Talk:Prataparudra Deva

Persecution of Buddhists

Need sources. TrangaBellam (talk) 04:58, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

So, Ober — whose grasp on premodern India is doubtful — writes,

Similar evidence for the survival of Buddhism well into the sixteenth century is found throughout the Prachi Valley southeast of Bhubaneswar in Odisha. This region, abounding in massive Buddhist monuments and structures dating from the tenth to twelfth centuries, appears to have been the scene of a rather violent conflict in the early 1500s. According to both the Odia-language chronicle, Madalapanji, and Ishvara Das’s Bengali-language Chaitanya Bhagavat (c. 1580s), the Gajapati king, Prataparudra Deva (r. 1497–1540), perpetrated large-scale persecution of several hundred Buddhists around the year 1530. The leader of these "crypto-Buddhists," as the scholar Nagendranath Vasu (1911: clxxvi) called them, was a nath siddha adept named Veersingh, who, under the threat of death, adopted external Vaishnava doctrines and adornments while privately adhering to Buddhist teachings. Despite Vasu’s concerns about whether these communities were "pure" and "authentic" Buddhists—hence the "crypto" moniker—what is less debated is Prataparudra’s persecution of a community understood locally as Buddhist in the early sixteenth century (Verardi 2011: 372–76; Mukherjee 1940: 53–54).
— Ober (2024); p. 28

To start with, Ishvara Das’s Chaitanya Bhagavat was written in Odiya language. TrangaBellam (talk) 15:47, 7 October 2024 (UTC)