Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973), born Erode Venkata Ramasamy in Erode, Madras Presidency, was a rationalist, anti-caste crusader, and architect of the Dravidian movement in South India. A prosperous merchant by background, he joined the Indian National Congress in 1919 and rose to prominence as a Congress worker in the Tamil country, presiding over the Madras Presidency Congress and championing prohibition and the boycott of foreign cloth. His ideological break from mainstream nationalism crystallised at the 1924–25 Vaikom Satyagraha in the princely state of Travancore, where he led agitation for the right of avarna (lower-caste) Hindus to use the roads around the Vaikom temple, an effort that earned him the honorific Vaikom Veerar (Hero of Vaikom). His subsequent resignation from the Congress in 1925, prompted by its refusal to endorse communal representation and his perception of its Brahmin-dominated leadership, marked the beginning of his independent reform career.

The defining vehicle of his thought was the Self-Respect Movement (Suya Mariyathai Iyakkam), launched in 1925, which demanded that non-Brahmins reject the social inferiority imposed by caste and the priestly monopoly over ritual. The movement promoted self-respect marriages—weddings conducted without Brahmin priests, Sanskrit mantras, or religious sacrament—a practice the Tamil Nadu government later legalised through the Hindu Marriage (Madras Amendment) Act of 1967. Periyar advocated inter-caste and widow remarriage, women's right to divorce and property, contraception, and the abolition of the devadasi system. His rationalism was uncompromising: he characterised religion, particularly Hindu scripture and the varna order, as instruments of social subordination, and he challenged the authority of the Manusmṛti and the Ramayana, offering in Ramayana: A True Reading a counter-interpretation that recast Ravana as a Dravidian protagonist.

Periyar's political and organisational reach broadened through the Justice Party (the South Indian Liberal Federation), founded in 1916, whose leadership he assumed in 1938. In 1944 he reconstituted it as the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), a non-electoral social organisation committed to a separate, casteless Dravida Nadu and the eradication of Brahminical Hinduism. He propagated his ideas through the Tamil journals Kudi Arasu (founded 1925), Revolt (English, 1928), and Viduthalai. His 1938 presidency of the anti-Hindi agitation against the compulsory teaching of Hindi in Madras schools, introduced under the Rajaji ministry, established the linguistic-nationalist plank that would define Tamil politics for decades and coined the assertion of Tamil and Dravidian cultural autonomy against perceived North Indian and Sanskritic imposition.

Periyar's legacy is institutionally embedded in contemporary Tamil Nadu. The 1949 split, when C. N. Annadurai left the DK to found the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)—partly over Periyar's marriage at seventy to Maniammai—produced the electoral force that has governed the state, alternating with its 1972 offshoot the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) founded by M. G. Ramachandran. Successive Dravidian ministries, from Annadurai's 1967 government onward, implemented Periyarist policy: expansive reservation in education and employment, the two-language formula resisting Hindi, self-respect marriage legislation, and the renaming of the state from Madras to Tamil Nadu in 1969. His statues, the Periyar memorial in Vaikom inaugurated jointly by Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and recurring commemorations on his birth anniversary (17 September, observed as Social Justice Day) attest to his continuing political salience.

Periyar is distinct from B. R. Ambedkar, with whom he shared an anti-caste agenda but diverged in method and constituency: Ambedkar worked through constitutional drafting and the Dalit conversion to Buddhism, whereas Periyar pursued an atheist, Dravidian-linguistic, non-Brahmin (rather than specifically Dalit) mobilisation and rejected scripture-based reform entirely. He differs equally from Gandhian reformers such as M. K. Gandhi, whose Harijan uplift accepted varnashrama in principle and retained Hindu religiosity—a position Periyar denounced. He is also separable from contemporaries like Jyotirao Phule, whose Satyashodhak Samaj anticipated several Self-Respect themes a generation earlier in Maharashtra.

Periyar remains a contested figure. Critics charge his rhetoric against Brahmins and northern India with sectarianism, and his proposal for a separate Dravida Nadu—abandoned after the 1963 Sixteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibited secessionist advocacy—is read by detractors as separatism. His atheism and public denunciations of Hindu deities continue to provoke litigation and political confrontation, including periodic disputes over statues and his quotations inscribed at the Salem and other sites. Defenders counter that his rationalism and emphasis on women's autonomy and social justice prefigured later civil-rights frameworks, and UNESCO described him in 1970 as a prophet of the new age and the socratic philosopher of South-East Asia.

For the working practitioner—UPSC aspirant, policy researcher, or analyst of Indian federalism—Periyar is indispensable to understanding the structural logic of Tamil Nadu politics, the durability of the reservation question, and the linguistic-federal tensions that recur whenever language policy or the delimitation of parliamentary seats arises. His thought explains why Dravidian parties frame social justice, regional autonomy, and resistance to Hindi imposition as a single continuous tradition, and why the Dravidian model of welfare and identity politics remains a counterpoint to pan-Indian Hindutva nationalism. Mastery of his biography clarifies the GS1 modern-history syllabus on social reform and the GS2 themes of federalism and affirmative action alike.