The History of Dhammachakra Pravartan Din The Wheel Set in Motion Again: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Conversion of 14 October 1956 and the Rebirth of Dhamma in Modern India

 

Dhammachakra Pravartan Din

The Wheel Set in Motion Again: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Conversion of 14 October 1956 and the Rebirth of Dhamma in Modern India

Dr. Rahul Sadshiv Kharat

Associate Professor and Head, Department of Commerce and Research Centre

M. S. Kakade College, Someshwarnagar, Baramati, Pune, Maharashtra

Abstract

Dhammachakra Pravartan Din, observed every year on Ashoka Vijayadashami, commemorates the mass conversion to Buddhism led by Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at Nagpur on 14 October 1956. The name deliberately recalls the Buddha's first sermon at Isipatana, when the wheel of Dhamma was first set rolling. This article examines the day as a historical event, a religious act, an intellectual project and a living public memory. It traces the antecedents of the event from the Buddha's first discourse and Ashoka's ethical polity through the eclipse of Buddhism in India; reconstructs Ambedkar's long passage from the Mahad satyagraha and the Yeola declaration of 1935 to his considered choice of Buddhism; analyses the ceremony at Nagpur and the Twenty-Two Vows; discusses Ambedkar's reinterpretation of Buddhism as a social and ethical philosophy in The Buddha and His Dhamma; and assesses the social, cultural and political consequences of the conversion movement. The article argues that Dhammachakra Pravartan Din is best understood not as a mere change of faith but as a collective act of self-emancipation, which joined rational critique, moral purpose and social democracy in an ethic that Ambedkar named Dhamma.

Keywords: Dhammachakra Pravartan Din; B. R. Ambedkar; Deekshabhoomi; Nagpur; Navayana Buddhism; Twenty-Two Vows; Dalit movement; Ashoka Vijayadashami

1. Introduction

Every year, in the days around the festival of Vijayadashami, the city of Nagpur in central India fills with a quiet and extraordinary multitude. Men and women in white clothes, many of whom have travelled for days by train and bus from villages across Maharashtra and from far beyond, converge on a white stupa known as Deekshabhoomi, the "ground of initiation". They come to remember 14 October 1956, when Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), the principal architect of the Indian Constitution and the foremost leader of India's oppressed castes, publicly renounced the Hindu fold and embraced Buddhism together with several hundred thousand followers. The day is called Dhammachakra Pravartan Din, the Day of the Turning of the Wheel of Dhamma.

The name is a statement of historical self-understanding. In the Buddhist tradition, Dhammacakkappavattana, the setting in motion of the wheel of Dhamma, denotes the Buddha's first sermon, delivered to five ascetics at Isipatana near Varanasi about twenty-five centuries ago. By naming the Nagpur conversion with the same words, Ambedkar's followers claimed that the events of 1956 were not an isolated act of protest but a fresh turning of a wheel that had long ago been stopped in the land of its birth.

The scholarly literature on the conversion is large and divided. Biographers such as Dhananjay Keer and Changdev Bhavanrao Khairmode produced the first detailed narratives of Ambedkar's life and of the Nagpur ceremony. Eleanor Zelliot placed the event within the longer history of the Ambedkar movement, while Gail Omvedt read it as a chapter in a long history of anti-caste Buddhism in India. Christopher Queen and others have analysed Ambedkar's reading of the Buddha's teaching as a form of engaged Buddhism, and critics from within and outside the Buddhist world have debated whether the "Navayana", or new vehicle, that emerged from the conversion is a legitimate development of the tradition or a departure from it. This article draws on these studies and on Ambedkar's own writings to offer an integrated account.

The argument proceeds in eleven steps. Sections 2 and 3 recall the original turning of the wheel at Isipatana and the career of Buddhism in India from Ashoka to its eclipse. Sections 4 and 5 follow Ambedkar's social struggles and his two-decade search for a religion. Sections 6 and 7 reconstruct and analyse the events of 14 October 1956 and the Twenty-Two Vows. Section 8 examines Ambedkar's interpretation of Dhamma. Sections 9 and 10 consider the aftermath and the present life of the commemoration, and Section 11 reflects on the historiographical debates before the conclusion.

