Modern Asian Studies: page 1 of 39 C  Cambridge University Press 2019 doi:10.1017/S0026749X17000907 From Buddha Bones to Bo Trees: Nehruvian India, Buddhism, and the poetics of power, 1947–1956 * DOUGLAS F. OBER Centre for India and South Asia Research, University of British Columbia Email: douglas.ober@ubc.ca Abstract In the first decade after Indian independence in 1947, the secular Indian state projected a vision of itself as being guided by universal ethics rooted in the nation’s ancient Buddhist past. From the circulation of Buddhist relics in distant lands to the reinvention and incorporation of Buddhist symbols in contemporary state regalia, the government sponsored a wide variety of programmes in the name of world peace, Pan-Asian unity, and enlightened democratic values that promoted Buddhism both within India and across Asia. This more than decades- long effort was entirely the outcome of the political and social visions of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and key members of his cabinet. In its most concise formulation, this Nehruvian-style Buddhism consisted of a two-pronged approach, one concerning the uses of Buddhism in the domestic sphere—that is, for domestic consumption by citizens of the new nation—and one concerning the uses of Buddhism as an instrument of foreign policy. At the heart of these projects was the dual effort to integrate a diverse South Asian populace into a wider national consciousness and yield influence among the post-colonial order in Asia. This article details the strategies and ideologies that Nehru and his cabinet employed vis-à-vis Buddhism from the mid-1940s to late 1950s when their Buddhist statecraft began to unravel due to geopolitical crises and the mass conversions of Ambedkarite Dalits. After tracing these developments, the * Research for this article could not have been conducted without the generous support of a Fulbright-Nehru Student Fellowship, administered by the United States- India Educational Foundation (USIEF). I would also like to thank the staff at all the archives and libraries I consulted in India, especially the National Archives of India and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and the Mulagandha Kuti Library in Sarnath. Early drafts of this article were presented at the South and Central Asia Fulbright Conference in Hyderabad in 2015 and at the South Asian Conference of the Pacific Northwest (SACPAN) at the University of Oregon in 2016. I am very grateful for all the feedback I received on those occasions, as well as from the reviewers of Modern Asian Studies. Any remaining errors are my own. 1 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17000907 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 24.85.240.157, on 06 Jan 2019 at 22:39:43, subject to the Cambridge Core