Editing Tamil Buddhist Movement

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The Tamil Buddhist movement was an anti-caste Buddhist revival among Tamil-speaking Paraiyars and other communities classed as "untouchable", centered on Madras (now Chennai), the Kolar Gold Fields, and the places where Tamil railway and mine workers settled. It ran from about 1898 into the 1940s. It began with [[Iyothee Thass]]'s Sakya Buddhist Society and his weekly ''Oru Paisa Tamilan'' (1907–14), and from 1917 it was organized through the South Indian Buddhist Association, whose first four general conferences [[P Lakshmi Narasu|P. Lakshmi Narasu]] chaired. It overlapped with the Madras branch of the [[Maha Bodhi Society]], whose officers included the future communist M. Singaravelu, and in 1903 [[Dharmanand Kosambi]] worked among its members. The movement combined Buddhism with anti-caste emancipation through institution building and conversion, but it was not socialist: the conference resolutions examined are loyalist and constitutional. Its links with the Left run through individuals, above all Singaravelu, and through the Self-Respect movement of the 1930s.

== Origins, 1892–1903 ==
Thass's turn to Buddhism followed a career in caste politics in the Nilgiris and Madras. In April 1892 he attended the Madras Mahajana Sabha, where, by his own later account in the ''Tamilan'', an item on the "Parayar problem" was struck from the agenda and a speaker told him that Siva and Vishnu were not the gods of his community. Gajendran Ayyathurai reads the episode as the point at which Thass concluded that the caste and the casteless had no common identity.<ref name="ay11">Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2011). ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India''. PhD dissertation, Columbia University, pp. 22–24 (reading Thass's retelling in the ''Tamilan'' of 21 October 1908). Aloysius dates an earlier memorial of the Nilgiris Dravida Mahajana Sabha to the Congress to 1891 (Aloysius, G. (1998). ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism''. New Age International, pp. 55, 195–196).</ref>

In July 1898 Thass and P. Krishnaswami, delegates of "Paraiah" committees in Madras, sailed with Colonel H.S. Olcott of the Theosophical Society to [[Sri Lanka|Colombo]], where Thass took the five precepts from the monk Sumangala at Maligakanda. Aloysius, who draws on Olcott's diary and on Thass's own account, stresses that the initiative lay with the delegates, and he notes that not every founding member of the new society took the precepts.<ref name="al98">Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 50–55, 58. The editor of Olcott's diary remarked that the delegates' Buddhist ancestry had not been proved (p. 51 n. 4). Aloysius and later writers date the founding of the Sakya Buddhist Society to 1898; some sources give 1899 (and the Maha Bodhi Society's Madras branch 1898 or 1900), and the dates of Thass's turn to Buddhism vary between 1890, 1898, and 1899.</ref> The Sakya Buddhist Society, founded in Madras on his return, was the first institution of the movement; its relations with Thass's own life and writings are treated in the biography of [[Iyothee Thass]].

The Madras branch of the Maha Bodhi Society, the organization that Anagarika Dharmapala had founded in 1891, was a second and separate body. Aloysius says that the effort to open it began in 1898 at the initiative of Singaravelu, although he also states that the Society opened a Madras branch in 1900, and he lists Singaravelu and Narasu among its early lecturers.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', p. 58 and n. 27. The identification of Aloysius's "M. Singaravelu Chettiar" with the communist Singaravelu (see below) is Aloysius's own gloss.</ref> Kosambi's memoir of 1903 names a Professor Lakshminarasu Naidu, probably Narasu, as the president of the Madras Maha Bodhi Sabha and Singaravelu as its secretary, and it shows the Sabha and Thass's followers as two groups that did not get on.<ref name="nive">Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन ''Nivedan'' [Statement] (Marathi). Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali, pp. 110–117. The pages do not name Narasu or Thass in full, and both identifications are inferences. See also Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, pp. 135–143.</ref> Thass criticized the Madras members of the Society in 1911, and the quarrel between the Society and Narasu, described below, ended in a lawsuit.