2. The First Turning of the Wheel: Isipatana

According to the Pali tradition, the Buddha attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya and then hesitated, wondering whether a truth so subtle could be understood by others. Moved, as the texts say, by compassion for beings, he decided to teach. His first audience were five ascetics, Koṇḍañña, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahānāma and Assaji, who had practised austerities with him before he abandoned self-mortification and who had left him in disappointment. He walked to Isipatana, the Deer Park near Benares, which is today's Sarnath, and there, on the full-moon day of Āsāḷha, delivered the discourse that the canon preserves as the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11; Bodhi, 2000).

The sermon opens with a rejection of two extremes: the pursuit of sensual pleasure, which the Buddha calls low and unprofitable, and the pursuit of self-torment, which he calls painful and equally unprofitable. Between them lies the Middle Way, which gives vision and knowledge and leads to peace and awakening. This Middle Way is the Noble Eightfold Path of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. The discourse then sets out the four noble truths: that there is suffering (dukkha), that it has a cause in craving, that it can cease, and that there is a path leading to its cessation. Each truth is presented in three phases, as something to be understood, something to be acted upon and something that has been accomplished, so that the whole teaching has twelve aspects (Rahula, 1959; Harvey, 2013).

The text records that when the discourse ended, Koṇḍañña perceived that whatever is subject to arising is subject to cessation, and the Buddha is said to have exclaimed in joy that Koṇḍañña had understood. The earth-dwelling spirits are then reported to have proclaimed that the supreme wheel of Dhamma had been set in motion at Benares, a wheel that no ascetic, brahmin, deity, Māra or Brahmā in the world could turn back. The Sangha of monks came into being with the ordination of the five, and the three jewels of Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha were complete.

The image of the wheel is not accidental. In the political vocabulary of ancient India the cakka was the emblem of sovereignty, and the universal monarch was the cakkavatti, the one who sets the wheel rolling across the earth. Buddhist tradition transposes this symbol from conquest to conscience: the Buddha's sovereignty is exercised by teaching, and the wheel advances by persuasion rather than by force (Gombrich, 2006). Eight spokes later came to stand for the Eightfold Path. The motif appears on the earliest Buddhist monuments, and it is carved at Sarnath on the pillar of Ashoka, whose Lion Capital has become the emblem of the Republic of India.

Ambedkar's reading of this foundational moment is distinctive and deserves mention at the outset. In The Buddha and His Dhamma he composed his own narrative of the Buddha's life and teaching, stressing that the Buddha's concern was the reality of sorrow and injustice in the world and its removal, rather than a metaphysics of renunciation. He therefore questioned whether the formula of the four noble truths, as the later tradition transmitted it, could be the Buddha's own early teaching, suspecting that monastic redactors had added a note of pessimism that sat uneasily with the Buddha's practical ethics (Ambedkar, 1957). Whether or not one accepts his historical suspicion, it reveals the spirit in which he approached the wheel: as a living instrument of liberation in this world.

3. The Wheel in History: From Ashoka to Eclipse

The first great political patron of the turning wheel was Ashoka Maurya (c. 268–232 BCE). After the bloody conquest of Kalinga, around 261 BCE, Ashoka recorded in his Thirteenth Major Rock Edict that he felt deep remorse for the slaughter and deportation that the war had caused. He declared that henceforth the only conquest he valued was the conquest of Dhamma, a conquest of hearts through moral persuasion that he said brought joy and had been carried even beyond his frontiers (Thapar, 1997). His inscriptions, written in the Prakrit of the people and the Brāhmī script, speak of non-violence, compassion to all living beings, respect for parents, teachers, elders, brahmins and ascetics alike, tolerance among religious sects, welfare measures for humans and animals, and the duty of officials to look after the people as a father looks after his children.

Historians have long debated whether Ashoka's dhamma was Buddhism as such. Romila Thapar and others argue that it was a broad civic ethic addressed to a plural society, intelligible to followers of every sect, even though Ashoka's personal devotion to the Buddha and the Sangha is beyond doubt, as the Bairat and Sarnath edicts and his pilgrimage to Lumbini and Bodh Gaya show. For the later Buddhist world, and for Ambedkar, the essential point is that Ashoka demonstrated the possibility of a state ordered by moral principle rather than by dominance. It is not surprising that the Buddhist tradition remembers the day of his turn to Dhamma as Ashoka Vijayadashami, the "victory-tenth" of Ashoka, in contrast to the Vijayadashami of the epic warrior.

