If you want to gain self-respect, change your religion.
If you want to create a cooperating society, change your religion.
If you want power, change your religion.
If you want equality, change your religion.

--B. R Ambedkar

While Buddhism arose in India and was an important religion in the history
of the subcontinent, its adherents at the time of Indian Independence in
1947 were few. Indeed, the faith at that time was practiced by only a small
group of Tibetans located in the Himalayas. Yet by the efforts of an
extraordinary individual, B. R. Ambedkar, the religion has experienced a
remarkable upsurge in the last thirty-five years. The architecture and
pictorial imagery adopted by this new Buddhist movement reveal a process by
which ancient symbols have been reinterpreted and given meaning in a new
and a different social context.[1]

The faith's success at the time of the historical Buddha (ca. 560-480
B.C.E.) and its resurgence in the twentieth century have hinged in part
upon its heterodox approach to the Indian problems of caste and rebirth.
Unlike brahmanical Hinduism, it rejects caste distinctions and the karma
theory of a soul that is reborn and predestined to live out a life
determined by its previous actions. A person's value is measured by current
actions and not by the caste into which she or he is born. In ancient
India, Buddhism was common among the lowest socioeconomic groups that
experienced discrimination by high-caste Hindus.

Buddhism virtually vanished within India following the twelfth century, by
which time it had taken root in Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and
Southeast Asia.[2] During the period of British colonization, India's
largely disused and ruined Buddhist monuments were explored. By the middle
of the twentieth century a good many Buddhist shrines had been uncovered,
restored, and placed under the natural protection of the Archaeological
Survey. Among these are a number of India's most world-renowned monuments,
such as the great stupa memorial at Sanchi and the painted monastic halls
of Ajanta, visited by pilgrims from around the world and treated in the
standard survey texts of world art.

B. R. Ambedkar was born on April 14, 1891, in Maharashtra in western India.
By the time of his death on December 6, 1956, Maitreya Ambedkar--as he has
come to be known by some--succeeded in bringing Buddhism back to the land
of its origins. Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism was largely a response to
his birth into an untouchable family of the Mahar community in Maharashtra.
In the nineteenth century Mahars were "village servants," mostly landless
laborers, outside the castes acceptable to Hindus. Ambedkar was thus among
the one-seventh to one-fifth of India's population condemned to a life of
social ostracism, which he later likened to the situation of
 African-Americans in the United States.[3] His conversion to Buddhism,
which disclaimed caste, was a carefully planned remedy for the social
distinctions so basic to Hinduism.

Rising through the schools the colonial British made available to a limited
number of untouchables, Ambedkar gained recognition in Bombay,
Maharashtra's great urban trade center, as a leader in the Mahar
community's civil rights struggles. The first in the community to gain a
college education, he eventually traveled to the United States where he
took a doctorate in economics at Columbia University. Later, in Great
Britain, he became a barrister, as Mohandas Gandhi had before him. and took
a second doctorate from the London School of Economics. Returning to
Bombay, Ambedkar threw himself into the politics of Maharashtra, winning a
seat in Bombay's Legislative Assembly. In the midst of India's Independence
struggle, Ambedkar rose as the leading champion for the "depressed
classes." While outside of India it was Gandhi who became known as the
untouchables' advocate, within India and among the untouchables it was
Ambedkar who was recognized as their great leader. The roles played by
Ambedkar and Gandhi in Indian history are comparable to those played by
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln in American history, both in
politics and subsequently in the popular media.[4]

Within the freedom movement Ambedkar became the great advocate of
secularism. Despite his continual struggle with Gandhi and the Indian
National Congress over their inability to transcend Hinduism's continuing
reliance upon caste and its implicit support of the concept of
"untouchability," he was able to maintain a political presence that allowed
him to become the principal drafter of the Indian constitution and main
source for that document's staunch secularism. He was also, in this role,
responsible for choosing the nonbrahmanic wheel and lion-capital symbols
adorning the nation's flag and seal.

In 1935, despairing of Hinduism's inability to renounce the caste system
and the stigma of untouchability, Ambedkar declared his intention to
convert to a religion that did not endorse the heinous hierarchy. He
"solemnly assured" the Depressed Classes Conference at Yeola, "that though
I have been born Hindu, I will not die a Hindu." He considered
Christianity, Islam, Arya Samaj, and Sikhism, but from relatively early on
his choice was Buddhism. While it had been virtually extinct in India for
centuries, Buddhism was a traditional Indian faith, based upon suppositions
familiar to every Indian. Besides rejecting caste, Buddhism was also a
major world religion, with vast support in the nations surrounding India
and high respect in India itself.[5]

