1956
Nagpur, and seven weeks
Deekshabhoomi, Nagpur · 14 October 1956
He had announced twenty-one years earlier that he would not die a Hindu. He had never said what he would die instead.
The twenty-one years between Yeola and Nagpur were not hesitation but an examination, conducted in public and at length, and he wrote about it as he went. Representatives of several faiths approached him after 1935 — the offers were substantial, because the number of people who might follow him was substantial — and one of them, Sikhism, he considered seriously enough that a delegation was sent to Amritsar and terms were discussed. It did not happen. Islam and Christianity he ruled out on the same ground, and he was explicit about it: both would have moved his people out of the civilisation they belonged to, and he was not willing to buy equality at the price of nationality.
The tests he applied
- The religion must rest on reason and on morality, and must be willing to be revised in the light of both, rather than resting on revelation that cannot be questioned.
- It must not contain, or sanctify, a hierarchy of birth.
- It must place morality at its centre rather than ritual observance, and morality must be owed to other people rather than to a god.
- Conversion to it must not remove a community from the history and culture of the country it lives in.
Buddhism met all four, and it had one further quality he valued: it had begun in India, and had been argued into and then out of existence there. Choosing it was not an exit from Indian history but a claim on a part of it — and, he argued, a return rather than a departure, since he held the Untouchable communities to be descendants of Buddhists who had refused to conform. That last argument, which he made at length in The Untouchables in 1948, is his own and is not accepted by most historians.
In 1955 he founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha, the Buddhist Society of India, and set a date. On 14 October 1956, at Nagpur, in front of a crowd whose size no one has ever settled, he took the three refuges and the five precepts from Bhadant U Chandramani, the senior-most Buddhist monk in India. He then turned round and administered them to the crowd, together with twenty-two vows of his own composition. The ceremony was repeated the following day for those who had not been able to reach the ground. Reported attendance runs from about three hundred thousand to half a million. The ground is now called Deekshabhoomi.
He told the crowd he had chosen Nagpur because of the Nagas, the people he held to have been the original carriers of Buddhism in India. He also told them, in the same speech, that this was not a matter of taking a new name but of accepting an obligation, and that anyone who converted and then went on living as before had done nothing at all.
The scale of what followed is visible in the census and is easy to miss. India recorded a few hundred thousand Buddhists in 1951. Ten years later it recorded several million, the great majority of them in Maharashtra, the great majority of them former Mahars. It is one of the largest religious conversions in recorded history to have happened without violence, inducement or an army, and it happened in the seven weeks either side of his death.
He had been writing The Buddha and His Dhamma for years and finished it shortly before the conversion. It is his own arrangement of the Buddha's life and teaching, and it is deliberately unorthodox: it argues that suffering is social and economic before it is metaphysical, treats the four noble truths and rebirth in ways many Buddhist scholars dispute, and is unsentimental about the parts of the tradition it does not accept. He wrote in the preface that he expected to be criticised for it. He was, and is. It was published in 1957, after his death, because he could not find a publisher for it while he was alive.
In November 1956 he travelled to Kathmandu for the conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, where he spoke on the Buddha and Karl Marx — arguing that they had asked the same question about human suffering, that the Buddha's answer did not require the killing that the other answer had come to require, and that a society could not be made just by force and kept just afterwards. It was his last journey.
He died in his sleep at his house in Delhi on 6 December 1956, seven weeks after Nagpur. He had been diabetic and in poor health for years and had been working through most of it. He was cremated at Dadar in Bombay the following day, on the shore, in front of a crowd that no one has ever counted accurately. The place is now called Chaitya Bhoomi.
Educate, Agitate, Organise.
He was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, in 1990 — thirty-four years after his death, by a government that needed the votes of people who had been asking why it had taken so long. His portrait hangs in the Central Hall of the Parliament whose founding document he took through clause by clause. The Constitution he defended in 1949, and warned against relying on, has outlasted every government that has worked it.
Decision point · 1956
Which faith
The decision to leave was taken twenty-one years ago and taken in public. At Yeola on 13 October 1935 he told an audience of some ten thousand people that he had been born a Hindu because it had not been in his power to prevent it, but that dying one was. He did not say what he would be instead. That is the question still open, and it is the only one.
Representatives of several faiths approached him within weeks of Yeola, and the offers were substantial, because the number of people who might follow him was substantial. One of them, Sikhism, he has considered seriously enough that a delegation was sent to Amritsar and terms were discussed.
He has written down what he requires of the answer: that it rest on reason and on morality and be open to revision in the light of both, rather than on revelation that cannot be questioned; that it neither contain nor sanctify a hierarchy of birth; that it put morality at its centre rather than ritual observance, and owe that morality to other people rather than to a god; and that conversion to it not remove a community from the history and culture of the country it lives in.
What he is choosing is not a private belief. Whatever he takes, some hundreds of thousands of people will take with him, and they will take it into the villages they already live in, among the neighbours they already have.
You have just read what he did, so this is not a guess. Every option below was actually open to him. Choose the one you would have taken, and each road is then set out as the record has it, including what came of it elsewhere or later. Where the record runs out the page stops, rather than guessing at how the roads he passed up would have turned out.
What followed
Reported attendance runs from about three hundred thousand to half a million, and the ceremony was repeated the following day for those who had not been able to reach the ground. He told the crowd in the same speech that this was not a matter of taking a new name but of accepting an obligation, and that anyone who converted and then went on living as before had done nothing at all. He died seven weeks later.
Twenty-one years is a long time to hold a question open in public, and he did not treat the interval as a delay. He was writing The Buddha and His Dhamma through it and finished the book shortly before the ceremony. He could not find a publisher for it while he was alive, and it appeared in 1957.
Source note
The conversion ceremony, the twenty-two vows and the Nagpur address are documented contemporaneously and collected in the Government of Maharashtra edition of his Writings and Speeches, which also contains The Buddha and His Dhamma, The Untouchables and the Kathmandu address. Reported attendance at Deekshabhoomi ranges from about three hundred thousand to half a million, so no single figure is given. The growth in the recorded Buddhist population is from the Indian censuses of 1951 and 1961.