Nagas in History and Myth: Ambedkarite Buddhist Uses of the Past in Contemporary Central India

This presentation draws on published scholarship and fieldwork in Vidarbha, central India, to consider the transformation of how Ambedkarite Indians have understood nāga figures in the past seventy years. In The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1948), B.R. Ambedkar offered a self-consciously speculative reconstruction of Nagas as an ancient group of humans in central India, as part of an effort to establish ancient Buddhist roots for Dalits or so-called Untouchables who would eventually convert (reconvert, in Ambedkar’s view) to Buddhism in 1956. Since then, Ambedkar’s reading of naga history has been widely adopted by Ambedkarites as a disenchanted view of nāgas that also functions mythically (as a use of a historically unverifiable past) to enable Ambedkarites to offset Hindu nationalist historiography. These views of nagas are further complicated when interacting with Japanese Buddhist collaborators whose interpretations of nagas are very different.