On October 14, 1956, a decade after Independence and precisely two decades
after his original declaration of his intention to convert, Ambedkar took
his Buddhist diksa (initiation) at Nagpur. On that day and the next he
personally led the conversion of about one-half million who had come for
that purpose. By the time of the 1961 census there were 3.25 million
Buddhists in India. Millions more have converted since.[6] For Ambedkar and
his many associates and followers, the conversion was not merely a
practical matter, but one of deep, psychological significance. They were
rejecting a system that condemned them, but they were also committing
themselves to an ideology that disputed the possibility of karma,
transmigration, and a divine hierarchy by birth, embracing instead a faith
that stressed the equality of all human beings. In repudiating the power
and prestige of the brahmans and their creed, they were choosing an
alternative that promised them progress without limits, that from the
beginning rejected the idea of untouchability.[7]

Ambedkar's epithet, Maitreya, carried significance in the movement he
founded, for Buddhist tradition held that after the death of the Sakyamuni
(the historical Buddha) another Buddha, or Bodhisattva (perfectly
enlightened being), called Maitreya would appear on earth to bring a
renewed enlightenment.[8] Significantly, Ambedkar's conversion coincided
with a worldwide celebration of the Buddha's Jayanti, the twenty-five
hundredth anniversary of Sakyamuni's enlightenment.[9] As in this adoption
of the epithet Maitreya, the new Buddhists[10] have resurrected and
revivified a number of traditional Buddhist concepts and imageries. In the
interest of exploring, defining, and legitimizing their Buddhist identity,
they have also taken symbols and motifs from Buddhist imagery abroad and
invented new imagery to fit their modern situation.

The reuse of Buddhist monuments of the past, with their powerful resonance
in panIndian elite and popular culture, has been employed to sanction the
new faith by enhancing its identification with established tradition.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, British and Indian writers raised a
laudatory literary and scholarly appreciation around the rediscovery of
India's Buddhist past. The intellectual richness of this tradition and the
aesthetic power of its magnificent remains elevated Indian Buddhism in the
eyes of the British and of the outside world, and, consequently, of India's
modern elite.

In adopting Buddhism, the Mahars and others who followed Ambedkar's lead
became heirs to India's vast store of ancient Buddhist imagery. In much the
same way that the Republic of India--also following Ambedkar's lead--found
peculiarly Indian, transcommunal symbols in the ancient Asoka's four-lion
standard and wheel, the Buddhists adopted an already established symbolism
that expressed not only their aspirations for the future but their
connection with a highly honored Indian past, providing them with a direct
link to a significant portion of India's ancient remains. After centuries
of denial of entry to temples and of association with the great events and
monuments of the past on the basis of caste, they now claimed a great
history of their own. Indeed, the Buddhists' monumental temple remains and
stone sculpture are even older, and so, by some measure, more prestigious,
than those of the brahmanical Hindus.[11]

Thus in Maharashtra, where most of the new Buddhists are concentrated, they
have taken the world-renowned Buddhist monuments and imagery of the west
Indian rockcut temples as their own (fig. 1). Turning their backs on the
Hindu temples from which they were for so long denied entrance, they have
established a special interest in Karli, Ajanta, Ellora, and numerous other
sites of major cultural significance and antiquity. Though they have not
been able to take possession of these monuments, most of which are under
the control of the Archaeological Survey of India, they have asserted their
new identity with them through visits that amount to pilgrimage. In this
way they gain the access to a cosmic identification denied them in many
Hindu shrines.[12] One of my most vivid experiences in India was to witness
Ellora's Visvakarma caitya--a gray, twelve-century old aesthetic relic and
one of India's best-known historical and tourist monuments--transformed
into a living rainbow of actualized faith by a gathering of local
Buddhists. Here, the despised descendants of a glorious tradition endowed
itself with a new legitimacy.

The vast store of ancient Buddhist imagery also serves as a source of
emblems and decoration for both public monuments and private homes. Where
in Hindu homes you will find puja (worship) rooms and decorative elements
filled with deities and pictures of well-known Hindu monuments and in
Muslim homes or shops, images of the Kaaba or Taj Mahal, in Buddhist homes
you will find replicas of famous Buddhas and photographs of important
monuments, such as Sanchi, Sarnath, and Bodhgaya. Already famous and
commonly reproduced as India's national treasures, these monuments are once
again peculiarly Buddhist. In Mahar homes, and even in some former
community temples, Buddhist images have replaced those of Pandurang and
Rukmabhai and other Hindu deities formerly honored, but never so truly
available.[13]

It is important to recognize that these Buddhist images are not treated in
the same way as the Hindu ones they have replaced. Ambedkar's rationalism
goes further than many sorts of Buddhism in flatly denying the existence of
gods, and so these images are taken, not as idols for offerings or
devotion, but as representations of beings to be respected and
emulated.[14] The garlands placed upon them signify respect, not
supplication.

