Managing Religion in Colonial India: The British Raj and the Bodh Gaya Temple Dispute
Author(s)
Copland, Ian
Abstract
It did not take the British long to connect the Bodh Gaya site with the story of the Buddha and to start making inquiries about its checkered past. Francis Buchanan’s visit was just the first of many by interested officials of the East India Company and the Crown between 1811 and 1861 when Bodh Gaya became the first project of the newly established Archaeological Survey of India. However, their interest was essentially antiquarian–Orientalist in the older sense of the term. They were looking for physical evidence to support the theory that India was a cradle of civilization. They had no religious agenda, and could hardly have suspected that their “discoveries” would later be used to strengthen colonial control in South Asia by helping the British mount a hegemonic claim to the “ownership” of Indian “scientific” knowledge.
