How did reformers in early 20th-century Kerala use Buddhist ideas against caste hierarchy?

In early 20th-century Kerala, Ezhava and Thiyya reformers inspired by Sree Narayana Guru turned to Buddhism for three things: an ethic of equality, a symbol of protest, and a lost non-Brahmanical past. They used it to attack caste by literary, religious, rationalist and historical means.

Why Buddhism appealed

• Egalitarian ethic: the Buddha's compassion and the open monastic order were the opposite of the ritual purity and pollution that upheld untouchability.
• Indigenous alternative: Buddhism let reformers reject caste without turning to a foreign faith. The Ezhava reformers had themselves been kept out of Kerala's upper-caste literary culture.

Modes of use

• Literature as critique: Kumaran Asan was deeply influenced by the Buddha. His Chandalabhikshuki, in which a Buddhist monk accepts water from an outcaste woman, showed how meaningless caste was [1].
• Conversion as protest: Mitavadi C. Krishnan embraced Buddhism as his "life's vow". He used his paper Mithavadi to campaign for lower-caste rights and led the removal of the "Thindal Palaka" (untouchability board) in Kozhikode [2].
• Rationalism in practice: Sahodaran Ayyappan declared that a religion which divides humanity is unnecessary. He organised Mishrabhojanam (inter-dining) and founded the Sahodara Sangham [3]. His journal Yuktivadi (1928) spread liberty, equality and fraternity [4].
• Reclaiming heritage: the 1920s press reported Buddha images that villagers worshipped as local deities [5]. This supported the case that Kerala once had a Buddhist past that Brahmanical revival had absorbed, a past later surveyed systematically by P.C. Alexander [6].

Limits

• The appeal was not uniform. Moorkoth Kumaran was drawn to Buddhism but returned to Hinduism on the Guru's counsel [2]. The mainstream SNDP stayed with the Guru's universalism rather than mass conversion.

Buddhist idea ──► Reform tool ───────────────────► Anti-caste outcome
Compassion       Poetry (Asan)                      Moral delegitimisation
Equality         Conversion, press (C. Krishnan)    Public protest
Reason           Inter-dining, Yuktivadi (Ayyappan) Social practice

Fig: Buddhist ideas turned into reform action

In short, Kerala's reformers used Buddhism less as a creed than as a moral and historical resource against caste. That legacy lives on in Article 17's abolition of untouchability and in the constitutional ideal of fraternity. Recording Kerala's Buddhist heritage today can help keep that egalitarian memory alive.