Subaltern Perspectives on Religion and Emancipation by Iyothee Thass

In the late nineteenth century, colonial Tamil Nadu was a society sharply divided by caste. Brahminical religious authority determined who could worship, who owned land, who was educated, and who was considered human. Into this world stepped Pandit C. Iyothee Thass (1845-1914) – a Siddha medicine practitioner, polyglot scholar, and radical thinker who mounted one of the most intellectually ambitious challenges to caste ever articulated in South India. His weapon was not arms but reinterpretation. He turned religious discourse itself into a site of liberation, arguing that the religion of the subaltern was not one of ritual hierarchy and birth-based pollution, but one of moral conduct, compassion, and social equality – namely, Buddhism.

Who was Iyothee Thass?
The subaltern critique of Brahminical religion
Religion defined by conduct, not birth
Reclaiming Thiruvalluvar
Buddhism as a religion of equality and emancipation
A departure from Brahminical traditions
The Tamilan newspaper: religion and discourse in print
The first subaltern history
Legacy and continuing relevance

Who was Iyothee Thass?

Born Kathavarayan on 20 May 1845 in Thousand Lights, Madras (now Chennai), Iyothee Thass came from the Paraiyar community – a Dalit caste subjected to extreme forms of social exclusion. Despite this, he became a formidable intellectual. He possessed deep knowledge of Tamil, Siddha medicine, and philosophy, and was literate in English, Sanskrit, and Pali – the sacred language of early Buddhist texts. This multilingualism gave him rare access to both the Brahminical canon and the Buddhist one, and he used both with remarkable critical precision.

His life’s project was, at its core, one of reinterpretation. The thoughts of Iyothee Thass orbit around the reinterpretation of history, religion, literature, and tradition, using his deep knowledge of linguistics and Tamil literary history to construct what he called Tamil Buddhism – an alternative civilizational narrative for oppressed Tamils. As scholars note, both Thass and Babasaheb Ambedkar, though separated by generation and region, reached the same conclusion: Buddhism was the only way to annihilate the caste system, and both identified the caste system’s origins with the historical decline of Buddhism in India.

The subaltern critique of Brahminical religion

Thass’s religious philosophy begins with a bold historical claim: that the oppressed castes of Tamil Nadu – particularly the Paraiyar – were not always “untouchables.” They were, he argued, the original inhabitants of the Tamil lands, formerly practitioners of Buddhism, who were systematically degraded and stripped of their religious and social identity after Brahminical Hinduism gained dominance. According to Thass, it was the defeat of Buddhism in India through Brahminical forces that led to the ascriptive caste system and the degradation of certain communities.

This was not just a historical claim. It was a philosophical and political intervention. By asserting that the stigma of “untouchability” was externally imposed – through what he described as Brahminical manipulation of religious texts and social codes – Thass sought to arouse consciousness of the transgression committed against Dalits and help them recognise their Buddhist antecedents. The humiliation of caste was not a divine verdict on their character; it was a historical injustice that could be undone.

Religion defined by conduct, not birth

Central to Thass’s subaltern religious philosophy was a radical redefinition of what religion means. Against a Brahminical system where one’s spiritual status was determined entirely by birth – where a person was “pure” or “polluted” from the moment of arrival in the world – Thass insisted that religion must be grounded in moral conduct and ethical living. This idea drew directly from Buddhist teaching, which holds that a person’s worth is determined by their actions, not their lineage.

He found rich support for this in classical Tamil literature. Thass studied the Thirukkural – the collection of 1,330 Tamil ethical couplets – and concluded that it represented “Tamil Buddhism,” a text that embodied Buddhist moral principles rather than Brahminical Vedic ones. The Thirukkural, which covers everything from personal virtue to governance and love, was in Thass’s reading a guide to ethical community life rooted in rationality, non-violence, and compassion – values he saw as distinctly Buddhist.

Reclaiming Thiruvalluvar

Thass went further. He asserted that Thiruvalluvar, the revered author of the Thirukkural, was originally a Buddhist practitioner, and that the text’s emphasis on rational ethics, non-violence, and social justice mirrored core Buddhist doctrines such as the rejection of caste hierarchies and the promotion of compassion – rather than Vedic ritualism. The veneration of Thiruvalluvar, in this framework, became an act of subaltern religious reclamation: honouring a figure emblematic of ethical living who had been co-opted by the very tradition that had dispossessed his community.

Thass argued that stories linking Thiruvalluvar’s birth to Brahminical puranic myths were later interpolations – inconsistent and absurd – designed to distance Thiruvalluvar from his Buddhist origins and absorb him into the Brahminical Hindu value system. This was reinterpretation as resistance: recovering a moral and spiritual ancestor from the grip of a tradition that had erased him.

Buddhism as a religion of equality and emancipation

Thass’s advocacy for Buddhism was not a matter of personal spirituality alone. It was a comprehensive programme of social transformation. He identified the caste system’s very origin with the historical displacement of Buddhism, which meant that the path to liberation ran directly through its revival. He urged Dalits to return to Buddhism for the annihilation of caste, framing conversion not as abandonment of Tamil identity but as its recovery.

