, even after Mukherjee resigned his political office.
The fourth member of Nehru's cabinet, and undoubtedly the most vocal Buddhist voice of them all, especially after 1950, was the extraordinary social reformer and constitutionalist Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). In 1956, Ambedkar and half a million of his Dalit followers converted to Buddhism in a massive public ceremony in Nagpur. Although Ambedkar's Buddhism shared the same rational interpretation as Nehru's, the space he envisioned for it in modern India contained a sharper edge—one that was not readily acceptable to Nehru's broader vision. Like Mukherjee, Ambedkar was also a political oddity in Nehru's cabinet, having opposed the Congress for nearly his entire political career. After the Hindu Code Bill failed to pass in 1951, which led to Ambedkar's resignation the next year, Nehru and Ambedkar's political divorce not so much severed their relationship as drew it out in a tortuous fashion. For instance, when Nehru organized the much-publicized Sanchi restoration ceremonies in 1952, Ambedkar did not receive an invitation, despite being India's only national leader at the time to have publicly declared himself to be a Buddhist.Footnote 34 Four years later when Ambedkar finished his magnum opus, The Buddha and his Dhamma, to coincide with the nationwide Buddha Jayanti celebrations, Nehru dismissed Ambedkar's plea for financial assistance to distribute the book.Footnote 35
Taken as a whole, the national leadership's support for and interest in Buddhism was multipronged and emphatic but it was hardly uniform. This was not a cabinet with a singular vision of Buddhism but rather one whose members spoke of competing Buddhisms—disparate interpretations that catered to different audiences. While the gathering of so many Indian politicians in one cabinet who were invested in Buddhist discourses may appear to have been a conscious decision, it should not be read as such. Instead, this was largely a symptom of a colonial age in which Buddhist thought and history had a profound influence on the educated Indian populace.
In the roughly one hundred years prior to Independence, the Indian relationship to Buddhism underwent a series of significant changes which can be located within the wider global phenomena associated with the advent of what scholars call ‘Buddhist modernity’.Footnote 36 Those who accept this terminology and similar terms (such as ‘Buddhist modernism’) typically use it to refer to new orientations in Buddhist social organization, ritual practice, and intellectual thought. At the heart of these intellectual transformations was a new discourse in which Buddhism came to be seen as the quintessential ‘scientific religion of modernity’, an altruistic philosophy in which reason and compassion was recognized as its ‘true essence’. Other aspects of Buddhism, such as ritual and dogma, were typically criticized as cultural baggage, accretions that had developed in the two-and-a-half millennia since Gautama Buddha walked the earth. The origins of Buddhist modernity are complex but it is undoubtedly rooted in the colonial encounter between Asia and Europe. Although it has only recently begun to be acknowledged, India played a vital role in this creation, both as a physical place where Buddhists from across the globe could travel, study, and worship but also as an idea that repositioned India as the centre of the Buddhist universe.Footnote 37 Within India, the conversation around Buddhism's modernity became particularly poignant as the result of successive generations of Indian and European Orientalist scholarship, ongoing archaeological discoveries, recurring diplomatic exchanges between high-level Buddhists and colonial authorities, and the revival of Buddhist pilgrimage in India's ancient spaces. Indian discussions surrounding Buddhism's rationality and compatibility with modern scientific doctrines was by no means restricted to English-speaking publics, as the cases of Rahul Sankrityayan, Dharmanand Kosambi, and others so clearly demonstrate, but its import was particularly strong among English-educated Indian elites who were simply more likely to be conversant with Orientalist works and popular books like Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia.Footnote 38
Placed within this much wider context, Nehru's interest in Buddhism was little different to that of other Indian elites. Indeed, considering Nehru's early exposure to a wider world and intellectual development in Western liberal traditions—he studied at an elite boarding school in England before moving onto the University of Cambridge and Gray's Inn in London—it is not surprising that he possessed the modernist's appetite for a ‘deculturalized’ Buddhism. Yet because of the power and authority Nehru came to exercise, a discussion of his ‘faith’—used here in its broader meaning of ‘trust or confidence, unshakeable belief or conviction’—is a necessary prelude to our evaluation of his Buddhist statecraft.Footnote 39 Nehru, as many biographers have noted, was notorious for being sceptical, if not downright hostile to religion, so the idea that he could have been personally attracted to and influenced by Buddhism should raise eyebrows. In an important essay, Sunil Khilnani argues ‘Nehru was a politician without religious faith but in possession of the deepest moral sense. He tried to develop a morality without the fallback of religion. . .It was his moral faith, at least as much as his ideological commitments, which sustained his political action.’Footnote 40 Religion, in Nehru's own words, was ‘closely associated with superstitious practices and dogmatic beliefs, and behind it lay a method of approach to life's problems which was certainly not that of science’.Footnote 41 In contrast, the Buddha and his dharma, Nehru penned in 1936, ‘has always had a great appeal for me. It is difficult for me to analyse this appeal, but it is not a religious appeal, and I am not interested in the dogmas that have grown up round Buddhism. It is the personality that has drawn me.’Footnote 42
Even prior to his studies in Europe, Nehru had learned about Buddhism from his childhood tutor, the Theosophist F. T. Brooks. At the age of 13, Nehru was initiated into the Theosophical Society by Annie Besant and, although he was deeply sceptical of Theosophy, in later years he still described the experience in positive terms:
I was thrilled. I attended the Theosophical Convention at Benares and saw old Colonel [Henry] Olcott with his fine beard. . .I have no doubt that those years with F. T. Brooks left a deep impress on me, and I feel that I owe a debt to him and to theosophy.Footnote 43
Nehru's interest in Buddhism continued throughout his childhood and he recalls that ‘the Buddha story attracted me even in early boyhood, and I was drawn to the young Siddhartha who, after many inner struggles and pain and torment, was to develop into the Buddha. Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia became one of my favorite books.’Footnote 44 As Nehru grew older and his political responsibilities began to take him across the subcontinent, he began incorporating visits to ‘the many places connected with the Buddha legend, sometimes making a detour for the purpose’.Footnote 45
