Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–914)

Introduction

This article is dedicated to the memory of Pandithar Iyothee Thassar (1845–914) on his 175th birth anniversary. While in contemporary India there are strong indications of worry about the absence of prominent Dalit journalists, and a lack of Dalit media practitioners (Sheth, 2015), further research uncovers much evidence of a history of erasure of earlier Dalit journalist activism (Balasubramaniam, 2020), indicating that print histories of South Asia have historically collaborated to cast out the words of the outcaste world and ignore critical writing about a caste-less society. This article, therefore, scrutinises the history of Dalit invisibility in print during the colonial period as a phenomenon of historical erasure, and of negligence (Thankappan, 2015). It also extends studies on anti-caste thought by attempting to understand how those oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century. This augments, but also departs critically from prominent works on histories of caste and print in South Asia.

The article discusses specifically the work of Pandit Iyothee Thass as part of an anti-caste movement (Aloysius, 1999), through journalistic-print activity, mainly within urban India, but also in diaspora (Leonard, 2019b). Just like the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Tamil intellectual sphere was changed quite drastically by the ‘avant-garde little magazines’ (Pandian, 2002: 1740), claimed as a democratising space, the overlooked Dalit socio-political emergence across the subcontinent in earlier times, such as the 1890s–910s in which Iyothee Thass worked, were a politically vibrant period. Evidence from such earlier times needs to be recovered and accounted for.

It is generally understood that Dalit writing, as a political act, emerged during the late 1990s, particularly connected to the 100th birth anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar (1891–1956), the icon of the oppressed across post-Independent India. Particularly in the Tamil political sphere, Dalit politics emerged with the rise of the Liberation Panthers (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal) and New Tamil Nadu (Puthiya Tamizhagam), movements supported by the rise of ‘little magazines’, especially Dalit Murasu and Nirapirakai. Questions of language, caste and gender were pertinently raised on the categories of literature and history in western and northern India as well during the same time, particularly by Dalit women (Rawat & Satyanarayana, 2016; Rege, 2006). In Tamil, this promoted writers, particularly Dalits, not only to study and express anti-caste history and thought, but also to articulate distinct viewpoints on literature and art, that had politically and aesthetically a Dalit foregrounding (Satyanarayana & Tharu, 2011). As many writers explored Dalit poetry, prose, intellectual thought and history, figures like Iyothee Thass, Rettaimalai Srinivasan (1860–1945), L.C. Gurusamy (1885–1966), M.C. Rajah (1883–1944), N. Sivaraj (1892–1964), Meenambal (1904–1992) and others were rediscovered.

The efforts of Thass and his contemporaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries require further historical re-examination to bring out how strongly Dalit intellectuals in the early twentieth century held counter views on caste and religion that were relative and transformatory explorations against any singular modernist and nationalistic inscription. This continues to have much relevance today, as part of necessary resistance to rampant violence against, and humiliation of certain bodies and minds in contemporary India.

Iyothee Thass and Tamizhan

The Tamil intellectual Pandit Iyothee Thass, also known as Pandithar Iyothee Thassar was born in 1845 as Kathavarayan, a Dalit in the Parayar community. As he admired his teacher, Tondai Mandalam Vallakalatinagar Vee. Iyothithaasa Kavirayar Pandithar, he changed his name to Pandit C. Iyothee Thass. Dr B.R. Ambedkar did the same five decades later, when Bhimrao Ramji Ambavadekar changed his name to B.R. Ambedkar in memory of his teacher. This indicates that anti-caste intellectuals also treat their own re-naming as a political act.

Thass contested the category of Paraya throughout his life. He floated alternative, open identities such as Ancient Buddhist (Poorva Bouddhar), Caste-less Tamils/Dravidians (Jaadhi pedha matra Tamizhar/Dravidar) and Tamil Buddhist (Tamil Bouddhar). Between 1907 and 1914, he ran the magazine Tamizhan, which revived interest in Buddhism as an anti-caste religion. A man of anti-caste ideas, he was a major leader, intellectual and activist whose life, work and legacy have regrettably remained neglected by historians until recently. Likewise, many figures seem to have worked like Thass during the same period in the vernacular regions. Narayana Guru (1856–1928) from Kerala, Bhima Bhoi (1850–1995) in Orissa, Poikkayil Yohannan (1878–1939) in Kerala and a little earlier Jyotirao Phule (1827–1920) created a hermeneutic of anti-caste community in writing.

In many ways a precursor to towering anti-caste figures like Periyar E.V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) and Babasaheb Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Thass was the first to develop an anti-caste narrative by espousing and writing on Buddhism. He was a practitioner of Siddha medicine, who during the 1881 British-India Census appealed that the panchamas (ex-untouchables) were not Hindus and must be recorded as original Tamils, Adi Tamizhar (Aloysius, 2015: 69). He used Tamil literary resources and palm-scripts to field anti-caste, Tamil literature and folklore-based explanations on Buddhism. Similarly oppressed and subalternised communities across the subcontinent had distinctly claimed emancipatory identifications and social emergence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Aloysius, 1997; Gupta, 2016).

However, Thass pioneered the Buddhist movement in areas and cities to which Dalits had migrated as coolies, such as the Kolar Gold Field, Bangalore, Rangoon and Durban (Leonard, 2019b). He devoted time to reconstruct Dalit history through a Buddhist framework in the vernacular, starting separate worship practices, festivals, libraries, schools, burial places and marriage customs. Working for the religious identity of Dalits, he also pragmatically cared about their political, social and economic needs. When placed within the wider Dalit discourse, this early activism goes well beyond the relationship of the local (desi) and the derivative national discourse identified by Guru (2011), who also discusses the writing of Iyothee Thass on religion, particularly Tamil Buddhism.