A second source of ready-made imagery is the international Buddhist
tradition, which has intensified its involvement in India over the past two
centuries, as British colonial interests located important Buddhist sites
and made them accessible. When the wealthy Birla family chose to build a
Buddhist temple in Bombay in the early 1950s, the Japanese made available
images and priests. The Buddhist conversion movement has found similar
responses from surrounding Buddhist communities. I have seen Tibetan, Thai,
Burmese, Japanese, and Sri Lankan images donated to various new Buddhist
temples.[15] A good example of this is the lifesize, fiberglass seated
Sakyamuni from Sri Lanka in the Shanti Vihara at Nagpur (fig. 2). This
imagery too serves strongly in terms of legitimation and identification. It
allows the Buddhists to dignify their modest temples with luxurious and
impressive images quite beyond their modest means. Whatever the theological
viewpoint, this is an important issue for a largely impoverished community.
More importantly perhaps, this usage offers a powerless minority community
direct connections with a powerful international Buddhist world. As the new
Buddhists identify themselves by and with these finely crafted images and
the creed for which they stand, they also identify themselves with the
international success and power of that world, through the actual
possession of these images.[16]

More interesting than these uses of past or imported imagery, however, is
the new imagery that serves to express these new Buddhists' particular
history and aspirations. This art allows a more direct manifestation of the
community's creativity, and harnesses that creativity to one of art's most
significant potentials, its ability to explore identity. If the adoption of
traditional Buddhist forms allows the community to signal its
identification with that tradition and to legitimize itself through this
prestigious connection, the creation of new imagery allows it to explore
its interests and destiny as a modern Indian community struggling for its
 place in the second-half of the twentieth century.

Public Buddhist monuments are mostly images of the historical Buddha,
Sakyamuni, Ambedkar, and Mahatma Jyotirao Phule (the nineteenth-century
Maharashtrian leader regarded as Ambedkar's major predecessor). These
statues in the new imagery are found at crossroads, public squares, and the
entrances to Buddhist neighborhoods or institutions, in the same kinds of
places we are used to seeing other major national figures, such as Gandhi,
Sivaji, and Subas Candra Bose. The Ambedkar statues indicate the presence
of the people who have chosen to transform their lives through his
teachings.

The style of these monuments varies greatly from a highly perceptual to a
more generalized realism, depending upon the nature of the patronage. The
monuments in front of the Lok Sabha (Parliament) in New Delhi and the old
Secretariat building in Bombay are realistic works in bronze. Those by the
roadside in Karnataka and Maharashtra are blander, and often cruder,
popular productions in plaster or concrete. Whether the variations in style
have more to do with the availability of funds or intentional choice is not
yet clear to me. It is possible that thirty-five years do not provide a
long enough history to develop the variety of alternatives from which a
conscious choice can be made. Nor is there a centralized authority to
codify stylistic or iconographic design. As in the past, style is
essentially a matter of region, era, and economic support, not of ideology.
Most modern Buddhist art shares the same generalized naturalism of bright
colors and somewhat stylized features common to other popular imagery in
India.

A typical monumental portrait of Ambedkar can be seen on the highway
leading north from Aurangabad to Ajanta (fig. 3). In the spirit of India's
traditional religious imagery of the past two thousand years, where such
images have much the same style and iconography regardless of where they
are located, Ambedkar is presented as a man in a blue business suit, white
shirt, and red tie, with a fountain pen in his pocket and a book in his
hand. He is bareheaded, his dark hair neatly combed down, and he wears a
pair of black-rimmed spectacles. He stands squarely in what the ancient
iconographic texts called samabhanga, or no bends. In the context of Indian
religious imagery, this figure makes three points: this is a city man, a
man of learning, and only a man--not a god.

As a Westerner who first saw this image in the mid-1960s, I found the style
immediately called to mind contemporaneous American Pop art, with its use
of blandly simplified realism, brightly colored surfaces, and deadpan
expression. But this is how the uninitiated usually respond to things they
don't understand, explaining them by distorting them into versions of
things they do know. For Buddhists and other people living in Maharashtra,
the image is a simple but clear expression of the Mahar's own modest yet
cosmic desires and potentiality. Here, those who had been forbidden a
public presence announce both their presence and their newly claimed right
to a place at the center of creation, by displaying an image of the Bombay
statesman who pled their cause before the world and taught them that they
were more than the "children of god," or Harijans, as Gandhi called them.
They are the followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar. The garland around the
statue's neck is not part of its structure but something added by his
respectful followers. Like the image's fresh coat of paint, the garland
indicates the community's active presence.