Nehru's ‘detours’ led to several sustained encounters with Indian Buddhist scholars and prominent foreign Buddhists. When the Maha Bodhi Society inaugurated the construction of a new Buddhist temple in Sarnath on 11 November 1931 by re-enshrining Buddhist relics found at Taxila nearly two decades before, Nehru, along with his wife and sisters, attended the functions. The truly cosmopolitan ceremony—it drew no fewer than 900 distinguished visitors, more than half of whom came from outside India—must have brought home the reality of both the intellectual and devotional appeal of Buddhism's modern-day revival.Footnote 46 In fact, a Buddhist exhibition of its size and grandeur would not take place again until almost exactly two decades later in 1952 when Nehru, then prime minister of an independent India, orchestrated his own re-enshrinement of relics at the newly constructed Caityagiri Temple in Sanchi. Those, however, were different days. This early experience clearly left an impression. Six weeks later, he posted a full-size Congress flag to India's premiere organizer of Buddhist ‘revival’ events, the Maha Bodhi Society, with a short note reading: ‘I trust this flag will be a perpetual reminder to you of the good will of the Indian Nation towards the great cause you represent.’Footnote 47
During the next decade, as Nehru's political stature grew, he regularly presided over and appeared at Buddhist functions at Shantiniketan, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, Bombay, and beyond.Footnote 48 These events, while not as grand as the one at Sarnath, continued to provide exposure to a wider Buddhist world and served as the springboards for several important post-colonial relationships. For instance, Nehru used Buddhist events to facilitate meetings with Taixu (1890–1947) and Tan Yunshan (1898–1983), two of the most influential Chinese Buddhists in the mid-twentieth century. Both Taixu, a Guomindang-supported reformist Chinese monk trying to make ‘humanistic Buddhism’ (Chinese, renjian fojiao) the ‘meeting place for all races’, and his lay disciple Tan, a noted professor of Chinese history and director of the Cheena-Bhavan Institute in Shantiniketan, were driving forces in the push to reconnect India and China.Footnote 49 At a historical moment when European powers were hegemonic and Japan began its violent incursions into Chinese territory, these figures sought out Nehru and the Congress, hoping to ally India and China through the language of Buddhism. Tan, who had joined Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in 1928, not only organized several meetings between high-profile Guomindang and Congress officials but arranged Taixu's pilgrimage to India and meeting with Nehru in 1940 under the auspices of the ‘Aśoka Day’ celebrations. The day after their first meeting, Taixu visited Nehru's home where he explained to him that ‘future collaboration among the Buddhist countries of Asia’ rests upon ‘the revival of Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India and the establishment of an international Buddhist university’.Footnote 50 Seeds were being planted in the future prime minister's mind.
Of no less importance were the relationships Nehru forged at these events with other Indian scholars of Buddhism. Throughout the 1930s–1940s, when several Indian savants saw traces of socialism in early Buddhist teachings and organization, Nehru was part and parcel of the ideological current. For instance, he was close to Acharya Narendra Dev (1889–1956), the leader of the Congress Socialist Party and a Buddhist scholar of repute. In the early 1940s, when both men were imprisoned together for their involvement in the Quit India Movement, they spent many of their prison days discussing Buddhist philosophy, in particular, the Abhidharmakośa, which Dev was in the process of translating into Hindi.Footnote 51 Through these international encounters and Indian conversations, the Pan-Asian popularity and cosmopolitan ‘modern feel’ of Buddhism was impressed upon Nehru. When he became head of the world's largest democracy, he drew on these intellectual and human resources to forge diplomatic connections abroad and a new nation at home.
Nehru's relationship with Buddhism also appears to have been remarkably personal, far more than a dry and sterile scientific appreciation. In the early 1930s, while sweltering in a blazing jail at the foot of the Himalayas, the Buddha served as his virtual guru-bhaī, a kind of secular saviour that gave him strength to carry on:
When I was in Dehra Dun Jail, a friend in Ceylon sent me a picture of this statue [of a seated Buddha from Anuradhapura in Ceylon], and I kept it on my little table in my cell. It became a precious companion for me, and the strong, calm features of Buddha's statue soothed me and gave me strength and helped me to overcome many a period of depression.Footnote 52
Just over three decades later, when Nehru died at the Teen Murti Bhavan in New Delhi, there is strong material evidence to suggest that the Buddha remained by his side. The conservationists in charge of the building, which has been converted into a museum, maintain that the various rooms have been kept in their original state since Nehru's death in 1964. As one scholar who visited the house observed: ‘In almost every room there is a representation of the Buddha in either a photo or a sculpture. No other image is repeated with such regularity, and there is even a photo of the Buddha on the table next to the bed where Nehru slept.’Footnote 53
The simplicity and single-mindedness with which Nehru spoke about Buddhism gave his vision a clear and coherent formation. Yet there is strong evidence to suggest that as Nehru's political responsibilities set in, he felt closer to the Mauryan emperor Aśoka, the world conqueror, rather than Shakyamuni, the world renouncer.Footnote 54 Nehru's affinity for Aśoka has been well documented.Footnote 55 Throughout his writings, Nehru celebrates Aśoka's conquest of other nations through the propagation of morality (dharma) and non-violence (ahimsa). In the same way in which he imagined himself, he took Aśoka, the ‘great son of India’, to be the philosopher-king par excellence, a just and non-violent ruler. In a letter written to his daughter from prison in 1932, he tells her how Aśoka's ‘way of thought’ led him to become the head of one of the most powerful empires the world has ever seen, ‘nearly the whole of India, except a tiny tip in the south, was under him’.Footnote 56 Writing again from jail in the 1940s, in a climate tinged by communal violence, Nehru makes special reference to the fact that Aśoka, as the ‘ardent Buddhist’ that he was, ‘showed respect and consideration for all other faiths. . .everywhere an appeal was made to the mind and the heart; there was no force or compulsion’.Footnote 57 As many scholars have noted, a kind of ‘cult of Aśoka’ emerged in the first decade after independence: he not only represented the Indian nation to the Buddhist world but his ancient edicts outlawing the death penalty, providing free health care, and spreading a quasi-Buddhist civil religion were seen as having an important message for the modern world.Footnote 58 Nehru capitalized on this popular sentiment but also saw himself in Aśoka. As Ananya Vajpeyi puts it: ‘Aśoka was a ruler, a pacifist, ethical, ecumenical, and literary—a veritable Jawaharlal avant la lettre.’Footnote 59
Bo trees and Buddha bones: relic tours and border area Buddhists
