Reclaiming Buddha

ARIF MOHAMMAD KHAN, Bihar’s governor, was the chief guest at a ceremony commemorating Buddha Purnima, on 12 May, at the Mahabodhi Mahavihara in Bodh Gaya. A video from the event, showing Khan being guided in prayer by Hindu priests at the vihara’s inner sanctum, soon circulated on social media. A Muslim, in the capacity of constitutional head of a state, performing Hindu rituals at a Buddhist site might be construed as a symbol of syncretism. Instead, it was illustrative of the government’s apathy towards a protest a couple of kilometres away.

Three months earlier, around two dozen Buddhist monks had begun a hunger strike inside the vihara, demanding that the Bodh Gaya Temple Act, 1949 be repealed. The police and district administration evicted them on 27 February, and the protest moved to a plot of government land on Gaya’s Domuhan Road.

The BT Act created the Bodhgaya Temple Management Committee, which had organised the ceremony Khan attended. It consists of eight members nominated by the state government—four Hindus and four Buddhists—and is chaired by the district magistrate. “All religions have control over their holy places,” Akash Lama, the general secretary of the All India Buddhist Forum, which is spearheading the protest, told me. “Only Buddhists don’t have it in Bodh Gaya.” The grievance about the BTMC’s composition is not new but the latest manifestation of a dispute spanning several centuries over the management of what the historian DN Jha calls “a site of religious contestation throughout Indian history.”

The Hindu argument has been that the vihara is part of the religion’s folklore and that adherents come there to perform pind daan—a funerary ritual—based on an episode in the Ramayana. Jha notes that Bodh Gaya features prominently in medieval Puranic texts as a place where ancestral rites can be performed and that “a site was appropriated in the mid-eleventh century to establish a Vishnu temple, with its floor and railing made of reused material.” However, the modern Vishnupada temple, where pind daan is conducted today, was built in the eighteenth century by Ahilyabai Holkar, the queen of Indore. Akash said that Buddhists do not have any objection with the ritual being carried out at the temple. “We respect your religion and your tradition, but do not play with our emotions.”