“Buddhism is a social movement against hierarchical tradition for social equality in Indian society.” Discuss. (1994)
The statement reads Buddhism sociologically rather than theologically. Tested against M. S. A. Rao’s definition of a social movement — an ideology, sustained collective mobilisation, and an orientation to changing existing relationships — the claim is substantially true of Buddhism’s ideology and of its twentieth-century Indian revival, but only partially true of its historical sociology.
The case for the statement
- A sramanic challenge to Vedic Brahmanism. Arising in the sixth century BCE in the Gangetic plain, Buddhism denied the authority of the Vedas, the efficacy of sacrifice and the monopoly of the priest — the three pillars of ritual hierarchy.
- Birth displaced by conduct. The Pali texts insist that one becomes a brahmana by deeds, not by birth; varna is presented as a social convention, not a cosmic order.
- The Sangha as counter-structure. Admission cut across varna and the renouncer’s former rank lapsed, making the order an institutional demonstration that hierarchy was dispensable.
- A new social base. Uma Chakravarti (The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, 1987) showed the movement drew on the gahapati householder and urban mercantile groups thrown up by the second urbanisation — classes whose economic power outran their ritual rank. This is textbook status inconsistency, giving Buddhism a class base, not only a doctrinal one.
The case against
- Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) argued that the renouncer is the individual-outside-the-world: renunciation constitutes an exit from the caste order, which it therefore leaves intact rather than negates. On this reading Buddhism was the system’s sanctioned safety valve, not its opponent.
- The Sangha built its own hierarchy of seniority, gender and monastic property; the bhikkhuni order was subordinated by additional rules from the outset.
- Buddhism addressed the renouncer, not the householder’s social arrangements. It generated no programme for lay marriage, occupation or commensality, and jati endured unbroken in the countryside through the centuries of Buddhist royal patronage. Richard Gombrich notes there is no evidence the Buddha set out to be a social reformer.
- Its decline in India by the twelfth century, without having dissolved caste, is itself the strongest counter-evidence.
The statement’s truth restored: Buddhism as a modern movement
It is B. R. Ambedkar who made Buddhism a social movement in the exact sense the statement means. His conversion at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, with roughly 380,000 followers, and The Buddha and His Dhamma (published posthumously, 1957) created Navayana — Buddhism stripped of karma-as-fate and reinterpreted as a this-worldly ethic of liberty, equality and fraternity, sealed by twenty-two vows explicitly renouncing Hindu gods and caste. Conversion here is a structural strategy, the opposite of M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation: exit from the hierarchy instead of upward movement within it. Census 2011 records 8.4 million Buddhists (0.7 per cent), of whom 6.53 million are in Maharashtra — a movement demographically concentrated, but associated with measurably higher literacy among converts than among Hindu Dalits.
Conclusion
Early Buddhism supplied the ideology of an anti-hierarchical movement without building the mass organisation that could dismantle caste; Ambedkar supplied the organisation and the political project. The statement is therefore best read as prophetic rather than descriptive — true of what Buddhism means in Indian social thought, and true of what it became after 1956.