He authored 20 research works that analyse the development of Tamil culture from ancient to modern periods with a focus on subaltern Dalit perspectives.
Raj Gauthaman was a part of the core group of writers and thinkers, many of whom were Dalits, which shaped the thinking of the influential journal, Nirapirikai in the early 1990s.
He was associated with government arts colleges in Pondicherry, and was lastly the Head of the Tamil Department at the Kanchi Mamunivar Centre for Postgraduate Studies in Lawspet, Puducherry.
Gauthaman's narrative is interrupted at specific points by an ordinary Dalit who brings in the freshness of a local dialect to question and comment on the account.
The answer, 'they say such things are not interesting; literature has to be appreciated and enjoyed; it is not politics,' opens out onto another major achievement of these books and of the Nirapirikai group — the repositioning of literary and cultural texts outside the confines of the aesthetic.
Jeyamohan classifies Raj Gauthaman's works in the post-2000 period as more rounded and reflecting the balance necessary to explore ancient Tamil history and culture.
It explored how Tamil society consolidated its patterns of 'righteousness based hegemony', and how it used power to create prevailing social hierarchies over time.
Aakol Poosalum Perungarkaala Nagarigamum analyzed how the tribal society transformed into the urban village of the Sangam area, and how those boundaries slowly got blurred, affecting the lives and equations of participants on both sides.
It charted unexplored areas on how wars gave way to games of cattle robbery, the changing role of the bards and pleasure women and the funerary customs of megalithic versus 'civilized' era.
This included Dalit social groups which were newly unencumbered from slavery and started to enjoy property rights and urban mobility.