Latest revision as of 21:05, 30 April 2025

Rahul Sankrityayan

[edit] Life: 1893-1963

The Times of India, July 24, 2011

The “father of Hindi travel literature” spent 45 years travelling. He became a Buddhist monk and then a Marxist. His ‘Volga se Ganga’ remains a pioneering work.

[edit] A brief biography

SANJAY SRIVASTAVA, April 14, 2025: The Indian Express

Around 1930, as a result of his conversion to Buddhism, Kedarnath Pandey changed his name to “Sankrityayan” and — if mentioned at all — he is now primarily known as a noteworthy Buddhist thinker. But that is to limit his importance as a philosopher who drew upon non-Western traditions to reflect upon the present without romanticising “ancient” Indian traditions and thought. If we are genuinely concerned with exploring the modernity of Indian traditions of thinking, it is Sankrityayan we should turn to. Both the trajectory of his life and his depth of learning make him a far more interesting figure than others whose biographies have found a market (mostly because of the recent search for an “Indian” way of thinking that derives inspiration for Hindutva world views).

Sankrityayan was, in turn, an Arya Samaji, Congress activist, communist, historian, novelist and Buddhist. He spent time in jail as a result of his participation in the Non-Cooperation Movement, was expelled from the Communist Party in 1945 (though he was readmitted in 1955) and, as a life-long traveller from a young age, collected massive amounts of material on Sanskrit and Pali, ancient Indian and Islamic history and Buddhist art from across Sri Lanka, Tibet and central Asia. He also had a keen interest in archaeology and linguistics.

Above everything else, Sankrityayan defined himself as a ghumakkad (wanderer), which was also a way of seeing the world in a particular manner. The potential of ghumakkad-thinking, Sankrityayan might have argued, lies in adopting a critical attitude to different forms of bigotry that derive from strictly defined ideas of home and belonging. One of his best-known books, Ghumakkad Shashtra (1948) — the other being Volga se Ganga (1943) — is a fine example of his worldview.

Perhaps the most useful way of understanding Sankrityayan as a philosopher for our times is to think about his work as addressing one of the most fundamental aspects of human life, one that is particularly crucial in the present environment: How should one think of ideas of home and belonging? How does one share one’s home with others?

For Sankrityayan, the importance of ghumakkaddi as a way of thinking is that the ghumakkad is at home everywhere and hence able to co-exist with a wide variety of people. Sankrityayan was a strong supporter of the Hindi language as the key means of communication. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, this was not connected to championing a religious world view.

“Hindi nationalism”, as scholars such as Alok Rai have pointed out, had strong links to nationalism of a religious kind. Though a scholar of Sanskrit himself, Sankrityayan was explicitly against making Sanskrit the national language as it was not the language of the people. For Sankrityayan, India as home had little to do with a particular religious identity but a cultural amalgam beyond it. As a thinker, he struggled with, and was deeply concerned with the question, what is Indian culture?, rather than providing a definitive stance that said, this is Indian culture.

There was an even more fundamental manner in which Sankrityayan was to imagine wandering and not-being-at-home as a way of thinking about the world. It had to do with how we might see the past. Having left home in his late teens, vowing not to return till he turned 50 — he did not even attend his father’s funeral — his commitment to ghumakkadi thinking was unshakeable. His method was to view the past itself as an unstable tableau rather than a fixed place to which one could return, treating history as certainty.

In Volga se Ganga, two friends are discussing the impending end of colonial rule and one of them says that when self-rule comes, it would be a tragedy if the homeland that emerged was a fragmented one. His companion responds that it has been suggested that the Mauryan empire had extended its boundaries into present-day Afghanistan. Should we then seek to include the Hindu Kush mountains into “akhand Hindustan”? The sense of home and attachment can survive fragmentation of political territories and Sankrityayan suggests that homes are always in the process of being made. There is no greater risk than to see the past as a fixed territory and it is a danger that can be avoided through thinking of oneself as a traveller-thinker: Travel-thinking avoids the worst aspects of hyper-nationalism.

If one wanders through the lives of different kinds of people — actually or through engaging with their thoughts — Sankrityayan’s writings further suggest that there is the possibility of developing a critical attitude towards established structures of power. We develop a critical attitude towards our rulers through an understanding of the lives of common people that ghumakkadi thinking can lead to.

In Volga se Ganga, a Brahmin berates his lower-caste interlocutor for praising Alauddin Khilji for improving the living conditions of the poor and reducing exploitation by local rulers. Did Khilji not destroy many temples, the former asks. The latter responds that that is indeed what monarchs do, and the poor suffer the actions of all rulers. However, speaking through the poor peasant, Sankrityayan argues that community life cannot be the same as attachment to this or that ruler. All forms of power must be questioned and this can only happen if one does not regard one kind of rule as better than others because it aligns with one’s religious identity.

The ghumakkad avoids the pitfalls of reducing home and belonging to one form of identity. In a world that has increasingly turned to the idea of fixed identities — and one that suppresses the voices that question it — Sankrityayan’s ghumakkadi is worth pondering upon.

The writer is distinguished research professor, SOAS University of London