BUDDHIST CALCUTTA

By the late 19th century, Calcutta was not only one of the most important cities of the British empire, it had also emerged as a pivotal city for Buddhists in South Asia and colonial Southeast and East Asia. From the first decade of the 20th century onwards, Calcutta was visited by various Buddhist leaders—Japanese priests, Tibetan lamas that included the Thirteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet and the Grand Lama of Siberia, Burmese reformers and others, who addressed gatherings and offered prayers. Calcutta would soon boast of a Burmese Buddhist pagoda and an association of Burmese Buddhists, Buddhist temples in Howrah and Lake Road, and Chinese Buddhist temples in Chinatown. A number of new societies and study circles focused on Buddhism and Buddhist study were established. There was the Buddhist Text Society started by Sarat Chandra Das, the Buddhist Shrine Restoration Society, which had a life of about 10 years, and the popular Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha and the Mahabodhi Society, which still exist. A branch of the Young Men's Buddhist Association was set up in Darjeeling in 1912. Many Buddhist periodicals were in circulation in Calcutta too. The scholar of Pali, Beni Madhab Barua, and Nepali Buddhist activist, Dharma Aditya Dharmacharyya, began a journal called Buddhist India in 1927, which lasted until 1929. Numerous articles on Buddhism found their way into the pages of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Indian Culture, Indian Historical Quarterly and many others. The Mahabodhi Society had an English-language journal that brought together figures involved in the Buddhist revival. For a time, it also had a Hindi journal called Dharmadhuta that was published from Sarnath. Participants in the emerging public sphere were not only from the bhadralok but included a much more international presence with people like Dharmapala and Dharmacharyya, art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and others. This lent a global aspect to these discussions.

Colonial Calcutta was witness to wide-ranging discussions on Buddhism and comparative religion in the burgeoning media, that is newspapers, journals, pamphlets and modern publishing, and in venues like the new university in Calcutta, study circles and religious reform societies.

This chapter examines the first systematic efforts to eliminate the Heimat concept. The chapter shows how they emerged in the early 1960s amidst a period of Cold War crisis. Expellee claims to a right to Heimat in the East lurched to the centre of the greatest foreign policy debate of the period and represented a major barrier to rapprochement with the Eastern bloc. Supporters of rapprochement took up two conflicting strategies in confronting expellee Heimat rhetoric. The first challenged how the expellee societies understood the concept, while the second involved arguing that desire for Heimat was inherently fascist. The chapter shows how other generational, demographic, and economic developments also shaped the anti-Heimat movement. While earlier focus on Heimat had been tied to its loss, long-term economic growth, completed reconstruction, and decline in mobility rates led earlier preoccupation with Heimat to ebb. A number of activists on the extra-parliamentary left, many of whom sought re-engagement in the 1970s, also described attachment to local Heimat as inherently exclusionary, reactionary, overly emotional, militarist, or a blockage to international revolutionary change.

The chapter examines the development of agriculture and rural society, the crisis of agriculture in the late nineteenth century, and the political mobilization of German farmers.

The German Empire was born in the aftermath of one war and died at the conclusion of another. Even within its own chronological confines of 1871 and 1918, Imperial Germany’s history poses narrative challenges. The principal issue has to do with the second of these wars, which brought the German Empire to an end. This conflict weighed more heavily than the short war that began the story in 1870. The earlier war made possible the unification of the nation-state and served as a symbol of its military splendor, but otherwise, at least to judge from economic historians, it had a limited or ambivalent material impact on what followed. The Great War of 1914–18, by contrast, gave rise to the term “total war.” It left no phase of life in the German Empire unaffected. It let loose pressures so comprehensive that they challenged even the narrative coherence of German history during the imperial era itself.

Chapter 6 traces the last years of Britain’s communal currency. From the chapter’s examination of the resumption debate, it emerges that the decision on resumption stemmed from loss of faith in inconvertible currency and the fractured state of British society, rather than from unanimous support for the theory or policy of the gold standard. This chapter reveals that the supporters of resumption were a mixed group of people, including those with metallist and non-metallist views alike. The anti-resumption campaign lacked coherence, but ultimately it was the fractured state of British society that made inconvertible currency unsustainable: Britain’s note users no longer saw themselves as a single community of money users but as competing groups with different economic interests. The rest of the chapter illustrates the process by which the remnants of communal currency were gradually chipped away in the following twelve years, which were punctuated by major events such as the financial crisis of 1825 and the political run on the Bank of England in 1832. This chapter closes in 1833, when the fate of currency voluntarism was finally sealed as the Bank note became legal tender.

