Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy, known as Periyar – the “great man” in Tamil, a title conferred on him by Rabindranath Tagore – is the most significant figure in the history of Tamil social reform and, through the political movements he inspired, the most important single influence on the political culture of Tamil Nadu. His Dravidian Movement, his frontal assault on Brahminical social order and Brahmin ritual dominance, his advocacy for caste abolition, and his militant rationalism and atheism transformed the social and political landscape of Tamil society over the course of half a century of activism. He is revered as a prophet of social liberation by large sections of Tamil society and viewed by others as a divisive anti-Hindu agitator. Both responses reflect how much he mattered and how much the questions he raised remain unresolved.
The Early Periyar: Congress, Gandhi, and the Break
Ramasamy was born in 1879 in Erode in what is now Tamil Nadu, into a prosperous Naicker (non-Brahmin) merchant family. His early adulthood included a period of religious questioning provoked by the discrimination he observed within Hindu institutions; he was reportedly turned away from temples and forced to eat in a separate area at religious functions because of his non-Brahmin status. This personal experience of caste discrimination radicalised him in a direction that his merchant-class background might not have predicted. He joined the Indian National Congress in the early 1920s and rose to prominence within it, serving as president of the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee.
The break with Congress came in 1925 over an issue that encapsulates the core tension in Periyar’s thought. A Congress-run school in Cheranmahadevi admitted non-Brahmin students only to a separate hostel and assigned lower-caste students to kitchen duties while upper-caste students were served as guests. Periyar agitated against this within Congress and found no adequate response from the leadership. He resigned from Congress and drew the conclusion that a movement dominated by upper-caste leaders – including Gandhi, whom Periyar respected but criticised sharply on caste questions – would not genuinely challenge caste hierarchy. The separation was not personal but programmatic: Periyar concluded that the Congress’s pan-Indian nationalism required leaving the caste system essentially intact to maintain its coalition.
Self-Respect Marriages and the Assault on Brahmin Ritual Monopoly
In 1925, Periyar founded the Self-Respect Movement, which would become his primary organisational vehicle for the next three decades. The movement’s central practical innovation was the self-respect marriage (suyamariyathai thirumana): a marriage ceremony conducted without a Brahmin priest, without the Sanskrit rituals that required Brahmin mediation, and without the caste endogamy that Hindu marriage had previously required. Couples who conducted self-respect marriages could marry across caste lines, they could marry without parental approval if they chose, and they stripped the Brahmin priest of his ritual indispensability. Self-respect marriages were legally controversial for decades before Tamil Nadu’s government gave them statutory recognition in 1967 – recognition that was itself a political achievement of the Dravidian movement that Periyar had inspired.
The logic of self-respect marriages was inseparable from Periyar’s broader critique of Brahminism as a system. Periyar argued that Brahmin ritual monopoly – the requirement for a Brahmin priest to conduct births, marriages, deaths, and religious ceremonies – was not merely a religious tradition but a political-economic institution that extracted resources from non-Brahmin communities while reinforcing social hierarchy. The priests were necessary intermediaries not because of genuine spiritual function but because they had successfully defined the sacred as exclusively within their domain. By creating marriage ceremonies that required no priest and used Tamil rather than Sanskrit, the Self-Respect Movement challenged the entire ritual infrastructure of caste hierarchy.
Periyar was not asking Brahmin priests to be more inclusive. He was arguing that their indispensability was a fraud – that the sacred did not belong to any caste, and that ceremonies conducted in a language the participants could not understand were not ceremonies at all but performances of subordination.
The Dravidian Movement and Its Political Children
Periyar founded the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) in 1944 as the political vehicle for Dravidian identity politics. The Dravidian movement’s central ideological claim was that the Tamil and other South Indian peoples were a distinct civilisation – racially, linguistically, and culturally – from the north Indian Aryan population, and that Brahminism was an Aryan imposition on Dravidian society rather than a native South Indian institution. Modern historians are sceptical of the racial dimensions of this argument, which borrowed from colonial-era race science in ways that are now discredited. But the movement’s political claim – that Brahmin dominance of Tamil social, educational, and political institutions was a form of oppression that non-Brahmin communities were entitled to resist collectively – was grounded in observable social reality.
The DK was not an electoral party: Periyar explicitly opposed elections as a distraction from social reform. When his lieutenant C. N. Annadurai decided to form an electoral party – the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in 1949 – it represented a split with Periyar’s non-electoral position but a continuation of his social programme. The DMK and its later offshoots (AIADMK founded by M. G. Ramachandran; later parties founded by Jayalalithaa and M. K. Stalin’s current DMK leadership) have dominated Tamil Nadu politics almost without interruption since 1967. This Dravidian political dominance – distinct from the Congress and BJP patterns that prevail across most of India – is Periyar’s most enduring political legacy.
Rationalism, Atheism, and the Challenge to Religion
Periyar’s rationalism was more thoroughgoing than most political rationalists. He was not merely sceptical of superstition or interested in secular governance; he was militantly atheist and devoted significant energy to public campaigns against religious belief as such. He organised events at which statues of Ganesha were broken, argued that God was a fabrication of the Brahmin class to maintain social control, and conducted debates with religious figures that were designed to demonstrate the irrationality of religious claims. His rationalist organisation, the Rationalist Association of India (to which he was connected), remains active today.
