‘Oru Paisa Tamizhan’ and the Dravidian Buddhist identity of Pandit Iyothee Thass - Kathiravan Annamalai
‘Oru Paisa Tamizhan’ and the Dravidian Buddhist
identity of Pandit Iyothee Thass - Kathiravan Annamalai (
The literary contributions of Iyothee Thass Pandithar (1845-1914), a traditional Siddha practitioner and an ardent Buddhist, to the revival of Buddhism in Tamil land have not been much discussed until the 1990s. The writings of Raj Gowthaman, D.Dharmaraj, G.Aloysius, D.Ravikuar and Stalin Rajangam brought Thass back into the socio-political and literary scene and revived him as a pioneer of the Dalit Movements. Particularly, after 2000, he has become a cultural icon and a political symbol representing the Dalits in public space. He is being studied and researched in different contexts and from various perspectives which stress his undeniable contribution to the Dalit cause. This paper focuses on the role of literary articulation by Iyothee Thass, particularly through the weekly Oru Paisa Tamizhan, which pioneered the entire social reformation project of the Dravidian Movements, in constructing a Dravidian Buddhist identity for the ‘Poorva Tamils’.
Oru Paisa Tamizhan – The origin of a Dravidian Buddhist thought
The
journey of the weekly “Oru Paisa Tamizhan” (1907) that carried articles,
letters, memoranda, and circulars focusing on the socio-cultural emancipation
of the Dalits can be studied in two different phases. During the first phase
(1907-1914) the magazine came out every Wednesday under the editorship of Thass
and its primary objective was to restore the glory of Tamil-Buddhist society.
The Buddhist Press, The Gautama Press and The Siddhartha Printing Press played
a crucial role in the publication and circulation of the journal in this phase.
To re-construct the Tamil Buddhist past, Thass embraced local legends, myths
and narratives into account along with the already written historical tracts to
provide a re-interpretation of the Tamil past with a harmonious blend of
history and fiction. This localization of the Buddhist religion by tracing its
inherent connection with the Tamil society and culture is one of the prominent
discourses he created to revive Buddhism in the Tamil land.
The second phase
(1926-1934), i.e. after the death of Iyothee Thass, G.Appaduraiyar and
A.P.Periyasami Pulavar took over the responsibility of Tamizhan and
there was a significant change in the objective of the journal. The new editors
moved from reconstructing the past to repairing the present, influenced by the
Self-Respect Movement. It is very important to mention that Thass has never
subscribed to the rival positions of Tamil and Sanskrit; he neither had a
staunch pride in Tamil nor an aversion towards Sanskrit. He even considered
that Tamil had evolved from Pali, the language in which Buddha spoke.
Masilamani, an important contributor to Tamizhan, is proximal to Periyar
in his articulations about Aryan resistance and women's emancipation. On one
hand, he attacked Brahmins for their passive colonisation and, on the other
hand, he demanded women empowerment. His writings stand as testimony to the
paradigm shift in the Buddhist Movement that happened after the death of Thass
and anticipated the radical ideas of the Self-Respect Movement. For instance,
unlike Thass, Masilamani considered women “wilfully subjugated” to conform to
patriarchal society and registered his criticism of religion. It can be said
that the popularity of the Self-Respect Movement initiated by Periyar has
devoured the Buddhist discourses within the framework of his Dravidian
ideology.
Iyothee
Thass and the Revival of Buddhism
The Oriental
scholars like Eugene Burnouf, T.Rhys Davids, Carolyn Rhy Davids initiated
studies on Buddhism and translated some of the Pali Buddhist works into
English, which opened a whole new paradigm of study. For Thass, it was Henry
Steele Olcott from the Theosophical Society and Anagarika Dharmapala from Sri
Lanka, the twin inspirations who turned him towards Buddhism. The Kolkata Maha
Bodhi Society was founded by Dharmapala in 1891 and the visit to Sri Lanka
accompanied by Olcott served as catalysts for Thass’ ardent faith in Buddhism
to emancipate the “Poorva Tamils”.
Thass’
acquaintance with Rev. John Ratnam, in initiating the Dravida Pandian magazine,
had inspired him to publish his own magazine. In 1907, Oru Paisa Tamizhan
appeared as a weekly that was circulated every Wednesday. The journal had twin
central mottos of promoting Buddhism among the ‘Adi-Tamils’ on one hand and
condemning the cruel practice of caste on the other. Along with it, Thass
attempted to propagate a unique Dravidian Buddhist consciousness among the
original inhabitants of the land, i.e., the “Adi Dravidas”, whom he called
“Adi-Tamils”, “Poorva Tamils”. According to him, they were the original
Buddhists who were subjugated and sidelined to the margins after the advent of
brutal systems of caste unleashed by the Vedic religion. Each and every section
of the journal were contributed to the above mentioned causes and all the
important contributors during the first phase, such as Periyasami Pulavar, TC
Narayana Pillai, Swapneshwari Ammal and C.M.E.Moorthy added to the cause with
their emancipatory writings. Tamizhan had four pages in total during its
initial days and carried different sections that aimed to awaken the Tamil
society from its socio-cultural and historical slumber. “Poorva Tamil Oli”,
“Varuthamanam”, “Thanthi Samacharangal” and “Gnana Prakasa Sudar” were some
sections which concentrated on the reconstruction of the Tamil past with a
Dravidian Buddhist narrative, also on the engagement with the local and global
contemporary political happenings.