One of the premier means by which Nehru drew on the cultural capital of India's Buddhist past was through the use of relics, or bodily remains (śarīra), of ancient Buddhist masters. Reverence for relics has long been a noteworthy feature of Buddhist societies and the use of relics in political settings was by no means novel. Yet, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the use of relics gained new traction when British colonial authorities began redistributing a wide variety of India's Buddhist antiquities and corporeal remains across Asia in order to generate cultural goodwill and strengthen diplomatic connections with the British empire. As noted earlier, Nehru had personally witnessed the re-enshrinement of Buddha relics at Sarnath's Mulagandhakuti Vihara in 1931. Yet the Sarnath ceremony itself was just the tip of the iceberg. According to the historian Himanshu Prabha Ray, there were seven major discoveries of Buddha relics in India between 1851 and 1910. The first occurred at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh in 1851, followed by Sopara in Maharasthra in 1882, Girnar in Gujarat in 1889, Bhattiprolu in Andhra Pradesh in 1891, Piprahawa in Uttar Pradesh in 1897, Shahji-ki-Dheri near Peshawar in 1908–1909, and Mirpus Khas in Sind in 1910.Footnote 60 Despite the inconsistencies in the way each relic case was handled—some were redistributed to museums and private collectors while others were re-enshrined in foreign and Indian viharas—there appears to have been a clear policy shift in the way relic discoveries were handled after the discovery of the Sopara relics in 1882.Footnote 61 In contrast to the discovery of earlier relics, which were routinely distributed to museums and collectors, the cultural and communication landscape made news of the Sopara relics well known across the elite Buddhist world. From that point onwards, relic discoveries were regularly met with memorandums from Buddhist organizations and governments requesting colonial officials to transfer the relics to Buddhist shrines where they could be worshipped according to designated Buddhist customs. When the colonial authorities recognized that relics held not just an aesthetic value as museum artefacts but a sacred presence that could be exploited for political purposes, they began using the relics to further their ‘geopolitical agenda’.Footnote 62 While Indian complaints regarding the dispersal of India's national heritage to ‘foreign’ entities after 1910 further complicated these diplomatic initiatives, the prevailing attitude was to distribute the relics to either Buddhist lands such as Burma or Ceylon or re-enshrine them at the new Buddhist temples being constructed across India.
Not long after its establishment in 1891, Anagarika Dharmapala's Maha Bodhi Society (hereafter MBS) took on an active role in negotiating with the government over the rightful ownership of relics. Although the MBS was at times an irritant to the viceroy, it possessed an international network of dignitaries and scholars that no other Buddhist organization in India could match at that time, and by the early 1900s, the colonial government increasingly began to rely upon MBS officials, along with Orientalist scholars, to help arrange the ‘repatriation’ and ‘re-enshrinement’ of these relics. By Independence, the MBS itself had not only been the recipient of numerous relics, but had come to be seen by the new Indian leadership as the most reliable functionary for managing relic exhibitions and transfers. There were exceptions to this—independent relations and diplomatic offices provided other connections—but the MBS's close connections with Nehru, Prasad, Mukherjee, and other government elites made it the obvious choice.
By coupling with the MBS, the Government of India was able to orchestrate several successful relic tours and international exhibitions in and outside of India's borders. It was the return to India of two Buddhist relics, in particular, that set the stage for some of the government's most vibrant celebrations of Buddhism. The relics of Sāriputta and Mogallāna, two of Buddha Śākyamuni's most renowned disciples, had been first discovered at Sanchi in 1851 before being shipped to London where they sat in the British Museum for most of the next century. After a decade of negotiation, it was agreed to return the relics to India in 1941, but the danger of a submarine attack during the Second World War postponed their departure until 1947. From 1947 to 1952, these relics travelled by plane, ship, train, automobile, horseback, and foot to Buddhist sites across India in Bihar, Assam, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Orissa, as well as reaching royal households, museums, and public exhibitions in Cambodia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, and Ceylon.
Throughout Nehru's rule, Buddhists in India's border regions were regularly extended official state invitations to celebrate Buddhist events at major urban centres that held no clear association with Buddhism as well as at the ancient groves where Gautama is said to have dwelled.Footnote 63 Yet what is notable is that when Nehru brought the relics to majority Buddhist regions along the borders, the public rhetoric and performance of the relic expositions was transformed. Although Buddhism's ethical message and historical contributions to Indian culture continued to be highlighted throughout these events, there were several notable shifts that were largely absent during relic expositions in non-Buddhist regions. For instance, in Assam, a 17-day exposition of the relics began on 18 April 1950.Footnote 64 Organized jointly by the government of Assam, the All-Assam Buddhist Association, and the MBS, the Assam exposition coincided and actually shared the pandal with the Congress's provincial conference in Assam. The governor of Assam, Sri Prakash, presided over a crowd of 10,000 devotees in Disangpani. A small party, led by Devapriya Valisinha, the MBS general-secretary, and Tan Yun Shan of Shantiniketan, gave several speeches, collected funds for the construction of a Buddhist temple, and presided over a series of conversion ceremonies for leaders of the All-Assam Ahom Association. The speeches delivered emphasized the ‘long-standing’ connections between Assam and Buddhism, and ‘the necessity of the revival of the Buddhist ideas of karuna [compassion], metta [loving-kindness] and mudita [empathetic joy] all over the world’.Footnote 65
Following the Assam tour, the relics were carried to Ladakh, a trip that was financed entirely by the central government and Ministry of States. Four years earlier, Nehru had visited the region, carrying bones believed to be those of the Buddha Gautama himself. During his tour, which lasted several days, he exhibited the relics to the highest local incarnate lamas (Tibetan, sprul sku) and promised the Ladakhi lama, Bakula Rinpoche, that he would send more relics for future worship.Footnote 66 After that trip, the social and political situation in Ladakh became extremely fragile due to two destabilizing forces: first, India and Pakistan's claims over the region, leading to the first Indo-Pakistan war of 1947, and, second, China's invasion of Tibet in 1950, which began the slow severance of Ladakh's cross-border trade and cultural links to Tibet.Footnote 67 In 1948, Bakula travelled to Delhi with a seven-man delegation to discuss Ladakh's precarious position and from this meeting, the plans for a relic exhibition in Ladakh were born. Two years later, a police honour guard, seven MBS officials, and one journalist took the Buddhist relics from Calcutta to New Delhi where Nehru met them at a public ceremony held at New Delhi's Buddhist temple on Reading Road, before moving on to Srinagar and then to Leh via a military airlift. For ten days, the Sāriputta and Mogallāna relics were exhibited at a number of monasteries across Ladakh, targeting those that had ‘suffered most during Pakistani raids’.Footnote 68 Several thousand people turned out to view and worship the relics, as local monastic and militia elites mingled with Buddhist delegates.Footnote 69
Officially, the relics were a symbol of India's dedication to ‘non-violence, co-operation, friendliness and forgiveness’,Footnote 70 yet the subtext was also clear. As Toni Huber argues, the relics sent ‘unequivocal signals’ to the Ladakhi population ‘that the Indian nation they had just joined was sympathetic to and would even ritually support their Buddhist cultural identity’.Footnote 71 MBS officials who travelled with the relic delegation were careful to articulate the government's support in terms that would resonate with any Buddhist audience: it was vastu-dāna (the gift of material goods), śikśa-dāna (the gift of education), and dharma-dāna (the gift of dharma).
