Opinion Mahabodhi Temple protests: Old discontent, new frictions
Varying conceptions of the relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism lie at the heart of both the historical campaign and the current protests
One strand of the protest argues that the Buddha was strongly against Vedic ritual and Brahmanical dominance and that the temple management should reflect these values. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 
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Recently, Buddhists have gone on a hunger strike demanding that the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained Enlightenment in the 6th century BCE, be managed by an exclusively Buddhist board. The protestors are arguing, with varying degrees of emphasis, that the temple has recently seen an unacceptable resurgence of Vedic ritual, that Hindus are over-represented on the temple management board, and that this goes against Articles 25 and 26 of the Indian Constitution that guarantee freedom of choosing, practising and professing religion.
One strand of the protest argues that the Buddha was strongly against Vedic ritual and Brahmanical dominance and that the temple management should reflect these values. Others feel that as the holiest of Buddhist spots, the temple’s management ought to be in the hands of Buddhists alone. The RSS has maintained that Hindu temples should be controlled by Hindus and are against the strict separation of Hindus and Buddhists. Those against the protest point to the freedom of practice that Buddhists have at the temple and denounce the protests as “political” rather than ‘religious’.
This is not the first time that Buddhists have rallied for exclusive control of the temple. After visiting the temple in January 1891, the Buddhist activist from Ceylon, Anagarika Dharmapala, established the Mahabodhi Society in Calcutta in order to protect the site, transfer its management to Buddhist hands and promote Buddhist pilgrimage to sites which were still to be excavated. Already, in 1885, Sir Edwin Arnold, old India hand and author of the bestselling The Light of Asia, had argued in the Daily Telegraph that the Mahabodhi temple was to the Buddhists what Jerusalem was to Christians and Mecca was to Muslims.
In fact, there is evidence that Buddhists had been visiting the Mahabodhi temple sporadically for several centuries even while it had become a part of Gaya’s circuit of shraddh worship. In 1811, the British officer-surveyor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton interviewed the mahant (head priest) of the Saivite sect which had managed the temple for at least a few centuries. The mahant described tension-free visits by Burmese Buddhists to worship ‘Bhagwan/Muni’ Buddha.
After a few years of failed negotiations with the mahant to buy the land on which the temple stood, Dharmapala entered the temple in February 1895 and installed a centuries-old Japanese statue of the Buddha inside the Mahabodhi temple. Before long, the mahant’s men removed the statue and deposited it outside the main temple. Dharmapala filed criminal charges against them, which, in effect, questioned the mahant’s right of proprietorship over the temple. He eventually lost the case with the courts maintaining the status quo but Dharmapala continued to campaign for the “rescue” of the Mahabodhi temple to coalesce a new Buddhist identity around it.
At the nudging of Viceroy Nathaniel Curzon (1899-1905), Bengal’s lieutenant governor instituted a viceregal commission including two well-known Hindu scholars to ponder the question of the management of the temple. Their solution was a new board comprising five “respectable gentlemen” including two colonial- and two mahant-appointees. They did not include a Buddhist member as they felt that Buddhists were worshipping freely at the temple.
In the 1920s, a group of international Buddhists and prominent Indians approached the Indian National Congress (INC) for a political solution to the custodianship of the temple. Gandhi appointed Rajendra Prasad to look into the matter. In 1925, he attended the Hindu Mahasabha annual meeting where a decision was taken to have the same investigative committee of seven members as the INC. Their final report suggested that a management board of an equal number of both Hindus and Buddhists be created and that rights of worship of both communities be ensured. Back then, as now, Buddhists and Hindus were accusing each other of “inappropriate” forms of worship at the temple. The mahant rejected the report and though Prasad had thought to raise the issue when the Congress was in power in the province in 1937, he never got around to it and the ministry stood dissolved by 1939.
In the late 1920s, a Burmese member of the legislative assembly in Delhi (Burma was a part of the Indian colony till 1937), tabled the Bodh Gaya Temple Bill which sought the transfer of the temple’s control to a board of nine elected Buddhist representatives from Burma, India and Ceylon. The mahant would be an ex-officio member and Hindus would have full rights of worship at the temple. When U Thein Maung, another Burmese member, brought the same bill up for discussion again in 1935, the Hindu Mahasabha asked him to hold off till they could deliberate an “amicable settlement”. They suggested a nine-member board of four Sanatanists (orthodox and upper caste) including the mahant (they did not use the term “Hindu” probably to emphasise that Sanatanists and Buddhists were two sects of the larger whole of Hinduism) and four Buddhists with an official government Hindu appointee. The mahant rejected this solution too.
Through the late 1940s, including at the Asian Relations Conference in March 1947, Nehru was questioned on the status of the temple by Asian Buddhist delegates. Nehru’s government developed its own discourse of Buddhism as a shared heritage between India and Buddhist Asian ex-colonies to serve as a foundation of new diplomatic initiatives like the Non-Aligned Movement. This was played up in the 1950s through government sponsored celebrations of the 2,500th anniversary of Buddha Jayanti and the circulation of Buddhist relics.
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In October 1948, the chief minister of Bihar, S K Sinha introduced the Bodh Gaya Temple bill with the original INC-Mahasabha solution of a temple management board of equal numbers of Hindus and Buddhists, all Indian citizens, with a Hindu district magistrate presiding ex-officio. Incidentally, the Mahabodhi Society was critical of this Bill for not going far enough to satisfy Buddhist demands. Nehru suggested in a note to the Bihar government that as a “graceful gesture” to the Buddhist world, a strictly advisory committee be created with non-Indian Buddhists nominated by the Mahabodhi Society. In May 1953, the management of the temple passed into the hands of a new committee. To avoid antagonising Hindus, Prasad, now the first president of India, stressed that Dharmapala’s campaign aimed at improving the temple’s management.
From being a quintessential pre-colonial place of shared worship to being recognised as a Buddhist place of pilgrimage, the Mahabodhi temple is today surrounded by viharas, temples and monasteries of different Buddhist communities while Gaya remains an important Hindu place, too. When the Bodh Gaya Temple Act came into being in 1949, there were very few Indian Buddhists. After B R Ambedkar’s landmark conversion in 1956, after which he himself went on pilgrimage to Lumbini, Sarnath, Bodh Gaya and Kusinagar, those numbers have steadily risen. Varying conceptions of the relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism lie at the heart of both the historical campaign and the current protests.
Surendran is the author of Democracy’s Dhamma: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c 1890-1956
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