Buddhism flourished in India for well over a thousand years after Ashoka. Monasteries and universities such as Nalanda, Vikramashila and Odantapuri became centres of learning attracting scholars from China, Korea, Tibet and Central Asia, and Buddhist art and architecture at Sanchi, Ajanta, Ellora, Amaravati and Karle remain among the glories of Indian civilization. In western India, the Sātavāhana and Western Kshatrapa periods saw the excavation of rock-cut monasteries that still stand not far from the regions where Ambedkar's followers live today.

Yet from the middle of the first millennium CE the fortunes of the tradition declined within India even as it spread across Asia. Historians identify several interacting causes: the loss of royal and mercantile patronage; the heavy dependence of Buddhist institutions on large monasteries, which made them vulnerable when patronage failed or when they were attacked; the absorption of Buddhist ideas, practices and even the figure of the Buddha, who was incorporated as an avatar of Vishnu, into the expanding Brahmanical and Puranic synthesis; and the destruction of major monastic centres in the north-east of the subcontinent around the end of the twelfth century, including Nalanda. By the late medieval period Buddhism had almost disappeared as an organized religion in most of the land of its birth.

Ambedkar offered his own interpretation of this eclipse. In Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India he argued that the decline of Buddhism should be understood in terms of a social and political contest between the egalitarian ethic of the Buddha and a Brahmanical order resting on graded inequality, and that the revival of the latter, sometimes with the help of royal power, was decisive (Ambedkar, 1987). In The Untouchables (1948) he advanced the further thesis that the communities later classed as untouchable had originally been "Broken Men" who, after supporting Buddhism, were stigmatized for refusing to abandon their adherence to it and for continuing to eat beef. This thesis is speculative and has been challenged by historians for want of direct evidence; but it shows why Ambedkar saw his conversion as a homecoming rather than as the adoption of a foreign creed. The wheel that he proposed to set rolling again was, in his account, the heritage of the very people whom caste had excluded.

4. The Making of a Rebel: Ambedkar's Struggle against Caste, 1920–1935

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow, into a Mahar family, one of the communities regarded as untouchable in the caste hierarchy of Maharashtra. His father, Ramji Sakpal, served in the army and belonged to the Kabir Panth, and the Bhakti poet-saints, among whom the Mahar saint Chokhamela had long ago asked searching questions about divine justice, formed part of the cultural air he breathed. The humiliations of childhood, such as being made to sit apart in the classroom and being denied water, were etched in his memory and later described in autobiographical notes. According to Keer (1971), a teacher, Krishnaji Arjun Keluskar, presented the young Ambedkar with a book on the life of the Buddha; the gift is often recalled as the first seed of his later commitment.

Scholarships from the Maharaja of Baroda and later from the Bombay government took him to Columbia University, New York (1913–16), and the London School of Economics and Gray's Inn. Few Indians of his generation, and none from his community, had received such an education. On his return in the early 1920s he turned his learning to the service of the oppressed. He founded the journal Mooknayak (The Leader of the Voiceless) in 1920, the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (Association for the Welfare of the Excluded) in 1924, and later the journal Bahishkrit Bharat, and he coined a three-word creed for his movement: educate, agitate, organize.

The first great public act of this struggle was the Mahad satyagraha. In March 1927 Ambedkar led thousands of followers to the Chavdar Tank at Mahad in the Kolaba district, to drink water from a public tank which caste Hindus had refused to the untouchables, although the municipal body had formally opened it to all. It was an assertion of the elementary civil right to water. Later that year, on 25 December 1927, a conference at Mahad ceremonially burned the Manusmriti, the ancient legal text which, in Ambedkar's reading, gave sacred sanction to graded inequality (Keer, 1971; Zelliot, 1992). The act was a deliberate symbolic rupture with a scriptural foundation of caste.

Between 1930 and 1935 Ambedkar led a long satyagraha for entry into the Kalaram Temple at Nashik. Its failure to move the Hindu orthodoxy, even after years of non-violent protest, marked a turning point in his thinking. In the same period he took part in the Round Table Conferences in London as the representative of the depressed classes and argued for separate electorates. After Mahatma Gandhi undertook a fast unto death in protest, the Poona Pact of 24 September 1932 replaced separate electorates by reserved seats within the general electorate. The Pact secured political representation but left Ambedkar convinced that the Hindu social order would never be reformed from within at the pace and to the extent required for the dignity of the untouchables.