== Dharmanand Kosambi in Madras ==
{{Main|Dharmanand Kosambi}}
Kosambi's memoir is the only eyewitness account of the Madras societies in 1903. He passed through Madras for a day in March 1902, when Singaravelu received him with a letter of introduction from the Maha Bodhi circle in Calcutta and helped him out of the plague quarantine at Tuticorin. From late March to mid-October 1903 he lived there for about six and a half months. He brought the Maha Bodhi Sabha and the recent Paraiyar converts around a Pandit Ayodhidas together in a rented house at Royapettah, the Bauddhashram, where on Sundays he read a Pali sutta, Singaravelu lectured in Tamil, and the professor taught him comparative study on Fridays.<ref>Kosambi (1924), ''Nivedan'', pp. 95–97 (1902) and 114–117 (1903); the pages record that Ayodhidas saw him off at the quay in October (p. 117). Meera Kosambi's translated selections corroborate the memoir only in part (Kosambi, Meera (Ed.) (2010). ''Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings''. Permanent Black, Selection 1). Ober (2023, p. 232) has Kosambi living at the Shakya Buddhist Society's rest houses from 1902 to 1904; the memoir gives one day in 1902 and six and a half months in 1903.</ref> He quarreled with Singaravelu, who had refused him the fare to Calcutta and later called the monks useless, and he left for Burma. 

== Iyothee Thass ==
{{Main|Iyothee Thass}}
Thass (1845–1914) was a Siddha physician and journalist, born a Parayar, who argued that the casteless Dravidians were India's original inhabitants and its original Buddhists and that caste was imposed on them by immigrant "false Brahmins". He founded the Sakya Buddhist Society in 1898, edited the ''Tamilan'' from 1907, and led a campaign over the census of 1911.<ref>Ayyathurai (2011), ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness'' (the 1911 census campaign and the Sakya associations); Leonard, Dickens (2021). "Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–1914)". ''South Asia Research'' 41.3: 349–368, p. 351. Ayyathurai records Sakya associations outside Madras, including in Burma and South Africa.</ref> 

== P. Lakshmi Narasu ==
{{Main|P Lakshmi Narasu}}
Narasu (1861–1934) was a science teacher in Madras and the author of ''The Essence of Buddhism'' (1907), which reads the Buddha's teaching as a rationalist and ethical creed and, in a passage that Rajesh Kumar cites, calls the spirit of Buddhism essentially socialistic.<ref>Narasu, P. Lakshmi (1907). ''The Essence of Buddhism''. Colombo, with an introduction by Anagarika Dharmapala. The "socialistic" sentence is at p. 45 of the AES reprint of 1993; Kumar, in: Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). ''Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste''. Routledge, ch. 1, p. 35, cites it as "Narasu 1912, 7", a reference that remains unexplained. The book itself has no Marx or communism in it.</ref> After Thass's death in 1914 he became the president of the Sakya Buddhist Society, and the movement regarded him as Thass's successor, although members from the Kolar Gold Fields elected M.Y. Murugesam as general president.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 140; Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', p. 83 n. 16.</ref> He presided over the first four general conferences of the Association. His materialist reading of karma and rebirth and his criticism of the sangha brought him into conflict with the Maha Bodhi Society, which sued him in the last years of his life over the Perambur vihara.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 142–143 and n. 83 (p. 314). The Society had helped to fund the vihara, which Ober dates to 1920 and Aloysius's chronology to 1922.</ref>

== The ''Tamilan'' and the Tamil Buddhist Press ==
The movement's first institution of lasting importance was a newspaper. ''Oru Paisa Tamilan'' ("The One Pice Tamilian") appeared weekly from 19 June 1907 until 29 April 1914, in four pages, and was printed at Thiru Adimoolam's Gautham Press; it was called ''The Tamilan'' from 1908, and Thass never said why the old title was dropped.<ref>Leonard (2021), "Caste-Less Tamils", pp. 351–352; Ayyathurai (2011), ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness'', p. 21 and n. 42. The paper is cited as ''Tamilan'' below. Aloysius's introduction to the collected writings gives the same range: Aloysius, G. (Ed.) (1999). அயோத்திதாசர் சிந்தனைகள் ''Iyothee Thassar Cinthanaikal'' [Thoughts of Iyothee Thass], vols. 1–2. FRRC, St Xavier's College.</ref> Besides news and argument on swadeshi, civic life, and caste, it carried a women's column and campaigned for women's education, and it was the vehicle for Thass's serial histories, among them the ''Indirar Desa Sarithiram'', which Ayyathurai counts as sixty-five parts between August 1910 and November 1911.<ref>Leonard (2021), "Caste-Less Tamils", p. 353; Ayyathurai (2011), ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness'', p. 88. The Roja Muttaiah Research Library in Chennai holds the paper for about 1907–09 and 1911–14 (Ayyathurai, p. 221), so much of the run is read through the selection printed by Aloysius.</ref>

