Tamilex monthly seminar: Shalin Maria & Neela Bhaskar

1 October 2024

Photo: Courtesy of the University of Oxford

Ellis and Ayothee Thass — Exchanging Knowledge Through Palm-Leaf Manuscripts

Shalin Maria & Neela Bhaskar

Shalin Maria is a dalit activist, writer and orator in Tamil and English. Through her work, she frequently encounters the activism and scholarship of Iyothee Thass (1845–1914), who perhaps most famously converted to Buddhism as a resistance towards Brahminical Hinduism. In this talk, Shalin focuses on Iyothee Thass’ relationship with Francis Whyte Ellis, an Orientalist and British colonial educator who died far too young for us to know much more about him. Through interviews with Iyothee Thass’ descendants, she has discovered that Thass’ grandfather Kandhappan, a medical doctor and butler to the Collector of Madurai at the time, sent his family’s collection of palm-leaf manuscripts to Ellis. This talk explores this interesting and lesser-known side of the early development of a colonial Tamil pedagogy, fuelled primarily by the efforts of Ellis (the core of this talk) and Colonel Colin Mackenzie. Together, they are best known as the founders and propagators of the Madras School of Orientalism (Trautmann 2010) and, currently, little is known about their sources and ’native’ collaborators. Shalin’s talk will be introduced and contextualised by Neela Bhaskar (Tamilex), who completed her PhD dissertation on the Mackenzie Collection.

The Tamilex monthly seminar will take place on 1 October 2024, at 10:30 CET. This will be hybrid event; for the Zoom link, please contact Charles Li(charles.li"AT"uni-hamburg.de).