한국국제교류재단

Pankaj N. Mohan
Formerly Professor, Nalanda University, Rajgir (Now Retired)

The Korea Foundation (KF) played an important role in shaping my career as a scholar of Korean history. In 1993, when I was a doctoral student at the Australian National University, Canberra, the KF awarded me a six-month fellowship to conduct field research under the guidance of Professor Choe Byong-hon of Seoul National University. After completing my thesis, I taught courses in Korean language, classical Chinese and pre-modern and modern Korean history at the University of Copenhagen for three years. However, in 2002, when the University of Sydney appointed me as a lecturer in Korean studies (which was a position funded by the KF), I was very pleased to return to Australia. In 2008, I was honored to once again receive a Korea Foundation Fellowship for Field Research. Thanks to these two stints of residency as a Korea Foundation Fellow, I was able to publish numerous journal articles and book chapters on various aspects of Buddhism during the Three Kingdoms and the Unified Silla Period in both English and Korean.

From September 2009, I started working as a professor and dean at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) in Seongnam. In January 2015, I resigned from the AKS and joined Nalanda University, a postgraduate university (under the aegis of India‘s Ministry of External Affairs) in Rajgir where I served in several leadership roles, including Dean, School of Historical Studies; Interim Dean, School of Buddhist Studies and School of Languages; and Interim Vice Chancellor. My new teaching responsibilities, combined with the onerous task of educational strategist and administrator at the above-noted two institutions, made it difficult for me to complete two research monographs on which I have been working for a long time.

After retiring from Nalanda University , I took up a KF fellowship for field research from August 2021 to January 2022 to study religious and cultural linkages between Korea and India through history.

Thanks to a vast corpus of material collected during my stay in Korea as a KF fellow and professor at AKS, and advice and guidance of my teachers and advisors (notably, Professor Choe Byong-hon, an eminent scholar of the history of Korean Buddhism; and Professor Shin Yong-ha, a pioneering scholar of nationalism and modern Korean history), I expect to complete two book-length projects in the next two years.

My monograph on religion in early Korea contextualizes Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism within the historical process in the Korean peninsula that led to the rise of centralized monarchical states, with a focus on their role in shaping the language of political legitimacy and facilitating social cohesion in Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla. In this research, I applied a theoretical model, derived from recent Indian approaches to the history of Indian Buddhism, to data from early Korea which helped me acquire an insight into the value of Buddhist cults, rhetoric and such rituals as the Benevolent King Assembly (inwanghoe) and Assembly of Eight Prohibitions (palgwanhoe) for their patrons and propagators.

My second book addresses various themes in Korea-India relations. It is a milestone (of sorts) that goes beyond existing research on this highly-understudied topic by utilizing archival resources in various East Asian and Indian languages and investigating the dynamics of broad changes that India-related legends and travels of Indian monks to Korea unleashed in early/medieval Korea. It also creates a new frontier of inquiry by understanding the ways in which India learned and gained inspiration from Korea‘s independence movement. During the course of my research, I discovered several long-forgotten books and articles in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and Bhojpuri that portay the tragic circumstances of colonial Korea with immense sympathy and sensitivity. I was also surprised to find a detailed deion of the atrocities of Japanese imperialist forces in Korea and China, including the comfort woman issue, in a 1942 play performed in Bhojpuri entitled Japaniya Rachchach (The Japanese Devil), which was written in an Indian prison by Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963). I was fortunate to find a surviving copy of the play, which was previously thought to be lost.

I experienced some difficulties in carrying out field research under the ominous shadow of the COVID-19 crisis. Nevertheless, thanks to the unstinted support of the KF’s program coordinator and my advisor, I was, by and large, able to achieve my objectives.