Childhood Rahul Sankrityayan was born as Kedarnath Pandey, the eldest child in a Brahmin family of Gotra Sankrit His ancestral village was Kanaila Chakrapanpur,
Azamgarh district, in Eastern
Uttar Pradesh. His mother tongue was
Bhojpuri. His family traces back their roots to Malaon village Due to his time spent travelling across India, Sankrityayan had no formal education or university degree and was largely self-taught on various topics. In 1912, he travelled to
Chhapra in
Bihar where he was initiated as a
sadhu and given the new name, Ramudar Das. He was to become the heir of a mahant of an ashram belonging to the
Vaishnava tradition. Eventually, he found himself becoming bored and fled Chapra later that same year for South India where he stayed at the Uttarārdhī monastery. After a few months, he again left and arrived in
Ayodhya.
Arya Samaj In October 1914, he returned to his home in Azamgarh with his family and it seemed that he had now abandoned his desire to become a sadhu. It was during this period that he was introduced to the
Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. Once again, in 1915, he left his home and travelled to the
Ārya Musafir Vidyālaya in
Agra where he was allowed to study free of cost and also trained to deliver lectures on the Arya Samaj movement. During this time, as well as studying about the Arya Samaj, he also engaged with the
Arabic language as well as various other religions of the world. After two years in Agra, he later moved to
Lahore which was a centre of the Arya Samaj movement, to study at the
Dayanand Anglo Vedic school. From Lahore, he would frequently travel to spread Arya Samaj doctrine in other locations. The teachings of the founder of the Arya Samaj,
Dayananda Saraswati emphasised elements of social reform and these same teachings carried over to Sankrityayan. This also led to his first engagements with
Buddhism as he would travel around to spread Arya Samaj ideals. Among some of the locations he would visit include
Kushinagar,
Sarnath,
Lumbini and
Bodh Gaya.
Political activities and conversion to Buddhism The year 1921 marked the end of Sankrityayan's engagement with the Arya Samaj and the beginning of his activities as part of the
Indian independence movement. On the 31st of January 1922, he was arrested while chairing a meeting of the District Congress Committee in
Chhapra and sent to Buxar jail for six months. However, even after being released, he continued his political activities. He also began to campaign for the
Mahabodhi Temple to be handed over to Buddhist control as part of his role in the Gaya Congress. He was later jailed for further incidents and by 1927 he had spent a total of 2 and half years in jail. It was during this stay in Bihar that Sankrityayan turned from politics and the Arya Samaj to Buddhism. He took up a teaching position in Sanskrit at the Vidyālaṅkāra Pariveṇa in
Sri Lanka in 1927 and he stayed there for a total of nineteen months where he immersed himself in the study of Buddhist texts and the
Pali language. He eventually earned the title of Tripiṭakācārya which indicates that he had become a master of the
Tripitaka which is an ancient collection of Buddhist texts. He left Sri Lanka for
Tibet at the end of 1928. This was not an easy journey and he had to travel by land through the
Kathmandu Valley to reach his destination. The journey took one year, six months, and twenty days in total before he finally reached the Tibetan city of
Lhasa. In Tibet, he learned the local language while also collecting manuscripts. He also compiled an unpublished dictionary entitled the
Bhot-Sanskrit śabdkoś which contained 16,000 words. He returned to Sri Lanka in 1930 where he was finally ordained as a monk and given the monastic name, Rahul Sankrityayan. The head monk of the monastery, Mahapad Nayak Mahastavir, initially did not allow Sankrityayan to leave so from the 7th of October to the 14th of December of 1930, he wrote a new book entitled the
Buddha caryā. He was finally granted permission to leave on 15th December 1930 at which point he left for
Chapra. He also visited other places including the historical sites in
Sindh and
Sarnath. He returned to the monastery in Sri Lanka on the 28th of November 1931. In July of 1932, he and
Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan visited
London as representatives of the
Maha Bodhi Society to act as religious messengers. Sanrkityayan returned after only a few months despite requests from the society to promote Buddhism in other European countries and the
United States of America. The reason he gave for this is: I find the capitalist life very dreary. I have observed and understood what I wanted to (in London); there are similar things in America; so I do not want to waste my time. In 1933, Sankrityayan spent his time writing and also visiting new places in
Patna,
Ladakh and
Lahore. Between 1934 and 1938, he also visited
Tibet three times as well as
Burma,
Korea and
Japan among others. He brought back more than eighty
Sanskrit Buddhist works of which he translated and published many.
Russia and peasant movement activities Sankrityayan first visited Russia in 1935 where he spent a fortnight. He had hoped to visit the Russian Indologist,
Fyodor Shcherbatskoy however the latter was based in
Leningrad and Sankrityayan was not permitted to travel there. His next visit to Russia was in 1937 when he was invited by the
Soviet Academy to teach Sanskrit at
Leningrad University. During this time, he met Ellena Narvertovna Kozerovskaya and began to teach her Sanskrit. They soon developed a relationship and married on the 22nd of December 1937. Due to this marriage, he had to discard the robes of a Buddhist monk and instead became a lay Buddhist practitioner (
Upāsaka). His son, Igor, was also born in 1938 in Russia. After returning from Russia in 1938, Sankrityayan rejoined the peasant movement and became a member of the
Congress Socialist Party. He was also a founding member of the Bihar Communist Party. He was jailed for a few months for organising a
Satyagraha at Amvari. In 1940, he presided over a peasant's meeting in
Motihari and was rearrested for a provocative speech for which he spent two years in jail in
Hazaribagh. During this period of imprisonment, he wrote several influential works including
Volga Se Ganga,
"Viśva kī rūprekhā" (Outline of the World), and
"Vaijñānik bhautikvād" (Scientific Materialism), among others. After his eventual release, in his third stay in Russia from 1945 to 1947, Sankrityayan was invited to take up a professorship at Leningrad University. His expertise in Buddhology was highly regarded, as noted by Professor Stcherbatsky, who praised him as an authoritative figure in the subject. During this period, Sankrityayan made numerous audio recordings of texts in Sanskrit and Prakrit. His family joined him in Leningrad, and he later documented his experiences in Russia in his work,
"Rūs mẽ paccīs mās" (Twenty-five Months in Russia), published in 1951. Following India's independence in 1947, Sankrityayan returned to India a few days later on 17 August 1947.
Final years where he spent his final days After India's independence in August 1947, Sankrityayan returned to India, leaving Russia, despite his deep ties and contributions there. Although he could not stay in Russia permanently due to visa issues and his family couldn't settle in India, his experiences there solidified his commitment to communism and Indian nationalism. Back in India, he remained active in literature and politics, becoming president of the All India Hindi Literary Conference. His strong advocacy for Hindi and opposition to Urdu as the national language led to his dismissal from the Communist Party. Late in life, he married
Kamala Sankrityayan, who was an Indian writer, editor and scholar in Hindi and Nepali. They had a daughter Jaya Sankrityayan Parhawk, one son, Jeta. Jeta is a professor of Economics at North Bengal University. Sankrityayan’s health declined over time, especially with the onset of diabetes. Nonetheless, he continued his literary work, dictating several works, including the award-winning History of Central Asia. In 1959, he moved briefly to Sri Lanka to lead a philosophy department but returned due to poor health. In December 1961, he suffered memory loss and was taken to Russia for treatment without improvement. On 14 April 1963, he died in
Darjeeling. ==Philosophy==