I read an interesting article today, an academic history about the fading away of Buddhism in South Asia. It was a bit of a surprise to me, as it was about how the claims that Buddhism was eradicated by the coming of Islam – whether by outright temple destruction or simply by conversion from an old debilated faith to a more vigorous new one – was not supported by what historical evidence there is and in any case is the wrong question to ask. The right question being, not what happened to Buddhism, but what happened to Buddists. It is by Audrey Truschke who is loathed by Hindutva types for her defence of Aurangzeb, and certainly her work on him made me question the accepted wisdom about him in liberal Pakistani circles, and to regard him with rather more nuance than before.
But my surprise was really that I had always assumed that Buddhism was just absorbed – or reabsorbed – into Hinduism. It had never occurred to me that my forebears were blamed for that too.