The relatively standardized iconography has only existed for a few short
decades and has yet to be fixed in a text. Ambedkar's blue business suit is
as regular as Sakyamuni Buddha's orange samghati robe--I have never seen
another garment or color used[17]--and it is as meaningful. Where the
samghati's patchwork of rags stands for Sakyamuni's presence as a wandering
beggar, the blue suit indicates a man of modern education and civic status.
The book in his hand augments this concept: the enlightened one of the
modern era rejects the hierarchies of the past, handed down in canonical
texts that the lower castes and outcastes were forbidden to hear, see, or
teach. Instead, faith is placed in modern secular learning and civil
disputation open to all. When the book is identified, it as the Indian
constitution, sometimes it is labeled "Bharat" (India), but it can also be
taken more generally to represent the value Ambedkar and the community
place upon education and the secular culture of the cities.

Most often Ambedkar stands with one leg slightly advanced as if walking,
his arm raised and index finger extended as if pointing (fig. 4). This
particular gesture, which seems to have no narrowly agreed upon definition
within the community as yet, does seem to have a generally understood
significance. To his followers, Ambedkar's hand gesture stands for oratory
or teaching, both activities with which he is popularly associated. Indeed,
Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma, the bible of the new movement, has a
line drawing of this very hand pose on each page. It is, apparently, the
new gesture, or mudra, of teaching.[18]

This image of a Bombay lawyer is in striking contrast to the standard Hindu
god depicted in the traditional garb of dhoti or sari, with multiple limbs
and fantastic attributes. The contemporary Buddhist imagery combines
elements of past art with new features, connecting past traditions with a
distinctly different present and future. Seeing Ambedkar's image in tandem
with the more traditional one of Sakyamuni, as they are regularly shown,
emphasizes just this juxtaposition (figs. 4, 5, and 10). Following the
rationalism of Ambedkar's interpretation of Buddhist doctrine, his
portraits emphasize his humanity. In this vision, we return to one of the
earliest attitudes of Buddhist theology, which claims that the Buddha is
not a god but an enlightened man. Pictorializing the issue proclaims it. in
the repetition of the pose and iconography, we see a construction of the
formal identity of Indian traditional art. Thus the Ambedkar image is not
only identifiable but comparable with the icons of the hegemonic
traditions. Variations in its form have been elaborated to explore its
meaning. One Ambedkar image in Aurangabad, for instance, has beneath it a
wheel flanked by seated deer, a familiar composition from ancient art of
nearby Ajanta, symbolizing the wheel of the law put into motion by
Sakyamuni's first teaching in the deer park at Sarnath. Though the intent
here seems to be projection of Ambedkar as a teacher, it also likens him to
Sakyamuni.

The least expensive and so most popular of all religious images in India
are the ubiquitous chromolithographs made by the Sharmas and their
competitors, which include images of every sect and popular hero.[19] Among
these images, which are created for Buddhists by artists who are not
themselves Buddhists, we find Buddha, Ambedkar (fig. 5), and Phule.
Ambedkar is here shown in a sympathetic bust portrait, an ethereal vision
of Sakyamuni Buddha with one hand raised in the abhaya gesture for
dispelling fear floating behind him.

A poster using Ambedkar's photograph to call a mass civil rights rally in
downtown Bombay also has images of an ancient Bodhisattva and a black
panther (fig. 6). It links the contemporary Buddhist movement to its
international history through the eighth-century Bodhisattva from
Thailand[20] and to an international civil rights movement through the
1960s and seventies iconography of the American Black Panther party.[21]
The Dalit Panthers, who sponsored the rally, are a politicized movement of
the left, composed largely of Buddhists. This combination of images
indicates the Buddhists' exploration of their identity and potential. While
some more conservative Buddhists might reject the panther symbol, some
Marxist Dalits might reject the Bodhisattva. In this poster, the polarities
of the community are embraced. This is more than just quotation and
combination of ancient and contemporary imagery; it is conscious
exploration of the Buddhist community's identity and of the meaning of the
Buddhism it is developing.

The site of Ambedkar's funeral pyre, or samadhi, on the beach at Dadar, in
Bombay, is marked by a domed memorial in a small garden. Pilgrimage is
common and a particularly large darsan, or witness, is held each year on
December 6, the anniversary of his "death" (fig. 7). The Ambedkar Memorial
Shrine, which amounts to what in Buddhist terminology is called a caitya or
stupa, combines traditional and modern elements. The most striking
traditional elements are the half-round dome rising from a square platform,
and the torana gateway (arches) on the south and north of the platform. The
relatively squat proportions of the wall supporting the dome possibly
relate to the relief imagery of ancient stupas in central India,[22] and
the square platform may refer to the stupas of ancient India's
northwest.[23] The gateways, on the other hand, are similar to those
depicted in reliefs from both central and southern regions of ancient
India.[24] The design is, in any case, not a copy of older imagery but a
new synthesis.