Though Thass used negative and oppositional language, he does not merely construct an angry anti-Brahmin discourse as an oppositional stance, talking about Brahmins as an ‘other’ to imagine the self, but transcends this chasm to create an ethical imaginary in Tamil Buddhism. Thass sought to cultivate an embodied cultural legacy for the oppressed to practise anti-caste values through his writings. Hence his agenda and search for an alternative was characterised by an anxiety to challenge, yet transcend the given situation as an indispensable condition for Subaltern emancipation. Political and cultural idealism, which reflect his astounding knowledge of history and culture, characterise his writings (Aloysius, 2010: 241). This was made possible not only by the historical context under which Tamil Dalits emerged as a community in the early twentieth century, but also because this emergent public sphere proved to be a backbone to Thass’ writings on Buddhism. It is thus highly instructive to discuss the emergence of the Dalit anti-caste public sphere in the early twentieth century.

Thass ran the Tamil journal Oru Paisa Tamizhan, later called Tamizhan (The Tamilian) from 19 June 1907 to 29 April 1914 from his Royapettah Office in Chennai, and the journal was printed at the Gautham Press of Thiru Adimoolam. In 1914, Gandhi was about to return to India from South Africa, while Ambedkar was in the middle of his doctoral research at Columbia University in New York. Comparable to radical, anti-race African–American magazines during this time, Tamizhan wrote against caste, provided health columns, local and international news and had a wide reach among the marginalised (Ayyathurai, 2011: 21–2).

The journal was a collective effort of philosophers, natural scientists, mathematicians and litterateurs (Aloysius, 2010: 239). As a mobilisational tool of the new Buddhist movement among the Subalternised communities against caste, the publisher’s intent was to teach justice, right path and truthfullness to people who could not discriminate between excellent, mediocre and bad (Aloysius, 1998: 61). The publication appeared every Wednesday for the rest of Thass’ life, carrying much information on current events, interpretation of Tamil history, religion, literature and politics, arguing against the dominant, oppressive religio-cultural discourses of the time to create an alternative discourse.

Tamizhan explored the myriad ways to articulate a novel critique associated with hierarchy as imagined by early twentieth-century caste society, in which the entire system of signs and meanings was re-evaluated. Thass rejected the nationalism propounded by the predominantly upper-caste Congress party and their demand for swadeshi and also challenged the caste-Hindu domination of the Tamil print public sphere. Thass used journalism to generate serious critiques and discussion especially on literature and history. He possessed numerous palm-scripts, which he used profusely. His collection of materials in Tamil included epics, literary texts as well as commentaries, which very few readers in the early twentieth century accessed. These palm-texts were circulated, he clarifies, amongst his community members as a legacy. This gives an entirely different idea about how the oppressed engaged with and produced knowledge during the colonial period, with the emergence of print-modernity (Balasubramaniam, 2016, 2017; Rajangam, 2008).

Proficiency in Tamil, Pali, Sanskrit and English aided Thass to refer these texts and derive a speculative etymology, to constitute a creative historiography in his journal. His Tamil prose was relatively new and his experimental style of writing rebelled against an external resource-based historical writing style that clarifies, verifies and is evidential. The oral traditions among the oppressed castes were presented in journalistic form, as commentaries, with which he subverted the existing practices of historical writing. In many ways, his writings inaugurated a millennial narrative on the relationship between language, literature and nation.

Through his speculative etymology, Thass created a community imaginary of resistance. As a Subaltern intellectual, he became the sole mediator, an author/ity of a textual practice transferred into anti-caste print culture, using journalism as a tool to gain access to the print public sphere and create his own readership that was active (Balasubramaniam, 2020: 37). This corroborates the idea that a sovereign nation does not only emerge, but gets vigorously contested, firstly in the language-zone, through journal print. Contested elements not only concern colonial powers, but also hegemonic caste-nations within a specific language zone. Tamizhan largely provided explanation from literary sources and derived historical interpretations, perceptions from ‘within’ the community which try to steer clear of Orientalist, Brahminical and casteist extrapolation of the marginalised communities.

Tamizhan also created a space where ‘the voice of women remained concomitant and inseparable’ (Ayyathurai, 2011: 196) along with Thass’ hermeneutics of Tamil Buddhism. Apart from carrying a ‘ladies’ column’, the contributors particularly problematised the role of dogmatic Hindu marital codes. They rejected Brahminical patriarchy, questioned the insensitivity to men’s and women’s sexuality and highlighted the practices of female foeticide and women’s collusion in child marriages. As one of the earliest feminists of his times, Thass constantly appealed for intensification of women’s education, to enhance the quality of their lives without depending on men. He figured out that core issues of women’s problems in India were inseparably linked with caste issues.

Although the early intellectual use of journalistic-print for anti-caste purpose by early scholars, such as Thass, is an important example of a legacy, we also find much evidence of erasure, as his prolific writings are largely absent in visible, legible historiographies today. These historical moments must be recovered to bring to light not only representative answers to questions regarding Dalit absence in journalism, intellectual practice and the public sphere in present times, but also as evidence of a resistant pre-history to caste and Brahminism itself (Leonard, 2017).

The Writings of Thass

Anbu Ponnovium (1923–2002), one of the earlier followers of Tamil Buddhism who had preserved the Tamizhan archives, recorded that Thass and his work must be understood in the context of the Adi-Dravidars’ contribution to Tamil in the nineteenth century. Born in Penang in Malaysia, he later settled in Tindivanam near Madras, where he worked for the Archaeological Survey of India. Along with his family, he became one of the earliest followers of Tamil Buddhism. Thass’ quotations below from the Tamizhan archives, including those cited by Ponnovium (1999), Aloysius (2003) and Gowthaman (2004) were translated into English by the present author.

