Among the many narratives gifted by the colonial excavations of subcontinental pasts, one is the flight of Buddhism from “India” eastward. For the colonial imagination, Islam's violent incursion into the subcontinent in the early eighth century marked the end of Buddhist dominion (and brought about the “Dark Ages” of Hinduism). While scholars have done much to combat such ahistoricist renderings, it remains an ongoing exercise to reimagine (and re-enliven) the relationship between people, faith, and space. This issue opens with a special section, “Buddhist Homelands: Transregional Pathways,” that productively restages the encounter between Hinduism and Buddhism, on the one hand, and modernity and the nation-state on the other. In interrogating the concepts of homeland and diaspora, the section allows us to pay particular attention to embodied movements and the spaces of ritual (temples, say) around which much of contemporary politics is organized.
The agitated categories of movement and belonging are...