This conviction crystallized in the Yeola Conference near Nashik on 13 October 1935. Ambedkar told the assembled delegates that he had had the misfortune of being born an untouchable Hindu but that this had not been his choice, and he declared, in a sentence that was to echo for the rest of his life, that he would not die a Hindu. The announcement did not mean an instant conversion. He wanted conversion to be a considered act, based on knowledge of the alternatives, and it took him twenty-one years to carry it out.

The following year he prepared the speech that is generally regarded as his most searching critique of caste. Invited to preside over the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, a reformist Hindu group in Lahore, he submitted the text of his address in advance, and when the organizers asked him to remove passages that challenged the authority of the Hindu scriptures, he refused. The conference was cancelled, and Ambedkar published the text himself in May 1936 as Annihilation of Caste. In it he argued that caste is not merely a division of labour but a division of labourers, that it cannot be removed without destroying the religious authority of the shastras that sanction it, and that the Hindus' real enemy is not their reformers but their scriptural belief (Ambedkar, 1936). A religion of rules, he said, must give way to a religion of principles. The search for such a religion was the next chapter of his life.

5. Searching for a Religion, 1935–1956

Ambedkar's reflections on conversion in the late 1930s took in several options. He met representatives of Sikhism, discussed the claims of Islam and Christianity, and considered their respective social consequences for the Scheduled Castes. At a conference of Mahars in Bombay in 1936 he advised his community to leave Hinduism, and he later wrote and spoke on the question, including a Marathi lecture usually translated as "What Path to Emancipation?". His criteria were practical and moral at once. A religion, he held, must be rational and consistent with science; it must be founded on liberty, equality and fraternity; it must not elevate any person or text above question; and it should be rooted in the soil of India so that conversion would not alienate his followers from the cultural history of the country (Zelliot, 1992; Omvedt, 2004).

Throughout the 1940s his political commitments absorbed his energies. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936 and the Scheduled Castes Federation in 1942, served as Labour Member in the Viceroy's Executive Council, became independent India's first Law Minister in 1947, and chaired the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly. The Constitution adopted on 26 November 1949 and in force from 26 January 1950 enshrines the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, abolishes untouchability, and secures equality before the law. Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet in 1951 after the failure of the Hindu Code Bill, which he had drafted to reform the personal law of Hindus, especially to improve the position of women.

During these years his interest in Buddhism deepened. He studied the Pali canon, learned from scholars such as Dharmananda Kosambi, and read widely in the works of Western Buddhologists. In 1950 he attended the inaugural conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Colombo and published in the journal The Maha Bodhi an essay entitled "The Buddha and the Future of His Religion". In it he presented Buddhism as the one religion able to meet the demands of reason, morality and social equality, argued for a clear and compact statement of the Buddha's teaching that could do for Buddhism what the Bible does for Christianity, and urged the revival of Buddhism in India (Ambedkar, 1950). That call for a short, authoritative text would be fulfilled in his own last major work.

In 1954 he attended the World Buddhist Conference in Rangoon and visited Burma, and in 1955 he established the Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha (Buddhist Society of India) in Bombay to prepare for the revival of Buddhism. He completed his book on Marx and the Buddha, Buddha or Karl Marx, in which he granted that Marx had rightly identified the exploitation of the poor but held that the Buddha offered the better path, because it aimed at the same end of ending suffering through moral transformation, persuasion and compassion rather than through violence and dictatorship (Ambedkar, 1987). In the same period he was writing The Buddha and His Dhamma, whose final draft he completed in 1956.

The year 1956 was the 2,500th year of the Buddha's parinirvana according to the Buddhist reckoning, and was celebrated throughout the Buddhist world as Buddha Jayanti. In May 1956, at a gathering in Bombay, Ambedkar announced that he would embrace Buddhism in October. He had already thought deeply about the tradition he would join. He did not choose any existing school as it stood; he wished to emphasize the Buddha's original and universal teaching of prajna (understanding), karuna (compassion) and samata (equality) as the basis of a modern and democratic ethic (Queen & King, 1996). In the months before the ceremony, he was in poor health but worked intensely to complete his manuscript and to organize the logistics of the ceremony at Nagpur.

6. 14 October 1956: The Day at Deekshabhoomi

The choice of Nagpur and of the day was deliberate. Ambedkar explained that Nagpur had been the home of the Nāga people, an ancient community which, in his historical reading, had accepted the Buddha's teaching and had been persecuted for it. The city was also centrally located in India, relatively accessible to followers coming from Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and further afield, and it was a stronghold of the Ambedkar movement. The date of 14 October 1956 coincided with Vijayadashami, which the Buddhist tradition remembers as Ashoka Vijayadashami, the day on which, according to tradition, the emperor who had conquered by the sword turned to the conquest of Dhamma. The symbolism of a victory that is moral rather than military was not lost on Ambedkar or his followers.