Ponnovium (1999: xxiv) claims that many poets, artists, spokespersons and writers were present among the Adi-Dravidas, and they emphatically contributed towards society, religion, literature, politics, history, rationality and reformation. He argues that Thass belongs to a continuum of Dalit intellectuals that produced Rettaimalai Srinivasan, M.C. Rajah and N. Sivaraj. He portrays the Adi-Dravida emergence as a revolt, foundational to the later Dravidian movement. Thass belonged to the nineteenth century anti-caste public sphere, long before the Non-Brahmin movement started in 1916, when the Adi-Dravidas already ran numerous sanghas and sabhas, including the Adi-Dravida Jana Sabhai, which was registered in 1892. This was followed by Adi-Dravida Maha Jana Sabhai in 1916 and the All India Adi Dravida Maha Jana Sabhai in 1928. Mostly run as grassroots organisations, they sought civic and social rights, but also claimed rights of political representation.

Ponnovium also records that the Adi-Dravidas not only worked with a single leader, but operated as collectives, expressing their requests, problems and petitions through journals, such as Adi Dravida Maha Vigada Thoodhan, Poologa Vyasan, Paraiyan and Adi-Dravida Mitran, between 1860 and 1910. Importantly, the historian Balasubramaniam (2017, 2020) brought out for the first time the 74-year-old history (1869–1943) of Dalit engagement in the colonial period with modern-print in Tamil.

Poems, essays and plays written in these early journals are more or less completely lost now. Though the activities of the anti-caste public sphere were not historically documented, Ponnovium (1999: xxv) states that not only Tamizhan, run under Thass from Madras, G. Appaduraiyar from Kolar, and later by P.M. Rajarathinam, but also books such as Madurai Prabhandham and Rangoon Pravesa Thirattu, published by Pulavar Pudhuvai Seyyappa Mudhaliar in 1896, had carried information about the Adi-Dravida anti-caste public sphere. This is supported by Aloysius (2010: 240), who suggests that the Subaltern classes of northern Tamil Nadu, particularly Dalits, ‘showed definite signs of awakening and incipient mobilization in the last quarter of the nineteenth century’.

Aloysius (2010: 239) further notes that the Parayars constituted an important segment of the population and ‘wielded power in the pre-modern culture and knowledge spheres’, particularly in their access to Tamil literature, medicine and traditions that practise several forms of asceticism. Through their early activities in the public sphere, Dalits indeed belied the timeless ‘depressedness’ attributed to them, through sheer production of the word (Perumal, 2000). Further, the Adi-Dravida intellectuals who created this public sphere vigorously debated and countered each other. In 1891, Rettaimalai Srinivasan started the Paraiyar Mahajana Sabha and Thass started the Dravida Mahajana Sabha. Though both were relatives, Thass filed a petition against Srinivasan’s journal Paraiyan for using the term in contempt, hurting the sentiments of the people. Aloysius (2010: 241) argues that a very debatable ‘Parayar-political’ emerged, starting a possible rivalry between both leaders. Srinivasan was the foremost critic of Thass, as ‘Tamizhan carried on a relentless hermeneutical battle against Paraiyar as a word to collectively identify the Subaltern communities’ (Aloysius, 2010: 241).

Thass also faced problems with the poets Gangadhara Navalar, Advaidananda Swamigal, Omprakash Swami, Reverend John Rathinam and Velayutham (Aloysius, 2010: 259). This reflects the emergence of a first generation of Subaltern leaders within the Dalit community in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, there was antagonism and sustained opposition to Dalit welfare as there were ‘united efforts in the 1910s to thwart the demands for civil rights of Madras’ first Dalit political representatives’ by the dominant castes, while the Dalits often conceptualised ‘a critique of caste’ also in terms of the relation between ‘landed elements and landless Dalit labourers’ (Viswanath, 2014: 247–8). Perhaps, these individuals and their organisations preceded the Non-Brahmin movement of 1916 that produced different kinds of leadership and also advocated a much more inclusive, relatively open identity.

All of these protagonists, researching in Tamil, created a Dalit public sphere in which they contested numerous issues, becoming very productive in their writings (Ponnovium, 1999: xxvi). Using Tamil resources and oral practices, Thass claimed that the indigenous/original Tamils (poorva/aadhi Tamizhar) were particularly those who were in contemporary times abused as untouchables. These are the same people, he claimed, who came to work for the transformation and well-being of the land. Hence, he claimed that Hinduism as Brahminism and Aryanism is a foreign import that had particularly deceived the original truth of the land (Ponnovium, 1999: xxviii). Thass fought an epistemological war against Brahminism, claiming that caste is untruth, and a religion that spreads this untruth is unethical, while he saw Buddhism as an ethical practice of life.

As noted, Thass also directed such critiques against the emergent Indian National Congress and the self-rule movement, stating in 1885 that ‘these Hindu swadeshi reformists only talk about unity despite caste differences. They do not want to eradicate caste at all. They talk about caste differences only to bring together the brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya, and the shudra together’ (Ponnovium, 1999: xxix). Like Dr Ambedkar later, he proposed that in this immunisation project transformation is impossible, as the upper caste would not treat the oppressed or lowered groups equally. Hence Adi-Dravida intellectuals claim a distinctive civilisation as their own, which to them is much more egalitarian and humanistic than the caste-based Brahminism. The claims for such a new civilisational community were made through creating particularly sanghas and sabhas against caste and Brahminism.

