Self-Representation of the Casteless

Abstract Chapter 7 analyses Tamil Buddhist self-representation in the emerging colonial modernity. It shows that while insisting on their own share of rights in education and jobs under the colonial state, anticaste Tamils did not depend either on the colonialists or the self-privileging-caste groups. Instead, Tamil Buddhists initiated their own projects of self-development by mobilizing their own resources locally and globally. Crucially it argues that: (1) there is a long history of emancipatory engagement against caste by marginalized Tamils, which peaks with the publication of The Tamilian in 1907; (2) Tamil Buddhists, through their indentured labour-based emigration and global networks attempted to establish a self-financed vocational institute, The Non-Caste Dravidian Industrials Limited, in Chennai in 1909 to educate and employ the next generation through their own teachers and mentors; (3) Tamil Buddhists were likely the first in colonial India to insist on reparations (for the Indians who had suffered caste-based dispossession of their dignity, labour, and land) through, for instance, their land to the tiller demands; (4) while being fully engaged in transforming their adverse economic conditions due to brahminism/casteism, Tamil Buddhists did not overlook the importance of asserting their casteless culture and historical indigeneity by successfully declaring themselves Buddhists in the colonial census of 1911—forty-five years before the Buddhist conversion movement under B. R. Ambedkar in postcolonial India.