Preparations were made over several weeks. Volunteers, many of them members of the Samata Sainik Dal that Ambedkar had founded, arranged accommodation, water and food for an assembly of unprecedented size. Special trains and buses brought people from across Maharashtra and from Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere. The contemporary reports of the crowd vary, which is unsurprising in view of its size; most accounts place the number who took the vows on the first day at between three and five hundred thousand, and the numbers swelled over the next two days (Keer, 1971; Zelliot, 1992). Whatever the exact figure, it constituted the largest single act of religious conversion in modern history.

Ambedkar's religious guide for the occasion was Bhadant Chandramani Mahasthavir, a senior Buddhist monk of Arakanese origin who lived in Kushinara, the place of the Buddha's parinirvana, and who had long been associated with Buddhist revival in India. In the morning, wearing a white dress, Ambedkar and his wife, Savita Ambedkar, received the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts from the monk. They recited in Pali the formulae of going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, and took the vows to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, falsehood and intoxicants.

Having completed his own conversion, Ambedkar turned to the vast assembly and, standing before them, administered the Three Refuges and Five Precepts to the crowd, who repeated the Pali words after him. He then asked them to take, in their own language, a set of twenty-two vows that he had composed to mark their renunciation of the old religious order and their entry into the new. The assembled people repeated the vows in unison, a sound described by eyewitnesses as a tide of voices. In his short address he spoke of the occasion as a release from a long suffering and the start of a new life. He warned that conversion should not be a mere change of label but had to bring a change of conduct, and he urged the neophytes to be loyal to the Dhamma and to the cause of equality.

Over the next two days the ceremony was extended. On 15 October Ambedkar addressed the crowd at length, explaining the reasons for his choice and the main teachings of the Buddha. He said that the Buddha's way, resting on understanding, compassion and equality, was the way that humankind needed. On 16 October at Chandrapur, a further large assembly, again reported to number in the hundreds of thousands, took the vows from Ambedkar. The sequence of Nagpur and Chandrapur has become an important template for later commemorations.

It is worth underlining the character of the ceremony. It was, first, an act of religious initiation in classical Buddhist form, conducted by a monk, in Pali. It was also a collective act: the individuals who took refuge did so as members of a community that was simultaneously claiming a new identity and a new way of life. And it was a public act, carried out in the open, in full view of the press and the nation, with all the dignity of a ritual that required no priest from the Hindu order and no temple. In that sense it embodied precisely the qualities that Ambedkar had sought in a religion: rational, egalitarian and free of mediating hierarchies.

7. The Twenty-Two Vows

The twenty-two vows that Ambedkar administered at Nagpur are central to the meaning of Dhammachakra Pravartan Din. They are in effect a short constitution of the new Buddhist life, and their content repays careful reading (Ambedkar, 2003).

The first group of vows renounces specific elements of the religious life from which the converts were departing. The first three vows disclaim faith in the gods of the Hindu pantheon and the practice of worshipping them. The fourth and fifth vows reject the doctrine of divine incarnation and the claim that the Buddha was an avatar of Vishnu, a claim which Ambedkar regarded as a mischievous misrepresentation that had assimilated Buddhism into Hinduism. The sixth to eighth vows reject the rites of shraddha and pinda-dana, the performance of rituals through Brahmin priests, and any conduct contrary to the Buddha's teaching. These vows should not be read as an attack on individuals or on the religious feelings of others; they were a declaration by people who had been excluded from the Hindu temple and ritual order that they would henceforth build their moral life on a different foundation.

The second group of vows affirms values rather than negating practices. The ninth and tenth declare belief in the equality of all human beings and the intention to establish it. The eleventh and twelfth commit the convert to the Noble Eightfold Path and to the ten perfections (pāramitā). The thirteenth to seventeenth are the ethical heart of the series: compassion and loving-kindness to all living beings, and abstention from theft, falsehood, sexual misconduct and intoxicating drink. The eighteenth vow commits the convert to live by the three principles of understanding, moral conduct and compassion.