Beyond these general forms and proportions, similarities with past
structures cease. The body of this stupa, like many, if not most, religious
structures built in India today, is constructed in reinforced concrete,
rather than the traditional brick or stone. This new and structurally
liberating medium has allowed the creation of a stupa type largely unknown
to historians of Indian art.[25] Unlike the ancient stupas, which are
nearly all solid masses, the Ambedkar caitya is a hollow, inhabitable
shell, containing chambers with figurative imagery as well as a portion of
Ambedkar's ashes, which can be seen through openings in the dome and base
and approached directly.

The other great site of the new Buddhist geography, the location of
Ambedkar's conversion and the first mass conversion, is the Diksha Bhumi
(conversion ground) at Nagpur. A great stupa hall is currently under
construction there.[26] Perhaps it would be more useful to see this as a
hall containing a stupa. There is a model of the structure, designed by the
architect Sheo Dan Mal, at the site (fig. 8). Its extremely low base, upper
walkway, and flatter profile resemble the ancient stupas of Sanchi (fig. 9)
and Amaravati. It also has northern style torana and a number of rather new
features such as an embanked, grassy platform and corner fountains.

This is a great stupa-shaped auditorium for mass community gatherings.
While the old stupas are sites commemorating the great events of the
Buddha's life, relics of the faith, or, most often, the Buddha's passing,
these new stupas are sites for staging the new Buddhists' future. At
Nagpur, the hall's basement contains living spaces for bhikkhus (members of
the monastic brotherhood) and smaller meeting rooms, which are marked on
the exterior by the windows lining the embanked basement. Although the
arched form of the windows refers to the traditional past, the very
presence of windows indicates the transformation of the stupa's content. At
the center of the structure at basement level, a small stupa marks the spot
of the great conversion, another connection with the past. The current
needs and interests of the Buddhists, however, are represented by new forms
that shape a different future. Commemorating the original conversion,
Diksha Bhumi Day, one of the community's four great annual observances, has
its major ceremony here.

Another kind of building constructed by the community are meeting halls,
which it calls viharas. While the term viharas traditionally referred to
monastic dormitories, and bhikkhus still sometimes stay in them, this is
not their main function today. Nor are viharas temples, which they resemble
with their images of deities at one end and even towers over these deities.
The common Marathi terms for temple, mandir and deul, are carefully avoided
when speaking of viharas.[27] The new viharas differ significantly from the
Buddhist temples built by the Mahabodhi Society at Sarnath or the Birla
family at Bombay, which resemble the temples of the ancient past. Indeed,
these viharas have a different purpose altogether.

Like the Diksha Bhumi hall, viharas are gathering places that contain
commemorative imagery. The images placed at the end of the hall resemble
the sanctum images of the Hindu temple, but here they are part of the human
space, not separated in a chamber for ritual purity, with attending
priests. People do not pray or make vows to these images; they are
memorials, not icons. Some may have rooms for bhikkhus, but the bhikkhus'
purpose is to instruct and lead the community, not to attend the images.

Viharas present a visual imagery that requires care to read. Though not
worship halls, they take a form that is only slightly different,
encompassing altarlike platforms and images. The apparent contradictions
seem heightened when we witness a scene approximating worship, such as the
one shown in Triratna Buddha Vihara in Bombay (fig. 10). Here is a
community in the progress of transformation. The common Indian form of the
temple hall, altar, and worshiper have been altered only slightly, but the
change is highly significant. In a Tibetan context, the Tibetan Buddha
image on this altar would be worshiped with devotional faith; in another
era, the bhikkhu would be a priest or a worshiper and the woman holding the
incense would be praying. But in this context, where the ideology of
devotion is explicitly rejected and an ideology of rationalized action is
proclaimed, the woman standing between the ancient imagery of the Buddha on
one side and the modern imagery of Ambedkar before Parliament on the other
is offering homage not worship. Old forms are transformed by new meanings.

The viharas are used for community meetings and functions of all sorts,
from Buddhist education and political action to pre-school. The Buddhist
teachings offered there, called wandana, are memorial services centered on
the Pali texts of the Theravada canon. Since they are not worship services,
they are never called by common terms like puja, used to designate worship.
For the most part, they are led by lay people, men and women. Discussions
begin with an honoring of the Buddha and Ambedkar, but not a call for their
blessings.

