Literary criticism as a critique of caste: Ayothee Thass and the Tamil Buddhist past

Abstract

While postcolonial studies has expanded Indian nationalist critique by considering how British literary forms reinforced imperial rule, little is known about how colonial-era Dalit writing demonstrated the bases of caste inequality. The literary criticism of Ayothee Thass (1845–1914) does so by locating the origins of untouchability in the vanquishing of Buddhism by Brahminical forces. This article draws upon issues of his Tamilan journal published between 1907 and 1914, to argue that Thass offered literary criticism as a means of destabilizing widely-accepted justifications of caste and as a basis of political action. Just as nationalists turned to the pre-colonial past to establish authority and critique colonial dominance, lower-caste intellectuals including Ayothee Thass turned to a pre-Brahminical past to assert their identity as indigenous inhabitants of the land. The little-known history of this mode of reading is crucial to understand the formation of a more inclusive public sphere in colonial India and the genealogies of twentieth-century Dalit assertion in the subcontinent.

Vernacular print culture in colonial India widened the arena of public participation while remaining in conversation with the closed circuits of manuscript transmission. Contrary to Eisenstein’s (1980) thesis that print veiled pre-print worlds, vernacular print artefacts from colonial India speak of a literary milieu where genres straddled print and pre-print forms (Orsini, 2009) and overflowed the bounds of literacy (Bayly, 1997), where individual agents were highly influential in crafting canons and tastes for their emergent publics (Stark, 2008). The influence of such extraordinary, and largely elite caste, agents, who shaped negotiations between these forms in the southern Indian language of Tamil under colonial rule, has received some attention (Ebeling, 2010b; Vēṅkaṭācalapati, 2012). Colonial technologies of knowledge-making are shown to have constrained or produced the actions of authors and publishers, as they brought both new forms like the novel and the ancient poetry of the region into print for the first time. V. Rajesh (2014) questions the narrative of “rediscovery” of ancient Tamil texts through print, showing them to be in circulation before and during the arrival of print. Debates about genres and the dichotomies of tradition/modernity and manuscript/print — false dichotomies, in Stuart Blackburn’s (2006) view — marked this history. The little-known work of Ayothee Thass (Ayōti Tās, 1845–1914) lends credence to these views, thick as it is with references to manuscripts and texts that have not found their way into print. ¹ Drawing poetry into journalistic and historical debates, straddling print and manuscript technologies of literary transmission, his journal foreshadows the critique of caste that was to shape the political life of the region. ² Offering a rare instance of writing from a Dalit location in colonial India, Thass’s work is of significance to literary and social history, to genealogies of the formation of a public sphere, and to modes of anti-caste reading. Drawing upon Tamil literature to deny Brahminical explanations for caste and offer a new account of untouchability as originating in the vanquishing of Buddhism, Thass produced printed texts that papered over and were simultaneously haunted by what came before. Manuscripts left myriad traces across his print journalism and are also set to new purposes by his critique.

Thass was a doctor in the indigenous Siddha tradition, and a scholar of Tamil literature, who protested the social exclusion of the impoverished Pariah caste that he belonged to. Through the 1870s and 1880s, he unsuccessfully petitioned the colonial government from the hilly Nilgiris district to classify the caste as “Original Tamils” in the census. The Pariah caste has historically been associated with landless agrarian labour, though members of the caste had begun interacting with, and occasionally gaining some ameliorative measures through, the colonial state at this time (Balachandran, 2008; Viswanath, 2014). This caste has also been rendered symbolic of caste oppression by the absorption of the caste name into English. Thass sought to refute the “externally imposed category of outcaste” (Ayyathurai, 2011: 19) by arguing that the group constituted the casteless, or sātipētamillā, original inhabitants of the land, through a mode of literary criticism that complemented his political activism and the establishment of new sanghas, or Buddhist civil associations. By his account, he had turned to Buddhism in 1890, and had also travelled and sent a delegate to Ceylon to study at the Vidyodaya College for this purpose. He sought the advice of H. S. Olcott of the Theosophical Society to establish a Buddhist Society in Madras (1911/2011b: 180–81). ³

