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Literary criticism as a critique of caste: Ayothee Thass and the Tamil Buddhist past

While postcolonial studies has expanded Indian nationalist critique by considering how British literary forms reinforced imperial rule, little is known about how colonial-era Dalit writing demonstrated the bases of caste inequality. The literary criticism of Ayothee Thass (1845–1914) does so by locating the origins of untouchability in the vanquishing of Buddhism by Brahminical forces. This article draws upon issues of his Tamilan journal published between 1907 and 1914, to argue that Thass offered literary criticism as a means of destabilizing widely-accepted justifications of caste and as a basis of political action. Just as nationalists turned to the pre-colonial past to establish authority and critique colonial dominance, lower-caste intellectuals including Ayothee Thass turned to a pre-Brahminical past to assert their identity as indigenous inhabitants of the land. The little-known history of this mode of reading is crucial to understand the formation of a more inclusive public sphere in colonial India and the genealogies of twentieth-century Dalit assertion in the subcontinent.