The Shanti Vihara, at Shantivana, on the outskirts of Nagpur, shows the
same contradictions (fig. 11). A modest brick structure finished in
brightly painted plaster, it has a gathering hall with one image at the far
end, surrounded by rooms for the bhikkhus and others who may reside or meet
there. Unlike most viharas, it has the tower that marks the traditional
Indian temple, here assuming the form of a small stupa. And indeed it is
intended to house relics of the Sakyamuni Buddha, which have been donated
to the Shantivana complex. The forms are thus not so unlike those of a
Hindu temple. It is clearly a religious structure, with which all Indians
are familiar.[28] But the use of the building is to link the messages of
Ambedkar and the Buddha, and to transform former habits of supplication
into those of social action. W. M. Godbole, a long-time associate of
Ambedkar's and organizer of the great diksha, is the vihara's designer. It
is part of an as yet unfinished seminary complex for training bhikkhus in
the evangelical work of spreading Ambedkar's message, in which social
transformation takes a religious form.

Finally, an aspect of the new Buddhist art we need to consider is the work
of individual artists and designers. Ram Tirpude, a local Nagpur artist and
perhaps the first new Buddhist artist, began the community's aesthetic
activity by giving already existing imagery a new Buddhist use. Tirpude
designed the stage at the Diksha Bhumi for the original conversion with
materials at hand to fashion a miniature of the Sanchi stupa as a canopy
over the heads of Ambedkar and his associates.

The common situation of Buddhist artists today is seen in the work of P. B.
Ramteke. The most popular Buddhist works are portraits of Ambedkar, either
taken from the original or based on surviving likenesses in photographs.
Ramteke's Babasaheb Ambedkar of 1987 falls into the latter category. An oil
painting based on a photograph, it shows the familiar bespectacled face,
with only parts of the coat and tie. More personal than some images,
intensely human, it is unquestionably a successful attempt to bring out the
acutely penetrating, yet compassionate gaze of the young man who would
become a Maitreya for his community and modern India. The original oil was
done as the basis for a widely available, inexpensive color lithograph
(fig. 12).

This community-oriented, inspirational art is the equivalent of the
traditional art of solidarity and identity found in most religions or
political movements in the world. Artists may express themselves either
personally or impersonally in this vein, indeed, the B. G. Sharma
lithograph (fig. 5) and other commercial works, as we have seen, may be by
artists who are not themselves Buddhists. The primary point of these works
is what they say, not how or who says it. This is an art of community, of
emblems of identification with group ideals It stands in distinct contrast
to the individualist art of the gallery world of the bourgeois cities.

In the case of Ramteke, we have an academically trained artist with a
gallery career quite separate from his religious art. In his gallery art
Ramteke may occasionally, but only subtly, reveal elements of his Buddhist
orientation. While his Buddhist art is naturalistic and communal, his
gallery art is essentially abstract and personal in both form and content.

Ramteke sees his gallery work as having developed in stages over the years
from a colorful diagrammatic style in the surrealistic vein of Paul Klee or
Joan Miro--both of whose influences he cites with alacrity--to increasingly
abstract formulations. The stage he reached in 1988 and 1989, he feels
expresses his independence from models and his most particular vision. Of
the three dozen works of his I have seen, only Joy of Unity (fig. 13) of
1987 has an identifiable Buddhist content. An essentially abstract design
of colorful insect, reptile, and birdlike shapes flickering about a
reticulated plane of grays and whites, the work on closer inspection
reveals a statement on the harmony of India's religions. The dark rectangle
at the bottom represents a structure decked with motifs symbolizing India's
different faiths: a trident for Saivism, a cross for Christianity, and a
half-moon for Islam. These forms are contained within a curving gray form
recognizable as the outline of a Buddhist stupa that unites the other
religions. In India, as everywhere in the modern bourgeois world, gallery
art is essentially personal and decorative. To succeed in that world,
religious artists must leave their social interests relatively obscured.

The study of this new Buddhist art offers a variety of useful insights, not
the least of which help us to understand earlier Buddhist art. Since
ancient India's Buddhist traditions came to an end without leaving a
literature explaining its beliefs, it is difficult to interpret a great
deal of the symbolism and instrumentality of the remains. The presence of
this new Buddhist tradition suggests alternative readings for many items
about which we now can only speculate. It can offer expressive
interpretations for objects and texts whose functional context we have
lost. More important, it can provide evidence of a fluidity of possible
meanings in contrast to the limited ones offered by a literal reading of
texts.

Finally, and most significantly, the new Buddhist imagery gives us a
genuine revolutionary art. In a discipline that spends much of its effort
considering whether or not selected imagery is "revolutionary," or
emblematic of change, or even a facilitator of change, here is an art that
is an instrument of social change of the most vital kind. India's new
Buddhists are a community in the process of a profound revolutionary
change, which is using visual imagery as a major means to accomplish that
transformation .

Normally, when we speak of revolutionary artistic forms in Western art
criticism or history we refer to normal novelty. Art that has a technically
unusual surface form--a new decorative style, more often than not--we term
revolutionary. The changes involved are significant only in the world of
aesthetic decoration and elite cultural discourse. Most likely they involve
no development in meaning and certainly none in the social or material
reality of their producers and consumers-their creators and buyers, if you
will. This use of the concept of a revolutionary art is largely a matter of
inflated rhetoric.

