Douglas Ober’s Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India, published by Navayana in March 2023, has been shortlisted for the $75,000 Cundill History Prize 2023. In this excerpt, Ober tells us the story of Raja Sivaprasad, a pioneering author of history textbooks for schoolchildren in the 19th century. This account shows us how, contrary to popular belief, the modern Buddhist revival in India was not just a result of colonial interest, but also led by local intellectuals and enthusiasts.

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In 1864, the department of public instruction in Allahabad published the first of a three-volume Hindi textbook, Itihas Timir Nashak or History as the Dispeller of Darkness. Composed by the Indian educator, Raja Sivaprasad (1823–95), the Itihas was one of the most popular school textbooks in nineteenth-century India, remaining part of the standard curriculum for history and geography classes from the fourth to the tenth grade in the North-western Provinces, from 1864 up until the turn of the century. While Sivaprasad was not a scholar of Buddhism, he was, as Ulrike Stark has argued, a “hybrid intellectual” who mastered both Indian and British systems of learning and then used those skills to engage the colonizers “as interlocutor and cultural broker [rather] than merely as ‘native informant’”. This makes his vision of Buddhism of particular interest since he approached it not from the position of a specialist but from that of an intellectual whose background and training lay within the wider north Indian current.

Born into a family of wealthy Jain merchants, Sivaprasad received a private education in Persian and Sanskrit before enrolling in Benares Sanskrit College, an institution first established by the Company administrator, John Duncan, in 1791. Like most Indian elites, he was multilingual, but his linguistic and intellectual gifts were exceptional. By the age of sixteen, his in-depth knowledge of Jain, Hindu, and Islamic works, alongside his growing mastery of English, Bengali, and Arabic, gained him a position as the ambassador (vakeel) to the maharaja of Bharatpur at the British Rajputana Agency. Not long after, he joined the foreign department as a munshi, later rising to meer munshi (chief clerk) of the Simla Agency and becoming private secretary to H.M. Elliot, the well-known British historian and civil servant. The manner in which he carried himself and rose to the top of the colonial hierarchy was as much a matter of contempt to some as it was inspiration to others, a sentiment well captured in the theosophist, Henry Olcott’s, assessment:

[Sivaprasad was] throughout life a supple courtier, who curried favor with every European official, played the sycophant and got titles, estates, and honors of sorts, earned the contempt of his compatriots and, at the same time, that of the whites to whom he “bent the pregnant hinges of the knee that”—well, that he might get what he coveted.

As the description indicates, Sivaprasad’s accomplishments were many, and in 1856, he became the first non-European inspector of schools in the North-western Provinces—a position he held until his retirement in 1878. Here, he began transforming the way the wider populace conceived of the subcontinent’s history, and Buddhism in tow.

In the opening pages of the Itihas, Sivaprasad outlines his reasons for composing the textbook. First, he found the existing histories of India, written by Lord Elphinstone and other British writers, to be full of errors and historical fallacies. Second, he wished “to prove to my countrymen that, notwithstanding their very strong antipathy to ‘change’, they have changed, and will change.” In Sivaprasad’s view, the study of the past was necessary for improvement and to understand contemporary predicaments. “Our readers must learn what history means,” he writes, “and with this knowledge they will not take offense at what we write … no sober man is expected to go through these pages and again believe in the mythology of the Puranas.” A firm believer in the model of “scientific history” invoked by his former teachers Elliot and James Prinsep, Sivaprasad drove a harsh wedge between myth and history. The stories of Rama and Krishna, of Jesus as the Messiah, and Muhammad as Prophet—these may all be believed, but “we ought never to mix it with the authentic [pramanika] events of history.” To determine that which is authentic, students were instructed to base their arguments on objectivity (yatharth) and strong evidence (prabal praman), being forever warned about those individuals that claim that the contents of their books (pothi) could not possibly be false.

Having outlined his historical method, Sivaprasad explains that the first step in determining the true (sachcha) Indian past is to realize that Indians could no longer afford to ignore the era of the “Buddha which begins from Shakyamuni”. Then, over the course of roughly fifty pages, or one half of volume three, the Itihas proceeds to outline details of the Buddhist tradition that had been largely unexpressed in this part of India for the past several centuries. Admittedly, many aspects of his outline diverge from what today might be considered standard accounts of Indic Buddhism. While this is due largely to the inadequacy of the scholarship at the time, his was the first modern Hindi text to recount the Buddha’s life in terms (semi-) faithful to normative Buddhist accounts.