Further research clarifies that Thass through his grass-roots movement claimed that the caste-immunised Brahminical civil society that emerged as swadeshi reform leads to self-centred destruction. He asks Adi-Dravidas, therefore, to keep away from the nationalist movement represented particularly by the nationalist Congress (Ponnovium, 1999: xxix). He states that the nationalist movement is against education, thought, has no compassion, discipline, unity and integrity. Thass used the violent metaphor ‘impalement’ (kazhuvu etrudhal), through which the Buddhists and Jains were exterminated from the Indian subcontinent. He warns the Adi-Dravidas that ‘the swadeshis would in fact impale them if they go along with them’ (Ponnovium, 1999: xxix).

Thass critically asked ‘how the people who protected the texts from being accessed by others, by rejecting access to read and write can have compassion for others’ (Ponnovium, 1999: xxxiv). Hence, opposing the ‘selfish swadeshis’, he suggested that the ‘untouchables’ and the ‘lowered’ communities would fare better if they remain working in Englishmens’ houses, administration, industries and plantations, warning profusely against supporting such a political community (Ponnovium, 1999: xxxiii–v).

Thass also forthrightly rejected as unethical the cultural politics of swarajya that promote Ramayana and Mahabharata, doubting that these epic models can ever lead to just outcomes. Interestingly, Thass used Tamil as a field to reclaim ethics, as he countered the religionist and caste extremist assault on this language through nineteenth century Tamil scholarship, since ‘important memorials of caste-less historical material such as the viharas were destroyed’, but also ‘knowledge resources such as the palm scripts were appropriated’ (Ponnovium, 1999: xxxvii). He suggested that even Tamil along with Sanskrit and Pali, languages that were used to propagate ethics, had been appropriated for the service of caste and Brahminism to spread unethical falsehoods.

Moreover, Thass argued that those who were most oppressed by caste, the untouchables, have still preserved their literature, art and medicinal knowledge. These earlier forms of anti-caste intellectual properties, he suggested, must be reclaimed and reprinted. The various texts that Adi-Dravidas claimed to possess could be read as a civilisational memory that counters violation as a process. This claim for a civilisational relationship with the Tamil language is a unique element during the colonial period, coming from a Dalit intellectual in the early twentieth century (Ponnovium, 1999: xxxvii).

Thass claimed that his grandfather Kandappan, who worked as a butler to George Harrington, a close friend of Francis Whyte Ellis, who in 1831 first published Thirukkural, had given the palm-scripts of Thirukkural and Naaladi Nanooru from Sangam literature around the year 1812 for the college at Fort St. George’s work on the ‘Dravidian proof’ issue (Ponnovium, 1999: xxxviii; Trautmann, 2006). Thass highlighted the Adi-Dravida contribution to this Tamil legacy, continuing the work of Dravidian scholarship and the Adi-Dravidas’ relationship with the British. Pragmatically, Thass also wanted the Tamil letters to be reduced to make the script easier to print, which eventually happened during the Dravidian movement after the 1930s. His literary criticisms in Tamizhan are an alternative attempt at historical method itself. It is worth studying the intermediary space that Thass was exploring here, while commenting on Thirukkural and much else. The print history and subsequent commentaries of this text opened a vociferous public debate over literary historiography. Thass continuously published articles in Tamizhan on the Kural, interpreting verses, providing references and etymological meanings, introducing new texts, commentaries and figures to recover Kural and Valluvar from the caste-biography that was published as print history.

In this context, Thass also discussed the biographical details of Valluvar and argued for retrieval of fragments of various texts to construct an alternative reading. For instance, he rejected the title Thirukkural (The Holy Voice), using Thiru as an honorific affix which may mean divine. Instead he gave a Buddhist interpretation to the Kural, explaining it as Thiri Kural, where thiri means the three pitakas of the dhamma doctrine, ethics (arathupal), material (porutpal) and love (kamathupal). Kural is hence divided into three parts called Muppal. This explanation offered Thass an opportunity to demonstrate with various resources the Buddhist origins of Valluva Nayanar, author of the Kural. Thass was here apparently waging an intellectual battle single-handedly with the Saivaite pandits of his times, of their claims over Valluvar as well as significant Tamil poets (Auvaiyar). Through poetic references and quotations, Thass literally wove an intellectual project of retrieval, contestation and re-reading, imagining an anti-caste political legacy or tradition through journalistic prose.

Thass suggested that texts which the most oppressed possess generated the practice of knowledge (vithai), rationality (butthi), generosity (eegai) and the right path (sanmarkam) among everyone. Brahminism and the caste society celebrated falsehood, violence and ignorance, not only by destroying this legacy, but by classifying certain people as untouchables and panchamas (Ponnovium, 1999: xli). Thass claimed that the most oppressed are ‘killed without killing’ by the caste extremists, who generate falsehoods. Ponnovium (1999: xli) also cites Thass as calling the National Congress fake and ‘dominated by caste-masked reformists’. He also suggested that the most oppressed found a better life by simply migrating.

The work of Thass thus inaugurated and remembered a casteless community in Tamil civilisation through non-violence, compassion and the right path. Thass researched and wrote about this Buddhist communitas to field it against and outside caste that sanitises life and kills it without any kindness and thoughtfulness (Ponnovium, 1999: xli).