Exactly one year later, this same message would be reiterated among a cosmopolitan Buddhist elite when the relics were carried across Sikkim, Tibet, and the five most prominent centres of Buddhist activity in the Darjeeling-Kalimpong hills.Footnote 72 As in Ladakh, tens of thousands of devotees turned out to see the relics and ‘drink deep in the ocean of the bliss of Tathagata [Buddha]’.Footnote 73 During the three-month exhibition, which was organized in conjunction with the visit of the Dalai Lama just over the border in Yatung, numerous political elites from the border regions gathered to venerate the relics. This included the king and queen of Bhutan, the maharani of Burdwan, the Sikkimese royal family, the (exiled) Burmese prince and princess, and a host of European scholars and former members of colonial India's frontier Raj. Due in part to the Dalai Lama's precarious and uncertain place across the border—only months earlier the People's Liberation Army had occupied Lhasa, triggering his ‘pilgrimage’ to Yatung—the relic exposition gained a heightened political sense and popularity that was witnessed by its frequent coverage in Tibetan, Hindi, and English newspapers. The relationship with the Tibetan state is discussed in more detail below but here, I wish to focus instead on how the relic exhibition in Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills was coupled with the belief among government elites that spreading Buddhism in the hills could help ensure the Himalayan population's loyalty to India.
This is indicated by concurrent events in both Assam and Sikkim-Darjeeling. When local officials discovered a Chinese government book entitled Buddhism in China circulating through the Sikkimese marketplaces in 1955, the Ministry of External Affairs, under the advice of the political officer in Gangtok, instructed the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to produce 10,000 copies of a comparable India-focused ‘History of Buddhism’ in Tibetan, Hindi, and English text.Footnote 74 After the report reached Nehru's desk, the Ministry instructed the Gangtok political officer to produce ‘as attractive a book as possible’, one that was ‘properly priced’ at no more than one rupee per copy with at least 2,000 copies distributed free of charge to ‘the various schools and libraries in the border areas’.Footnote 75 Nowhere in the packet of files transferred back and forth across Ministry desks is there an explicit explanation for why Nehru and other officers felt it so important to publish a trilingual history of Indian Buddhism in a remote Indian district. Yet the fact the idea came about after learning of a similarly themed Chinese publication makes clear the competitive nature of the relationship. The authorities believed that propagating Buddhism would send a clear message to the border communities that India, and not China, was their real ‘homeland’. Just one year later, in 1956, the same geopolitical agenda was witnessed during the Dalai Lama's tense visit to India, when Nehru expressed his support for plans to build a ‘Mahāyāna Institute of Tibetology’ in Gangtok. While en route back to Tibet, on 10 February 1957, the Dalai Lama laid the foundation stone for the noted Buddhological institute, with Nehru and Indira Gandhi presiding over its grand inauguration roughly 20 months later.
There is also considerable evidence that the same civilizational logic of Buddhism as a pacifying, Indo-centric force was influencing the decisions of foreign affairs officers in northeast India as well. For instance, during the winter of 1949–1950, New Delhi granted the Burmese government permission to send a ‘goodwill mission’ consisting of nine ‘carefully selected Buddhist monks to Assam whose object will be to strengthen the cultural ties existing between Burma and Assam’.Footnote 76 In short, integrating ‘Border Area Buddhists’ into the national fold was critical to Nehru's political aspirations and Buddhist symbols, whether material or immaterial, were central to accomplishing that mission.
Modern Buddhism and the poetics of power
At the same time that Nehru's government was attempting to secure loyalty at the borders and instil a moral code at the centre, it drew on the country's Buddhist resources to institute what was essentially an informal policy of strengthening India's role in post-colonial Asia. Srirupa Roy has rightly noted that the dharmacakra flag symbolized the ‘double-edged nature’ of Nehru's ‘universalist promise. . .of a peaceful international order and of a strong and expansionist state’.Footnote 77 In the years leading up to independence, Nehru had largely defined India as the symbol of anti-colonial resistance and anti-imperialism. However, in the new post-colonial order, he struggled to cast India in a new light, one where it retained its stature as an anti-colonial leader, but also projected an image of self-sufficiency and world leadership. As he saw it, the vision he possessed for India was not just for Indians, but for the hopes and aspirations of all Asian peoples. ‘The future that took shape in my mind,’ he wrote from a prison cell between 1942 and 1944, ‘was one of intimate co-operation, politically, economically and culturally, between India and the other countries of the world. But before the future came there was the present, and behind the present lay the long and tangled past, out of which the present had grown. So to the past I looked for understanding.’Footnote 78
As a product of the age, Nehru understood Buddhism to be the primary link between India and the rest of Asia. This idea coincided smoothly with his post-independence plan to establish India as a central player in international political affairs and to build closer economic links with other Asian countries. During the Inter-Asian Relations Conference, which met in New Delhi in March 1947, Nehru laid forth his philosophy which would characterize his foreign policy for the next decade: ‘In this atomic age, Asia will have to function effectively in the maintenance of peace. Indeed, there can be no peace unless Asia plays her part. . .the whole spirit and outlook of Asia are peaceful, and the emergence of Asia in world affairs will be a powerful influence for world peace.’Footnote 79 Projecting India as an international leader whose stature rested not on its armies, but on its moral superiority and devotion to world peace, Nehru enlisted India in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1955. The NAM, which was often called the ‘Third Way’, attempted to formulate an alternative policy to the Cold War divisions between communist and non-communist blocs. As the balance of global political power was replaced by a new power equilibrium oscillating between the United States and the Soviet Union, Nehru argued that a new Pan-Asian identity was an urgent necessity for global stability.