Narrating the story of the Buddha’s life, Sivaprasad recalls plots familiar to Buddhist cultures worldwide: the young prince abandons his life of luxury, practices various austerities before realizing the error of asceticism and gains enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, where he remains in a meditative state for forty-nine days. Although he does not always specify his sources, much of the content appears to have been drawn from Pali-language suttas, the English translations of which he likely took from George Turnour’s “Pali Buddhistical Annals,” published in 1837–38. Perhaps the most striking divergence from normative biographies of the Buddha is Sivaprasad’s argument—contained in a long footnote—that the Buddha (Shakyamuni) and Mahavira, the historical founder of Jainism, were actually the same person. Of Jain background himself, Sivaprasad anticipated criticism from Jain scholars but he was adamant in his view that ancient Jains and Buddhists were originally followers of a single figure named “Buddh Mahavir” and only later, just “as a river flowing to some distance branches off into two streams named separately,” did the two form separate paths. The argument that Mahavira and the Buddha were identical may seem odd today, but according to John Cort, it was only after the towering German Indologist and scholar of Jain texts, Hermann Jacobi, published the Kalpasutras in 1879, that Orientalist scholars became convinced of their differences. Despite this (mis)interpretation, the descriptive narrative that Sivaprasad provides is surprisingly faithful to Pali Buddhist sources and contains none of the demonizing of Puranic scriptures better known at the time. In alignment with his own humanistic lens, Sivaprasad also firmly placed the Buddha in temporal history, providing the reader with precise dates and times at which certain events occurred in his life. Moreover, while the cosmological element of the Buddha’s enlightenment is not ignored, the accent on his humanity is obvious.

As for Buddhism itself, he declares it to be a “progressive and modern creed” (unnati ka naya dhang) that “prevailed throughout the whole of Bharatvarsha [India]” for more than a thousand years. The school textbook explains how when Buddhism was at its apex, people from across the globe (sari duniya) visited India to study at its universities (vidyalaya). Rulers outlawed capital punishment (qatal ki saza) and built large hospitals where the poor and sick could be relieved of their suffering. He tells the reader how the bones of two of the Buddha’s most renowned disciples were recently discovered near Bhopal, the princely state whose Muslim begums would decades later go to great lengths to protect the famed Sanchi stupa. He also reports that large Buddhist ruins had been found near the Hindu holy city of Benares. Narrating the accounts of the medieval Chinese pilgrims, Xuanzang and Fa-Hsien, Sivaprasad explains how in the provincial city of Patna (ancient Pataliputra), the Buddha’s birthday was celebrated with great pomp: there were gripping plays and performances (natak aur lila ka hangama), night-time illuminations (rat ko roshni ka tamasha), and four-wheeled chariots carrying statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

By Sivaprasad’s reckoning, the Buddha’s message of equality and non-violence was a direct challenge to the brahmanical elites (vedon ki mahima langhan). In a remarkable passage, he even frames early Buddhism as a popular protest movement against the tyranny of society, comparing its fight against brahmanical caste supremacy and Vedic sacrifice to US president Abraham Lincoln’s, struggle “for the emancipation of slaves” (ghulami se nikalne) in the American Civil War (1861–65) and the Russian tsar (badshah) Alexander II’s freeing of the serfs in 1861 (49). Before the Buddha arrived on the scene, the shudras or lower castes were treated as no better than cattle, he argues. “But how long,” Sivaprasad asks rhetorically, “can a wooden vessel be heated without setting it aflame? … [I]t is a general rule that an institution based on the deprivation (nuqsan) of the many for the profit (phaida) of a few has not long to last”. Thus, when Shakyamuni spoke against the “evil of violence” (himsa ki burai) and proclaimed that “Aryan and non-Aryans, men as well as women, were all alike able to choose their own religion (dharma),” the number of Indians who took to the Buddha’s message soared. “It was autumn for the Sanskrit and spring for the Prakrit. The brahmins had become [pale like] morning stars while the shudras … bloomed like lotus flowers before the sun.”

Despite these progressive qualities, Sivaprasad explains that there was a fundamental flaw in the Buddha’s teaching. It is “beyond the sphere of ordinary reasoning,” he contends, “attainable only by intuition and deep and patient meditation”—unrealistic skills for the majority populace. Thus, by the time of Ashoka, the teachings of the Buddha had weakened the people, allowing sacrilege (dharmaghata), ostentatiousness (ayyashi), and idol worship (murti puja) to take root. In fact, the real danger was not its idealism, but its pacifism. In a statement that anticipates the later writings of twentieth-century Hindu nationalists like V.D. Savarkar and B.S. Moonje, he writes that Buddhist non-violence so “softened the heart to the detriment of the land” that “the tame spirit of petty traffickers, banias, fell upon the kshatriyas [ruling classes] … [and] the cruelty, hardheartedness, rapacity and debauchery of the Muhammadans demoralized both [the merchants and ruling classes].” By the thirteenth century, Buddhism vanished.