The concluding vows are performative. The nineteenth declares that the convert renounces Hinduism, a religion that, in the words of the vow, impedes the advancement of humanity because it rests on inequality, and adopts Buddhism. The twentieth expresses the conviction that the Dhamma of the Buddha is the true Dhamma. The twenty-first declares that the person believes he or she is having a new birth. The twenty-second records the solemn resolve to act henceforth according to the teachings of the Buddha.

Two features of the vows deserve emphasis. First, they combine the personal and the social. The prescription not to steal or lie stands alongside the demand to believe in and work for equality; the Eightfold Path is joined to a declaration against caste-based inequality. Ambedkar insisted that Dhamma is not a private route to individual salvation but a morality of social relations, and the vows concretize this belief. Second, they are addressed equally to men and women. Savita Ambedkar took the vows with her husband, and women formed a significant proportion of the multitude at Nagpur, consistent with Ambedkar's lifelong support for women's rights, including his authorship of the Hindu Code Bill.

The vows have also generated controversy. Critics have argued that the early vows are polemical and that they establish a negative identity based on what Buddhists are not. Ambedkarite writers respond that the vows have to be read in the historical context of a people for whom Hindu ritual had been an instrument of humiliation, and that the positive content of the vows, which occupies the larger part of the series, shows that the convert's identity is meant to be founded on ethical aspiration. The vows continue to be recited at every conversion ceremony and at the annual gathering at Deekshabhoomi, and their repetition keeps alive the meaning of the event.

8. Navayana: Ambedkar's Interpretation of Dhamma

The conversion was accompanied by a major intellectual enterprise: the re-reading of the Buddhist tradition in a form suited to modern, democratic India. The principal document of this enterprise is The Buddha and His Dhamma, which Ambedkar completed in 1956 and which was published after his death in 1957 (Ambedkar, 1957). The book narrates the life of the Buddha, sets out the Buddha's teaching in the form of a connected discourse, and in a series of chapters devoted to the Bhikkhu and to the Buddha's lay followers treats the practical life of the Buddhist community. It is written in simple, direct language intended for a community of new converts rather than for scholars, and it has become for them the nearest thing to the "Buddhist Bible" that he had called for in 1950.

The distinctive features of Ambedkar's Buddhism have been described as Navayana, the "new vehicle", a term that followers and scholars apply to distinguish it from the traditional Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana schools (Queen & King, 1996; Jondhale & Beltz, 2004). Several features stand out.

First, Ambedkar emphasized that the central problem addressed by the Buddha is the problem of social suffering. The Buddha's concern, in his account, was to remove the sorrow caused by exploitation, inequality and conflict, and the Dhamma was a method for establishing a just society as much as for attaining inner peace. His treatment of the four noble truths, noted above, and his insistence that the Buddha's renunciation was motivated by a concern to end conflict between the Sakyas and the Koliyas over the waters of the river Rohini, rather than by the sight of old age, sickness and death alone, both belong to this reorientation.

Second, he stressed rationality and the rejection of supernatural claims. He read the Buddha's teachings as consistent with the scientific temper, denied the existence of an eternal soul, treated kamma chiefly as a moral law of cause and effect operating in conduct and in society rather than as a mechanism of fatalistic reward and punishment, and was sceptical of the idea of rebirth as the transmigration of a soul. This reading made it possible for the converts to reject the fatalism by which the Hindu doctrine of karma and birth had been used to justify caste.

Third, he distinguished sharply between religion and Dhamma. In his usage, religion in the ordinary sense is concerned with the relation between humans and the supernatural; Dhamma is concerned with the relations between human beings. Morality, which in older religions is an adjunct, is in Dhamma the very substance. The three principles which he regarded as the core of Dhamma were prajna (understanding), karuna (compassion) and samata (equality), or, in the formulation of the Twenty-Two Vows, understanding, moral conduct (sila) and compassion. He contended that these three corresponded to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity in the French Revolution, but that they were older and deeper, since they derived from the Buddha rather than from European history (Omvedt, 2003).

The Navayana has attracted criticism from several directions. Traditional Buddhists, especially from the Theravada school, have argued that Ambedkar's omission or reinterpretation of rebirth, of the four noble truths and of the monastic ideal of renunciation constitutes a departure from the tradition. Some Buddhist scholars have questioned his selection of texts and his historical judgments. On the other hand, scholars such as Christopher Queen have argued that Ambedkar's hermeneutic is in the long tradition of Buddhist adaptation, in which the Dhamma has been reinterpreted in each society it entered, and Ajay Skaria has proposed that Ambedkar's Buddhism is best read as a distinct project that questions the boundary between religion and politics (Queen & King, 1996; Skaria, 2015). Whatever one's judgment on the theology, the sociological fact remains that the Navayana gave several million people a religion in which they could be full participants.

