CHENNAI: Pandit Iyothee Thassar (1845-1914) was a neo-Buddhist, social activist, thinker in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Tamil society. He was systematically educated in native Siddha medicine. When different communities of the Tamil society were reshaping their identities during the British rule, he was a pioneer who constructed the debates around the name, religion, and rights of the marginalised community. He started Dravida Mahajana Sabha in 1891.
He ran a weekly magazine, Tamilan, from 1907 to 1914. His thoughts and reflections on Tamil culture, which appeared in the magazine, were also published as books by the Sidhartha Publishing House operating from Kolar gold fields. They were preserved by different Dalit intellectual groups, but it was only in 1999 that his writings were compiled and published (by the efforts of Aloysius). It was almost a discovery for the insurgent Dalit identity movements of the 1990s. It is not an exaggeration to say that his writings altered and influenced the writings on Dalit history.
Since notions on caste and annihilation of caste are associated with modern times, modernity is viewed as a gift, tradition with resentment. That is why, religion, tradition, and native identities are conferred negatively in the modern anti-caste discourse. It is regarded that Dalits could not have had a past and even if they had one, it could not have been good. Pandit contests this view. He said that Dalits did have a past and it was an ‘enlightened period’. He believed that as natives of the land, Dalits should have had certain conduct of life.
This helped Thassar to challenge the opposition between tradition and modernity. Instead, he reread tradition in the light of modernity. This was a novel position in Dalit intellectual history. He said that today’s stigma against the oppressed should be traced back to the very beginning of the caste system. For him, the circulation and the gradual acceptance of the caste system were more crucial than caste. He insisted that it is necessary to know this strategic formation of caste and counter it through alternative narratives.
He exemplified how society through stories, tales, songs, and lore turned caste ignominies acceptable where they are not apparent. So, he challenged the myths of Arichandran, the parentage of Thiruvalluvar, Avvai, and so on and presented counter-myths with evidence from ancient Tamil literature. We could understand the significance of Thassar only if we consider other sources which testify the truth of his writings. For instance, in my fieldwork, I have seen how his narrative of the defeated king, Nandan, contrary to the image of a coolie in Periya Puranam, matches with the prevalence of place names like Natham and Nathamedu in different villages across Tamil Nadu.
Pandit Thassar not only gave examples but developed a methodology to read the sources. He argued that the cultural markers of the glorious past exist not only in the apparent forms (puramei) but contain hidden significance (ulmei). While reading a story, ritual, or even a name, Thassar focuses on their different versions and explains how they are read by different social groups and the questions that arise out of different contexts. Such exposure to varied sources helped him to come out with new (a Tamil Buddhist) interpretations for Kural and poems of the Sangam poet, Avvai.
Thassar's readings of the stigmas attached to the oppressed were not presented within the frame of caste but were seen as contempt for the practitioners of Buddhism. It helped him to discuss the mechanism involved in the annihilation of Buddhism, which got integrated with the lives of the oppressed (so called Parayaras). This pushed him to write an incredible alternative history of our Buddhist past, Indirar Desa Sarithiram (History of the Indira Country), which could be considered as the first subaltern history written in Indian languages. Though his contour was influenced by the revival of Buddhism in the Madras Presidency in the 19th century, he construed it through the cultural life of the Oppressed.
He collected broad cultural traditions of the oppressed to forge ‘Native/Tamil Buddhism’. This is a practice of constructing history from within rather than constructing one from outside. It offered the possibility of considering people's cultural practices as loaded with meaning instead of rejecting them from a rational perspective. No doubt he became one of the inspirations for Babasaheb Ambedkar to convert to Buddhism later (1956), considering it as the ‘Religion of the Oppressed’.
Iyothee Thassar’s thoughts on history have also offered a renewed understanding of language, religion, literature, and art. Although his work centred on a particular caste of the oppressed, his approach could be elaborated to write an alternative history of the oppressed in a pan-Indian level.
(Translated from Tamil by Aadhavan)
The author is a Tamil scholar, who writes on Dalit history. He has written eight books on politics, cinema and literature. Stalin has expertise on the life and times of Iyothee Thassar, having done a doctoral thesis on him.
This Dalit History Month, here’s an attempt to learn from history, as Dalit writers, artists and activists weave together the then and the now, offering a way out of the ‘history repeats itself’ impasse.