From the moment it was printed, Sivaprasad’s Itihas ruffled the feathers of a wide swathe of Indian society. Many protested against its anti-Muslim bias. Others were uneasy with his image of an ever-fragmented Hinduism. Educators complained about its excessive footnoting and pedantic prose. But despite calls for the book to be removed from state curricula, it only grew in popularity. In its first three years of use (1864–67), the department of education in the North-western Provinces published more than twenty thousand copies of the text. When the government issued translations into Urdu (1867) and in “a rare reversal of colonial textual hierarchy”, even English (1874), the number of copies circulating in classrooms across the subcontinent nearly tripled each year. By 1870, more than eighteen thousand copies were being printed annually. This number nearly doubled by 1883. Buddhism may not have found its place among north India’s largest private publishing houses, like Naval Kishore’s “Empire of Books”, but it had found a grand new patron in the state’s educational campaigns to “civilize the natives”.

The widespread use of the Itihas in government schools is of great significance considering the radically different views of the past being imparted in customary centers of learning. Popular Hindu works like the Vishnu Purana demonized Buddhists. Temple art and chronicles depicted Buddhists as dangerous to society and degenerate. One catches glimpses of these attitudes in contemporaneous memoirs. For instance, in Rahul Sankrityayan’s autobiographical portrait of his childhood education in the village schools (pathshala) of late 1890s Azamgarh (in modern-day Uttar Pradesh), he recalls a fascinating moment when his grandfather tells him that the carved Buddha images at Ajanta were of “demons” (rakshasas) frozen into stone by Hindu heroes. Colonial schools not only challenged these views but attacked their very epistemological foundations. This was a pivotal change. In the textbooks, the Buddha became a modern icon: a veritable Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ, the latter of which comparison Sivaprasad could not resist employing (in an ode to Max Müller). Sivaprasad’s interpretations strengthened the tendency to understand the history of Buddhists and the Buddha as part of the existing discourse on world religion, an intellectual object on par with Christianity. Like all “world religions,” Buddhism was ancient, geographically widespread, had its own historical founder, and a fixed “canon” of “classical” scriptures (typically associated with Sanskrit or Pali).

Although Sivaprasad was deeply conversant with Orientalist thought, one needs to be careful in over-interpreting its influence. The historian Avril Powell has shown how many of Sivaprasad’s inferences were drawn from his readings of Persian texts and much vaster knowledge of that literature. Furthermore, Sivaprasad composed the Itihas because he found existing British histories of India inadequate (and he was courageous enough to say so). While Sivaprasad’s reading of primary Buddhist sources in Pali seems to have relied upon English translations, many of the conclusions he drew must be situated within a larger Jain and brahmanical Hindu framework. His assertion that Buddhist non-violence and laxity of morals led to India’s downfall was, for instance, the modern extension of an entrenched Puranic argument about Buddhism leading to social disorder and decay. The idea that Buddhist monastics were hypocrites and hedonists dwelling in luxury was also a common trope in satirical Sanskrit literature, in which Sivaprasad was likely well read.

The argument that the Buddha was a kind of socio-religious reformer, a Lincoln and Luther combined into one, was certainly a novel proclamation that can be traced to his intimate knowledge of Euro-American history and current events. While the notion that the Buddha was a reformer may be a historical anachronism, it has maintained its steam to the present day because Sivaprasad’s critique of Vedic norms has deep and discursive underpinnings in the literary traditions of both Buddhists and brahmins. Lastly, his argument that Buddhists once formed the majority of the Indian population, particularly among oppressed castes, has had an equally long shelf life, with real-life repercussions among colonial and post-colonial dalit–bahujan populations. Ultimately, many of his claims regarding Buddhist history are derived from both pre-modern sources and colonial scholarship. The Itihas is best seen in this vein, as a hybrid intellectual’s synthesis of the available materials.

Douglas Ober teaches history at Fort Lewis College, Colorado, and is an honorary research associate in the Centre for India and South Asia Research at the University of British Columbia.

This is an edited excerpt where the academic notes and references have been removed. Excerpted with permission from Navayana.

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