Can Periyar’s Politics Be Accepted In Today’s Anti-Caste Discourse?—Diya Maria Abraham

“The Jews are only interested in themselves and nobody else. They somehow contrive to have the rulers in their pocket, participate in governance and conspire to torture and suck the lives out of other citizens in order that they live (in comfort).” “Are they not comparable to the Brahmins, who too have no responsibility but have the rulers in their pocket, have entered the ruling dispensation and been lording over (all of us)?” These are the words of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, popularly known as Periyar. While critics of the caste system such as Ambedkar wrote in-depth theoretical pieces to reiterate that their fight was against Brahmanism and not the Brahmins themselves, Periyar did the opposite, and with much gusto.

The first statement above can, when read on its own, raise a number of questions because it looks like a sentence straight out of an anti-Semitic tabloid during the Nazi regime. Periyar was known to be crass and quite irrational in many of his arguments, and is often pitted against Ambedkar, the latter being famous for his theoretical clarity and exposition. While this may be partially true, a large portion of this argument can be said to be misrepresentation and bad translation of nearly forty volumes of writing, compiled from speeches and manuscripts in Tamil.  Periyar, a man who fought against Brahmanical hegemony for most of his life, was accused of engaging in hate-mongering and for vilifying Brahmins by many.  His politics have come under fire for not directly addressing issues concerning Dalits, as he conflated them with the larger bloc of non-Brahmins, which also included the economically and socially affluent castes of Tamil Nadu. The question remains: can Periyar’s politics be classified as anti-Dalit?

Ever since the inception of the non-Brahmin movement, Brahmin ideologues have accused it of standing in the way of Dalit reform. The continuance of atrocities against Dalits, their social and economic poverty and their lack of political participation in Tamil Nadu despite its being ruled by Dravidian parties for decades are all credible points in support of this argument. However, it has now been co-opted by some members of the intellectual class and the nationalist right wing in dangerous ways. Narendra Subramaniam argues that Periyar’s conception of the Dravidian ‘contains at its centre the Tamil-speaking Shudra of Tamil Nadu’ and that the Dalits exist only in its outer layer. Rupa Viswanath argues that as far as the Dalits were concerned, Periyar prioritized social reform over long-term legal and political solutions. Others have tried to elaborate on how there has never been Brahmin hegemony in the state, with OBC groups occupying many important positions of power even before Independence. N. Kalyan Raman has clarified that the preponderance of Brahmins in government posts was due to their high literacy ‘which was corrected in due course.’ By quoting statistics that showcase some backward castes’ having held government posts in numbers disproportionate to their population in a lone year or two, these theorists fail to realize that by only looking at the immediate historical and social context of Periyar’s political thought, they miss the bigger picture of his critique of the Brahmin nation-state and his espousal of Dalit emancipation everywhere.

Periyar’s work as a social activist can be said to have begun in 1924 with his participation in the Vaikom agitations. The inability of the untouchables and other lower castes to use the roads surrounding the local temple spurred a number of agitations which brought the attention of the Congress and Gandhi. His work in creating a newspaper, Kudi Arasu (The Republic) was instrumental in providing a non-Brahmin perspective on national events. He vocally supported category-wise representation and wrote about it extensively. While he encouraged his followers not to trust their Brahmin political counterparts and called upon upper-caste Hindus to even convert to other religions in rather intimidating tones, this was done for the complete annihilation of the caste system and for such liberation to be spearheaded by those oppressed by it. The Self-Respect Movement was important in this regard aimed to cultivate pride and respect in non-Brahmin identities and to discourage their implicit support in the perpetuation of the caste system. It was an attempt to encourage these communities to define themselves without the oppressive Brahmin lexicon and as completely outside the Brahminical social order. This was a direct attack against communities within the non-Brahmin bloc that fashioned themselves like their upper-caste oppressors.

Much before Independence, it became increasingly clear to Periyar that the emerging polity would be overwhelmingly representative of the Brahmanical upper classes due to lack of support from the Congress in social reform movements. It is with this fear that he envisioned a new alliance being forged between the various non-Brahmin and Dalit groups, based on lived experience and injury. According to K.R. Manoharan, even his idea of a Dravidian nation can be seen as an attempt to imagine a rational state in which citizenship and the rights of all groups, especially Dalits, Shudras and women would exist on an equal plane, free from the shackles of Brahmanical Hinduism.

The present arguments against Periyar have to be juxtaposed with the rise of the Hindu Right and their recent attempts to appropriate Dalit icons such as Ambedkar in order to create a myth of inclusivity in Hindutva politics. While Ambedkar provides the upper-caste dominated right-wing parties access to a fresh vote bank, Periyar offers no such lucrative political gains. Karthik Manoharan and S. Anandhi argue that while the RSS has appropriated Ambedkar’s ideology in its larger majoritarian and nationalist discourse, it hasn’t been able to do the same with Periyar because of his scathing critique of the legitimacy of the Indian state. To quote them, “One could also say that Ambedkar’s criticism and rejection of Hinduism was more theoretically intensive than that of Periyar. Periyar, however, rejected the nation-state and its ideology, either in its ‘secular’ or ‘communal’ manifestations. Hence, Periyar remains untouchable and ‘anti-national’.” The politics behind the branding of Periyar as a villain and a black hole in contemporary Indian politics seem to be part of a larger project to erase key social movements and their leaders from popular imagination.

This does not mean that Periyar and many of his contentious statements do not need to be problematized, but one must not fall into the pit of decontextualization. His statements about Brahmins and, especially, Brahmin women border on attempts at vilification, but, when considered in light of his struggle to eliminate the root of Brahmanism which has often been cited as the brahmin himself, his words do not seem that heinous, especially since Ambedkar had also put forward many similar ideas. “Historically [Brahmins] have been the most inveterate enemy of the servile classes (Shudras and the Untouchables) who together constitute about 80 per cent of the total Hindu population. If the common man belonging to the servile classes in India is today so fallen, so degraded, so devoid of hope and ambition, it is entirely due to the Brahmins and their philosophy.” (B.R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, vol. 9, p. 215)

However contradictory his politics may seem, the goal of his political life can be summed up in this statement from an editorial published in his newspaper, “…to strive for, among other things, each individual to develop their knowledge and skills, the progress of each section of the society, the growth of a sense of equality and camaraderie among the people, ending of religious conflicts, and to destroy the feeling of casteism and caste-based inferiorities.” (Kudi Arasu, 2 May 1925)  Periyar’s anti-caste politics and his critique of the nation-state continue to hold relevance in our volatile political environment. His political atheism can act as a powerful tool against the communal agenda of political parties today and aid in legitimizing organized dissent against all levels of political and social authority. It is only fair that we write, critique and further expand our understanding of him, if only to remind ourselves of the power of resistance in the face of collective dissociation and erasure.