Freethought, Atheism and Social Radicalism in Colonial Madras – V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai

A  secular, freethinkers’ union was active in Madras in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It affiliated itself with and was perhaps known to Freethought circles in England. The union called itself ‘the Chennai Suyaakina Sangam’, calling attention to its will to think through rather than accept truth as given and handed down. The sangam ran two journals, Tattuva Vivesini in Tamil and The Thinker in English. We do not know enough about the circumstances that halted their publication, but the forthright and freewheeling critique of scripture and priesthood which Tattuva Vivesini put forth did leave its mark in the Tamil intellectual world. Some of the Tamil Buddhists who gathered around Pandit Iyothee Thass and those who were drawn to the rational aspects of Buddhism such as M. Masilamani and Professor Lakshminarasu in the early twentieth century knew of the Madras secularists.

This tradition of criticizing religion in public and suggesting a recognizably atheistic and rationalist world view was returned to history in the 1920s, with the founding of the Self-Respect movement. Voiced in public forums, private social gatherings and cultural events, and consistently argued in various Self-respect magazines and journals, rationalism and atheism acquired a characteristic resonance, as they spoke to and addressed the critical claims of their vernacular and historical contexts. Drawing on the marvelously lucid and satiric writings of freethinkers in Victorian and Edwardian England and the United States of America, Tamil atheists and rationalists deployed these learnt principles to advance a critique of the indecent inequities of caste society and Brahmins and Brahminism. They called attention, in particular, to the manner in which religion and politics intertwined and informed both the politics and practice of Congress nationalists, in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere in the country. Self-respecters put forth a radical critique of Gandhi’s ‘resolution’ of untouchability, which subjected the Mahatma’s humane piety to pitiless, rational scrutiny. Such a lens was also taken to the women’s question, and this led to the making of an extraordinarily rich feminist point of view, which baffles us even today, by its fearlessness and commitment to equality in both sexual and social relationships.

V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai