Re-writing History in the Brahmin's Shadow Thiruvalluvar's birth and origins have been the subject of much debate in recent times and suggests that the poet's parentage has become a site of contention in view of the particular tenor of his work, that has managed to irritate, if not baffle, certain self-ordained literary enthusiasts and upper-caste custodians of culture. 128 Ayothidas goes on to note that, faced with the proof of non-brahmin genius—the suffix 'valluvan,' he argues, indicates the poet's 'lowl/ origins—brahmin men of letters and a few upper-caste non-brahmins have sought to claim Thiruvalluvar as their own. Thus it came to be rumoured and written that Thiruvalluvar was born of a brahmin father and a 'paraiah' (a Tamil untouchable caste) mother; that he was bom out of a fortuitous divine miscegenation. . . . Ayofhidas characterizes these myths of the poet's origins as fictitious and instances of brahmin dissembling and, for his part, attempts to demonstrate how, in fact, Thiruvalluvar was an early 'paraiah'-Buddhist, and his work an exegesis on Buddhist scriptures and morality. Ayothidas reveals a similar concern and even obsession with the question of 'origins' in his other works as well. In Indirar Desa Chharitiram, for instance, he seeks to excavate 'new' beginnings to an old history, attempting, thereby, to rewrite and transform that history. He argues in this text that the original inhabitants of the subcontinent were those who lived by the precepts of Indirar; Indirar being none other than the Buddha himself or he who had come to control his 'Aindiriyams' (the five senses). Then, again, in a series of texts on gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon, Ayothidas attempts to recover the 'original' deity or principle of worship—always an aspect of the Buddha—that had, over time, been transmuted by the alchemical brilliance and guile of an alien priesthood to resemble dieties associated with the Hindu Trinity. In each of these texts Ayothidas locates the beginnings of history in the subcontinent in events associated with Buddhism. These events, so many movements in the progress of Buddhist ideas in time, are constituted as privileged points of departure for a history that is, then, subsequently narrated as a dissolution and waning of an originally equitous existence and consciousness. This irrevocable fall from a caste-free arcadia is narrated as the fall of an originally free and equal community of 'p^raiahs' into slavery, ocassioned by the crafty interventions of a malicious and self-serving foreign clergy. Ayothidas wrote within a tradition of critical-political hermeneutics that was continued and amplified by other dalit-Buddhist scholars of the same period and after. This tradition existed within and against the dominant tradition of historiography, which invariably glorified what it characterized as 'Aryan-Hindu' civili-zational achievements, and shared with the latter several fundamental methodological and epistemological assumptions: the notion of a golden age; the idea of a 'fall' due to outside influence and internal corruption; the acceptance of the evidence of literary texts as salient. Likewise, 'paraiah'-Buddhist constructions of history drew heavily on contemporary developments in the fields of archaeology, palaeography, numismatics and, chiefly, hermeneutics. But what distinguished the parallel historiographical tradition perfected by Ayothidas was its positionality. For the parallel historiography privileged, in a sort of self-conscious gesture, caste as a category of historical analysis, and sought to imagine a historical rationality that Journal of Arts & Ideas