This paper maps the political trajectories of U Ottama (1879-1939), an anti-colonial revolutionary and Buddhist monk who mobilized the sangha and laymen in Burma into political action in the early 20th century. U Ottama’s politics was shaped by his travels across Buddhist Asia, especially India where he spent two decades intimately involved in the project of Buddhist revival, and Japan, the Asian exemplar of political and religious sovereignty. In his quest for spiritual and temporal freedom, U Ottama invoked the sacred geography of India – the birthplace of Buddhism – and its political destiny with which he believed Burma’s was inextricably entangled. At the same time, Hindu reformers within the Arya Samaj and All India Mahasabha aligned themselves with the movement for Buddhist revival in their projections of Greater India. U Ottama served as the “living link” between the spiritual and temporal manifestations of Hindu-Buddhist proximity in the 1920s and 30s, becoming the president of the All India Hindu Mahasabha in 1935. Shifting focus away from the territorial nationalisms of anticolonial politics in the inter-war years, this paper argues that the Pan-Asian projects of Buddhist revival and Greater India coalesced around the imagined existential threat posed by Muslims in India and Burma that produced a shared politics of Hindu-Buddhist religious majoritarianism that continues to reverberate across South Asia till today.

Bio:

Sana Aiyar is Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her broad research interests lie in the regional and transnational history of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, with a particular focus on colonial and nationalist politics and society across the Indian Ocean. She is author of Indians in Kenya: Politics of Diaspora (HUP, 2015) and is currently completing a book manuscript on India and Burma in the 1920s and 30s. She is also Research Director and Co-curator of South Asia and the Institute: Transformative Connections.