After Thass's death the paper was revived. G. Appaduraiyar edited a revived ''Tamilan'' from Madras from 10 January 1921 (fortnightly from August of that year), and a ''Tamilan'' published at the Kolar Gold Fields from 1926 until about 1932; Aloysius judges that the Kolar paper, a popular and more secular journal of contemporary politics, lacked the learning of Thass's.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 82, 91; Aloysius, G. (2010). ''Dalit-Subaltern Self-Identifications: Iyothee Thassar & Tamizhan''. Critical Quest, pp. 11–13, 41. The paper in the 1914–17 interval and the Kolar paper's last year were not examined.</ref> Srinivasan's ''Paraiyan'' (1893) belongs to the same early Tamil subaltern press, and Appaduraiyar also wrote for Periyar's ''Kudi Arasu'' from 1925.<ref>Aloysius (2010), ''Dalit-Subaltern Self-Identifications'', pp. 14–17 and n. 5 (a list of early Tamil subaltern journals); Ayyathurai (2020), "Living Buddhism", p. 9 n. 4.</ref>

== The South Indian Buddhist Association, 1917–1945 ==
The Association held its general conferences at Madras on 4 November 1917, at Bangalore on 21 November 1920, at Madras on 6–8 April 1928, on 21 May 1932, and at Madras on 31 March–1 April 1945, with Narasu presiding over the first four and Appaduraiyar over the fifth.<ref name="conf">Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 89, 97–100 and App. 5–9, pp. 209–229 (the resolutions, in Aloysius's translation). The conferences are numbered inconsistently in the source, and the Association's own records were not seen.</ref> It continued the organization of the Sakya Buddhist Society and was the movement's public face. Its resolutions are those of a constitutional lobby: expressions of loyalty to the British government in 1917 and 1920, requests for a separate Buddhist column in the census and separate seats in the legislatures, demands about schools, liquor shops, land, and holidays, and a code of reformed Buddhist life, including a membership test that rejected idol worship, ritual customs, and caste discrimination, a wedding badge with the Bodhi tree and the wheel of the Dharma in place of the Hindu ''thali'', and equal inheritance for men and women on the Burmese model.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', App. 5–9, pp. 209–229 (1928 res. 3 and 16; 1920 res. 1 and 7; the liquor-shop, village-school, and holiday motions of 1928 were proposed by Appaduraiyar). The 1920 address was to George V and the "benign British Government of India". The sources do not say at which conference each motion was moved.</ref> The conference of 1932 recommended Narasu's ''Essence of Buddhism'' in Tamil as its authoritative book, and that of 1945 approved Appaduraiyar's Tamil explanation of Buddhism, which was based on it, as the common text.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', App. 5–9, pp. 225, 228.</ref>

The conference of 1928 had guests from outside the movement. Aloysius lists Periyar and "Comrade M. Singaravelu" among them, but he does not record what they said, and Murugesan and Subramanyam's biography of Singaravelu mentions neither the conference nor the revival of the Narasingapuram branch that he helped to bring about in 1930.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 95, 97; Murugesan, K., & C.S. Subramanyam (1975). ''Singaravelu: First Communist in South India''. People's Publishing House.</ref>

