Atheists of Madras

On a small band of freethinkers of the old Madras province who provoked anxiety and dread in missionary and religious circles.



Author: Edited by V. Arasu
Publisher: New Century Book House, 2012
Price: Rs. 3000 for the six volumes.

Print edition: November 1, 2013
By V. GEETHA

NARENDRA DABHOLKAR, rationalist, teacher and campaigner against superstition, was shot dead on August 20 for his commitment to challenge those who spread superstition and traded in ignorance. Those responsible for his death clearly feared the way he took on those who benefitted from fear and unknowing. Irrationality has behind it powerful vested interests that do not like being challenged or criticised. It was even so in the heyday of rationalism and atheism in old Madras and later on in Tamil Nadu: while Periyar E.V. Ramasamy’s atheism was considered “commonplace” and engraved on the pedestals of all his statues, his rationalist views were continuously challenged, and not always through honourable means. In the 1920s, he was accused of promoting immorality and godlessness; in the 1930s, his self-respect/socialist ideas were seen as encouraging promiscuity; and in the 1940s and after, he was considered the very scourge of Hinduism. In the 1950s and after, popular entertainment, especially cinema, confronted his criticisms with revivified versions of bhakthi devotionalism.

It is remarkable, therefore, that nearly half a century before Periyar came to voice his views, the old Madras province was home to a group of intellectuals who called themselves “freethinkers”, “secularists” and atheists. These men were initially members of the Hindu Freethought Union, which counted amongst its members Pandita Ramabai and later on some of them set up the Madras Secular Society as well as the Hindu Malthusian Society. A Madras Freethought Tract Society was also set up to bring out timely pamphlets and tracts on subjects dear to the secularists.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor V. Arasu, Head of the Department of Tamil, University of Madras, we have today, within reach and access, a vast corpus of their publications. Prof. Arasu supervised an M. Phil thesis on the Madras secularists more than 15 years ago and since then has worked on identifying, acquiring and putting together a selection of writings by them. Culled almost entirely from the Tamil and English journals they edited between 1882 and 1888 (Tattuva Vivesini and The Thinker), this selection is today available in six large volumes (Tattuva Vivesini and The Thinker, New Century Book House, Chennai, 2013). Grouped under different thematic categories (religion, caste, the women’s question, poverty, atheism, science, superstition), these essays tell a remarkable story about a forgotten and hitherto unknown phase in the history of ideas in modern Tamil Nadu, and one which would require us to revise existing views on the social and cultural history of the old Madras province.

The essays also tell us about the beginnings of rationalism and atheism in Madras: scattered in these volumes are several references to subscription details, both for the journals and the society, notes on books received and sold from the secularists’ office, readers’ opinions, details of polemical exchanges between secularists and their rivals, and to local, continental and global networks of free thought and atheism… In a sense, what we have here is a new geography of intellectual activity and one that extended across the British empire, and brought together men of vastly different backgrounds and nationalities. Such internationalism prefigured the more familiar socialist and communist internationalism of the early 20th century and in some crucial ways fed into it. Within the Indian subcontinent, the secularists were aware of and were in touch with like-minded souls, in Calcutta, Udaipur, Bellary, Hyderabad, and so on.

http://www.frontline.in/books/atheists-of-madras/article5229015.ece