The art of these new Buddhists is different in two ways. First, it is an
art stylistically and pictorially conventional in the extreme. There is no
formal novelty. Changes from the past are essentially matters of content.
Second, it is an art of social and material transformation, a significant
tool in the transformation of Indian culture and society. The identities it
portrays are precisely those being used by the Buddhist community to
reshape its psychology and reorient its social and material life. To the
degree that it recognizes the Buddhist personality and focuses energy on
new and different statuses and material possibilities via education,
election, and conversion, the new Buddhist art is a materially powerful and
socially significant instrument for change.

This may not be the usual way to speak of revolutionary art, but we have so
thoroughly lost track of our basic meanings, and taken the analogy of Pablo
Picasso's and Jackson Pollock's "revolutionary" transformations of
decorative vocabulary so seriously, that it is refreshing to have a genuine
revolutionary imagery to remind us of the difference between the analogy
and the real thing and to point up how much time we spend on the trivial
imagery, which our wealthy compete to possess, and how little time on the
imagery that defines our living reality.

Notes

[1] I owe a great debt to Eleanor Zelliot and Vasant Moon for my
introduction to Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Buddhist movement, and for my
access to the new Buddhist art. I also wish to thank S. K. Thorat for his
discussions with me and particularly for a number of important suggestions
he made after reading a drain of this paper

[2] For a good general survey and explanation of the development of India's
ancient Buddhist art, see Susan and John Huntington, The Art of Ancient
India (New York: Weatherhill, 1985).

[3] Ambedkar lived on the edge of Harlem while attending Columbia
University. His writings include numerous comparisons of India's
untouchables and American Blacks. The most comprehensive biography is
Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission, 2nd ed. (Bombay: Popular
Prakashan, 1962).

[4] Eleanor Zelliot. "Gandhi and Ambedkar," in Michael Mahar, ea.,
Untouchables in Contemporary India (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press,
1972), 69-95.

[5] Eleanor Zelliot, "Religion and Legitimation in the Mahar Movement," in
Bardwell Smith, ed., Religion and the Legitimation of Power in South Asia
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 88-105.

[6] Since the 1990 Parliament has readmitted those converting to Buddhism
to eligibility for the Scheduled Caste reservations in education,
government jobs, etc., that they had previously lost upon conversion, this
number is expected to double: see Times of India, May 8, 1990.

[7] Ambedkar's interpretation of Buddhism is supremely rational and
relatively distinct from the many other schools and sects now in existence.
Its prime text is his posthumously-published The Buddha and His Dhamma, 2nd
ed. (Bombay: Siddharth Publications, 1974). Ambedkar's interpretations are
compared with others in Joanna Rogers Macy and Eleanor Zelliot, "Tradition
and Innovation in Contemporary Indian Buddhism," in Studies in the History
of Buddhism, ed. A. K. Narain (Delhi: B. R. Publishing Co., 1980), 133-53,
and in S. R. Goyal. A History of Indian Buddhism (Meerut: Kusumanjali
Prakashan, 1987), 412-23.

[8] Though "Hindu" is a common synonym in English for later brahmanism or
brahmanical Hinduism, particularly in the colloquial English words that
differentiate among Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India. the term is
misleading. In India and in some cases in the United States, "Hindu" is
commonly taken as "Indian," although Jains, for instance. consider
themselves to be as Hindu as anyone else. To consider these other Indian
religions non-Hindu should not suggest that there is something non-Indian
about them.

[9] The international Buddha Jayanti. marking twenty-five hundred years
after gakyamuni's enlightenment (or his birth or nirvana, depending on your
source), was celebrated in India, Sri Lanka, and around the world in 1956.
Since the Buddhist calendar and its dates, like the Christian, are
disputed, all Buddhists do not agree precisely on the same dates for these
events. Nor do all new Buddhists feel comfortable with the title Maitreya
for Ambedkar, some seeing this as a Mahayana concept, which does not fit
their more Theravada vision.

[10] Some have called them new Buddhists or neo-Buddhists, but many among
them resent the implication that they are less authentic than other
Buddhist sects. Keer reports Ambedkar telling reporters on the evening
before his conversion that what he was initiating was a "neo-Buddhism or
Navayan[a]" (Keer, Ambedkar, 495).

[11] One of the most interesting facts of Indian art history is the early
avoidance of permanent materials by the brahmanical worshipers. There
exists Buddhist art in significant amounts from the third century B.C.E.,
but little brahmanical art in stone before the third century C.E.