== M. Singaravelu ==
M. Singaravelu (1860–1946), a lawyer born to a fishing family in Madras, is the movement's best-documented link with the Communist movement.<ref name="mur75">Murugesan & Subramanyam (1975), ''Singaravelu'', pp. 1–7 (life), p. 6 (death on 11 February 1946). The book calls him "M. Singaravelu" and "Singaravelu Chettiar" and never expands the initial; the "M.N." of some earlier accounts is not supported by it.</ref> The Buddhist phase of his life is documented by four lines of evidence. Aloysius describes him as an early lecturer for both the Sakya and the Maha Bodhi societies and as the initiator of the Maha Bodhi branch in 1898. Kosambi, who knew him in 1902 and 1903, shows him as secretary of the Maha Bodhi Sabha, a hospitable and quick-tempered man who spoke in Tamil at the Sunday meetings of the Bauddhashram. Murugesan and Subramanyam report meetings of the Society at his house and name him, with Narasu, as the principal speaker.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', p. 58; Kosambi (1924), ''Nivedan'', pp. 110, 114–116; Murugesan & Subramanyam (1975), ''Singaravelu'', pp. 8, 146. Whether the Singaravelu of these accounts is the communist rests on Aloysius's gloss and on Murugesan's biography, and Nivedan, which predates any communist role, does not say.</ref> His manifesto for the first May Day celebration in India, at Madras in 1923, is signed as "Indian Communist" and as president of the Madras Maha Bodhi Society, among other offices; and in his presidential address to the first Communist Conference at Kanpur in 1925 he is reported to have said that communism was taught by the Buddha in one form and practiced by his disciples.<ref>Murugesan & Subramanyam (1975), ''Singaravelu'', p. 187 (the manifesto) and p. 206 (the address, in Murugesan's translation).</ref>

The evidence should not be stretched. His family told his biographers that he was not himself a Buddhist, none of his Tamil works has a Buddhist title, and an anonymous reviewer told Douglas Ober that his embrace of Buddhism and Marxism was more superficial than his biographers claim.<ref>Murugesan & Subramanyam (1975), ''Singaravelu'', p. 145; Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', nn. 2–3 (p. 330). Ober writes that his relations with Thass and Narasu appear to have been strained (p. 228); Thass's own writings examined for his biography never name Singaravelu.</ref> The evidence supports an early organizational role and a later use of Buddhist vocabulary and of the Buddha's authority in Marxist argument; a personal Buddhist identity is disputed or absent. His mature politics were Marxist, atheist, and anti-caste.

== G. Appaduraiyar ==
G. Appaduraiyar (Gabriel Appaduraiyar, 1890–1961) was born in Salem district and worked at the Kolar Gold Fields, and he took the precepts in 1911 from a bhikkhu named Indravansa after writing for the ''Tamilan'' first as a "Christian friend". He edited the revived ''Tamilan'' (1921) and the Kolar ''Tamilan'' (1926–c. 1932), founded Buddhist centers in South India, notably in non-Tamil regions, and set up the Association's chapter and vihara at Hubli in 1924. In 1923 he joined the Ceylonese delegation to the Belgaum Congress on the question of Bodh Gaya and broke off a discussion with Gandhi over the ''varna'' system. He presided over the fifth conference of 1945, which approved his Tamil explanation of Buddhism, and Aloysius also lists a work of his, ''Puththarathu Arularam'' (1950).<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 70 n. 54, 72, 82, 84, 91, 96 n. 52, 100–102, 192–194, and App. 7–9; Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2020). "Living Buddhism: Migration, Memory, and Castelessness in South India". ''History and Anthropology'' (online first, 14 December 2020): 1–19, p. 9. His name is also printed Appaduratyar and Appadurai Pillai; Aloysius places his death at Vannivedu in 1961 and his funeral at the Kolar Gold Fields, which are not necessarily in conflict. Whether the "Appaduraiyar (1950)" cited by Aloysius at p. 107 n. 6 is the same work is not established.</ref> He was a friend of Periyar from the mid-1920s, wrote in ''Kudi Arasu'', and attended the Self-Respect conference at Kolar in May 1932 with his daughter; Periyar presided at his funeral.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 101–102, 192–194; Ayyathurai (2020), "Living Buddhism", p. 9 n. 4; Geetha, V., & S.V. Rajadurai (1998). ''Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar''. Samya, ch. 9, p. 11 (the page numbers restart in each chapter of the electronic copy used).</ref>

