ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Tamil Śaivism saw the emergence of Dalit vedāntic gurus and vedāntic maṭhas within the colonial context and examines how it is within this context that cīvakāruṇyam takes on a new lease of life in two radically different figures separated by half a century from each other. The first is Ramalingar whose seminal essay the Cīvakāruṇya oḻukkam is the focus of this chapter. The second person was probably the most brilliant and towering Dalit intellectual of the Tamil region in the late 19th and early 20th century – Iyothee Thass Pandithar (1845–1914). Cīvakāruṇyam is the focus of his ambitious Buddhist narrative work, the Ātivētam. The chapter begins by briefly looking at the latter and then concludes with Ramalingar in order to demonstrate how cīvakāruṇyam comes to be reinterpreted, modernized, and radicalized by two of the most original thinkers in the Tamil religious landscape in the long 19th century.
