Iyothee Thass and the Assertion of Dalit Identity

In the long history of anti-caste thought in India, few figures made as radical a move as Pandit Iyothee Thass – a Tamil Siddha practitioner, Buddhist intellectual, and social reformer who, in the late nineteenth century, asked a deceptively simple question: who are Dalits, really? His answer upended the dominant social order. Dalits, he argued, were not “fallen” outcasts within Hinduism. They were the original people of the Tamil land – Buddhists stripped of their heritage, dignity, and history by Brahminical conquest. This reframing was not just philosophical rhetoric. It was a carefully constructed assertion of identity, personhood, and the right to self-determination.

The man behind the movement
The declaration that changed everything
Registering as casteless Dravidians: a political act in the census
What “casteless Dravidian” actually meant
Buddhism as the foundation of subaltern identity
Rewriting Tamil history from below
Oru Paisa Tamilan: print as a tool of self-recognition
Challenging two powers at once: Brahminism and colonialism
Legacy and lasting influence

The man behind the movement

Iyothee Thass was born Kathavarayan on 20 May 1845 in Thousand Lights, Madras (now Chennai). He came from a family with roots in Siddha medicine and possessed deep knowledge of Tamil, philosophy, Sanskrit, Pali, and English – an unusual combination for a Dalit in colonial India. He later migrated to the Nilgiri Hills, where he began his social work by organising tribal communities. In 1876, he established the Advaidananda Sabha. By 1885, he was co-editing the Dravida Pandian magazine alongside Rev. John Rathinam, becoming one of the earliest voices in Tamil Nadu to give political meaning to the word “Dravidian.”

His intellectual journey was shaped not only by caste oppression but also by a close reading of Buddhist texts in Pali and Tamil. An ancient Tamil text, Naradiya Purana Sangai Thelivu, written by the Buddhist saint Ashvakosh, is credited with kindling his deep interest in Buddhism as the indigenous faith of the Tamil people. This was not a borrowed religion for him – it was, in his reading of history, what the oppressed had always practiced before it was taken away.

The declaration that changed everything

In 1886, Thass made a move that was almost unthinkable at the time: he issued a revolutionary declaration that Dalits were not Hindus. This was not simply a religious statement. It was a political refusal – a rejection of the entire Brahminical framework that had defined Dalit existence as the lowest rung within the Hindu varna system. He argued that Dalits had never voluntarily entered that system. They had been forced into it through conquest, dispossession, and the systematic erasure of their Buddhist past.

Hindu orthodoxy had long portrayed Dalits as “fallen” people – those who had deviated from dharma and thus suffered karmic consequences. Thass tore through that spiritual fiction. He refused to let the label “Hindu” define the oppressed. Instead, he declared that Dalits were the Adhi Tamilar – the original Tamils – rooted in a history that predated Aryan incursion and the varnashrama system. This was a direct challenge to the foundations of caste society.

Registering as casteless Dravidians: a political act in the census

One of Thass’s most significant and concrete interventions came during the colonial census. As early as 1881, he gave a memorandum to the British India Government requesting that the Depressed Classes of Tamil-speaking lands be considered as Adi-Tamilar and not as Hindus. The British did not comply, but Thass did not stop there.

By 1891, he had established the Dravida Mahajana Sabha. During that year’s census, he urged Dalits to register themselves as “Casteless Dravidians” – in Tamil, Sathi Pethamatra Dravidar – rather than Hindus. The logic was clear and deliberate: at a time when every non-Brahmin caste was aggrandizing its status within the Hindu varna system by equating itself with Kshatriyas or Vaishyas, Thass called Dalits to step outside that system entirely. He repeated this demand in the 1901 and 1911 censuses as well, urging the British to record untouchables as “original Buddhists.” The result was tangible: Dalits in Mysore got themselves categorised as a separate category of “Buddhists” in the 1911 Mysore decennial census report.

This use of the census as a site of identity assertion was philosophically important. The census was not just an administrative tool – it was a framework through which the colonial state and Brahminical social order categorised and controlled populations. By demanding a different category, Thass was insisting on a different ontology: a different account of who Dalits were, where they came from, and what they deserved.

What “casteless Dravidian” actually meant

The term “Casteless Dravidian” was not simply a census label. It carried a precise philosophical weight. For Thass, “Dravidian” was a positive, non-caste political principle of egalitarian and inclusive unification – an oppositional term to “Aryan,” which he associated with the hierarchical varna order. He argued that the casteless Tamil was the genuine and original Tamil (aadhi Tamizhan), while a Tamil who had absorbed caste was only a partial, distorted version of the original. In this framing, the claim to be a “Casteless Dravidian” was not a diminishment. It was the highest possible statement of authentic Tamil identity.

Buddhism as the foundation of subaltern identity

At the heart of Thass’s project was the claim that Dalits were originally Buddhists – that the Paraiyars of Tamil Nadu had been Buddhist communities who owned land and lived without caste hierarchy, until Aryan invasion and Brahminical consolidation dismantled their world. Identifying the caste system’s origin with the decline of Buddhism, he urged Dalits to return to Buddhism for the annihilation of caste.

In 1898, he traveled to Sri Lanka with Colonel H. S. Olcott of the Theosophical Society, received Buddhist initiation (diksha) from the Sinhalese monk Bikkhu Sumangala Nayake, and returned to found the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras. The Society established branches across South India and eventually reached South Africa, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, and Fiji – connecting Dalit migrant workers in colonial industries to a shared religious and political identity. This reach gestured to his acceptance among India’s indentured labourers in these colonies.