Thass frequently cites the Maṇimēkalai, a sixth-century Tamil narrative poem believed to be of Buddhist provenance, to substantiate his claims in his journal, which was intended to mobilize support for the Buddhist Society. The poem tells the story of a female renunciate who makes a rational choice to turn Buddhist, following a journey filled with marvels, rejecting the advances of a prince who sought to treat her as a courtesan based on her birth, receiving the inexhaustible bowl that allows her to feed the hungry, and visiting various gurus in Kanchi. The didactic portions of this text, announcing the story of the Buddha and the virtues of choosing his path, become an important source for Thass’s account of Buddhism. Drawing on this text among others, Thass offered a “history” of Buddhism that drew upon literature, rather than historical scholarship or religious texts, to make its claims. In the following, I will be collating Thass’s citations of the Maṇimēkalai, showing how he uses the text to produce an account of this Buddhist past. As Paula Richman (1988, 1992) suggests, the sixth-century text uses the then-familiar rhetoric of female beauty to undermine it, and the literary tropes of sexual union to tell a story of renunciation. Echoing the text’s moves, Thass uses the rhetoric of indigeneity to undermine elite castes’ claims to representing the nation or region. In using Tamil literature to read Buddhism as an oppositional faith to Brahminical Hinduism, he takes the familiar medium of literature to introduce the unfamiliar theme of resistance. In doing so, Thass offers an early twentieth-century counterpoint to recent scholarship on colonial India that has followed Nicholas Dirks’ (2001) lead in reading caste as an administrative category imposed from above and solidified by a colonial state. Thass argues that the social practice of exclusion that “untouchable” castes were subject to derived from a category imposed upon these groups by elite castes. He concurs with recent scholarship in reading caste as an imposed category, but differs from it by reading it as imposed by native elites, rather than a colonial state. Contesting dominant views that pushed the group to the margins through ritual, symbol, and practice, he places the Pariah caste at the centre of his history. His argument that the caste constituted the “first Tamils” gave this landless group, frequently subject to segregation and forced into settlements outside villages, stronger claims to the land and the language — a claim staked in the name of his journal, the Tamilan, literally “The Tamil Man”, which he ran between 1907 and 1914. ⁴

In its pages, Thass mines the corpus of classical Tamil literature, giving literary production by regional elites new meaning, thereby rendering an egalitarian future plausible by giving it a past. The texts, in print and manuscript form, serve him as linguistic fossils that could speak of an erased past. Treating literature as a historical archive was fairly common practice at the time, especially within the Madras Presidency, and the Maṇimēkalai, alongside other classical Tamil literature, was frequently read as providing ethnographic data, or as offering an account of past social worlds. Thass cites the ēṭṭuppiratikaḷ or palm leaf manuscripts, owned by Bahubali Nayanar and Markalingam Pandaram, to compare their version of the Maṇimēkalai with the more commonly used version. The currently accepted version of the text (Cāttan̲ār, 1965) is believed to describe the birth of an illegitimate son to a Brahmin mother in the section titled Āputtiran kātai. Thass cites the passage, which uses the phrase pārppana sāli to refer to the mother. He finds that manuscripts owned by Nayanar and Pandaram use the word sīli instead — a word that can mean one of good behaviour or, in Thass’s interpretation, a nun. Nuns were called pārppini, a name appropriated by the invaders, the false Brahmins, he argues. Therefore, he finds that the passage describes the ravishing of a Buddhist nun, resting on the difference of meaning that a vowel sound produces (1908/2011b: 126). This plausible difference that he locates by comparing manuscripts, offers the basis for building an argument for a local practice of Buddhism that was then vanquished by wily invaders who further appropriated the names and practices that were associated with Buddhists. Using the Maṇimēkalai’s text as proof of the pre-Brahminical past, Thass argues that once there were “casteless Dravidians” (1908/2011a: 119) who were characterized by their willingness to help each other. The Buddhists were once the real Brahmins, a name stolen by those who took on this identity as if it were a costume (1908/2011b: 126). In his reading, such shifts in vocabulary were deliberate attempts to overwrite Buddhist histories with Brahminical contempt. Just as “the Buddhist king Nandan was derided as a Pariah” (see Ebeling, 2010a for the shifting resonances of this tale), “kings and sanghas associated with the Buddha Dharma have been pushed down, their histories rewritten and their texts changed”, he argued. He finds that the texts with Bahubali Nayanar and Markalingam Pandaram, especially the texts of the Maṇimēkalai, Nannūl, Cīvakacintāmaṇi, and Viracoliyam, show sākkaiyar in places where other texts indicate sāvakar. Therefore, the Buddha, or one who rules the Sakya in the Nayanar and Pandaram manuscripts, is erased by changing the description to “the one who rules the Savakar” in other manuscripts (1907/2011b: 42). In this manner, Thass’s anti-caste method of reading appears as another instance of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” — the phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to suggest that the meaning of the text emerges in interpretation, in the gap between real and apparent meaning (Stewart, 1989). By remaining suspicious of elite caste influence on the production and transmission of literary texts, Thass produces new interpretations of literature and offers implicit commentary on the closed circuits that had marked its transmission until recently.

