Buddhism in India

Colonial Challenges and Buddhist Revival 233

such self-interested literature of theirs as the manusmriti. After some

years, four disinterested holy wise men who disliked the prolonged

misfortune founded the Buddhist religion and campaigned against the

artificial religion of the Arya Brahmans to free the ignorant shudra

farmers from the noose of the Aryabhats. Then the chief head of the

aryas, the great cunning Shankaracharya, engaged in a wordy battle

with the gentlemen of Buddhist religion and made great efforts to

uproot them from hindustan. However, rather than the goodness of

Buddhism being threatened even a mite, that religion kept growing

day by day. Then finally Shankaracharya absorbed the turks among

the marathas and with their help destroyed the buddhist religion by

the sword. Afterwards the Arya Bhatjis, by banning eating beef and

drinking alcohol, were able to impose an awe on the minds of the

ignorant farmers through the help of Vedamantras and all kinds of

magical tricks (ibid.: 236–37).

This made some important points: Buddhist non-violence, the role

played by Sankaracharya and bhakti devotionalism in combating

Buddhism; but it missed the essence of the Buddha’s teachings.

Phule evidently also confused Buddhism with Jainism, referring at

times to the ‘Buddhist Marwaris’ in his books. In this sense, while

his image of Buddhism was very favourable, he never saw it as a

viable religious alternative. Centuries of Brahmanic dominance had

wiped it out of historical memory; and the new impact of the uni-

versalistic religions of Islam and Christianity had made it difficult

to imagine a religion not based on a supreme deity.

Phule’s sarvajanik satyadharma(public religion of truth) was a

constructed monotheism postulating a vague but loving ‘Creator’.

It won few adherents. His general anti-Brahman cultural radicalism

was too much for significant numbers of people in his time; even

his closest Mali companions, Bhalekar and Lokhande, worked

apart from him, Lokhande focusing on workers in Bombay, and

Bhalekar becoming alienated and trying to form an organisation

concentrating only on education and reforms. Yet, though he died

without apparently making much of a significant impact on his era,

he opened up the way to a new one.

Buddhist Revival: Scholars and Searchers

While Phule himself had only a bare knowledge of the role of

Buddhism in Indian history, by the end of his life, a significant

Though Phule had an all-around approach, political and economic
as well as cultural, he came back constantly to religious and cultural
themes. His critique of Brahmanic Hinduism attacked not only
the caste divisions that it created and maintained, but also its
ritualism, legends, sacred books and festivals. The first chapter of
Shetkaryaca Asudis a scathing description of the various festivals
that occur throughout the year, as well as the life-cycle rituals of a
good ‘Hindu’, each and every one of which are used by Brahmans
to claim gifts and food—another ‘Brahman feast of ghee and
goodies’. To Phule, in fact, ‘Hinduism’ was not a true religion at
all; the adjectives he used to describe it were ‘self-interested’
(matlabi), ‘artificial’ (krutrim) and ‘counterfeit’ (banavati). Thus,
finding a true religion was a major part of the freeing of the masses
from the yoke of Brahmanic slavery. Just as Ambedkar’s final
and major book was to be The Buddha and His Dhamma, so the
concluding written work of Phule’s life also focused on religion—
The Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak, published just after his
death. In it he gave a savage critique of the Vedas, the Ramayana
and Mahabharata stories, and undertook the effort to formulate a
religious alternative.
What could this alternative be? All of Phule’s writings give
indications of several important criteria: a true religion should be
universal; it should be founded on reason and truth and rejection of
superstition, i.e., it should be suitable for a scientific age; it should
be anti-ritualistic; it should be ethical; it should be equalitarian, not
recognising caste or ethnic differences, and especially admitting the
equality of women. (Among the few ‘rituals’ he did write was a
wedding ceremony where the verses, or mangalastaka, have the
wife first asking for equal rights and the husband promising them,
and finally with the two together vowing to serve other human
beings). And, in the context of 19th century thinking, where
Thomas Paine represented the height of radicalism, he also felt that
a religion had to be monotheistic.
Phule knew little about Buddhism. His interpretation was sum-
marised in a passage in Shetkaryaca Asud:

One might wonder how farmers could be so ignorant as to be looted

up until today by the Bhat-Brahmans. My answer to this is that when

the original Arya Bhat-Brahman regime was started in this country,

they forbade knowledge to the shudras and so have been able to loot

them at will for thousands of years. Evidence for this will be found in

232 Buddhism in India