The Bible,The Bottle And The Knife: Religion as a Mode of Resisting Colonialism for U Dhammaloka

While those who sought solidarity between Asians and Europeans in the colonial era often ended up replicating the colonial divisions they had hoped to overcome, the interstitial position of working class and beachcomber Buddhist monks allowed for more substantive modes of solidarity and critique. U Dhammaloka offered a sophisticated critique of British colonialism in its religious, cultural and material modes, but opted to focus his efforts on Buddhism as an avenue of resistance because it offered him a means of connection, like that which Leela Gandhi has identified as a ‘politics of friendship.’