Writing a World Outside Caste

For Thass, critiquing caste and creating an anti-caste community imaginary was not just to portray the Brahmin as a figure of scorn, it was also a subversive attempt to create a new textuality to create a religion and culture against caste. Interpreting that the metaphysics of caste as an enforced hierarchy remained largely intact in the writing of Thass, and reading his discourses as only underscoring continuing Brahmin power in the Tamil context is more than vindictive. Even renowned scholars on the Non-Brahmin and Dravidian movements (Geetha & Rajadurai, 1998; Pandian, 2007) and Venkatachalapathy (2012) inadequately read the role of oppressed communities’ fight against caste in history, as they do not foreground them (Leonard, 2019a). While Ramaswamy (1997) considered a definitive book on the socio-cultural history of modern Tamil Nadu that does not even mention Thass, Venkatachalapathy (2018) dedicated a chapter to him. Yet he acknowledges him only as a cultural and literary figure who anticipated Ambedkar, not as a political personality in his own right.

In a sense, a certain ‘brushing-aside’, if not erasure, of the life-long efforts of Dalit intellectuals and activists who recovered Dalit history, and challenged Dravidian politics, seem to be the general tone of such historians on Tamil Nadu (Azhagarasan, 2019). In contrast, works by Aloysius (1998, 2015), Gowthaman (2004), Rajangam (2008), Ayyathurai (2011) and Dharmaraj (2019) study Tamil history through different modes of enquiry, sociological, religious, literary, historical-anthropology and cultural, particularly foregrounding Thass as an anti-caste organic intellectual, who worked on an epistemology against caste by engaging with print, towards a social movement.

Engaging with Tamil print culture in the early twentieth century, running the magazine Tamizhan to revive interest in Buddhism as an anti-caste religion, Thass was instrumental in creating an anti-caste vernacular-cosmology of those times. He was an intellectual who used journalism as a tool to gain inroads into the print public sphere, which was undeniably caste-ridden. Altogether, 42 Tamil journals produced by Dalits existed between 1850 and 1947 in the Madras presidency (Balasubramaniam, 2017, 2020). Why such clear-cut facts in print history have been erased in public memory calls for serious enquiry, questioning the role of academics and history-writing in India in responding to anti-caste perspectives.

Thass not only wrote about the Parayar community’s possession of cultural material, but also refused the socio-political principle of mass exclusion of any community and refuted any possibility of untouchability as a sanction for eternity. Hence Thass simultaneously deconstructed and reconstructed identifications for an anti-caste community, forthrightly rejecting the disparaging terminology of panchamas and untouchables. His methodology was historicisation, contextualising the history that was projected by the dominant classes as meta-historical or culturally essentialist (Aloysius, 2010: 245). This historical interpretation was aided by multi-level critical hermeneutics and textual exegesis. When Thass deconstructed the new socio-political identification that had emerged in the public domain during the late nineteenth century, he critically deployed his own arguments and established his concerns by drawing upon Orientalism, though not imitating Orientalists. Hence, he brought out hidden tensions inherent in the very conditions of Subalternity (Aloysius, 2010: 245–6). The Orientalist discourse created the Brahmin as an affirmative congruence with power, while identifying Paraiyars as having negative congruence with the same power. Thass relentlessly challenged the real-life Brahmin resistance to Subaltern emergence in the new spheres of land allotment, education, employment and political representation.

Aloysius (2010: 247–8) suggests that ‘cultures’ developed around this basic force in a multi-dimensional sense, working around the Buddhist Sramana ideal of a cluster of social relational values. This led to flourishing of arts and crafts until an alien counter-force identified as Aryan and Brahminical sectarian power and privilege initiated a drawn-out war of ideals and ideology. Aloysius categorises the Sramanic as achievement-based, rationalist and humanist and concludes that Thass practised historical deconstruction as well as reconstruction to arrive at the truth through a moral critique.

Aloysius (2010: 249–50) also discusses at length how Thass contested the category of Parayar in Orientalist as well as nationalist discourses. Challenging the Brahminical way of life as deceptive and despicable, he asked how Tamil savants, Siddha practitioners and advisers to royalties of old, current teachers, engineers, magistrates, rai bahadurs and srestadhars could contemptuously be called Parayars. The category of ‘untouchable’ was read by Thass as referring only to those who were ill, lepers, cholera patients, suffering from poisonous poxes, traitors, backstabbers and murderers. He considered Brahmins and casteists as unapproachable untouchables, whose practice was plainly selfish and opportunistic. Through this deconstruction, Thass completely punctured the narrative that produced Parayar as untouchables. Instead he reversed the gaze back on the caste-supremacist narrative of Brahmins as the centre of socio-political and religio-cultural space in the subcontinent (Aloysius, 2010: 252).

In Tamizhan, Thass further deconstructed the dominant narratives on panchamas, untouchables and depressed classes through hermeneutic exploration. About panchamas, he asked wittily whether these are remnants of the Pandavas (pancha pandavas) of old, or victims of a famine (pancham), or constituted from the five elements (panchaputham) or are they indeed thrashed and scattered as cotton (panchu), or do they live along the five rivers (pancha nadhi)? He also suggested that the discourse changed from panchamas to depressed classes to dispense notions of pity, condescension and welfare engagement of the dominant groups. He saw this as a form of contempt, connoting that the so-called depressed classes lacked ideological and cultural resources and hence human dignity. He pinpointed that in this narration of the oppressed and depressed, all talk on upliftment and welfare was merely an opportunistic strategy by the dominant players to prevent the self-respect of the so-called oppressed, keeping them in their degraded status. Countering this, Thass proposed the identity of the true Buddhist to contest the idea of uplift by others.