In 1898, following a visit to Sri Lanka facilitated by Theosophical Society leader Colonel H. S. Olcott, Thass formally embraced Buddhism and founded the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras, which established branches across South India, South Africa, and Sri Lanka. The Society was not merely religious in the narrow sense – it organised regular doctrinal lectures, integrated Buddhist rituals into life events like birth, marriage, and death, and worked to transform the everyday cultural life of Dalits into a Buddhist one.

A departure from Brahminical traditions

What made Thass’s Buddhism genuinely radical was its explicit rejection of the Brahminical religious framework – not just as a matter of theological disagreement but as a matter of political necessity. His exploration involved the deconstruction of Brahminical Hinduism and the construction of Tamil Buddhism as an alternative religion for subaltern people, with a vision of creating an egalitarian society.

Where Brahminical religion sanctified hierarchy through the varna system and justified exclusion as cosmic order, Thass’s Buddhism placed moral conduct, compassion, and the dignity of every person at the centre of religious life. Through scholarly and creative engagement with ancient Buddhist thought and the Tamil literary archive, Thass re-conceived India’s history around an open and egalitarian community, altogether indifferent to caste provenance. Religion, in this vision, was not a mechanism of exclusion but a framework for communal harmony.

He also made a politically significant move in 1886, issuing a declaration that Scheduled caste people (Dalits) were not Hindus, and during the 1891 census, urged members of oppressed castes to register as “Casteless Dravidians” rather than Hindus. This was a direct challenge to the Brahminical claim that caste hierarchy was the natural and universal order of Hindu society – and a demand that the state recognise oppressed communities as having an identity outside and prior to that system.

The Tamilan newspaper: religion and discourse in print

Thass understood that ideas need vehicles. In 1907, he launched a weekly Tamil newspaper, Oru Paisa Tamizhan (One Paise Tamilian), later simply called Tamilan, which became the main instrument of his criticism against caste power, giving voice to members of the Dalit community to publish on religion, law, Tamil literature, economy, and agriculture – and notably refusing to use caste names. The newspaper ran until his death in 1914.

The paper carried serialised works like Buddhar Aadhi Vedam and Thiruvalluvar Charithiram, blending Tamil identity with Buddhist thought and using print as a battlefield against caste. Beyond religion, Thass called for land redistribution, temple entry, public employment, and separate schools for Dalits – making clear that his subaltern religious vision was inseparable from a programme of material justice. For Thass, spiritual emancipation and social emancipation were not two different projects. They were one.

The first subaltern history

One of Thass’s most significant intellectual contributions was his work Indhirar Desa Sarithiram (History of the Land of Indra), widely recognised as the first subaltern history written in Tamil. Instead of the traditional Vedic history that centred Brahmins and Hinduism, he created an alternative history by focusing on Buddhism and the oppressed people, drawing on oral traditions, palm-leaf manuscripts, and folk practices that upper-caste historiography had systematically ignored. This was historiography as philosophical practice: the act of writing history from the perspective of those who had been written out of it.

Iyothee Thass was the first to interpret the history, religion, and literature of the Tamils from the viewpoint of a Buddhist presence in the region, and his writings anticipated, in many important ways, the later historiographical work of B. R. Ambedkar. His writings reconstructed the indigeneity of Tamil Buddhists, asserting a casteless Tamil Buddhist identity that preceded the arrival of Brahminism and the onset of caste oppression.

Legacy and continuing relevance

Thass died on 5 May 1914 – largely unrecognised beyond his immediate circles. For nearly a century, his work was forgotten. It was only in the 1990s, when scholar G. Aloysius brought out a collection of his writings, that his ideas began receiving the academic and political attention they deserved. In many ways, Periyar, the Dravidar Kazhagam movement, and B. R. Ambedkar are all inheritors of his legacy. He was also the first notable Scheduled Caste leader to embrace Buddhism.

What Thass built was more than a religious movement. He constructed a philosophical architecture for subaltern self-respect – one in which the oppressed could claim a civilisational heritage, define religion on their own moral terms, and reject the legitimacy of a system that had degraded them not by divine will but by historical manipulation. For Thass, caste-lessness was not merely a social ideal but an ethico-political principle – the very foundation of what a just religious community should look like.

His vision of Buddhism was not escapist or otherworldly. It was deeply communal, grounded in ethics, and oriented toward dismantling the structures that dehumanised the most marginalised. In reinterpreting religious discourse to centre moral conduct over birth, and in choosing a tradition defined by equality and compassion over one defined by hierarchy and exclusion, Iyothee Thass offered something rare in the history of Indian thought: a fully developed subaltern theology of liberation.

What do you think? If the true measure of a religion lies in how it treats its most vulnerable members, does Iyothee Thass’s critique of Brahminical Hinduism still hold lessons for religious institutions today? And can religious conversion – as practised by both Thass and Ambedkar – function as a genuine act of political emancipation, or does lasting change require something more?

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References

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Table of Contents

Who was Iyothee Thass? 🔗

The subaltern critique of Brahminical religion 🔗

Religion defined by conduct, not birth 🔗

Reclaiming Thiruvalluvar 🔗

Buddhism as a religion of equality and emancipation 🔗

A departure from Brahminical traditions 🔗

The Tamilan newspaper: religion and discourse in print 🔗

The first subaltern history 🔗

Legacy and continuing relevance 🔗