Iyothee Thass interpreted Tamil history, culture and tradition in a new light of Buddhism, which enabled them to challenge the prevalent Brahminism. He engaged himself in re-reading the cultural texts of the Tamil land for which he took local myths, legends, lore and other native discourses into account. For instance, he argued that the subcontinent was originally known as ‘Indirar Desam’, which later evolved as India. Nandan, who is depicted as an untouchable in the Hindu legends, was given a completely new and unheard story that he was the King of the Indira Desam. In another instance, he completely rejected the idea of Thiruvalluvar having an Aryan lineage by exposing the malpractices of Visakaperumal Iyer and Saravana Perumal Iyer, who had incorporated a false biography to Valluvar. He neglected the grand canonical Sangam literature which classified Tamil life into ‘Agam’ and ‘Puram’. Rather, he considered the Buddhist and Jainist texts such as Manimekalai, Kundalakesi, Valayapathi, Veera Sozhiyam and the ethical works of Thiruvalluvar and Avvaiyar as the original Tamil canonical works. All these re-readings and reconstructions helped him to find Buddhist reminiscences in the Tamil religious and cultural practices and to establish Aram (ethics and morals) as the central core of Tamil literature and society.
V.Geetha and S.V.Rajadurai argue that Thass has found an intricate
nexus between the fall of Buddhism and the rise of Brahminism. However, Thass
has never believed that Buddhism has declined. Rather, he argued that it was
altered by Aryan intervention. He tried to explain a Buddhist version of almost
many of the religious and cultural practices of the ‘Poorva Tamils’, which
enabled him to construct a Tamil Dravidian Buddhism. The Sakya Buddhist Society
of Thass served as a socio-cultural exercise in his writings in Tamizhan.
Mentioning the importance of the
Society, he writes that it is established “to explain the ancestral histories
and Buddhist Dhamma to the casteless Dravidians and, through stability in
virtue and religious discipline, to help them towards progress” (56). Through
‘Poorva Tamil Oli’, Thass continuously attacked the Aryans for polluting the
Buddhist religion and their whole agenda with the introduction of a caste
system in the Tamil land. He condemned the epistemological systems of the
Aryans in one of his articles dated 28.10.1908 for having caste as its
underlying structure and rejected them as useless. Another contributor,
Masilamani, in the issue dated 05.08.1908 glorified the original Dravidian
culture by remembering the forgotten past of the aboriginal ‘Poorva Tamils’ and
engaging in a search for a lost history.
Interestingly, Tamizhan
articulated its condemnations against the Hindu religion and its articulation
to reconstruct the forgotten past came in a period where Hindu revivalism was
deeply in action by the educated Aryans with the help of Theosophical Society.
We can see constant journalistic clashes between Tamizhan and Sudesimithran
where the latter stood for what the former had determined to abolish. This was
completely on a religious basis and not on linguistic grounds. Thass strongly
believed that Sanskrit and Tamil were sister languages and rejects its
contradictory positions. In 1911, he argued that “the one who constructed the
Tamil language was Sakkaya Munivar and those who promoted it were the Samana
Munvars” (Aloysius 182). He even believed that Buddha preceded the Hindu
religion in a time period and lived during a period when there were no
caste-based hierarchies. This brings us to the idea that Thass did not see
Buddhism as a resistance against the Vedic religion. Rather, he complained that
the Vedic intrusion spoiled and altered the Buddhist religion.
Though Thass
concentrated mostly on the emancipation of the panchamas, we can infer that
‘Poorva Tamils’, as propagated by Thass, did not refer to the members of a
particular caste but any Tamil speaker who embraced castelessness. It can be
said that it is his aversion against caste that attracted him towards the
ideology of Tamil Buddhism. A constant attack on the brutal caste system was
ubiquitous in the writings of Thass. For instance, an issue dated on 07.01.1909
carried instances of caste restrictions on pariahs - they were not allowed to
read, wear clean clothes, or even fetch water from Brahmin lakes. He believed
that the pariahs and panchamas were the aboriginals of the land who had a
Buddhist ethnic continuity in their cultural practices. Specifically, he
believed that the valluva-sakya (sub-caste of the paraiahs) was the direct
descendants of the Sakya clan of Buddha. G.Aloysius sums up the entire
Dravidian Buddhist ideology of Thass by arguing that Buddhism, casteless
Dravidians and original Tamils were interchangeable terms that he used in his
writings to denote the same thing.