Turning this all around, Thass further asked who could be an Iyer, rhyming the word Iyer with ‘higher’ class. He professed that only those who can protect all life as their own, attain knowledge, excel in discernment, are generous and moral, transcend caste discrimination and jealousy, and promote human unity, can be called ‘Iyer/higher class’. He mandated that only those who become compassionate, inclusive and selfless through self-discipline, good conduct and universal compassion, while renouncing the despicable distinctions of caste through long years of practice, are higher human beings. He proposed that ‘the Buddhist moral qualities of an exalted human life were based on achievement’, not on one’s birth (Aloysius, 2010: 253).

Ultimately foregrounding that identification is about what one does, and not one’s birth, Thass accused those who followed the caste-ideals as mere imitators, paarpaar in Tamil. Sarcastically using this term for Brahmins, Thass suggested that Hindus and Hinduism are merely alternative terms for Brahmins and Brahminism, which sacralise Brahmin authority and the practice of caste through acts of imitation. Aloysius (2010: 253) claims that this term paarpaar is a ‘contribution of Thass to the lexicon of modern Tamil social history’. Thass countered the meaning of the word caste (sathi) by emphasising its form as a verb rather than a noun. In this derived verb form in Tamil, sathi means to achieve, articulate and act. Hence, one becomes known only by what one achieves, articulates and the way one acts. Accordingly, Thass asserted clearly and very differently that there is ‘nothing natural, given, or divine about caste’ in this subcontinent (Aloysius, 2010: 254–5).

Thass constructed Tamizhan (Tamilian) as a caste-less identification of the Subalterns, where one neither believes nor practices the caste-way-of-life (sathi aacharam). Hence, he propounded that ‘the casteless Tamil is the genuine and original Tamil (aadhi Tamizhan) and a caste Tamil is only a paadhi Tamizhan (half Tamil)’. The rest, therefore, is only ‘meethi (residual) Tamil’ (Aloysius, 2010: 255). Hence Thass argued that ‘Dravidian’, another name for Tamil according to him, takes an oppositional socio-political meaning to ‘Aryan’. Thass’ Dravidian is a positive non-caste political principle of egalitarian and inclusive unification. Aloysius (2010: 256) claims that this was an ideal based on congruence between power and culture.

Thass founded a counter-throw through re-imagining a history of Tamil language that rationalises a caste-less sociality. This pedagogic take on history and writing by Thass is weaving together a social and religious counter-world that defied the ascriptive discrimination of the Brahminical congruence between power and culture. Redefining the identity of sub-continental history, culture and tradition, Thass’ writings insisted on a rationalised community while imagining a language. Numerous pieces of historical and linguistic evidence were mobilised to build a logically coherent case of continuity and identity with the purva/sakya Buddhists. This anti-caste community, constituted through the lens of out-caste experience, was an open-ended inclusive identity based on castelessness and universal compassion as ethical core principles.

Writing a world outside caste, Tamil Dalits forcefully imagined a ‘coming-community’ which is not transitory and liminal, but ‘looks-back’ at the past. The experience of freedom to conceptualise this anti-caste community in Tamil is not dissociated from political practice. For threshold people like the Dalits, ‘alterity’ is creatively explored to understand community. Clearly, Tamil Dalits wrote and published extensively about such issues in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The writings of Thass, seeking to create an anti-caste vernacular cosmopolitan in the Tamil print public sphere, during the early twentieth century, must be treated as words on a world outside caste. Particularly his journal’s ethico-religious commentaries were hermeneutically rich, interpretatively complex and ideologically refreshing. The most oppressed by caste used journals to create a language of and for a caste-less world, to belong and communicate through a critical interpretative practice. Dalits used the reserves of language to explore print-modernity for an anti-caste critique. They were also experimental and innovative in their practice of knowledge, which was, however, never recognised even by thoughtful historians of Tamil print-history.

Print, Reading–Writing Practices and Anti-caste Publics

Modern print, as a subject of research enquiry, has kept many historians, philologists, media-theorists and linguists busy. As often theorised, slowly yet systematically, print paved ways to make language largely soundless (McLuhan, 1962: 1–11). Printed truths privileged the eye, more than any other sensory organ. Besides, print inscribed languages, and therefore knowledge, into a visual bias (Ivins, 1969: 1–20). Hence, print-capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could evoke the idea of a nation as ‘imagined political community’, a derivative category, in many countries, as languages and nations were simultaneously produced through print-modernity (Anderson, 1991: 1–8).

In Indian languages, particularly, the complex relationship between orality, print-history and nation has attracted scholarly interest for some time (Blackburn, 2003: 1–15). Despite serious research in this field, such studies do not have much to say about marginalised regimes of truths. In India, what was print to those who were considered outcaste? What does modern print mean to Dalits? In the context of post-Mandal agitations and debates, discussions on caste, Dalit politics, modernity and the public sphere were rampant (Guru, 2000; Ilaiah, 1998; Nanda, 2001; Nigam, 2000), but did not focus on the Dalit print sphere, let alone evidence of earlier developments.

Three important edited books, published as part of the ‘Book History in India’ series (Gupta & Chakravorty, 2004, 2008, 2016), do not include even one chapter that foregrounds the caste question and/or the Dalits’ engagement with modern-print. All these books prioritise print and publishing history across the Indian subcontinent in 24 chapters by prominent scholars, with just one from South India on Tamil Encyclopaedias. Though many anti-caste movements across India generally, and by ideologues such as Phule, Thass, Ramasamy and Ambedkar particularly, engaged with modern print for their movements against caste, serious academic scholarship on print seems to be still largely silent about this phenomenon, rendering it invisible.