Beginning with the printing of the Kalitokai (1887) by Damodaran Pillai, the texts that now constitute the Tamil classical canon were published by 1920, with the Maṇimēkalai printed in 1892 by U. V. Saminatha Iyer. Some Buddhist texts are believed to be lost but have been recovered in fragments from commentaries (Zvelebil, 1974). The manuscripts that Saminatha Iyer is believed to have consulted for the purpose of arriving at a standardized version of the Maṇimēkalai for print, though, do not seem to be the ones that Thass was using. Meiyappan̲ (1979: 19) finds that Iyer consulted manuscripts from Sēlam Rāmasāmi Mutaliyār, Mitilaipaṭṭi Alakiya Sirrambala Kavirāyar, Tirunelvēli Tirvampalattinnamutampiḷḷai, Nallūr Sir. Kailāsa Piḷḷai, Ārumugalangam Ē. Suntaram Piḷḷai, Tirumailai Saṇmukam Piḷḷai, Cennai Muttukumārasāmi Mutaliār, and the institutional holdings of the Tirvāvaṭuturai Mutt, Ēṭṭayāpuram Palace, and the Madras Government Manuscript Library. Thass, by contrast, cites Nayanar’s and Pandaram’s manuscripts to compare them with a dominant version of the text. Thass’s accounts of the Buddhist past have, therefore, unwittingly produced a rich corpus of excerpts of manuscript material, as ghostly ephemera of forms past that continue to haunt the printed page. Thass’s practice of citation — using block quotes for literature and making oblique passing references to ideas and names of authors rather than detailed citation — alongside the questions raised in the journal, and the names of those who send in these questions, all suggest a literate audience drawn from diverse castes, debating his propositions and following his speaking engagements. Monius (2001) speculates about the historical community the Maṇimēkalai was likely addressing by seeking clues within its rhetoric and language — she concludes that its historical audience was probably multilingual, with Buddhism still a dominant force in a time and region where Brahmins still sacrificed cows. While the Maṇimēkalai may have become a “text without a community” (Richman, 1988) in the intervening period, it finds a similarly diverse literate audience while producing new meanings in the pages of the Tamilan journal in the early twentieth century. Thass’s work shows that the text was still in circulation through manuscript transmission in the time of print. Print is often accused of homogenizing, or giving fixity to one version of, more diverse oral or manuscript traditions — an unhelpful dichotomy, as Blackburn (2006) indicates in his account of how folklore finds its way into print. More than other critics of the time, Thass was attentive to the various versions of texts in circulation. He uses the medium to note textual variations between copies, seeking to reproduce differences of versions alongside his interpretations, allowing the polyphony of his material to resound to some degree. He does not always cite manuscripts as belonging to individuals, allowing room for speculation that he owned a library of manuscripts, while also engaged in comparative study of those that belonged to others. He further cites literature that does not appear to have found its way into print, suggesting that the formation of a canon of classical Tamil literature may have erased some evidence of Buddhist pasts (Vēṅkaṭācalapati, 2012, indicates the Saiva Vellalar influence on this process of canon formation).

