Southasia has since many millennia been a multilinguistic, multicultural and multireligious region. The forerunners of many of its classical languages existed in the Subcontinent before the arrival and predominance of Indo-Aryan languages, as did the cultures and societies that engendered them. Yet the historical and cultural imagination of the region remains disproportionately fixated on Sanskrit, Vedic religion and other features of what we now know as brahminism – all of which, as an ever-increasing tide of evidence suggests, arrived in the Subcontinent via migration of Indo-Aryan groups roughly around the time of the Indus Valley Civilisation's decline. Many linguistic and historical studies point to socio-cultural turmoil resulting from this migration and the penetration of brahminical culture into diverse regions, moving from western Southasia into North India, South India and Southeast Asia. Brahminism's adverse impacts have led to profound historical reconfigurations in the ancient, medieval and modern periods. Nonetheless, our critical understanding of brahminism and its attendant casteism, as well as of the casteless and anti-caste resistance to it from Southasians in diverse linguistic and cultural regions, remains limited.
There are many reasons hindering a deeper understanding of this issue. The discipline of Southasian Studies, for instance, in Southasia and in the West, is largely constrained by brahmin-centrism: that is, it takes for granted the centrality that brahmins have assumed in much of the Subcontinent, and the marginalisation they have imposed on the many communities they have othered by birth, language, regional origin and class, as well as by privileging brahminical deities, texts, institutions and practices over all others. The results – such as caste segregation, gendered inequalities and caste-based accumulation of wealth – have not been adequately examined so far.
A large part of the problem is that brahmin-centric sources and perspectives continue to enjoy primacy. This is because Southasian Studies is largely in the hands of either brahmin or white researchers who collude in maintaining their control over teaching, research projects and institutions. This has led to a lack of thinking against and beyond brahmin-centrism, and an effective moratorium on unravelling the histories of caste-free and anti-caste communities that have existed in opposition to and despite the violence of brahminism and casteism. It is still quite rare to find publications on Southasia that engage with casteless and anti-caste communities, their cultures, religions, economies and histories. Even as caste-marginalised, non-brahmin scholars and perspectives fight for more room, the intellectual crisis of brahmin-centricism in Southasian humanities and social sciences looks set to persist for years to come.
Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India, an erudite study by the historian Douglas Ober, is an exception to the brahmin-centric trend, and an outstanding intervention for many reasons. Right from its thoughtful title – which captures the deep history and "revival" of the region's Buddhist past – the book tells us a different story than the brahmin-centric narratives of so much other scholarship. Ober shows how the widespread notion that Buddhism in the Subcontinent had died by the thirteenth century or earlier, and showed no trace of life into the modern period, is at most a "useful fiction", if not a foolish conclusion outright. Dust on the Throne demonstrates the ways Buddhism has thrived through its "rich tapestry of localized traditions across Asia – worshipping fo (Buddha in Chinese), hotoke (Japanese), sangay (Tibetan), samana Gotam (Thai), and many more."