The Inter-Asian Conference in New Delhi coincided with several other conferences, including an All-Asia Buddhist Convention held at the New Delhi Buddha Vihara on 31 March. During that meeting, nearly two dozen government officials from Ceylon, Siam, Burma, and Tibet met with leading Indian Buddhists to discuss the important role Buddhists could have in forming an ‘Asian federation’ or what S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, one of the Ceylonese delegates and future prime minister, described as ‘a Brave New World’.Footnote 80 A recurring topic that day was the tremendous ‘sensitivity’ being shown to Buddhism by the new leadership in Delhi. When Nehru met the delegates later that week, the most pressing matter they raised was the management of the Maha Bodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya. The issue had been set aside during the Quit India movement, but in May of the previous year, Rajendra Prasad, the chairman of the committee, along with the MBS and Hindu MahāSabhā, had met in Patna and passed a further resolution to strip the current Hindu mahant of his legal ownership of the temple. In the face of the mahant’s continued opposition, the negotiations continued to stall, leaving Prasad with an ever-growing pile of demanding letters on his desk.Footnote 81 Nehru responded by promising the delegates ‘all support for the restoration of Buddhagaya to the Buddhists’. Just weeks later, he wrote to his secretary that Bodh Gaya should have a ‘certain international character’;Footnote 82 including foreign Buddhists on the Maha Bodhi Temple advisory committee, he added, would be ‘a graceful gesture to the Buddhist world’.Footnote 83 On 19 June 1949, the Bodh Gaya Temple Act was passed, resulting in an eight-member committee, split evenly between Buddhists and Hindus, with a final ninth vote to be decided by the governor of Bihar. The result was unsatisfactory to both parties but when the transfer was officially completed in 1953, Buddhists around the globe celebrated while the mahant counted his losses. The return of Buddhists to Bodh Gaya, it seems, was just one part of Nehru's Pan-Asian vision.Footnote 84
The Nehruvian era also marked the beginning of a period when long-time Buddhist activists in India gained the sanction of the central and state governments, emerging as critical interlocutors in government initiatives abroad. When Burma gained its independence in January of 1948, President Prasad attended the celebrations as part of India's first official delegation to the country. Joining Prasad was the ‘special envoy’ Bhikkhu Jagdish Kashyap (1908–1976), a brilliant Pali scholar and monastic from Bihar. In the 15 years that had passed since Kashyap had taken the vows of a Buddhist monk in Ceylon, he had studied widely across south and southeast Asia, gaining a deep knowledge of Buddhist history and building an extensive network of like-minded monastics and intellectuals in India and abroad. Presumably, it was these connections and skills that persuaded the government to include him in other delegations to China and Tibet in the following decade. During Kashyap's visit to Burma with President Prasad, he delivered saplings of the bo tree from Bodh Gaya to various Burmese officials, invoking a tradition of ritual veneration and gift-giving (dāna) that dates back to at least Tang China, when the Chinese monk Xuanzang returned from India with leaves from the bodhi tree as gifts for the emperor. Following the visit, Prasad wrote to Nehru:
There is a great deal of goodwill on account of cultural relationship with that country which could be canalized. . .[Kashyap] had conversations with leading Buddhists, about establishing some sort of a [Buddhist] cultural institution. . .its importance or necessity cannot be questioned. . .we require such institutions—or perhaps ‘missions’ should be a better expression—not only in Burma but in all Buddhist countries towards the east, south-east and north-east of India.Footnote 85
The idea resonated with New Delhi. By the end of the year, Nehru had pushed the central government to grant a plot of land in south Delhi to the Cambodian lawyer and politician turned itinerant monk Dharmavira Mahathera (1889–1999). When Dharmavira established the Aśoka Mission later that year, the property was little more than a thatched hut with a small Buddhist shrine, but its central location in the national capital, along with Nehru's support, ensured its growth.Footnote 86 During Nehru's own travels abroad, colonial Buddhist networks continued to pave the way for foreign affairs. In Japan, Nehru and other Indian leaders networked with Nichidatsu Fujī (1885–1985), the Japanese monk who, with the Birla family's financial support, built Buddhist temples in Calcutta in 1935, Rajgir in1936, and Bombay in 1940. Against the backdrop of the growing strain between Britain and Japan, Fujī returned to Kumamoto, the place of his birth, in 1938 ‘to contemplate what course of action he and [his Japanese sect] Nipponzan Myohoji should take’.Footnote 87 After Japan's defeat in the Second World War, Fujī began constructing Peace Pagodas (Shanti Stupa) across the globe on the basis that the massive Buddhist reliquaries could help save the world from destruction. Today, more than 40 of these grand monuments dot the globe, from India to Japan, the United States to South Africa, and Latvia to Italy. Significantly, when the first Peace Pagoda was inaugurated in Kumamoto in 1954, Nehru and Indian delegates from the Gandhian Seva Sangha were there to transfer ten reliquary urns to Fujī and other priests, in front of a massive crowd numbering in the thousands.Footnote 88
The impact of these relic expositions in other foreign Buddhist lands was also considerable. Relics have long played an important role in the formation and maintenance of Buddhist states, and as decolonizing initiatives took root across Asia, national leaders often looked to relics as vectors of moral order, political legitimacy, and social unity. For instance, the exhibition and, eventually, permanent loan of a portion of India's Sanchi-Satdhara relics to Burma from 1950–1952 was as highly politicized as it was popular. As Jack Daulton's detailed study shows, there was a series of high-profile events surrounding the relic transfers which involved Burma's political elite joining hands with Indian government representatives like S. P. Mukherjee, Nehru's former cabinet minister and president of the MBS.Footnote 89 For the Buddhist public in Burma, the climax of these affairs was undoubtedly the week-long festivities that marked the consecration and enshrinement of the calcite remains in Rangoon's [Yangon] Kaba Aye Pagoda (literally, ‘World Peace Pagoda’), a structure built to house the relics and widely touted at the time as the world's largest pagoda. Contemporaneous with the lavish ceremonies, which included U Nu hoisting a gem-encrusted hti to the top of the pagoda's spire as rockets were fired, was a local festival with theatrical performances, boxing matches, and an open-air cinema, all of which amounted to what Daulton calls ‘perhaps the most extraordinary celebration in modern Burmese history’.Footnote 90 Other Theravādin nations greeted India's holy vestiges with equal enthusiasm. Six months later, when Mukherjee travelled to Cambodia as the guest of honour at an exhibition of Indian relics in Cambodia, the events were no less opulent. During the week-long exhibition at the preah vihear held on the grounds of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh in October 1952, ‘tens and hundreds of thousands’ of people, including King Sihanouk, several ministers, military officials, and prominent monks were in attendance.Footnote 91 From New Delhi's perspective, these events were signs that India's Buddhist heritage could indeed forge a brave new world.