The relationship between Periyar’s atheism and his social critique is important. For Periyar, caste was sustained by religious sanction – the Brahminical interpretation of the Manusmriti and of the varna system in Hindu sacred texts provided ideological legitimation for social hierarchy. Attacking the religious system was therefore a necessary part of attacking caste. This logic distinguished Periyar’s position from reformers who accepted Hindu frameworks while seeking to reform caste within them (as B. R. Ambedkar initially attempted before concluding it was impossible and converting to Buddhism). Periyar’s view was that caste could not be reformed from within a religious system that had produced and sanctified it; the religious system itself had to be rejected.
| Periyar: Key Contributions | Legacy |
|---|---|
| Self-Respect Movement (1925) | Self-respect marriages legalised 1967 |
| Dravidar Kazhagam (1944) | Foundation for all Dravidian parties |
| Anti-caste activism | Tamil Nadu’s OBC political dominance |
| Anti-Hindi agitation (1937-40) | Tamil language constitutional protections |
| Rationalist movement | Secularist tradition in Tamil politics |
The Anti-Hindi Agitation and Tamil Identity
Periyar’s most politically successful single campaign may have been the anti-Hindi agitation of 1937-1940, when C. Rajagopalachari’s Congress government in Madras Presidency attempted to make Hindi compulsory in schools. Periyar led sustained agitation – involving strikes, protests, and civil disobedience – that generated two deaths among protesters and eventually forced the withdrawal of the Hindi imposition. The agitation established Tamil language as a political identity marker and Periyar as its most effective defender. When the central government again attempted to make Hindi the sole official language at independence, Tamil Nadu’s resistance, drawing on the political mobilisation that Periyar had built, was a primary factor in the constitutional compromise that established the three-language formula and protected non-Hindi speaking states from Hindi imposition.
The relationship between the Dravidian movement’s linguistic nationalism and its caste politics is complex. Tamil identity claims were used to argue for reservation in education and government employment for non-Brahmin Tamil communities; the Tamil Brahmin community, though Tamil-speaking, was positioned as culturally and racially “other” in Dravidian ideology. This created political tensions that persist in contemporary Tamil Nadu politics, where the question of how to address Brahmin economic and cultural advantages without reducing Tamil pride in its Brahmin intellectual tradition remains sensitive. The social reform dimensions of Periyar’s legacy – which are widely respected – coexist with the ethno-linguistic identity politics dimensions, which are more contested. For a connected perspective on social reform figures, see our profile of Kailash Satyarthi and India’s child rights movement.
The Unfinished Agenda
Periyar died in 1973, aged 94, still agitating. He had lived long enough to see the Dravidian parties he inspired come to power in Tamil Nadu, but not long enough to see whether their political dominance would actually deliver the caste equality he sought. The evidence since then is mixed: Tamil Nadu has significantly reduced the Brahmin dominance of public institutions, expanded reservation, and created political space for backward-caste leadership. But caste discrimination persists, inter-caste violence continues, and the Dalit communities that were lowest in the caste hierarchy have benefited less from Dravidian political dominance than the better-positioned OBC communities that form the movement’s core constituency. The self-respect agenda is still unfinished.
Periyar and Women’s Rights
Among the dimensions of Periyar’s social radicalism that receive insufficient attention is his consistent advocacy for women’s equality and autonomy. Periyar argued in the 1920s and 1930s for positions that were radical even by contemporary global feminist standards: women’s right to divorce, women’s right to property independent of their husbands, women’s right to choose their own partners (including across caste lines), and women’s right to control their reproductive choices. His advocacy for women’s sexual autonomy was particularly controversial – he argued that women’s sexuality was a matter of personal choice rather than community or family honour, and that the social enforcement of female sexual purity through caste endogamy was a mechanism of social control rather than a protection of women.
The Self-Respect Movement explicitly included women’s liberation as a core objective alongside caste abolition. Self-respect marriages, which required no Brahmin priest and could cross caste lines, also offered women greater agency: they could be conducted with mutual consent of the partners rather than requiring parental negotiation, and they did not carry the ritual subordination that Hindu wedding ceremonies encoded. Periyar’s personal conduct was less consistent than his political positions – his marriage to a much younger woman in his eighties attracted criticism even from supporters – but his ideological positions on women’s rights were advanced for their time and have influenced Tamil feminist discourse. The Self-Respect Movement also produced a number of significant women leaders and writers who developed feminist critiques within the Dravidian intellectual tradition.
Periyar’s Ambedkar Connection and the Limits of Alliance
The relationship between Periyar’s Dravidian movement and B. R. Ambedkar’s Dalit movement is one of the most instructive episodes in the history of Indian social reform. Both men shared the diagnosis that Brahminism was a social system of oppression that could not be reformed from within and that required fundamental challenge. Both advocated for the communities most degraded by the caste system. Both rejected the Congress’s approach of subordinating caste reform to anti-colonial nationalism. And yet the two movements, which might have formed a powerful alliance, maintained a more complicated relationship characterised by both cooperation and tension.
The tension arose from the difference in their respective constituencies. Periyar’s primary base was the non-Brahmin OBC communities of Tamil Nadu – the Vellalars, Mudaliars, Gounders, and Thevars – who were above the ex-untouchable communities in the caste hierarchy and who had their own interests in that hierarchy to protect. Ambedkar’s movement was centred on the Scheduled Castes – the communities at the very bottom of the caste hierarchy who were most systematically degraded. The OBC communities that Periyar organised were not fully committed to the abolition of caste hierarchy that Ambedkar demanded; they wanted to reduce Brahmin dominance but were not necessarily ready to fully equalise their own relationship with communities below them. This structural tension between OBC and Dalit interests has persisted in Tamil politics and remains one of the defining fault lines in the state’s political economy. For the national picture of social reform advocacy, see our analysis of Kailash Satyarthi’s rights work.