Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : Publisher Anand on Gail Omvedt’s book on Buddhism and the politics of freedom and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
Twenty-three years ago, when Ravikumar and I came up with the idea of starting a publishing house to be a vehicle for Ambedkarite ideas, we were looking for a name. Many names were considered and set aside. One struck and has since stuck: Navayana. In the summer of 2003, I was reading Gail Omvedt’s Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste, which had just been published by Sage. In the introduction to this book, Gail posed a question: “Is a fourth yana, a Navayana, a kind of modernistic Enlightenment version of the Dhamma, really possible within the framework of Buddhism?” The last chapter, called “Navayana Buddhism and the Modern Age”, explored this idea in detail.
Our publishing house owes many debts to Gail Omvedt. Right from our modest start on November 5, 2003, she was a keen supporter. In 2008, she published her first book with us: Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anti-Caste Intellectuals. Gail passed away in 2021. And in 2022, Sage Publishing shut down its books division in India. We felt the need to bring back Buddhism in India to a new generation of readers. Gail’s partner Bharat Patankar and daughter Prachi Patankar agreed and enabled this. And today, as our bumbling republic completes 76 years, we have re-issued the title with a new Foreword by the historian Uma Chakravarti.
A mortal conflict
Why is it important to keep this book and Ambedkar’s idea of a Prabuddha Bharat (Enlightened India) alive? What is the history that Gail sought to retell, framing it with a statement Ambedkar had made in his posthumously published work, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India: “The history of India is a history of the mortal conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism.”
More than two thousand years ago, the northern plains of the Indian subcontinent witnessed a great ideological contest. What came to be known as Brahmanism and Buddhism struggled with each other. The revolution created a counter-revolution. Heterodoxy ossified into orthodoxy. And even though Buddhism waned over time, the memory of its revolutionary promise infected the cultural unconscious, erupting every now and then to push history towards new thoughts of freedom and equality. Its effects reverberate into the present.
But this history was lost to myth, and the contingencies of conquest and servitude brushed aside the deep questions it raised. Omvedt’s study was the culmination of a process that began in the nineteenth century with the rediscovery of India’s Buddhist history. Anti-caste thinkers found a counter-history they could identify with. BR Ambedkar led the greatest mass conversion of about half-a-million followers to Buddhism in 1956. The religion had come alive again. The dhammachakra and the Sarnath pillar became authoritative symbols once more. But what was the significance of this history for the lay people of the country?
India and Buddhism
Gail Omvedt came to India in the 1970s as a young doctoral researcher. She got swept up in the peasant movement, fell in love, became a political activist and eventually an authority on India’s anti-caste, working-class and feminist movements. In due course, she began chronicling the many radicals and iconoclasts from the subcontinent’s history who articulated visions of egalitarianism and utopianism. This road inevitably led her to the Buddha.
As Uma Chakravarti writes in her foreword to the new edition, “Gail was a serious scholar … she located herself firmly within the Ambedkarite tradition of Buddhism that saw it as a succour from the brutalities of Hinduism. … This led her to questions about what the Buddha thought, said and did in his own time to find a way out of humanity’s cycle of sorrow. She researched the quest of ancient Buddhists for a meaningful and ethical way of living, and their ideas of shaping the world for an ethical and meaningful way of being, both individually and collectively.”
With Buddhism in India, Gail Omvedt demystifies the mystical and takes Ambedkar’s creation of socially-motivated Buddhism as the consequential development in the politics of freedom. She goes back to the past and shows us how Buddhism emerged, why it declined and how it has become important once more. Buddhism in India is one of the most celebrated and foundational works in anti-caste scholarship. The task of annihilating caste seems almost impossible in the present. Omvedt’s work shows us that this is a task that has been taken up before, that we are not alone, but heirs of a long line of revolutionaries. This is the history that Gail gives us. And this is the Gail that history gives us.