By the early 1950s, the act of distributing relics and other Buddhist antiquities had become so common that some government officials began to worry that they were running out of relics, a fear that is likely to have stemmed from a warning issued by India's director-general of archaeology a decade before that India's source of ancient relics would soon be exhausted.Footnote 92 Such anxieties were evident in several diplomatic exchanges. For instance, in 1940, when a Thai Goodwill Mission to India returned home with a steatite relic casket, seven-and-a-half centimetres high, containing a small cylinder of gold with fragments of ashes and bone, the leader of the Mission explained to the chief secretary of India's Ministry of External Affairs ‘that the success of the Mission would be judged in Bangkok according to the value of the relics which it brought back’.Footnote 93 Later in the day, having had ‘a whole bottle of champagne without being visibly affected’, the Thai Mission head added, ‘in confidence that it did not matter much if the relics were not genuine’.Footnote 94 After their return home with the relics, the Thai government responded that ‘here in Thailand these relics are confidently assumed to be those of the Buddha himself. . .[and] the casket containing the relics has been exposed to the public view and has been venerated by many thousands of people, including the highest personages in the land’.Footnote 95 A decade later another request for Buddha relics, this time from the Thai-Bharat Cultural Lodge in Bangkok, had to be delicately declined. After much discussion, the request resulted in the distribution not of corporeal remains, as had often been the custom, but of the earth from ‘four sacred Buddhist pilgrim centres’.Footnote 96 During a three-day ceremony in February 1953, an urn containing the sacred soil—taken from Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Kushinagar—was carried by Thai monastic and government officials to the temple at Prachin Puri where ‘thousands of people’ gathered to venerate its installation inside the Chedi of the Wat Saeng Swang in Bangkok.Footnote 97 In a Thai-language booklet published to commemorate the event, Nehru described the ceremony as one ‘to serve the cause of peace for humanity. . .The Lord Buddha has been for ages past a symbol of peace, and the great faith which drew its inspiration from him has been a link for ages past between India and Thailand. I trust that this dedication will help to revive the ancient cultural relations between our two countries.’Footnote 98
By November of 1952, when the Sāriputta and Mogallāna relics were installed at a new vihara financed by the government in Sanchi, attendees regularly included the ‘who's who’ of the Asian Buddhist world. In addition to Nehru, Radhakrishnan, Mukherjee, and the Indian delegates of the MBS, the following were also in attendance: Prime Minister U Nu of Burma; Maharaja Kumar and Kumari of Sikkim; U Win, minister for Sasana affairs in Burma; A. Ratnakaye, home minister of Ceylon; Kushok Bakula, a senior Ladakhi lama (and a later Indian ambassador to Mongolia), in addition to a wide range of representatives and ambassadors from non-Buddhist countries like France, Nepal, and Pakistan. Weeks later, amid the ‘chanting of Buddhist hymns and recitations of suttas to the accompaniment of blowing of conch-shells and ringing of bells’, a near-identical list of political dignitaries was present in Calcutta.Footnote 99 Only this time, the former and present prime ministers of Cambodia and the Japanese and Thai ambassadors joined the distinguished gathering. Clearly, Nehru's declaration to the Constituent Assembly just five years earlier that the Buddhist dharmacakra was a reminder that India was once ‘an international centre. . .[and not] a tight little narrow country’ was bearing fruit.Footnote 100
Prasenjit Duara has shown that ‘civilizational’ categories served as the trans-territorial basis for many twentieth-century nationalist leaders in China, Japan, and Sri Lanka.Footnote 101 Like these figures, Nehru was aiming to project India as the sole heir to a progressive and glorious civilization that was simultaneously both unique and therefore ‘national’, and yet equally ‘trans-national’ and therefore part of the wider heritage of Asia. This idea, which contains a possibly insoluble tension between the exclusion of nationalism and inclusion of universalism, had its strength in modern India on the basis of Buddhism's origins. Nehru, of course, was astute enough to capitalize on these historical connections. During the Calcutta functions of 1952, Mukherjee told the international delegations present that as ‘the birthplace of Buddha and of many of His saintly disciples, [India] is the home of a culture and religion that brought civilization and spiritual light to a large section of the Asian peoples. . .This is an event of profound religious and historical significance not only for India but also for the whole of Asia.’Footnote 102 Relishing a universalist message of Buddhist fraternity, tolerance, and peace, bolstered by slogans about Pan-Asian unity, Nehru argued that India was a kind of axis mundi for the Buddhist world. Following a cultural convention in Calcutta in 1949, he remarked: ‘It was gratifying to see all these nations of the Buddhist world looking to India, not only with friendship but as the mother country where their great religion originated.’Footnote 103
A Buddhist teaching in impermanence: Tibet and the India–China debacle
By 1954, state rituals supporting Buddhism and using the language of Buddhism were central to the Pan-Asian performances of India's theatre state. Perhaps nowhere was this more obvious than in Indian attempts to assess and resolve the tumultuous political relationship between China, India, and Tibet. Between 1951 and 1958, there were at least five unofficial ‘friendship missions’ led by Indian Buddhist monks, scholars, and officials to China.Footnote 104 The Buddhist links between the two countries were the focus of these delegations and special efforts were made to visit those historical sites associated with the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, whose seventh-century pilgrimage to India became a focus in the early years of 1950s Sino-Indian relations. According to the historian Holmes Welch, ‘so important was Hsuan-tsang [Xuanzang] considered [as] a symbol of Sino-Indian friendship that the temples connected with him in Sian [Xian] were among the first in China to be repaired [after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949] and at once began to be shown to Indian visitors’.Footnote 105 For instance, during the Indian mission to China in 1955, the first to be led by a government official (A. K. Chanda, the deputy minister of external affairs), the Indian delegates gifted Buddha relics and bo tree saplings to Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai, and Mao Zedong.Footnote 106 In addition to visiting industrial centres and Chinese theatres, the Chinese government arranged for Indian officials to visit the ‘principal centres of cultural contact’ between India and China in the past centuries, including the pagodas of Xuanzang and Kumārajīva.Footnote 107 The premise was clear: revive memories of old links and symbols of their ancient relations.