Crucially, Thass insisted on castelessness as a founding value of Buddhism itself. He differed sharply from the Maha Bodhi Society on the question of caste and refused any compromise on this point. For him, Buddhism was not only an exit from Brahminism but also an alternative to imperial religion and hierarchy.

Rewriting Tamil history from below

Thass was also a historian – or more precisely, a counter-historian. His major work, Indhira Desa Sarithiram (History of India), argued that before the Aryan invasion, Indians had lived without caste in a Buddhist social order. He maintained that divisions like Brahmin, Vaishya, Kshatriya, and Sudra had originally been mere occupational categories without graded status, and that the Aryans had converted this division of labour into a birth-based caste hierarchy for their own advantage. This text has since been called the first work of subaltern history of India.

He also argued that the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar, author of the classical ethical text Thirukkural, was originally a Buddhist practitioner whose work had been misappropriated into a Brahminical Hindu framework. By reclaiming Thiruvalluvar as Buddhist, Thass connected the dignity and intellectual legacy of Dalits to Tamil civilisation’s most celebrated literary heritage. This was identity work on a grand scale – not just political organisation, but the reconstruction of a people’s entire civilisational memory.

Oru Paisa Tamilan: print as a tool of self-recognition

On 19 June 1907, Thass launched the weekly Tamil newspaper Oru Paisa Tamizhan (One Paisa Tamilian), later simply known as The Tamilan. The press for this publication was funded by Dalit workers at the Kolar Gold Fields – workers who extracted wealth they would never own, yet pooled their earnings to give Thass’s ideas a platform. From 1907 until his death in 1914, all of his social and religious activities were recorded in the journal.

The weekly carried articles, letters, memoranda, and circulars focused on the socio-cultural emancipation of Dalits. It published editorials, gave space to ordinary Dalit voices, and covered topics ranging from religion and law to Tamil literature, agriculture, and women’s rights. It refused to use caste names. It also served as a newsletter linking branches of the Sakya Buddhist Society. The paper was not neutral journalism – it was a systematic project of constructing an anti-caste public sphere at a time when Dalit voices had no other platform.

Scholars note that Tamizhan eventually catalysed the production of 42 other Dalit journals, contributing to a broader anti-caste print culture in Tamil Nadu. This was not incidental. Thass understood that reclaiming identity required controlling the means of representation – the power to name, to narrate, and to remember.

Challenging two powers at once: Brahminism and colonialism

Thass occupied a distinctive position in that he challenged both Brahminical social domination and British colonial classification simultaneously. He was neither a Hindu reformer seeking to clean up caste from within, nor a simple collaborator with colonial power. When the 1891 census tried to fold oppressed castes into the Hindu order, he resisted. When the Indian National Congress sought to claim nationalist authority, he was sharply critical – famously remarking that it was only a “Bengali Brahmin Congress.” He foresaw that the nationalist movement, dominated as it was by upper-caste leadership, would not address caste oppression as a structural problem.

Just as nationalists turned to the pre-colonial past to assert authority against British rule, lower-caste intellectuals like Thass turned to a pre-Brahminical past to assert their identity as indigenous inhabitants of the land. He pulled Dalit history out from under two dominant forces – the Sanskritised Hindu tradition and British-imposed racial taxonomies – and reasserted it on Dalit terms.

Legacy and lasting influence

Iyothee Thass died on 5 May 1914, just two weeks before his 69th birthday. For much of the twentieth century, he was largely forgotten – overshadowed by the towering figures of Periyar and B. R. Ambedkar who came after him. Yet his novel ideas and activities broke new ground in the subaltern struggle for identity, human dignity, and justice in ways that directly shaped both the Dravidian movement and Ambedkar’s own turn to Buddhism in 1956.

Scholar G. Aloysius has praised the Tamil Buddhist movement Thass built as an ideological foundation, organisational model, and mass mobilisation project that laid the groundwork for Dalit emancipation in Tamil Nadu. The Self-Respecters under Periyar considered Thass a towering figure and drew on many of his pronouncements as the foundation of their Samadharma platform. The first Self-Respect General Conference was held under the Buddhist Society in 1932, directly tracing its lineage to Thass’s work.

In recent decades, researchers and Dalit intellectuals have increasingly reclaimed him. He was the first to interpret the history, religion, and literature of the Tamils from the standpoint of a Buddhist presence in the region – an intervention whose scale is only now being fully appreciated. Today, he is recognised as the first anti-caste leader of the Madras Presidency, and the National Institute of Siddha in Chennai bears his name.

What Iyothee Thass ultimately offered was not just a critique but a construction: a coherent alternative account of who Dalits were, what they had lost, and what they could reclaim. The identity he proposed – casteless, Dravidian, Buddhist – was not a retreat into nostalgia. It was a philosophically grounded, politically actionable claim to full human personhood, made at a time when the dominant order insisted that such a claim was impossible.

What do you think? If identity is constructed through history, language, and religion – as Thass demonstrated – what does it mean for a community to reclaim its own narrative after centuries of imposed erasure? And in what ways does the tension Thass identified between caste reform from within versus categorical rejection of caste remain unresolved in contemporary Dalit politics?

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References

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Table of Contents

The man behind the movement 🔗

The declaration that changed everything 🔗

Registering as casteless Dravidians: a political act in the census 🔗

What “casteless Dravidian” actually meant 🔗

Buddhism as the foundation of subaltern identity 🔗

Rewriting Tamil history from below 🔗

Oru Paisa Tamilan: print as a tool of self-recognition 🔗

Challenging two powers at once: Brahminism and colonialism 🔗

Legacy and lasting influence 🔗