The shifting meanings of words for god are, in Thass’s view, another instance of the overwriting of a Buddhist past by a hegemonic Hinduism. The text of the Maṇimēkalai shows that Intirar was a name of a deity for whom festivals were held (1908/2011a: 119). Those who have attained the Buddhist principles of restraining, or of not being led by the desires of, the five senses of taste, vision, touch, hearing, and smell, those who have triumphed over the god of lust and love, are now called Intirar or Aintirar (1908/2011b: 117). The prefix of the latter word translates as the number five in Tamil, suggesting that the divine entity for whom the festival was celebrated, derived his name from the word for the Buddhist monk who has conquered the five sensory cravings. While all the Tamil names that Thass cites do not bear equivalents in Pali — the language in which the traditional texts of Buddhism are written — the Indriya Sutta does discuss the monk who has controlled all the senses. The Intira festival was celebrated by decking gateways with banana leaves and other decorations, according to ancient Tamil texts (1907/2011b: 54). Paratar and Intirar were among the 1000 names of the Buddha, the source of terms such as Bharat and India, he argues (1899?/2011b: 18). While the name Paratar does not figure in the available compilation of Pali proper names, the name Inda, and occasionally Indra, is associated with the Pali equivalent of the Vedic god by that name, described as the “king of gods” and “protector of cows”. The sacrifice of cows was still a Brahmin practice, according to the Maṇimēkalai, attempts to halt which earn Āputtiran̲ the appellation of pulai or unclean (Cāttan̲ār, 1965: 144). Nān̲ mukan̲, or the four-faced one, is another name of the Buddha. The Maṇimēkalai is proof of the Buddha having 1000 names (1909/2011a: 150a; 1899?/2011b: 18). Āti tēvan̲, kaṭavuḷ, nātan̲, piraman̲ are names of the Jekatkur̲u, the Buddha (1908/2011a: 559; 1907/2011b: 27). Responding to a reader’s question regarding how the words for the Hindu gods Vishnu and Siva came to be kaṭavuḷ, he writes that the word kaṭavuḷ refers to the Buddha in Maṇimēkalai and has been absorbed by Hinduism.

Thass primarily draws upon Tamil literature to document the life of the Buddha, his teachings and the practice of Buddhism in the region, with the occasional accurate transcription from the Pali text of the Dhammapada. The teachings that are often called the essence of Buddhism are accurately transcribed into Tamil from Pali (1908/2011a: 545): The three vētam or sacred sayings are to not sin, to hold on to the good, and to cleanse the heart. Thass cites the Maṇimēkalai as proof that the Buddha was a Sakya monk or muni (1899?/2011b: 20) and was of royal birth (1909/2011b: 111). Drawing on the text’s description of the Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree (1899?/2011b: 21), Thass argues that the contemporary Tamil practice of worshipping the Muni-āṇṭavar with stones placed under the tree had emerged from this knowledge. It suggests to him that the festival of Sankaranti is actually a celebration of the Buddha’s Nirvana, that the Sākya Muni established sanghas, “rotating the wheel of Dharma across the world” (1907/2011b: 53). The Muni was the author of the veta vākya, or the words of the scriptures, written, in Thass’s estimation, about 2500 to 3400 years ago (1908/2011b: 79). Arguing that caste was created to defeat Buddhism (1899?/2011b: 19), Thass emphasizes compassion to all as the central feature of Buddhism. “Knowing that false gurus will arise to fool the people, the Buddha only emphasized the unfalsifiable message of love” (1909/2011a: 583–84), he wrote. The Maṇimēkalai mentions a kaṭavut pīṭikai or an altar for a deity (1908/2011b: 74), which is, in Thass’s view, the laya ankam, or the pillars erected over representations of the lotus to worship the Buddha. The bali or sacrifice that was offered at the pīṭikai was traditionally of rice, as indicated by the Maṇimēkalai (1909/2011b: 105). Thass speculates that meat and alcohol likely became included in the ritual later, since they were also part of the common diet. The sūrar were likely those who ate meat and drank alcohol and the asura were likely the ones who did not (1907/2011b: 48–49). Given that asura became the name of demons in Hindu mythology, the name of those who abstained from meat and alcohol, the Buddhists, became demonized in such usage, he implies. The laya ankam, the pillars resting on a lotus to represent the Buddha, became the lingam, the representation of Shiva, as part of the absorption or transformation of Buddhist practice and philosophy into Shaivism, he argues. This is why, he claims, “Shaivism is love, love is Shaivism” becomes an accepted claim in Tamil literature — it is derived from the Buddha’s teaching of universal love. Thass chooses to counter the claim of Shaivism for Tamil in choosing to tell the life history of the Buddha himself, besides that of untouchability, with quotes from Tamil literature. ⁵