== R. Srinivasan ==
Rettaimalai Srinivasan (1860–1945) was a leader of the Paraiyar community who founded the Paraiyar Mahajana Sabha (1891) and the journal ''Paraiyan'' (1893), urged the community to own the name "Paraiyar", later sat in the legislature, and supported Ambedkar at the Round Table Conferences.<ref>Aloysius (2010), ''Dalit-Subaltern Self-Identifications'', pp. 14–17, 42, 54; Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 57, 166, 187.</ref> His relation to Buddhism is unclear. Aloysius calls him an initiated Buddhist, but his monograph also describes him as an opponent of the Buddhist revival, and he criticized Thass's Buddhist organizing in a newspaper; the date, place, and officiant of his own initiation are not documented in the sources examined.<ref>Aloysius (2010), ''Dalit-Subaltern Self-Identifications'', p. 16; Aloysius (1998), pp. 57, 187. Ponnovium's overview in Aloysius (Ed.) (1999), vol. 1, pp. xxvi–xxvii, denies any enmity with Thass and speaks of a family tie and a doctrinal difference. Ober (2023, n. 91) calls him Thass's brother-in-law; Aloysius (1998, p. 82 n. 9) records the marriage in 1916 of Srinivasan's daughter to Thass's eldest son. The nature of the kinship is therefore not settled.</ref>

== The Self-Respect Movement and the Left ==
The Tamil Buddhists and the Self-Respect movement of Periyar were distinct movements that met at several points. Periyar was a guest at the conference of 1928, Appaduraiyar was his friend, and Narasu is reported to have called the Buddha's creed the oldest "samadharmic" one in an address to the Association that ''Kudi Arasu'' printed on 29 March 1931.<ref>Geetha & Rajadurai (1998), ''Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium'', ch. 11, p. 2. The report is second-hand; the periodical was not seen, and whether "samadharmic" renders Narasu's own word was not checked. Narasu also criticized Annie Besant in ''New India'' on 17 November 1916 for saying that a Paraiyar must work out his karma (ch. 1, p. 20).</ref> From 1931 Singaravelu wrote for the Self-Respect papers, including ''Kudi Arasu'' and, from 1935, ''Pudu Ulagam'', and with Periyar he drafted the Self-Respect-Samadharma action plan adopted at Erode in December 1932. In the Self-Respect press he read ''samadharma'' as a Buddhist word, with the Buddha using ''dharma'' for a thing and so for property, which made ''samadharma'' a call for common ownership against the caste duty that the Hindu ''dharma'' meant.<ref>Geetha & Rajadurai (1998), ''Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium'', ch. 11, pp. 2, 21 and App. 3; Murugesan & Subramanyam (1975), ''Singaravelu'', App. 17, pp. 221–222, where the same word is said not to capture "socialism". The authors judge his later socialism "imitative" and "unilinear" (ch. 11, p. 28; ch. 6, pp. 41–42).</ref> He broke with Periyar in 1933–34 over the movement's alliance with the Justice Party and with capitalists.<ref>Geetha & Rajadurai (1998), ''Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium'', ch. 11 (the articles in ''Kudi Arasu'' of 8 October 1933 and in ''Pagutharivu'' of 30 September 1934 are the main evidence; the page numbers were not recorded).</ref> Geetha and Rajadurai, whose history of non-Brahmin thought begins with Thass, are critical of the empirical basis of his history of the casteless as the first Buddhists. Whether the Tamil Buddhist movement prepared the ground for Periyar's movement, as Aloysius argues, or only overlapped with it, is disputed.

== Later Communities: Kolar, Hubli, and the Diaspora ==
The movement spread with the Tamil workers who moved to the mines and railways. At the Kolar Gold Fields the contractor M.Y. Murugesam was a patron of the movement, the Kolar ''Tamilan'' was published, and a Self-Respect conference was held in 1932.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 83 n. 16, 91; Geetha & Rajadurai (1998), ''Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium'', ch. 9, p. 11.</ref> At Hubli, in what is now Karnataka, a chapter of the Association and a vihara were founded in 1924, and the community of descendants of Tamil railway migrants that remains there keeps Thass's ''Adivedam'' as a core text. Ayyathurai's ethnographic study reports the community's own claim to be casteless, and the author defends it; the claim is the community's account and is given here as such.<ref>Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2020). "Living Buddhism: Migration, Memory, and Castelessness in South India". ''History and Anthropology'' (online first, 14 December 2020): 1–19, p. 9.</ref> The movement's later history, including its relations with Ambedkar's movement after 1956, is outside the scope of this page.

