From a footnote to the forefront

A. R. Venkatachalapathy

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The Hindu

Illustration: Manivannan

In fin-de-siècle Tamil Nadu, Iyodhee Thass Pandithar forged a radical identity for Dalits

The death centenary of C. Iyodhee Thass Pandithar (1845-1914) has passed practically unnoticed. But for a few Tamil magazines and some Dalit intellectuals, no one seems to have commemorated it. When I suggested his name to a scholar-administrator seeking nominations for a scheme of the Ministry of Culture, which celebrates the centenaries of leading Indian personalities, I had to write a follow-up mail outlining who he was.

Who was Iyodhee Thass Pandithar? To put it simply, he was an intellectual who anticipated Dr. B.R. Ambedkar by two generations. In fin-de-siècle Tamil Nadu, Iyodhee Thass forged a radical identity for Dalits. He argued that they were the original Buddhists who were stigmatised as ‘untouchables’ by Brahmins for resisting the caste system. At a time when Buddhism was in practical oblivion (and whatever little was known of it was mediated by Orientalist antiquarians), he reinterpreted Indian and Tamil history through Buddhism. His movement to revive Buddhism radicalised significant numbers of Adi Dravidars — “the original Dravidans” is how he described the Dalit — especially among the working classes in the Kolar Gold Fields.

For long Iyodhee Thass was little more than a footnote in the history of the Dravidian movement. People knew of him through tantalising references in the great Tamil writer and political personality, Thiru.Vi. Kalyanasundara Mudaliar’s classic autobiography. In the wake of Dr. Ambedkar’s birth centenary, the Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu, for long subsumed within the non-Brahmin movement, came into its own. In 1999, G. Aloysius, following his pioneering monograph on Iyodhee Thass’ movement (Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils Under Colonialism, 1998), published an edition of his copious writings from Tamilan, the weekly that Iyodhee Thass published from 1907 until his death. These volumes have been the major ideological arsenal for the Dalit intellectual movement in Tamil Nadu over the last decade and a half.

No sense of history

India is notorious for not having a sense of history. The terrible shambles of most of our archival repositories stands testimony to our apathy. The mainstream disdain for lower caste histories makes this historical apathy lethal. Not surprisingly, our knowledge of Iyodhee Thass — “Not much is known of [Iyodhee Thass’] life,” observes G. Aloysius in a footnote — especially until the launch of Tamilan in the last years of his life, is particularly sketchy. Based on some documents in the colonial archive and a report in The Hindu, both dating to 1898, I present some new information on Iyodhee Thass and his movement.

In mid-1898, the Government of Madras noticed from occasional newspaper reports that certain persons of the outcastes were attempting to establish that they were once Buddhists. The issue was referred to the Commissioner of Police, who set the intelligence machine in motion. The police functionary, who made the enquiries, was on the mark when he noted that caste disabilities rather than purely religious motives were behind the claim to a Buddhist identity. Even though he remarked pejoratively that they were “posing as Buddhists,” he rightly noted their desire to be “free from all the intolerance of caste” and be “liberated from the position of degradation in which they now are.”

The investigator also had “a long conversation” with Iyodhee Thass himself (we do not know if Iyodhee Thass knew that he was speaking to a policeman), but the results provide interesting gleanings that amplify the little that we know about his life.

Iyodhee Thass, according to this report, was born in Mylapore, Chennai. He learnt Tamil and English apart from acquiring expertise in native medicine. He then moved to Ootacamund where he practised medicine for 17 years before returning to Chennai circa 1893. At the time of the enquiry, he was making between Rs. 70 and 100 a month, not an inconsiderable sum those days.

Iyodhee Thass stated that he had his first insight into the Buddhist origins of outcastes in an old palm-leaf manuscript titled Narada Purana Sungai Thelivu. Towards propagating his new discovery he had started ‘a Buddha Sungum’ in Ootacamund. (The police checked out this information in Ootacamund. While they could confirm that he was “respected … as a skilful doctor and also as a Sanskrit scholar,” no information was forthcoming about the Sangam itself.) In was at this time that he came into contact with the theosophist, Colonel H.S. Olcott (1832–1907), who was in Chennai then. Through Olcott he interacted with two Buddhist scholars from Sri Lanka. One was Anagarika Dharmapala of the Maha Bodhi Society of Ceylon, who forged a Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian identity in Sri Lanka. The other was an old Sinhala priest ‘Gunaratnaswami’ (Gunaratne).

A meeting was held in Chennai on June 8, 1898. Olcott and the two Buddhist priests spoke, and an appeal was made for support to Iyodhee Thass’ movement. The very same day Iyodhee Thass issued a public appeal to Colonel Olcott, making a plea to support the movement. “[I]t was our heartfelt desire to return to our old Buddhist faith only in its primitive purity.

“For thus alone, we believe, can we hope to restore our self-respect and to gain that right, to win by our exertions, domestic comfort and untrammelled personal liberty of action, which we are denied us in the Hindu Social System of caste, under the weight of which, we are now, and for many centuries have been, crushed into the dust.” The plea, “A Unique Petition,” was carried by The Hindu (July 14, 1898) — the title most certainly the handiwork of a sub-editor.

The report of the June 8 meeting was printed in English with the title ‘The Revival of Buddhism in Southern India: A Great Event.’ Unfortunately, our source presents only a few excerpts from the report which ran to four printed foolscap pages. It is also not clear if the two other pioneers of Buddhism in India, M. Singaravelu Chettiar, “the first communist in South India,” and Professor Lakshmi Narasu were present on the occasion. Evidently Iyodhee Thass’ involvement in Buddhism predated their interest, and in any case the trajectory of his movement took a more radical turn rather than remain bookish.

Iyodhee Thass soon started a Dravida Buddha Sangam, which at this time, according to the police, had a modest membership of 50. More than a month after the meeting, towards the end of July 1898, Iyodhee Thass accompanied Olcott and the Buddhist priests to Lanka, addressed some meetings at Colombo and Kandy, before returning to Chennai on September 5, 1898.

Conditions for upliftment

As the Indian nationalist struggle progressed in the 20th century, Iyodhee Thass’ loyalist position was confirmed. He saw in the colonial state an agent that would create the necessary conditions for the upliftment of Dalits. An uncompromising critic of the Indian National Congress — he dubbed it “the Brahmin Congress” — he wondered what self-rule under the Brahmins might mean for the lower castes, a position articulated after his death by both Periyar and Ambedkar.

After making this enquiry, the Government of Madras seems to have scarcely worried about Iyodhee Thass and his movement, and there are few reports of his activities in the colonial archive. The enquiry smugly concluded that “the movement is scarcely likely to have any political significance as it is extremely unlikely to succeed.” Writing in 1898, the police inspector may be pardoned for not sensing the momentous import that Iyodhee Thass now has in the Dalit movement. Historians have fared worse.

(A.R. Venkatachalapathy is a historian and Tamil writer.

E-mail: chalapathy@mids.ac.in)

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