Thass’s version of Buddhism is therefore world-embracing while also rooted in Tamil country, an instance of a “local cosmopolitanism” (Lazarus, 2011). Since the suruti or the spoken knowledge that is passed on by one speaking and another listening can be distorted, Buddha gave the northern language to Panini and the southern language to Agastya to set the teachings into written alphabets, Thass argues, thereby making Buddhism the fountainhead of written language. Therefore, in his view, Tamil and Sanskrit are sister languages. This claim is not borne out by philology, though the two languages have been shown to produce “cross-cultural fertilization” in the medieval period (Cox and Vergiani, 2013). Thass’s move, though, serves to recast both languages and their literature as Buddhist products, and therefore capable of speaking Buddhism’s history. Not only does he bring significant parts of South Asia under a Buddhist umbrella through such claims, he proceeds to argue that Christianity is itself a version of Buddhism, since it preaches universal love. The global spread of Buddhism is further attested to by archaeological evidence, he finds (1908/2011a: 559). Despite such occasional mentions of other forms of historical evidence and of scholarship in English, the primary thrust of his arguments, which may on occasion have a global reach, draw upon Tamil texts.

While it must be acknowledged that Thass himself described his task as removing the obfuscations of Brahminism, this account cannot be productively read as a verifiable history. M. S. S. Pandian (2008) reads Thass’s version of Buddhism as a revelatory vision — in his view, Thass is not aspiring to tell a historical truth, but intends to offer a revealed vision of the past, which cannot be questioned rationally because it is not produced through reasoning and deduction. Given that Thass is indeed engaging in comparative literary analysis, I suggest, instead, that it would be more useful to read Thass’s argument as historically formed — responding to debates within the Tamil public sphere, and producing a thick literary conversation between literature and journalism. This analysis shows the reading of literature itself to be a contested space, opening the possibility for literary criticism to function as a critique of social inequality. Thass’s claims also cannot be completely verified against the historical record, given the scant evidence available of the Buddhist period in southern India. Little is known about the period between 300–600 CE — frequently called the dark ages of the “predatory” Kalabhra rulers — though it is widely accepted as the period when Buddhism and Jainism flourished in the region (Sastri, 1976: 3). This “dark period”, as Sastri calls it, is “characterized also by great literary activity in Tamil” (1976: 131), with the Maṇimēkalai written toward the end of this time. A few other Buddhist texts have been recovered in fragment from commentaries and other sources (Richman, 1988; Zvelebil, 1974). Stupas across the Deccan further attest to the spread of Buddhism across the south (Sastri, 1976: 88–89) and there is evidence that Ceylonese Buddhism was in conversation with Andhra Buddhism (Sastri, 1976: 90). Ceylon and the Tamil kingdoms find mention in the second and thirteenth rock edicts of the Buddhist king Asoka (Sastri, 1976: 76), who is said to have sent missionaries to preach the dhamma in the region (Hikosaka, 1990: 186; Sastri, 1976: 77). Yuan Chwang, visiting in 642 CE, is said to have noted the decline of Buddhism (Sastri, 1976: 386). Kanchi, the town named in the Maṇimēkalai as the place where the protagonist learns of various religions and chooses Buddhism, was known as Buddhakanci for a long time (Sastri, 1976: 394), and likely sent out Buddhist missionary monks northwards at around the time the Maṇimēkalai was written (Hikosaka, 1990: 192–93). The text of Maṇimēkalai is believed to include references to castes as occupation groups (Cāttan̲ār, 1965: 329–30), suggesting that it was written in a time when caste hierarchies were either entrenched or familiar to the author. Indeed, the protagonist’s attempts to escape the fate of one born to a former courtesan comprises the larger part of the text that Thass employs to argue for a past unmarked by caste. Other historical and literary analysis from the time (Aiyangar, 1928; Narasu, 1922), though, shows that Thass is writing to an existing consensus on Tamil country’s Buddhist past, offering a different interpretation of literature as his basis for an alternative account of this past. Therefore, his proposal of a Buddhist past as a source of an emancipatory imagination may have been an attempt to create a new and contradictory mythology to that which is proffered to justify caste.