The most conspicuous example of Buddhist theatrics between India and China began in 1954 with the signing of the Sino-Indian, or Panchshila Agreement, which marked the apogee of the Hindi-Chini Bhāī Bhāī (Indo-Chinese Brotherhood) policy. The preamble to the accord, entitled ‘Panchshila’ purportedly in reference to the five (pañc) principles of Buddhist morality (śīla), details the rules of conduct between the two Asian superpowers.Footnote 108 The framework is indeed remarkably Buddhist: 1) mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity, 2) mutual non-aggression, 3) mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs, 4) equality and mutual benefit, and 5) peaceful coexistence. As the famous expression goes, the Sino-Indian brotherhood (bhāī bhāī) soon went ‘bye-bye’, culminating in the deadly Indo-Chinese War of 1962. In his seminal history of Buddhism in modern China, Welch offers a sober assessment of this new age of international Buddhist diplomacy:
It was possible for genuine friendship to arise between individual Buddhists who had been brought together by people's diplomacy. It has to be recognized, however, that even if it did not arise it was going to be reported; and that while friendship can exist between individuals, to speak of it between nations involves a misleading personification. Nations have no hearts. They act—or rather their governments act—on the basis of national self-interest. The purpose of people's diplomacy was to obscure this fact, to create the illusion that nations are capable of loyalty and deserve trust in the same way as individual friends.’Footnote 109
As Welch's critical perspective suggests, there were opportunities for genuine collaboration but there was always an underlying layer of realpolitik. By 1956, India and China's supposed brotherhood was under increasing strain and Buddhist celebrations in India that year provide a final window into the ritual theatre of Nehru's Buddhist statecraft.
One of the most important events of the Buddha Jayanti celebrations of 1956 was the much-anticipated arrival of the fourteenth Dalai Lama to India. His visit, which was his first trip to India and ‘one of the most politically important pilgrimages in Tibetan history’, came amid declining relations between India and China and recent uprisings among Tibetans in Kham in eastern Tibet against the Chinese occupation.Footnote 110 Just four years earlier, the notorious ‘Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet’, which effectively ceded control of the central Tibetan state to the People's Republic of China—had been signed by a Tibetan delegation and there were serious concerns over whether the Dalai Lama would stay in India. Throughout the course of his visit, there were continued rumours and news of ongoing Tibetan rebellions against the Chinese, thus exacerbating the situation. The complete picture of this fascinating year-long pilgrimage is beyond the scope of this article, but for our purposes here, it is another stunning example of the ‘poetics of power’ central to India's post-colonial foreign relations. Although the Dalai Lama's visit to India's various Buddhist shrines and sites was ostensibly religious, most—if not all—of the public events themselves were overshadowed by political affairs.
The major actors in the play—Nehru, Zhou Enlai (the Chinese premier), and the Dalai Lama—all struggled to push their own agendas. Although there was already explicit recognition that Tibet was a part of China in the Panchshila Agreement, throughout his travels the Dalai Lama, much to the chagrin of Beijing, was treated by India ‘like a head of state’.Footnote 111 One of the most important moments in the Dalai Lama's visit came in Bihar when the Chinese engaged in their own Buddhist ritual (dāna) by donating money for the construction of a Xuanzang Memorial Hall in Nalanda, Bihar. This seemingly simple gesture of cultural goodwill was rich in political overtones. Rather than having a Chinese official present the gift, which was also coupled with the bodily remains of the intrepid Chinese pilgrim himself, the Dalai Lama was placed in charge of the ritual offering. As Tsering Shakya explains:
the Chinese tried to make it appear that the [Dalai Lama's] visit was a delegation from China by arranging for the Dalai Lama to present a gift from the Chinese Government. When the Dalai Lama and Panchen Rinpoche visited the famous Buddhist university city of Nalanda, the Dalai Lama gave Nehru the relics of the Chinese monk Xuan Zang who had visited India more than a thousand years earlier, and announced that the Chinese Government would donate 300,000 yuan for the construction of a memorial hall. This ceremony could hardly conceal the diplomatic and political problems that had emerged.Footnote 112
By trying to make the Dalai Lama appear as a Chinese rather than Tibetan delegate, Beijing was sending explicit signals to New Delhi, the international community, as well as the politically savvy Tibetan émigré in India that Tibet was theirs. These kinds of overtly political performances and attitudes behind the state Buddhist ceremonies of 1956 leads one to cast a justifiably sceptical eye on the entire Nehruvian decade of state Buddhist diplomacy.
Conclusion: the competing wills of universalism and nationalism
How do we reconcile the performance of politics, the aspirations of a benevolent universal Buddhism, and the rational calculations of a bureaucratic state? While it is tempting to reduce everything to politics or to blindly ignore the political gerrymandering behind the public accolades, the complexity of human life and the habits, responsibilities, and logics inherent in political statecraft demand a more nuanced account. Ananya Vajpeyi suggests that the life of Nehru reveals two trends: one towards the idealism of non-violence, tolerance, and unity, and the other towards the realism of warring nation-states and state diplomacy. ‘The tension within the self,’ she writes, ‘between aspiration and instrumentality, between norm and purpose mirrors or replicates a larger contradiction in the very nature of the modern state, which cannot but pull in these two opposite directions in order to present itself as ethically desirable and worthy of dying for.’Footnote 113 This tension, which Vajpeyi frames through the Indic categories of pragmatism (artha) and ethical order (dharma), is also found in the distance between Aśoka and Buddha, or between the ‘world conqueror’ and ‘world renouncer’.Footnote 114 Nehru, it appears, seems to have been torn between these two models, and drew on both for personal sustenance as well as political inspiration at different times.
