Navayāna Buddhism and the Conditions of Religious Continuity: Conversion and Anti-Caste Emancipation in Modern India

Navayāna Buddhism emerged from B. R. Ambedkar’s effort to make Buddhism a path of liberation from caste oppression. Its emphasis on equality, dignity, compassion, and the refusal of humiliation gave it considerable emancipatory power. Yet Buddhism in modern India has remained regionally concentrated rather than broadly expansive. This article argues that this uneven consolidation cannot be explained by external constraints alone, although administrative barriers, anti-conversion laws, reservation policy, and Hindu nationalist pressures have shaped the conditions of Navayāna affiliation. It also reflects the religious form produced by Ambedkar’s founding reinterpretation of Buddhism. Shaped by the urgency of anti-caste struggle, Navayāna developed strong resources for public ritual, collective memory, and moral–political assertion, while devotional, contemplative, and ritually mediated forms of everyday practice were not institutionalized to the same degree. Drawing on Ambedkar’s writings, census data, and historical, sociological, and ethnographic scholarship, this article examines the relationship between conversion, anti-caste emancipation, and religious continuity. It suggests that the features that make a religious movement politically potent are not always the same as those that sustain it as a living tradition across generations.