D V. Geetha was essentially different from those ruses of Reason which had come to characterize historical aspirations and expectations and the historical imagination during the late nineteenth century. While the parallel historiography simulated and reproduced arguments from the dominant tradition of historical discourse—though with contradictory implications—it inscribed within its discursive ambit an emancipatory 129 project that was transgressive of text and history as it was unfolding during the period we are concerned with. Ayothidas' anxiety over questions of historical import has to be, ultimately, seen as an expression of his overall political concerns that are clearly evident even in his discursive interests. In his re-readings of history and literature, Ayothidas returns insistently to two themes: the issue of 'paraiah' origins and the semantic import of the term 'paraiah'. Before I consider these concerns at some length and note their implications for our understanding of the nineteenth-century historical imagination and its relationship to colonialism, it would be useful to outline, very briefly, the premises of an incipient nationalist historiography that assumed form, coherence and hegemonic significance during the last decades of the previous century. In the course of the great social reform debates that raged throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century the question was often posed: Should social reform be practised even as such reform practices as the raising of the age of consent of brides in Hindu marriages were being urged by a self-righteous officialdom? In other words, the unuttered but tacitly expressed query of the new species of nationalist intellectuals was, would not reform carried out under the benign eye of a colonial government constitute a slur on 'Indian national' honour? 'Indian national' honour was, of course, constructed in and through these social reform debates and it was in favour of this newly consecrated national honour (and pride) that reform concerns w^re all but nominally abandoned by India's political elite and their forum, the Indian National Congress.1 The abandonment of serious and sustained social reform by the Congress coincided with the era of Hindu resurgence, symbolized by the pervasive presence in Hindu life of those organizations committed to a preservation of tradition, customary practice and the cardinal tenets of Varnashramadharma. The latter was now reinterpreted as representing the essential ethos of an Indian (Hindu) national community.2 During this period, when the question, 'Who shall own India's past?' was posed, it is hardly surprising that the traditionally literate brahmins and other upper castes came to proudly state and 'prove' their claims to ownership as just and valid. In the Tamil country, for instance, the Theosophical Society and its constellation of brahmin elites emerged as spokespersons for the Hindu past. Colonel Olcott, one of the founders of the Society and an indefatigable populiser of its ideas, argued that the works of Max Mueller and others had indeed proved beyond doubt that 'Aryavarta was the cradle of European civilizations, the Aryans the progenitors of the western peoples and their literature, the source and spring of all western religions and philosophies' (Sutharalingam 1974: 294). Further, the researches of Sir William Jones had demonstrated the existence of a 'splendid garden of Sanskrit literature . . . (with) its philosophy, its crystalline rivulets of science (and) its magnificent struc- Numbers 25-26