INDIAN OCEAN EMPIRE
I N T H E
AGE OF

SANA AIYAR (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Sacred Geographies and Hindu-Buddhist Majoritarianism
across the Buddhist Bay
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.
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Sana Aiyar is Associate Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her broad research and teaching interests lie in the regional and transnational history of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, with a particular focus on colonial and postcolonial politics and society in the Indian Ocean. Her first book, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), explores the interracial and extraterritorial diasporic political consciousness of South Asians in Kenya from c. 1895 to 1968. Her research has appeared in several journals including the American Historical Review, AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute, and Modern Asian Studies.