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Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India

byDouglas Ober

Douglas Ober challenges the familiar story that Buddhism vanished from India until colonial scholars rediscovered it and B. R. Ambedkar revived it in 1956. He traces overlooked communities, reformers, monks, intellectuals, archaeological projects, and political movements that searched for and remade Buddhism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book shows how debates over caste, nation, religion, and modernity shaped claims about India as Buddhism's original home. Ober presents revival not as one sudden return but as a contested process involving many actors who used the Buddhist past to imagine different futures.

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Publication date

2023

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9781503635036