In a memorandum submitted to the Indian National Congress in 1831,
Iyothee Thass demanded the Congressmen not to mention Adi-Dravidas as Hindus
and argued that “there is no basis to call this community the pariahs… (which)
causes deep hurt and actually degrades them”. Instead, he proposed the
identity of ‘Poorva Tamils’ or ‘Adi Tamils’ to the community as he believed
that they are the real Buddhist inhabitants of the land. It is interesting to
note that the first organisational resistance against the Brahmin hegemony
emerged from an oppressed community which had Thass and his Dravidian Buddhist
ideologies as its central thrust. His identification of the “brahminical core
of Swadeshi ideology” of the Congress made him neglect the great wave of
national movements. Instead, he concentrated on the emancipation of the ‘Poorva
Tamils’. In the issue dated 25.12.1907, he questioned the Congress “Was a
paracheri a part of the motherland?” and demanded separate representations for
his people in the modern bureaucratic and electoral structures. It is possible
to conclude that ‘castelessness’ and the pre-Brahminical Buddhist past were the
twin motives of the Tamizhan under the editorship of Thass. After the death of Thass, Tamizhan
came under the leadership of his son Pattabiraman for a short tenure between
17.06.1914 and 26.08.1915. Once Pattabiraman moved away from the faith of
Buddhism, Tamizhan suffered from lack of finance and leadership, which
led to a rupture in the frequency of its publication and for 9 years the
publication was curbed. The second and final phase of the magazine ranges from
07.07.1926 – 27.06.1934 where both G.Appaduraiyar and A.P.Periyasami Pulavar
from the Kolar Gold Fields played an important role in the editorship and the
circulation of the magazine. They were already popular among Buddhist circles
for their books on Buddha and their authentic past. The important contributors
during this period were M.V.Ponniah, C.K.Kuppusamy, Annapoorani Ammal and
M.Ponnu.
It is important to
mention that the 1930s saw the emergence of two secular voices –
Dr.B.R.Ambedkar from the North and E.V.Ramasamy Periyar from the South. Periyar
from Tamilnadu did not consider religion to be a unifying factor to emancipate
the lower castes. Instead, he stressed the importance of self-respect and
rationalism. This had a huge impact on the ideologies of Tamizhan, which
started deviating from stressing the importance of Buddhism as liberation from
caste brutality. G. Aloysius mentions that the post-Iyothee Thass period of Tamizhan
did deviate from its Buddhist essence and started concentrating on the
contemporary socio-political events of the land. Other journals like Adi
Dravida Mahavikatathoothan, Boologavyasan, Parayan and Adi Dravdia Mithran were
in circulation during this period, which also supported the cause of Adi
Dravidas but not how Thass envisioned it. From November 1932, considering his
deteriorating health, G.Appaduriar withdrew himself from being in-charge of the
magazine. The subsequent deaths of the two Buddhist stalwarts, P.Lakshmi Narasu
in 1934 and Anagarika Dharmapala in 1933 officially ended the publication of
the magazine.
The Dravidian Buddhist identity as proposed by Thass and his fellow
leaders became a public activity with the help of the magazine, but it was
confined only to northern Madras. Its failure to create an organisational
structure in the other parts of the Tamil land led to the inactiveness of the
news journal and Buddhist articulations. However, as Thass argued in the case
of Buddhism, the religio-cultural Tamil history constructed by Tamizhan
continued to reverberate in the Dravidian Movements that later took the centre
stage of Tamil politics and culture. The Self-Respecters under the guidance of Periyar
considered Thass as a towering figure and took many of his pronouncements as
their foundation of Samadharma. It needs to be mentioned that the first
Self-Respect General Conference was held under the Buddhist Society in 1932. G.
Aloysius praises the Tamil Buddhist movement propagated by Iyothee Thass for
serving as “an ideological antecedent, organisation of programmatic partnership
and a mass merger” which laid the foundations of Dalit emancipation in
the Tamil land.
References
Aloysius, G. Religion as Emancipatory Identity – A Buddhist Movement among the
Tamils
under Colonialism. New
Age International Publishers, 1998.
Geetha, V., S.V. Rajadurai. Towards a Non-Brahmin millennium: from Iyothee Thass to
Periyar
Samya Publishers, 1998.
Sambandhan, Ma.Su. Tamil Idhazhiyal Varalaru.
Tamilar Publications, 1987.
Stalin Rajangam,
Pandithar 175. Neelam Publications, 2022.
Suntharalingam, R. Politics and National Awakening
in South India, 1852-1891. The
University of Arizona Press, 1974.
Published in Bodhi Journal, October 2023
E-ISSN: 2456-5571.
Thoughtful
ReplyDelete