[12] Though the practice of untouchability was outlawed soon after
Independence, and entrance to public temples guaranteed to all and enforced
by civil authorities, there is still in actuality a good amount of
discrimination. Seventy-one percent of villages bar former untouchables
from local Hindu temples according to the 1978 79 Report of the
Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In the numerous
private temples, civil codes do not require openness.

[13] This includes even deities such as Matamaya. the Mahar smallpox
goddess, which belonged to the untouchable community rather than to the
brahmans and to which there was never a bar

[14] Macy and Zelliot, "Tradition and Innovation." 146.

[15] A Tibetan image occupies the central place at the Triratna Buddha
Vihara, Bhandra East, Bombay (fig. 10). There is a life-size Thai bronze
image in Nagpur's Indra Buddha Vihar. A Burmese image sits on a small altar
at the Shantivana. next to the reliquary with Ambedkar's relics, Nagpur. A
Japanese image can be found in Nagpur's Ananda Vihara.

[16] There is commonly. as in the Shanti Vihara image, a dedicatory
inscription giving the name of the donor.

[17] The recent dedication of a portrait in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of
the Indian Parliament in New Delhi) showing Ambedkar in the long caftan
often worn by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, was met with
instant criticism by his followers. It was not because of lack of proof
that he had on occasion worn such a garment in his days as a cabinet
minister--photographs of him dressed in a caftan were, in fact, the basis
for the painting--but because this was not the way the Buddhists want him
memorialized. See Times of India, April 19 and 28 (with a picture), 1990.

[18] The Japanese bhikthu at Ananda Vihara in Nagpur calls it Prajna
Tarowar, or sword of knowledge. Eleanor Zelliot's phrase "pointing toward
enlightenment" fits what I have heard many Buddhists say.

[19] It is not at all uncommon in India to have one community create images
for another.

[20] The fact that it is a specifically Thai image seems to carry no
significance. Its presence refers more to Buddhism's ancient and
international history.

[21] The Dalit (literally, oppressed) Panthers took part of their name from
the Black Panther Party for Sell Defence in the late 1960s. See Janet
Contursi, "Militant Hindus and Buddhist Dalits: Hegemony and Resistance in
an Indian Slum," American Ethnologist 16, no. 3 (1989): 441-57.

[22] Heinrich Zimmer, The Arts of Indian Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1955),
vol. 2, pl. 18.

[23] E.g., Huntington, Ancient India, pl. 8.8.

[24] Such images Irom Sanchi and Amaravati can be seen in Heinrich Zimmer,
Indian Asia, vol. 2, pls. 10 and 91.

[25] The form, which is not as rare as modern historians tend to assume,
has essentially not been discussed in modern studies, however For a
comparable image of a Buddhist temple in a Gandharan relief in the Lahore
Museum, see Heinrich Gerhard Franz, Buddhistische Kunst Indiens (Leipzig:
E. A. Seemann, 1965), pl. 209.

[26] Stupas are raised to enshrine three sorts of relics: bits of
scripture, the remains of those who have achieved enlightenment (such as
Ambedkar), and great sites of the faith, such as this one.

[27] Macy and Zelliot, "Tradition and Innovation," 146.

[28] The Christian theological seminary at Tumkur makes similar use of a
towered-temple form for its chapel. with the same purpose of displaying an
appropriate shape for an Indian religious structure.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 1 Cave 19, cat 475. Ajanta, Maharashtra.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 2 Sakyamuni Buddha in Meditation, cat 1975,
fiberglass, donated by the V. A. Sugathadasa and A. B. Gomes Trust, Sri
Lanka, to the Shanti Vihara, Shantivana, Nagpur.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 3 Ambedkar statue, cat 1960. Facing west on
Ajanta Road, north of Aurangabad.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 4 Ambedkar and Sakyamuni Buddha statues at
the entrance to the Tarodi Settlement, Nagpur.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 5 B. G. Sharma, Sri Ambedkar, cat 1960,
chromolithograph.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 6 Dalit Panther poster, December 1988.
Bombay.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 7 Ambedkar Memorial Shrine. Sivaji Park,
Dadar, Bombay.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 8 Model of Babasaheb Ambedkar Memorial
Complex, designed by Sheo Dan Mall Diksha Bhumi, Nagpur (begun 1982).

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 9 Great Stupa, 1st century B.C.E--.C.E.
Sanchi.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 10 Interior. Triratna Buddha Vihara, Hanuman
Nagar Government Colony, Bombay.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 11 Shanti Vihara, designed by W. M. Godbole.
Shantivana, Nagpur.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 12 P. B. Ramteke, Babasaheb Ambedkar, 1988,
photo offset reproduction of original oil painting, 15 X 17 inches. Private
collection.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 13 P. B. Ramteke, Joy of Unity, 1987, oil on
canvas, 30 X 36 inches. Private collection.