Memory, history, and casteless consciousness: Tamil Buddhists in modern South India

ABSTRACT The study of memory and caste-based oppressed communities in India and in the Indian diaspora is largely an unexamined field. If caste was an imposition of the self-privileging groups then, how do we understand the memory and history of the subalternized communities? Likewise, if those Indians who were oppressed by the brahminical invention of untouchability were actually not untouchables, then in what ways do marginalized Indian communities re-member and sustain their intrinsic cultural and historical identities? Do their language, literature, philosophy, and knowledge practices present alternative perspectives about their memory and history beyond caste? This paper aims to address of some of these questions by focusing on the Buddhist movement of the Tamils, who had been marginalized as outcastes, Parayars/Paraiyars/Pariah. It examines the varying ways Tamil Buddhist cultural and communicative memory affirms their casteless and anticaste identity in colonial India. Furthermore, it argues that a direct consequence of such a retention and revival of Buddhist memory in modern India was that these subordinated communities could sustain alternative ways of identifying, representing, and centering themselves beyond brahminical valorizations of caste.