A few years ago, historian Shashank Shekhar Sinha was sightseeing in Mandu, the fortress town in Madhya Pradesh, accompanied by a local tour guide. The young man’s stories about the place were so inaccurate and fantastical, he says, “that I was finding it difficult to understand or relate to the monuments”.
Sinha taught history for a decade at University of Delhi, then worked with Oxford University Press before taking on his current position, as publishing director for South Asia at Routledge.
“The structures were so fascinating,” he says, of the 14th-century palaces, mosques, ornamental water bodies, unusually shaped stone structures, and tombs at Mandu, “but the explanations seemed to float free from history.”
India is famous for having some of the world’s richest heritage, and the poorest explanations of it on-site. Archaeological Survey of India guidebooks, Sinha points out, may go decades without being updated, widening the gap between fresh research, new information, and the average citizen.
Shouldn’t there be a better way to make sense of India’s monuments?
That question led Sinha to launch a series of books titled Magnificent Heritage. The first volume, published in 2021, explored sites in Delhi, Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. The second, Casting the Buddha: A Monumental History of Buddhism in India, recently won the Karwaan Book Award (handed out annually by the public history collective Karwaan Heritage Exploration Initiative).
“[Moving] away from the traditional approach… based on texts, Shashank Sinha’s history is rooted in monuments, art, and heritage sites,” the jury noted in its citation. Most importantly, in an age of fundamentalist religion distorting society and underwriting politics, the book is lucid, readable, and anchored in academic rigour.
Sinha, 57, was particularly pleased by the citation; this is, after all, what he was aiming for.
The series is an attempt to bridge what he calls the “progressively growing gap between the academic and popular understandings of history”, a gap he believes is most visible at the monuments themselves. “Unlike books or documentaries, these sites allow one to experience history oneself,” he adds. Yet, over and over, thin, outdated and misleading information damage this relationship.
What should one know, as one stands before an architectural and historical marvel? Casting the Buddha answers this in interesting ways.
Structurally, it starts near the beginning, wending its way from the ancient stupas and temples of Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh, where the Buddha died under a grove of trees; to Sarnath, also in UP, where he gave his first sermon, making the birth of the faith; and Lumbini in present-day Nepal, where an Ashoka Pillar and ancient monasteries mark the site where he was born in the 6th-5th century BCE.
There is a special focus on four Unesco World Heritage Sites: the Mahabodhi Temple Complex in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, that marks the spot where the Buddha gained enlightenment; the hilltop stupa complex in Madhya Pradesh’s Sanchi; the Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, with art dating to the 2nd century BCE; and the mahavihara or grand monastery complex at the ancient university of Nalanda, also in Bihar, parts of which are thought to be even older than Ajanta.
But knowing what one is looking at is one thing; understanding it is another. This is where Casting the Buddha really comes through.
Drawing from new research in archaeology, anthropology and art history, Sinha challenges conventional wisdom and pat historical narratives through his book.
“For example, the popular perception is that Buddhist monks only engaged in spiritual pursuits and abandoned all material things,” he says. But inscriptions found at Sanchi show that monks and nuns accounted for over 40% of active donors. “So they actually had a fair amount of wealth. They also wielded power, and commissioned and oversaw the building of monasteries and stupas, among other things.”
Many of these monasteries and enclaves of faith survived, even as the dominance of the religion faded from the 13th century on.
Some of these live on, as still-thriving centres of Buddhist learning, in regions ranging from Lahaul-Spiti in Himachal Pradesh and Chittagong in Bangladesh to Tibet, Myanmar and vast swathes of South-East Asia. Newer centres are still emerging, in Europe, Australia and North America.
As Sinha’s book reconstructs this path, one can see the great turn in 20th century India looming.
The book’s final two chapters map Buddhism’s resurgence among an emerging English-educated Indian intelligentsia in the colonial era. Reformist organisations such as the Brahmo Samaj and Theosophical Society amplified discourse around the religion, drawn to its ideals of equality and its caste-free structures. Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore used the country’s ancient Buddhist art to revitalise and redefine contemporary Indian art forms.
By the 20th century — as it had done in Ashoka’s India in the 3rd century BCE, and in Kanishka’s empire in the 2nd century CE — Buddhist thought shaped statecraft.
For Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of a newly independent India, Hindu and Buddhist principles of tolerance and non-violence would shape the non-aligned movement. Nehru also recognised Buddhism’s potential as a way to strengthen diplomatic relations with Asian neighbours.
In 1956, meanwhile, BR Ambedkar would lead a mass conversion of hundreds in Nagpur, in a sort of culmination of his fight against the caste system. “He framed a new approach to the faith,” says Sinha. “One that combines a more socially engaged vision of Buddhism with ideas of equality and protest.”
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What’s next for Sinha? There is enough material in India to keep his series running for years and years, he says, laughing. But the real change must be systemic.
We need to change how history circulates in public life, he says. “We need a communication mechanism. Our study of history must follow accessible and creative formats. That is the only way to make serious scholarship available to the people; and keep people from getting their ideas of history from WhatsApp forwards.”
Knowledge and a sense of our true past is also the surest way to hold on to the values enshrined in our culture: compassion, peace, non-violence, humanism.
“Just like the statues of our icons are getting taller and taller in modern times, these values should get taller in public behaviour and in our body politic,” Sinha says. “We should make them a core part of what we stand for as a society and a nation.”
