Pandit Iyothee Thass

Pandit Iyothee Thass (also Iyodhee Thass Pandithar) was a Tamil physician, scholar and journalist who built one of the earliest organised movements against caste in the Madras Presidency. He was born Kathavarayan on 20 May 1845 in Royapettah, Chennai, into a family of Siddha medicine practitioners, and took his new name from his teacher. He appears in this record as background to the later Tamil Dalit turn to other faiths, which reached Sikhism in the case of Jeevan Singh Tamil (see the analysis).

Key moments

• 1870s: he founded the Advaidananda Sabha, which opposed both Christian proselytising and the caste system (The Federal dates it 1870; the writer D. Ravikumar says 1876).
• 1881: at the census he asked the British to record Pariahs as Adi Dravidars, original Tamils, rather than Hindus. The government refused. In 1886, Ravikumar writes, he declared that the so-called untouchables are not Hindus.
• 1891: he founded the Dravida Mahajana Sabha, whose first conference at Ooty asked for a law against calling Dalits "Pariahs".
• 1898: he took Buddhism in Sri Lanka, with the help of Colonel H.S. Olcott of the Theosophical Society, and on his return founded the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras. He held that the Paraiyars of the Tamil country had originally been Buddhists.
• 1907: he launched the weekly Oru Paisa Tamilan, renamed Tamilan a year later, which he ran until his death. It carried writing on caste, language and religion.
• He wrote Indirar Desa Sarithiram (History of India). He died on 5 May 1914.

Remembered for: Thass was largely forgotten for about a century. G. Aloysius revived his work in 1999 and published his writings in three volumes. The Federal says his contribution was overshadowed by Periyar's Dravidian movement and Ambedkar's Dalit politics, and Ravikumar, writing in opinion, calls him a forerunner of Ambedkar.