Born in 1879, Periyar is
remembered for the Self Respect Movement
to redeem the identity and self-respect of Tamils.
He envisaged a Dravida homeland of
Dravida Nadu, and launched a political party, Dravidar Kazhagam (DK).
Periyar started his political
career as a Congress worker in his
hometown Erode. He quarrelled with
Gandhi over the question of separate dining for Brahmin and non-Brahmin
students at Gurukkulam, a Congress-sponsored school owned by nationalist leader
V V S Iyer in Cheranmahadevi near
Tirunelveli. At the request of parents, Iyer had provided separate dining for
Brahmin students, which Periyar opposed. Gandhi proposed a compromise, arguing
that while it may not be a sin for a person not to dine with another, he would
rather respect their scruples. After failing to bend the Congress to his view,
Periyar resigned from the party in 1925, and associated himself with the Justice Party and the Self Respect Movement,
which opposed the dominance of Brahmins in social life, especially the
bureaucracy. The Justice Party had a decade earlier advocated reservation for non-Brahmins in the bureaucracy and,
after coming to power in the Madras Presidency, issued an order to implement
it.
Periyar’s fame spread beyond the
Tamil region during the Vaikom
Satyagraha of 1924, a mass movement to demand that lower caste persons be
given the right to use a public path in
front of the famous Vaikom temple. Periyar took part in the agitation with
his wife, and was arrested twice. He would later be referred to as Vaikom Veerar (Hero of Vaikom).
During the 1920s and 30s, Periyar
combined social and political reform, and challenged
the conservatism of the Congress and the mainstream national movement in the
Tamil region. He reconstructed the Tamil identity as an egalitarian ideal that was originally
unpolluted by the caste system, and counterposed it against the Indian identity
championed by the Congress. He argued that caste
was imported to the Tamil region by Aryan Brahmins, who spoke Sanskrit and
came from Northern India. In the 1930s, when the Congress ministry imposed
Hindi, he drew a parallel with the Aryanisation process, and claimed it was an
attack on Tamil identity and self-respect. Under him, the Dravidian Movement became a struggle against caste and an assertion of
Tamil national identity.
In the 1940s, Periyar launched
Dravidar Kazhagam, which espoused an independent
Dravida Nadu comprising Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada speakers. The
Dravidian linguistic family was the foundation on which he based his idea of a
Dravida national identity. These ideas had a seminal influence on the shaping
of the political identity and culture of the Tamil speaking areas of Madras
Presidency, and continue to resonate in present-day Tamil Nadu.
Periyar died in 1973 at the age
of 94.
His work and his legacy
For the average Tamil, Periyar
today is an ideology. He stands for a politics that foregrounded social equality, self-respect, and
linguistic pride. As a social reformer, he focused on social, cultural and
gender inequalities, and his reform agenda questioned matters of faith, gender
and tradition. He asked people to be rational in their life choices. He argued
that women needed to be independent, not mere child-bearers, and insisted that
they be allowed a equal share in employment. The Self Respect Movement he led
promoted weddings without rituals, and sanctioned property as well as divorce
rights for women. He appealed to people to give up the caste suffix in their
names, and to not mention caste. He instituted inter-dining with food cooked by Dalits in public conferences in the
1930s.
C N Annadurai, who was Periyar’s dearest pupil at one time, broke
with him, split the DK, and formed the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in 1949. Anna, a man of the masses,
recognised the value of electoral democracy and accepted that Tamil separatism had no future. He used
the new medium of cinema to spread the ideals of the Dravidian Movement and
established himself as the successor to Periyar.
If Periyar was an iconoclast, Anna was a moderate reformist. On the
pedestal of one of Periyar’s many
statues in Tamil Nadu is the inscription: “There
is no god, and no god at all. He who created god was a fool, he who propagates
god is a scoundrel and he who worships god is a barbarian.” His successors
moderated this radicalism — R Kannan recounts in Anna: The Life and Times of C
N Annadurai, that Anna, who under
the influence of his atheist mentor once broke Ganesha figures, would later
say, “I would neither break the Ganesha
idol nor the coconut (the offering).”
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