Iyothee Thass, Pandit (1845 - 1914), native physician in Sidha medicine, social reformer, thinker and writer. Born in Coimbatore on May 20,1845. He learned Sidha medicine and Tamil literature from a native scholar called Iyothee Thass Kavirayar and later adopted the name of his teacher. He was brought up in vaishnavaite tradition. Later rebelled against that tradition and embraced Tamil Buddhism.
Iyothee Thass is a person of multiple talents. Simultaneously he plays the roles of literary critique, editor of a weekly magazine, leader of a religious society, native physician, etc. The magazine he published from 1907 to 1914, as Oru paisa Tamilan earlier and Tamilan later is rich with his articles and occasional notes. The concepts such as Dravidian, self respect, rationality, Buddhism, etc. were conceived by him during those active years. He is considered as the first modernist of the twentieth century Tamil Nadu.
Iyothee Thass started his dynamic socio-political career by instituting Sakya Buddhist society at Madras as a result of his experimentation with the truths of Buddhism. With the effect of these experiments he conceived the idea, modern Tamil Buddhism. The idea of modern Tamil Buddhism burgeons to construct an alternative discourse on Indian culture as a reply to the 'India' patronized by Vedic tradition. According to him, the 'untouchables' are the real inhabitants of this part of the peninsula; also they were the Buddhists. In the series of articles he wrote under the title 'History of Indira thesam' in Tamilan weekly, he promoted the idea, 'original inhabitants' or 'ancient Buddhists'.
In all the discourses on Tamil Buddhism, he invariably gave emphasis to and evidently had corroborated that the so-called 'untouchables' in general, and 'Parayars' in particular, had an age-old contradiction with the Brahmins. Hence, the animosity of Brahmin community transposed the social stratum of the Parayars or ancient Buddhist from ritual masters to 'untouchables'.
The thoughts of Iyothee Thass orbit around sole trait, reinterpretation. That means, reinterpreting the history, religion, literature, tradition, etc. In this context, his illustriousness in literature, linguistics, and history supports him in the construction of a grand discourse called Tamil Buddhism. His expertise in languages like Pali and Sanskrit other than Tamil dispenses radically interesting vestiges for this project.
In the exercise of procreating an alternate history, the coinage of the word 'India' is not from the root word 'Hindu' as prevalently hypothesized. Contrarily, Iyothee Thass insinuated another cause word 'Indiran' (one of the names of Buddha). Similarly he deconstructs all those ideologically loaded signs of 'Indian culture' and demonstrates how they had been originated from Buddhist tradition. Likewise he portrays the ideological contradiction between Buddhist and Vedic traditions. For him the Buddhist principles have been still practices by Parayars of Tamilnadu who are the ancient Buddhists while the Vedic tradition is championed by the Brahmins.
Therefore the disgusting socio-cultural reality of Parayars in present day Tamilnadu is not because of their origin as perplexed by Brahminic traditions, but through the political annoyance as well as the cowardliness of Brahmins, the Parayars were inscribed as untouchables. Iyothee Thass spent most pages in his volumes for arousing the consciousness of being transgressed. Similarly he desired to cognize the Parayars about their Buddhist antecedents. Once the historical fallacy is reasoned out by the 'ancient Buddhists', he visualized the reinvention of tradition that affects the rescue from the castiest context.
Despite Iyothee Thass accomplished as a multifarious personality till his unanticipated demise on May 5th 1914, mysteriously the modern historians forgot him. However, the charismatic leader E.V. Ramasamy Periyar ubiquitously unfurled his conceptions like Dravidian origin, self-respect, and rationality. The importance of Iyothee Thass is realized while G. Aloysius discovered him during the late nineties. Only because of him Iyothee thass' works are brought to the light of day to the contemporary Tamil nadu. Aloysius wrote a full-length book on Tamil Buddhism as conceived by Iyothee Thass signifying the exercise of religion as an identity for emancipation.
Following that G. Aloysius edited the writings of Iyothee Thass, that had been appeared in Tamilan weekly, in two volumes. This is a pioneer effort in anthologizing Iyothee Thass' writings scientifically under four major titles, politics, society, religion and literature. The contribution of Iyothee Thass to modern Tamil literary criticism is exceptional. His interpretations for the classical Tamil texts like Aathichoodi, Konraivendan, Tirikural (unfinished), etc. were embedded on the methodology of reading a text designed by Tolkappiyam (a classical Tamil grammatical work), that has been forgotten for centuries. Similarly, his rationalization for various myths, rituals, customs and traits we repeat even today are based on a logical theory of mythology. When he called this theory of mythology as an indigenous way of understanding predominates among the 'untouchables' of this country, nobody could escape from the sphere of questioning the western theoretical models we pursuit laboriously.
Iyotheethasar often wrote about folk practices of Tamil speaking communities. Particularly folk religious practices earned much attention from him. Though his writings were oriented towards non-academic readers of his closely circulated Tamil weekly, the articles were heavily loaded with literary and linguistic references from traditional Tamil texts. The way in which he formulated his articles shows that the readership of Tamilan weekly was not of ‘popular’ but ‘specialized’ in cognition.
Festivals and rituals are often referred and discussed in his writings. Festivals like Deepavali, Sankaranthi, Saraswathi puja, Ayutha puja, Karthikai light festival, Amman festival are some of the Tamil festivals those he wrote elaborately. Life cycle ceremonies, particularly death ceremony was thoroughly discussed by him under different headings at various times. He problematized the relationship between the Tamil folk cognition of ‘death’ and the Buddhist theology of ‘death’, one of the three major sufferings.