Thass’s stance was not widely accepted among, and put him at loggerheads with, other Dalit leaders like Rettaimalai Srinivasan. Srinivasan was the only other Dalit leader to attend the historic Round Table conference with Ambedkar, and he argued for reclaiming the Pariah caste name that was associated with all that was despicable and to use it with pride — an argument that Srinivasan followed through by running a journal called Paraiyan in the early twentieth century (Srinivasan, 1999). Both Thass and Srinivasan concurred with the futility of converting to other religions. Writing in the early 1900s, when a young Ambedkar had just met the benefactor who was to fund his higher education, Thass’s turn to Buddhism differs markedly from Ambedkar’s later call for Dalits to convert. Thass does foreshadow Ambedkar’s argument that Brahminism supplanted Buddhism. Ambedkar chose Buddhism after finding the Hindu epics distasteful as a boy for their treatment of lower-castes and women, and undertaking “close study of all religions after 35 years”, he writes in the unpublished preface to the Buddha and his Dhamma (1992/1956), dated 6 April 1956. Buddhism alone, he writes, is suited to “a society awakened by science”. Arguing that the acquisition of knowledge must be open to Shudras and women (Section 3.5), he writes that it is imperative to tear down social barriers (4.1.2). The Dhamma does this because it is social in contrast to the more personal belief or practice of religion. In Ambedkar’s view, love and understanding are its cornerstones, and the morality is fraternity (4.1.6). Thass shares some of these views, though he refers to the Pariah as “children who have forgotten their parents and are searching for their real father, the Buddha, down the wrong paths of Brahminism, Islam and other religions”. Thass’s vision of an egalitarian Buddhist past that the casteless ones, now rendered members of the Pariah caste, had lost but could reclaim, is somewhat at odds with Ambedkar’s call for crafting an egalitarian future by choosing a “Dhamma that was fundamentally social” over a more individualized religion.

These differing visions of the Dhamma and Thass’s “creative etymologies” (Collins, 2010: 61) may have also been influenced by the practice of Buddhism at the time, with its wide range of interpretations of Hindu mythology and creative crafting of rituals that were not always codified in text. Thass’s weekly journal was integrated with ongoing attempts to establish new sanghas, or Buddhist civil associations, to spread the teaching of dhamma in the Presidency. Initially called the Oru Paisā Tamilan (The One Paise Tamil) in 1907, it was printed at a Buddhist press in the colonial centre of Madras. It remains among the few, if not the only, colonial-era Dalit journals whose issues have survived, primarily in contemporary personal archives. Later gifted a press of its own by the Buddhists of Kolar Gold Fields (1911/2011b: 181), the journal acted as a mobilization tool for the new Buddhist movement among subaltern groups in its time, Aloysius (2010b) notes. The journal became Tamilan in its second year, and continued under Thass’s editorship until his death in 1914. It was periodically revived under different editorships with monetary contributions from the lower caste diaspora in the Kolar Gold Fields (Aloysius, 2010: 14b). Thass writes in English, “With a desire to circulate the Dharma throughout the length and breadth of the Tamil speaking world, single handed and unaided I have started a Weekly, The Tamilian” (1911/2011b: 181). This finds place in his letter addressed to “Buddhist Societies in Europe and America”, telling them about the activities of the Sakya Buddhist Asrama in Royapettah in Madras, dated 5 June 1911 (1911/2011b: 185). He takes pride in the fact that the Sakya Buddhist Society of Madras has been the cause for the revival of “Buddhism, the scientific religion” in southern India. He reports that Paul Carus from Chicago had consented to be its head. ⁶ Thass further notes that the Sakya Buddhist Society had branches in Mysore, North Arcot, Hyderabad, Burma, and South Africa (1911/2011b: 184). Thass advises new societies that it would be better to nominate a head who was Christian, Muslim, or a “casteless poor man without love for the Buddha Dharma”, rather than the fakes that wander around with the arrogance that “I too am a Hindu” (1913/2011b: 442–43). Though established to support and connect these societies, like other journals of this time (Zvelebil, 1974: 271), the Tamilan also focused on literature and culture, carrying contributions from others sympathetic to its views, with a significant portion of the writing produced by Thass. In Benedict Anderson’s (2006) influential thesis, print journalism, by allowing readers to imagine themselves as inhabiting the same space and time, created the “imagined community” of the nation. Thass’s journalism, likewise, demarcates a space for his people, creating a political space for Dalit communities in print.