== Literature in English ==
* Leonard, Dickens (2025). "Iyothee Thassar's Buddha and Civilizational Memory". In: Banerjee, Prathama (Ed.), ''Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages: Hierarchy, Humanity and Equality in Indian History'': 113–127. Bloomsbury Academic. {{annotation|Reads Thass's ''Indirar Desa Sarithiram'' as an account of a civilizational conflict between indigenous Buddhists and "Aryan" invaders, and notes his reliance on the Orientalist theory of Indo-Aryan migration.}}
* Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press. {{annotation|Places the Tamil movement within a wider network of Buddhist revival before Ambedkar, and gives its relations with the Maha Bodhi Society and with Narasu and Singaravelu.}}
* Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2020). "Living Buddhism: Migration, Memory, and Castelessness in South India". ''History and Anthropology'' (online first, 14 December 2020): 1–19. {{annotation|An ethnographic study of the Buddhist community of Hubli, which descends from Tamil railway migrants. Its claim that the community is casteless is the community's own account, which the author defends.}}
* Leonard, Dickens (2021). "Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–1914)". ''South Asia Research'' 41.3: 349–368. {{annotation|A short account of Thass's career and his press. Most of its quotations of Thass are the author's own translations from a secondary source, and should be checked against Thass's texts.}}
* Aloysius, G. (2010). ''Dalit-Subaltern Self-Identifications: Iyothee Thassar & Tamizhan''. Critical Quest. {{annotation|An essay by the editor of Thass's collected writings on his journalism and on early Tamil subaltern journals. It is an argument and not a neutral summary.}}
* Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2011). ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India''. PhD dissertation, Columbia University. {{annotation|The most detailed English study of Thass's arguments in the ''Tamilan'' and of the Sakya associations. All translations are the author's, and the study finds no direct archival evidence of an influence on Ambedkar.}}
* Geetha, V., & S.V. Rajadurai (1998). ''Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar''. Samya. {{annotation|A history of non-Brahmin thought in Tamil Nadu, critical of the empirical basis of Thass's history, with the fullest account of the Self-Respect movement and of Singaravelu's part in it. Page numbers restart in each chapter of the electronic copy.}}
* Aloysius, G. (1998). ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism''. New Age International. {{annotation|The standard monograph on the Sakya Buddhist Society and the South Indian Buddhist Association, with a chronology and the conference resolutions in translation. Its thesis that Tamil Buddhism was the ideological antecedent of the Dravidian movement is the author's argument.}}
* Murugesan, K., & C.S. Subramanyam (1975). ''Singaravelu: First Communist in South India''. People's Publishing House. {{annotation|The standard biography of Singaravelu, sympathetic to its subject, with translated speeches and manifestos among its appendices. It is the source for his Buddhist-communist remark of 1925, in translation.}}

== Literature in Other Languages ==
* Aloysius, G. (Ed.) (1999). அயோத்திதாசர் சிந்தனைகள் ''Iyothee Thassar Cinthanaikal'' [Thoughts of Iyothee Thass], vols. 1–2. FRRC, St Xavier's College. {{annotation|Thass's writings from the ''Tamilan'', cited by item and page, with an introduction by the editor and an overview of Thass's life by Anbu Ponnovium. Tamil (a third volume followed in 2003).}}
* Kosambi, Dharmanand (1924). निवेदन ''Nivedan'' [Statement]. Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali. {{annotation|The memoir of a Marathi monk, with the only eyewitness account of the Madras societies in 1903 (pp. 95–97, 110–117). Marathi.}}

== How to Cite This Article ==
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Brons, Lajos ({{REVISIONYEAR}}). "Tamil Buddhist Movement". ''The Radical Buddhism Project''. Version of {{#time: j F Y | {{REVISIONYEAR}}-{{REVISIONMONTH}}-{{REVISIONDAY}} }}. <nowiki>http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Tamil_Buddhist_Movement</nowiki>.

== Notes ==
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[[category:India]]
[[Category:Topical Pages]]
[[Category:Movements]]
[[Category: Tamil Buddhist movement]]
[[Category:Iyothee Thass]]
[[Category:P Lakshmi Narasu]]
[[Category:Dharmanand Kosambi]]
[[category:Dalit Buddhism]]