TO ‘BREAK THROUGH THE BOTTLENECKS …’

Despite its lack of electoral imprimatur, there were no troubles for the Nehru government after it decided to remain in the remodelled British commonwealth in April 1949. On the day that the constituent assembly ratified this decision, the only dissenting voices were those of the Khilafatist Hasrat Mohani, the UP socialist Shibbanlal Saxena and the Bombay liberal K. T. Shah. Chapter 2 chronicles the threefold challenges of 1949, refugees–food–economy and the bottlenecks therein, and then interrogates the attempted breakthroughs by a still-contingent state, whose presentation of the new constitution ushered another age of establishment. It demonstrates the tumult before any transformation within the administrative apparatus of a neither too strong nor yet fully centralised state. With the communists ‘isolated’, some peasant proprietorship could be attempted, along with control of key industries before the election, but it was the food situation that proved the biggest headache, and the provinces needed to initiate on the troika of intensive cultivation– procurement–rapid yields.

On the other hand, some initiatives were unwelcome. When Indian army's chief General K. M. Cariappa made a press statement congratulating the prime minister for the Commonwealth conference and the country's ‘all-round progress’, he was told to not get ‘mixed up … with politics.…’ Inside a week, Lt General Nathu Singh made comments on law and order in Lucknow, as well as on ‘step-motherly army pay scales.…’ In this context, it was not surprising that in Hyderabad, where communism, food production and land reform came together, the Ministry of States outlined a fantastic proposal of the abolition of jagirdari over 60 years. Going this slow might lead to a ‘rapid shift-over to Communism’.

Across the southern peninsula, there was also a linguistic tussle simmering, and educationist Ali Yavar Jung suggested that like Banaras and Aligarh, central centres like Andhra university (Telugu), Madras (Tamil), Mysore (Kannada) and Osmania (Urdu) could be created to spread the ‘national language’. Another academic, John Boyd Orr, the Scottish polymath who would win the Nobel Peace Prize later in the year, came visiting in April 1949 and left India having grasped the prime difficulty of decision-making in New Delhi and actioning them across the country.

Widely considered to be an art today, music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as a branch of the mathematical sciences; in fact, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. Focusing on the science of music this book discusses how a non-European premodern intellectual tradition – in this case, the Islamic philosophical tradition – conceptualized science. Furthermore, it explores how this intellectual tradition produced “correct” scientific statements and how it envisioned science’s relationship with other bodies of knowledge. Finally, it investigates what made music a science in the medieval Islamic world by examining the ontological debates surrounding the nature of music as a scientific discipline as well as the epistemological tools and techniques that contributed to the production of musical knowledge during the medieval period (third/ninth–ninth/fifteenth centuries).

A rich historiography of secularism (the doctrine of the separation of church and state) in India examines its fate as an essentially European Enlightenment export to the colonies. Indian secularism was a key component in the configuration of the relationship between nation, state and religion. Sumit Sarkar argues that secularism in India was seen as the other of communalism (mutual social, cultural and political antagonism between religions). The discourse of secularism that eventually became the distinct Indian one, that is, the state's equidistance and equal treatment of all religions, sprung from the needs of a united anti-colonial movement. Shabnam Tejani suggests that secularism was a bulwark for predominantly Hindu upper-caste male nationalists against challenges from the minorities, namely dalits and Muslims. Both ‘nationalist’ and ‘secularist’ became political positions with specific attributes, and any variance from these positions was deemed ‘anti-national’ or ‘communal’. What secularism was clearly not was a set of widely-agreed-upon human values that could endure various forms of national and regional crises.

Buddhism had the most ‘secularist potential’ through its denial of the existence of god, as T. N. Madan points out, though the history of Buddhism has more than revealed its political potential, where the world renouncer as monk is at a slightly higher plane than the world conqueror as king, while being mutually dependent. Many of the figures covered in the pages of this book did argue for Buddhism's secularist potential, that is, as a faith that was compatible with the modern age and modern politics while denying the existence of god. Buddhism was therefore more a philosophy rather than a religion.

Ashis Nandy's well-known formulation of the problem of secularism lays the blame at the feet of the Indian state and the elites that run it. The state regards religious ideology as its field of action and is unable to comprehend religion as faith. Elaborating on this in a similar way, Nandini Chatterjee, Anuradha Needham and Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan view the transition from religion to community—that is, religion as a guide to salvation to a political community with a bundle of rights—as the key transformation here. In India, as mentioned in Chapter 8, Buddhism's political community came with the dalit conversion in 1956 and after.

This chapter examines the institutional bases of the new German state, the constitution, efforts to establish national systems of transportation, communication, law, education, and the military. It also introduces the class of people who most favored these developments.