Nationalist and anti-caste print journalism both call a public into being, writing them into history. By reclaiming the power to represent themselves or their pasts in defiance of, or contrary to, hegemonic colonial or elite caste ideological regimes, these spaces were arenas of both political struggle and assertion. The writing of anti-caste intellectuals such as Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890) in western India and Thass in southern India show how caste and colonial power alternately reinforce and threaten one another (O’Hanlon, 2002). They show that anti-caste and nationalist ventures were in tension precisely over the question of representation and social categories. When the nationalist Tamil daily Sutēsamitran expressed anguish over Indians being labelled coolies in South Africa, for instance, Ayothee Thass asked in return if it was acceptable to label people including doctors and agriculturists as pariah (Ayyathurai, 2011: 66–67). The later rationalist strands of anti-caste resistance in the region, such as those that rejected all signs of religion, bear a debt to the work of Dalit intellectuals — with the category of Dravidian itself borrowed from Dalit writers like Thass (Rajangam, 2008). While Laura Brueck’s (2014) question about whether writing from the colonial period, before the emergence of wider political consciousness, can be considered Dalit is well-taken, this writing can nevertheless be classified as “anti-caste”, for it is critical of Brahmin dominance, the basis of the hierarchy, and the notions of purity and pollution. Anti-caste writing of the time offered a mode of reading the social, including the literary, that is attentive to the representative strategies of elite castes within nationalist political struggles and elite indigenous literary texts. Thass’s account of the Buddhist past is, additionally, attentive to the changes that mark texts in literary transmission. His history of the “casteless people who have been named Pariah” is therefore a valuable corrective to the empty category of pariah, as synonymous with any kind of social shunning, in English. Paying heed to his reconstruction is to clear space for an intellectual from the caste to speak of or reject this category on his or her own terms.

By positing a Dalit caste as the original inhabitants of the land, as the Buddhists who were pushed to the outskirts of villages by invading Brahminism as punishment for their refusal to practise caste, Thass both makes a claim for the origin of untouchability and provides a rationale for the vanishing of Buddhism from Tamil country. By folding the origin of untouchability into an accepted historical narrative, he places the origin of caste within human time and hands, rather than treating it as divinely ordained, and therefore immutable, hierarchy. He seeks to provide historical depth to the structural violence of caste segregation, rejecting formulations such as the “harmonious interdependence” of castes claimed by elite caste scholars. Thass’s argument therefore seeks to provide an explanatory framework to understand the historic origins of caste exploitation, while being made in the context of ongoing conversations about Buddhism in Tamil country. This, then, is a fabricated history, emerging from the weaving together of existing scholarship and political and literary discussions. Ayyathurai (2011: 2–3) asks if it is possible to place Dalit voices at the centre, rather than see them as marginal; to read their resistance as an “immanent critique” present within caste society to offer an alternative to caste itself. Thass’s work offers an instance of such resistance. In his argument, the critique of the structure, or the practice of castelessness among Buddhists, was deprived of its transformative potential by being folded into the logic of caste. The casteless ones were reduced to another caste, but were held outside the system, as the “outcastes”, through untouchability and segregation.

The anti-colonial and pedagogical possibilities of print could, therefore, be a threat to caste elites as well. The representational strategies of colonialism find eerie resonance in elite caste literary production in its erasure or caricature of lower-caste histories. As is exemplified in Thass’s work, through print, manuscripts took on new meanings and travelled through new social networks. Through print, literary criticism was deployed to question literary representations and transmission. The critique of Sanskrit texts and Brahminical mythology as a means of contesting Brahmin domination was to become an established political strategy by the mid-twentieth century — indeed, the critique of caste is emblematic of the non-Brahmin public sphere in Marathi for Anupama Rao (2009). Such debates offered texture and counterpoint to nationalist critique of colonial rule. The sprouting nation-to-be is shown as splintered at its heart. The “transitional print object” (a phrase used in Orsini, 2009) between manuscript and print drove the expansion of the public sphere and, through work such as Thass’s, showed the fissures that marked this sphere. Thass draws on a plural and fecund archive of hand-written literature, myth, and ritual to conduct the archaeological etymologies that characterized his work. He is not, in his view, engaged in myth-making, more in pushing aside the obfuscations of Hinduism to reveal a Buddhist core. Recognizing myth as a means of domination, his claim to indigeneity of the landless outcaste serves as a source of authority, of producing a ground to stand upon. His work of drawing divine theories of caste into a human history is also of interest for literary history — it offers snippets of texts that have fallen out of academic favour, and shows the diverse audiences to which the “rediscovered” Tamil literature of the time had long been speaking.