Modern Buddhisms and Democracy: Diverse Encounters in India and Sri Lanka

Abstract The article explores the ways in which Buddhism had reinvented itself in a modernist idiom to deal with social and political conditions in India and Sri Lanka. This is done primarily by looking into the work of Anagarika Dharmapala, Iyothee Thass and B.R. Ambedkar. In general, the article is an attempt to place in context how political conditions of specific times and expectations of democracy play an active role in refashioning a religious ideology into an engaging political force