Douglas Ober, "Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2023)

New Books in Indian Religions · Jun 16, 2023 · 1h 38m

Received wisdom has it that Buddhism disappeared from India, the land of its birth, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, long forgotten until British colonial scholars re-discovered it in the early 1800s. Its full-fledged revival, so the story goes, only occurred in 1956, when the Indian civil rights pioneer Dr. B. R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with half a million of his Dalit (formerly "untouchable") followers.

This, however, is only part of the story. Dust on the Throne reframes discussions about the place of Buddhism in the subcontinent from the early nineteenth…