The article he wrote on Amman festival was published as a short series, continued for seven issues. The title of the article is straight and clear as usual ‘The Reason for remembering Amman during the month Aadi’. The article began with the narration of a mythico-historical fiction about a Tamil poetess Avvai. The narration was elaborate and marked with numerous temporal and spatial references. The mythico-historical episode explains the birth of the poetess Avvai, her childhood, her longings to become a sage, protests from her kin, the way she transforms as an ascetic, her service to the society as a monk in detail.
The dramatic part of the fiction unbound when the land was severed by an epidemic. Since, the Avvai, the sage was practiced in medicine she prescribed the way of living to survive the epidemic. The prescription was a set of rules and regulations for the entire society for a short span of time. The society reciprocated her in a proper way and got rid of the epidemic. Hence, Avvai became the symbol of adoration. People used to repeat the prescriptions those Avvai preached to them annually. When Avvai died of old age, the entire country remembered her in its collective memory in the name of Amman. As a way of remembrance it repeats the way of life preached by Avvai in the form of a ritual.
Iyotheethasar’s intention of constructing a mythico-historical narrative to substantiate a folk ritual is apparent and transparent. He tried to establish his hypothesis that Buddhism in Tamilnadu still remains as a living tradition. He contests that Buddhism was not totally removed from the Tamil landscape. Though princely support and state sponsorships were not given to Buddhism, the mass which practiced Buddhism (for him it is ‘Tamil Buddhism’), still continues the tradition at the behavioural level.
Iyotheethasar’s entire exercise on Tamil folklore and literature firmly placed upon a set of believes. This believes are derived personally by him from a traditional Tamil cognitive system. He travailed hard to derive those set of believes from the traditional knowledge for a period of not less than a decade. During this period he examined various textual illustrations, travelled in and around the northern districts of Tamilnadu, observed various rituals and traditional behaviours of ‘untouchable’ mass.
A single question made him to wander along the plains of Tamil speaking land. He was actually struck by the question at different instances of his lifetime. The question was more personal and hence emotional to him: why the ‘untouchables’ of this country are treated so? As he travelled through the villages of northern Tamilnadu he happened to see lot of references regarding the praxis of caste system. The day to day experiences of caste was apparently different from the doctrines of varnashra dharma that was projected as the Indian traditional way of classifying human beings. Hence his doubt over the originality of caste as a system grew wild and started to enquire about that in various old Tamil texts.
The experiences he gained during those years with respect to the manifestation of caste were important in the making of his theory regarding casteism. Till that time he was in a confused state of mind in understanding the rationale behind the prescription of caste. However the moment he gathered the other side of the caste system, his methodology of fathoming caste as an object of study had been changed. He became more and more sensitive to the systemic changes those happened within the cultural terrain of Indian subcontinent in large and Tamil speaking areas in particular. Hence he developed an indigenous way of conceptualising the factor ‘caste’ through placing it rightly within the pages of the history of Indian religions.
The inferences he gathered from his wanderings among the clusters of ‘untouchable’ villages are noteworthy and highly critical. He produced a series of statements from these data and started to correlate them with various strands of cultural streams. At first, he found in his field exposure that practice of untouchability is not linear from top to bottom but it happens in a non-linear way for multiple reasons. At the popular level it is told that caste system is a doctrine of preaching hierarchical relationship between the ethnic communities of Indian state. The hierarchical relationship is visualized as the interaction between the layers of the society. The socio-cultural and economic power is said to be distributed among the social systemic layers with the principle of prioritising the top layers. Such kind of a myth regarding the rationale of caste as a system is circulated through various means of oral and literal expositions. The myth of varna system involving a mythical character Brahma, explains the brahmanical interpretation of ‘caste’ and ‘untouchability’. Not only the active dramatis personae of the caste sytem, even some of the academic, scientific minds such as Dumont also proposes such a linear, hierarchical, purity based structure for caste system. Iyotheethasar found the misconceptions of brahmanical myth regarding the origin of caste system through his field experiences.
Historians imagined that in India during the early decades of twentieth century the entire people were engaged in the process of nation building in the name Indian freedom struggle. However they never paid reasonable attention over the liberation movements of the untouchable section of the Indian society who were aware of the castiest and selfish motivations of the upper caste people in the name of Indian nationalism. From the part of nationalistic historians it is pre designed that what ever fell out of the nation building exercise those will not be registered or documented. To the extreme they all went to the level of branding the movements of Untouchables as anti-nationalistic. Further the Untouchable leaders are defamed as ‘colonial supporters’. Iyothee thasar was one of such Untouchable leader heavily neglected by Indian historians. The emancipatory paradigm for the liberation of the Untouchables that is named as ‘Tamil Buddhism’ was programmed amidst this historical conditions.
Iyotheethaas had utilized various types of data to concoct the discourse ‘Tamil Buddhism’. The cultural memory he inherited from his family of medicinal practitioners helped him enormously. His personal experiences, information gathered from the others, oral narratives, folklores, literary texts, interpretations, traditional beliefs, medical records and practices, knowledge of Sanskrit, Tamil and Pali, religious texts of these languages, folk etymology and series of Nikandu were all incorporated within the construction of the discourse.
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