9. Aftermath: Mahaparinirvan and the Movement of Conversion

Fifty-three days after the ceremony at Nagpur, on 6 December 1956, Ambedkar died in his sleep at his residence in Delhi. His body was flown to Bombay, and on 7 December he was cremated according to Buddhist rites at Dadar, by the sea, in the presence of an immense crowd. The place is now known as Chaityabhoomi. His followers call his death Mahaparinirvan, the great final liberation, a term traditionally reserved for the passing of the Buddha, and 6 December has become, with 14 October and 14 April, one of the three principal dates of the Ambedkarite calendar.

The sudden death left the movement without its founder at the moment of its greatest expansion. Conversion ceremonies continued in the following months and years in Maharashtra and other states. Within a few years the Buddhist population of Maharashtra grew by several million, and the 1961 census registered a large increase in the number of Buddhists in India. According to the Census of 2011, Buddhists number about 8.4 million in India, or 0.7 per cent of the population, and about 6.5 million of them, roughly three-quarters of the total, live in Maharashtra (Census of India, 2011). The numbers are small in national terms but highly significant in the history of the religion in modern India, since they represent, for the first time in many centuries, the re-emergence of Buddhism as a living community on Indian soil.

The conversion also had legal and social consequences. At first the converts lost their eligibility for the reservations and safeguards available to the Scheduled Castes, because the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 had limited that status to Hindus; Sikhs were added in 1956, and it was not until 1990 that Buddhist converts were brought within its terms. In the intervening decades the converts therefore paid a material price for their decision, which makes the scale of the movement all the more striking. Socially, the converts abandoned inherited ritual obligations and occupations associated with their former status, began to celebrate their own festivals, such as Buddha Purnima, Dhammachakra Pravartan Din and Ambedkar Jayanti, and developed new life-cycle rituals based on Buddhist forms.

The cultural creativity released by the movement was remarkable. In the decades after 1956 a new literature in Marathi came into being, in poetry, autobiography, fiction and criticism, written by authors who consciously drew on Ambedkar's thought and Buddhist symbolism; it contributed to the Dalit literary movement, which transformed Marathi and other Indian literatures. The Dalit Panthers, founded in Bombay in 1972, were conceived by young writers and activists as the heirs of Ambedkar's militancy, and their manifesto gave voice to the anger of a post-conversion generation. Educational institutions founded by Ambedkar, such as Siddharth College in Bombay and Milind College in Aurangabad, and many more established by his followers, extended his injunction to educate. The long campaign to rename Marathwada University after Ambedkar, which succeeded in 1994 after severe conflict, indicated the public weight of his memory (Zelliot, 1992; Omvedt, 2004).

Buddhist organizations also grew. The Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha, later divided into several factions, the Buddhist Society of India, and numerous local vihara committees provided religious instruction and ceremony. Foreign Buddhist organizations and monks from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Japan and the West, among them the Triratna Buddhist Community in Pune and Nagpur, worked among the converts, introducing meditation and scriptural study. Many converts, in turn, became monks and teachers, and the Dhamma has begun to be taught in Marathi, Hindi and other Indian languages by those who were born into the movement.

10. Dhammachakra Pravartan Din Today: Pilgrimage, Memory and Public Culture

Since 1956 the anniversary of the conversion has been observed every year. The first decades were marked by simple gatherings on the ground at Nagpur, but with time a permanent memorial was raised. The Deekshabhoomi Smarak Samiti oversaw the building of a large stupa, modelled on the great stupa of Sanchi and designed by the architect Sheo Dan Mal Chandrakar, which was completed in 2001. Beneath its dome is a hall in which a statue of the Buddha is placed, and the grounds include a bodhi tree and spaces for assembly and worship. The stupa is now one of the largest centres of Buddhist pilgrimage in India.

On Ashoka Vijayadashami, and in the days before and after, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims come to the site, and the commemoration has become a central ritual of the Ambedkarite movement. The pilgrims offer flowers and incense and recite the refuges and precepts, and the Twenty-Two Vows are repeated. Monks lead chanting and address the crowds, and a vast book fair sells works on Ambedkar and the Buddha, as well as poetry, music and Dalit literature. The festival is also a social gathering in which families from different regions meet, and volunteers provide food, water and medical help without charge. In a country in which religious festivals are often associated with display, the pilgrims are conspicuous for their disciplined simplicity.