Yet the tension between Aśokan statecraft and Buddhist benevolence (mettā), like the tension between nationalism and universalism, is difficult (if not impossible) to reconcile. Nehru's uses of Buddhism in the post-colonial state demonstrates this very dilemma: one turned towards Buddhist morality and universalism, and the other towards the national self-interest of the Indian state and its territorial sovereignty. By linking nation with state through the ethical principles embodied by the dharmacakra and lion pillar, Nehru offered an Indian alternative to the Cold War models of communism and democracy, and to Gandhian nationalism, by projecting modern Buddhism as a kind of enlightened nationhood. It was a project of self-definition upon which he felt the Indian state's future relied.
In the turbulent years after Independence, Nehru and other leading cabinet members attempted to institute all kinds of land and social reform policies in the Indian state, some of which, despite his deep vested interests, collapsed under the weight of a fractured India. For Nehru, the promotion of Buddhist tolerance, non-violence, and the legacy of Indian Buddhist civilization through national cultural events, institutes, relic exhibitions, and the national flag and symbol represented a less politically contentious vision of national development and reform. To be sure, in terms of their basic mechanics and choreography, many of these events differed little from those conducted by the viceroy's ‘humble servants’ when the Union Jack still flew high above Delhi. In the Nehruvian age, Buddhist rituals and idioms were simply adapted to the politics of the era in the form of Indian secularism, non-violence, and the Non-Aligned Movement. They were an integral part of Nehru's attempt to promote the development and welfare of the nation, temper the antagonisms between Hindu–Muslim factions, instil a sense of secular-spiritual belonging to the Indian state, and maintain the loyalty of the national frontiers. Nehru's idealistic vision, with its connection to a purportedly united Buddhist world and simultaneous rooting in the land of its origin, reflected a new sense of hope as the age of European empires in Asia came to an end. Yet the memory of the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan and the general unease in world politics by the mid-1950s, with the crises over the Suez Canal, the revolution in Hungary, and the growing ideological clash between the Soviet Union and the United States were weighing on Nehru's conscience. ‘So we hover between war and peace, between the atom [bomb] and the Buddha,’ he wrote to the Indian ambassador to the United Nations in 1956.Footnote 115
In those tempestuous years Nehru was forced to succumb to the bitter reality that while the nation's well-being could also be the world's well-being, the two do not always go hand-in-hand. The first major rupture in his Buddhist politic came when Ambedkar, Nehru's former law minister, and nearly half a million of his followers converted to Buddhism in a mass ceremony (dharma dīkṣā) in Nagpur. It was a triumphant moment for Ambedkar and for an oppressed population of Dalits which had been unjustly forced to bear the heavy burden of social ostracism and violence. Yet Ambedkar's Buddhism (Navāyāna) was in fundamental contradiction to Nehru's own vision.Footnote 116 Rather than giving further momentum to Nehru's secularized cultural Buddhism, which stressed the resolution of difference through a non-aligned Third or ‘Middle Way’, Ambedkar's conversion recreated the historical antagonism between Brahmanism and Buddhism, and Hindus and Buddhists. Having personally experienced the failures of the secular state to rectify the wrongs inflicted upon the Untouchables, Ambedkar's vision for Dalit emancipation hinged on a separate identity as the foundation for political rights. Although there are some hints that Ambedkar's Buddhism was moving towards an enlightened, national identity for all Indians and not just Dalits, his untimely death, just two months after the grand conversion, effectively undercut that momentum, shifting the parameters of Indian Buddhism away from reconciliation towards struggle, exacerbation, and continued revolutionary fervour.Footnote 117
The ideals of reason, tolerance, and non-violent imperial expansion, symbolized by the government's Buddhism, had come under deep scrutiny, both by Nehru and his critics. Growing Dalit conversions to Buddhism and the Dalai Lama's exile to India in 1959 undermined Nehru's attempt to synthesize universalism and nationalism. Trapped by his own web of a universalizing Indian Buddhism, Nehru had failed to see the limitations of his Buddhist diplomacy, or what Joseph Nye famously called ‘soft power’.Footnote 118 It was simply soft. When Chinese boots hit the ground in India in 1962, leading to India's devastating defeat in the Sino-Indian War, Nehru's Buddhist vision took a catastrophic blow. All the premonitions had been there. By 1960, the Indian public had clearly caught wind of this alternative face of Buddhist diplomacy, as is evident by the immense scepticism levelled at the ‘pilgrimage’ by U Nu, the Burmese prime minister, to India that year. When Nu met with Nehru and the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev in Calcutta, in between visiting Buddhist sites, ‘for a casual talk about old times’, as Nehru put it, the Guardian called the bluff, reporting that, ‘the real purpose [of] the visit was political and not religious’.Footnote 119
Although Buddhism no longer stands at the forefront of India's soft power diplomacy, having been surpassed by new cultural contributions like Bollywood and yoga, it still retains an important presence. Nowhere has this remained more obvious than in the Indian government's continued bids to cast Bodh Gaya as the centre of the Buddhist world. As David Geary's rich body of research shows, the Indian government has continued to make special concessions in the form of land grants to various Buddhist national communities up to the present-day.Footnote 120 The Pan-Asian discourses that surround these activities at Bodh Gaya have also been a regular feature of contemporary efforts to revive the ancient monastery of Nalanda as a global university.Footnote 121 And in recent years, the Nehruvian missions of the 1950s have been undergoing their own revival. For instance, from 2013–2014, then President Pranab Mukherjee delivered saplings of the bo tree in Bodh Gaya to state heads in Thailand, Vietnam, and Korea. Likewise, when Chinese President Xi Jinping made his first state visit to India in 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government built a special visual exhibit on Gujarat's ancient Buddhist heritage to welcome him. In the days preceding Xi's arrival, Modi published images of India's Buddhist sites on his Twitter account and tweeted numerous times about how ‘Buddhism is a strong bond between India and China’.Footnote 122 India's transnational Buddhist networks were also the scene of much fanfare during Modi's first visit to Japan as prime minister. After visiting the Toji Temple in Kyoto, both the Japanese and Indian press reported the event to have ‘rekindled ancient India-Japan civilizational bonds’ while Prime Minister Abe Shinzo tweeted, ‘Looking at statues of Buddha, we were reminded of the deep historical ties between Japan and India’.Footnote 123 The medium has changed, but the political performance and message remain the same.