Arguing that the contradictory engagement of lower castes with modernity and politics has an important message for the present, Pandian (2002: 1740) concludes that ‘[b]eing one step outside modernity is indeed being one step ahead of modernity’, opening a disparate space where the politics of difference through caste can articulate itself in new ways and caste can emerge as a legitimate category of democratic politics. Colonialism, he argued, made the ‘national community’ speak in two competing sets of languages dealing with the issue of caste (Pandian, 2002: 1737). The dominant caste nationalists spoke of caste by other means, and the oppressed talked about caste ‘on their own terms’. Identifying nationalism’s ‘inability to exercise hegemony over the life of the nation’ (Pandian, 2002: 1736) not only locates ‘the source of two competing modes of speaking caste’ (Pandian, 2002: 1736), but points to the limits of any central nationalist dispensation within the Indian federation to control all the various disparate parts of India as a composite nation.

The obvious triumph of Indian nationalism over colonialism might well emerge as formal domination over the various Subaltern sections within the nation and its contexts and claims of modernity (Pandian, 2002: 1739), but the ‘contradictory engagement with modernity by the lower castes’ that Pandian (2002: 1740) so clearly identifies, it would appear, indicates concerted efforts by various Subalterns to differentiate themselves from dominant structures of power and ideology which claim to represent modernity. The critical point for the present article is that Pandian (2002) indeed does not ‘see’ that this is not only a recent phenomenon.

Pandian (2002: 1736) correctly identifies that language plays a key role in such contexts. However, not only Sanskrit and English, or Hindi, would be pertinent. Such an analysis seems necessary for all languages, including the numerous vernaculars of tribal groups. The present historical study of Thass indicates the potential that major local/regional languages can serve as a medium of resistance for Dalit counter-publics, which in Tamil produced such significant anti-caste writing at the start of the twentieth century, if not before.

Why and how different kinds of nations as imaginaries competed against each other, in the same language, was never given serious thought, especially in the context of print-public spheres and the changed reading practices that print created. Venkatachalapathy (2012) accounts for the history of reading practices in the colonial Tamil public sphere and studies the Tamil book history, observing how palm scripts were converted into print. A particular mode of reading, silent reading rather than reading aloud, emerged as dominant practice. The printed book made silent reading the dominant mode, a historical transition from learning by rote through hearing what was read. Venkatachalapathy (2012: 208–42) draws attention to the new publics that the printed book was creating, while erasing the older reading–writing practices.

Detailed recent historical studies of print history in Tamil claim that the social history of the recovery and publication of Tamil classics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was dictated by a conglomeration of upper-caste land-holding communities as active participants, along with institutions, like land-holding Saiva mutts and the Tamil language promotion associations ‘under the collusive pact with hegemonic colonial economy’ (Rajesh, 2011: 65). Their combined efforts brought the Tamil classical texts as books into print form by the turn of the nineteenth century itself, in a competitive environment under colonialism. Rajesh (2011) examines this pattern of patronage in detail for the period between the first phase, which started in 1812 with the establishment of the college at Fort St. George through active patronage from the Madras government. The second phase from 1830s to 1880s consisted of editorial and printing activities associated with the Saiva revival movement inaugurated by Arumuga Navalar in Jaffna, ably supported by the Zamindars of Ramanathapuram and Tiruvavatuturai Atinam in Tirunelveli. Tamil pandits played a dual role as printers and editor/publishers. The third phase from the 1880s to the 1920s was dominated by C.W. Damodaran Pillai, U.V. Swaminatha Iyer and others who published the Sangam epics such as Silappadhikaram, Sivakasinthamani and Manimekalai in the 1880s for the first time. The third phase produced an enormous number of Tamil classical texts as books by scholars who were invariably Brahmins. An intensive competition ensued between Damodaran Pillai from the Saiva Mutt and Swaminatha Iyer to produce the maximum number of books from the antique Tamil past.

Recent historical research argues that the popularisation of Tamil and publication of classical texts in this language was a culmination of three factors in the late nineteenth century. One of the factors influencing the institutionalisation of Tamil literature, language and nation in a continuum was the growth of journalism (Rajesh, 2013: 17) among other reasons. But research into the Subaltern articulations of Tamil as a heritage of the most oppressed, either contesting the Brahmins in the public sphere, or critiquing the colonial state, remains far less prominent. Historians, indeed, did not adequately reflect on the role of the emergent journalistic practice that gained currency among the most oppressed, nor is there serious reflection on the Tamil public spheres and its anti-caste counter publics that journalistic-print brought forth. There is hardly any account of how an embodied anti-caste public had to work on alternative epistemological practices using journalistic-print, rather than the book as a dominant print form which the caste-public practiced profusely.

However, some valiant attempts have been made to investigate the articulations of oppressed communities in the sphere of printing and publishing in colonial Tamil Nadu (Balasubramaniam, 2017, 2020; Rajangam, 2008). These are excellent accounts of Dalit engagement with Tamil print in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Very few works, though, highlight Thass’ industrious work as an organic intellectual through his contributions to Tamil journalistic print and creative knowledge practice that prioritises an anti-caste point of view.

Even before the print-flourish gained momentum towards a print capitalism of the nationalist kind, Tamil Dalits used print-journals to create an anti-caste community imaginary. They often contested and debated the nationalist aspirations of the dominant castes. This early period is least researched or documented. Many Dalit-Subaltern intellectuals attempted to ingeniously create a reading community, using the emergent print reading–writing practice. Pioneers such as Iyothee Thass and many others participated in promoting journalistic print. This helped in carving out not only a political but also an anti-caste cultural community that read and wrote in public.

