ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the city space of Calcutta at the turn of the nineteenth century became conducive to a Buddhist revival movement, partly led by the Bengal Buddhist Association or Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha (established in 1892) and its founding figure, Kripasaran Barua. The ‘revival’ movement itself can be broken down into three separate yet mutually contingent registers – the first involving an active community of Theravada Buddhist worshippers who assembled in Calcutta towards the end of the nineteenth century, the second a more ‘secular’ community of empathizers who saw Buddhism as synonymous with India’s lost glorious past, and the third a group of scholars and pedagogues, both British and Indian, practicing the newly emergent disciplines of archaeology and museology. The chapter explores how these modes of engagement with India’s Buddhist past spilled over from the textual to the visual field and how the establishment of the first-ever Department of Pali in 1907 at the University of Calcutta marked the shift from Buddhism as active faith to Buddhism as an object of historical and philosophical enquiry.
