This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Buddhism is revived among Dalits in India on 14 and 15 October 1956, when B.R. Ambedkar, the principal author of India's constitution and himself born into the Mahar caste, led a mass conversion ceremony at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur. Several hundred thousand fellow Dalits took Buddhist refuge and precepts alongside him, and Ambedkar administered twenty two vows renouncing Hindu deities and caste practice as part of the ceremony.
Ambedkar carried the mission himself, framing it not as bringing in a foreign faith but as a return of Buddhism to the land of its own origin, and giving the new movement, Navayana, an explicitly socially engaged character built against caste from the start. The event is remembered as Dhammachakra Pravartan Din, the turning of the wheel of the dharma, and it set off a wave of further conversions well beyond Ambedkar's own ceremony: India's Buddhist population, roughly 181,000 at the 1951 census, exceeded three million within five years. Ambedkar himself died six weeks after leading the conversion.
What changed for the tradition's spread is a genuine revival inside the country where organized Buddhism had nearly disappeared centuries earlier, this time rooted not in royal patronage or monastic institutions but in a mass lay movement of Dalits reclaiming the Buddha's teaching as their own, on their own terms, in the land where it began.