Numerous journals run by leading figures during the latter half of the nineteenth century began with Suriyodhayam (1869) and extended to Oru Paisa Tamizhan (later Tamizhan) published by Thass from 1907 onwards. The idea of ‘Dravidian’ was also mooted by the Dalit-Subalterns first in this journalistic public sphere. The magazine Dravida Pandian, started by Reverend John Rathinam and Thass in 1885 was the first magazine to use this term as a political imaginary, constituting anti-caste consciousness. The ‘Dravidian proof’ (Trautmann, 2006) in the South Indian languages emerged through the works of F.W. Ellis in 1816 within an interesting orientalist exchange. Trautmann’s study of the ‘Madras School of Orientalism’, and its contribution to this proof, ascertains that the interactions between European and Indian traditions of scholarships were embodied by intellectuals from both sides (Trautmann, 2009: 5). While Raman (2012) investigated the ‘document raj’ and the ‘new’ bureaucratic orientations to language, writing, memory and pedagogy by colonial officers and the native elite, the radical philology explored by Dalit intellectuals in the context of a transition from one regime of knowledge to another, where the past was moulded for a new anti-caste future, was never accounted for.

For instance, Gowthaman (2004: 116–38) discusses a large number of texts about medicine, astrology, mathematics, astronomy and grammar which had a genealogical link with caste-less Dravidian languages and Buddhism and constituted a textual heritage possessed by the Dalits of North Tamil Nadu. This remarkable output of texts by Dalits not only produced a textual tradition in print that contested the Vedic Brahminic lineage of Tamil texts, both Vaishnavaite and Saivaite, but also created a public sphere that was textually embodied and lay claim over a caste-less civilisation in print. Reading, as an embedded activity, was going through tremendous modification. Print-cultures introduced a mediatory effect particularly through journals. Along with book-reading communities, print enunciated ‘political imaginaries’ of different kinds (Anderson, 1991: 6). The Dalit-Subalterns were active agents in such transition, participants of an emergent ‘sensorium’ that was being modulated not only as emancipatory, beyond being just considered untouched, but also lay claim over an open-minded civilisation.

Aloysius (2010: 238–74) confirms that there were many reasons for the emergence of the Buddhist movement in northern Tamil Nadu in the second half of the nineteenth century. Primarily, he identifies that the relatively low-level Brahmin impact on colonialism created a multifaceted awakening among the colonially subalternised castes in South India. He also suggests that the institutional modernity produced by colonialism provided a context for members of these communities to resuscitate themselves both individually and collectively. One of the manifestations of this, he claims, is that ‘they took to the printed word’ as a means of socio-political and religio-cultural awakening as well as mobilisation.

Therefore, the early emergence of print journals in the Tamil public sphere could be understood as promoting debates on a plethora of issues in a heterogeneously politicised Tamil public sphere. The journalistic practice, apparently, especially for the Dalit-Subaltern constituencies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crafted the community as a political force that could emerge through print journalism. But importantly, it was also fashioning new subjects who could sense, read, touch, smell and cultivate tastes, a field of research that remains largely under-studied.

Conclusions

This article clearly showed that India’s highly diverse Dalit community, with specific reference to the Tamil socio-cultural and linguistic sphere, experienced early on how its own patterns of communication through print could develop a critique of past and present discriminations, looking ahead to a better future. Consciousness of this process of activism shows the community as being-in-common. It could also be understood that such writing and communication constituted the ‘political’ moment of the self-definition of the community. Its intellectual leaders open the community to itself, and to its limits. It enjoins its own dissemination through its own writing, allowing its own alterity to form a ‘unique convergence’ (Nancy, 1991: xxxvi). Evidently, writing is political and gives the community a specific existence, of being-in-common, which gives rise to the existence of being-self. This mode of exposition is also posed towards an alterity, an appeal to the other. Therefore, Dalits as Subalterns cannot think of an anti-caste community as essence, they must counter the fact that the hegemonic forces of ‘the other’, in this case Hinduism and Brahminism, at the same time reject and seek to incorporate the community. It is in opposition to this process and experience of being denied equality of status that Thass and those around him became active as writers and publishers, generating a readerly print-public.

Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tamil Dalits used print-journals to create an anti-caste community imaginary. They not only rejected the nationalism propounded by the predominantly upper caste print-public sphere, but also laid out an alternative knowledge practice. This prioritised the oral traditions present among the oppressed communities. Thass employed journalistic-print intelligently and intellectually to retrieve, contest, re-read and revaluate an anti-caste legacy. Placing himself outside modern caste inscription, his search for an anti-caste descent fundamentally transformed what was previously considered rigid and static into a complex new modernity (Pandian, 2002: 1740). Yet, when such fairly recent critical writing fails to recognise such earlier efforts within the Tamil public space, this ironically embraces colonial discourses and high-caste apologetics aimed at erasure of more than a century of Dalits’ attempts to make their own life visible and legible. Increasingly, thus, Dalits in contemporary India profusely use social media and Internet as alternative technological tools in their fight against caste. In this, they face not only the opposition of hegemonising ‘traditionalists’ of various kinds, but also have to stand up against media giants that structure the globalised regime of power that does not voice the violence of caste loudly enough.

Dalit intellectuals seem to conceptualise community as beyond the traditional model of the social bond supposedly determined by caste. They interrogate community to undo caste rigidity and challenge Brahminism to get its own house in order in the current global cacophony of different socio-cultural and ‘religious’ orders. They open the chance of a political to emerge that is otherwise deemed foreclosed. In an act towards self-respect, they question, through an ethical-ontological register, the philosophical suppositions of a caste-society through a deconstructive understanding of ‘community’. This constitutes a deconstructive opening, in an essential way, of further debates regarding the possibility of a caste-less community.