The symbolism of the wheel has also entered the national life of India. The Ashoka Chakra with its twenty-four spokes stands at the centre of the national flag, and the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath is the state emblem. The Constituent Assembly adopted the flag in July 1947, and the Lion Capital became the state emblem when the Republic was inaugurated in January 1950. Although the choice of these emblems was the work of many hands and cannot be attributed to Ambedkar alone, the fact that the Republic's chosen symbols come from the Buddhist heritage of Ashoka gives Dhammachakra Pravartan Din an additional resonance for those who see in the Constitution a modern expression of the Dhamma of equality.

The commemoration is also an occasion for reflection on the continuing problem of caste. Ambedkar's followers point out that atrocities against Dalits, such as the massacre of the Bhotmange family at Khairlanji in Maharashtra in 2006, show that the social order that he criticized has not been abolished. Speeches at Deekshabhoomi often turn on the tasks of education, employment, dignity and political participation. For many of those present, the day is not an episode of the past but a yearly renewal of a commitment to build a society of equals.

11. Critical Reflections: Debates and Historiography

An honest assessment of Dhammachakra Pravartan Din must acknowledge the debates that surround it. The first concerns the nature of the conversion: whether it was fundamentally a religious act, a political strategy or a social protest. The evidence suggests that these dimensions cannot be separated. Ambedkar insisted that he was seeking a religion and not merely a political bargaining counter, and he rejected suggestions that conversion would be a means to exert pressure on the Hindu leadership. He also understood that the choice of religion has social consequences, and he chose Buddhism in part because it offered the most complete rupture with caste and the most secure moral foundation for democratic society.

The second debate concerns authenticity. Some critics have asked whether the Buddhism of the Nagpur converts is the Buddhism of the canonical sources. Defenders reply that Buddhism has always been translated into the languages and needs of those who adopted it, and that the Buddha himself warned against blind reliance on authority. The question cannot be settled by textual criticism alone, because it involves differing conceptions of what makes a tradition authentic. What can be said is that Ambedkar studied the sources with seriousness and that his reconstruction, whatever its disputed points, is a considered intellectual proposal.

The third concerns the present condition of the movement. Observers have noted the divisions among Ambedkarite political organizations, the tendency of some converts to retain elements of earlier ritual life or to treat the Dhamma primarily as an identity, and the risk that the commemoration becomes ceremonial rather than transformative. Scholars such as Zelliot and Omvedt, who admired the movement, nevertheless drew attention to the gap between the hopes of 1956 and the achievements of subsequent decades. These observations do not diminish the importance of the event, but they remind us that the turning of a wheel is a continuing task, not a single act.

A final methodological note concerns sources. Most accounts of the ceremony rest on the biographies of Keer and Khairmode, on newspaper reports and on the recollections of participants. The figures for the crowds are estimates, and the precise sequence of events on the first day is described somewhat differently in different sources. Careful historians therefore treat the numbers with caution, while accepting the broad consensus that the conversion involved several hundred thousand people on the first day and many more over the following days.

12. Conclusion

Dhammachakra Pravartan Din stands at the intersection of religion, history and politics. It recalls the first turning of the wheel of Dhamma at Isipatana, the ethical statecraft of Ashoka and the long eclipse of Buddhism in the land of its origin. It commemorates the decision of a scholar, statesman and social revolutionary who, after two decades of reflection, concluded that the emancipation of the oppressed required not only legal safeguards and political representation but also a new religious and moral foundation. And it honours a multitude who, at the end of a long struggle against indignity, chose to be reborn in a community defined by understanding, compassion and equality.

The legacy of 14 October 1956 is therefore twofold. As a historical event, it altered the religious map of modern India and gave rise to a new literature, new institutions and a new self-respect among millions. As an ideal, it poses a continuing question to Indian society and to the Buddhist world: whether the wheel of Dhamma can be kept in motion by the institutions of a modern democracy, and by the efforts of people who take seriously the Buddha's teaching that suffering can be ended and that the way to end it lies in right understanding and right action. The commemoration at Deekshabhoomi each year is an answer in the form of a pledge. In the words of the vow that every convert recites, the wheel turns again whenever people resolve to act henceforth according to the teachings of the Buddha, and to build a society that is just, compassionate and free.

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