Periyar: Concept of Self-Respect as the Bedrock of Equality

Rajan Kurai Krishnan

Periyar E.V.Ramasamy had a nuanced concept of the self. He did not accept any metaphysical foundation of the self, nor believed in any pre-given teleology of human progress rooted in the self. He only argued for the demonstrable capacity for critical enquiry a human being possessed as “self” which should yield ethical responsiveness. Based on that he forged a concept of self-respect which will not allow anyone to treat others as either superior or inferior, not the least as a pre-given attribute at birth. Hence, to respect oneself is to respect the critical reflexivity in oneself that will lead to egalitarian attitude. Such idea of self-respect, Periiyar hoped, will militate against the Varna Dharma inspired caste ontology of the self that the Indian social fabricated in the last two millennia.
It is important to grasp the historical context in which Periyar launched his unique Self-Respect movement in 1925, quitting the Indian National Congress in which he had held the position of Tamil Nadu State President. He had joined the Congress six years before shocked by the Jallian Wallah Bagh massacre and inspired by Gandhi’s initiatives in the political awakening of the masses. Periyar all through his life believed only in rising the consciousness of the people as the necessary political work for social change. He never believed in insurrectionary politics though he often resorted to iconoclastic action, albeit nonviolent, to shake up people from their somnambulist conformism. Periyar also abhorred office seeking, that is craving for power that he found in many Congressmen of the Swarajya wing of the Congress. Hence Gandhi’s program of social reconstruction appealed to him as a way to reach out to the masses to conscientize them. He proved to be a highly successful propogandist and organization builder in the short span of six years he spent in the Congress. These six years set him on a course of political action vastly different from that of Gandhi in terms philosophy if not in the core value of non-violent propagation.
Vaikom and Cheranmadhevi: Caste as the Ontopolitical Premise
In the years he spent in the Congress there were two issues or conflicts that brought Brahmin hegemony that held the vast swathe under the yoke of caste order came to the fore. In the small temple town of Vaikom in the part of Kerala that was under Thiruvidhangur (commonly anglicized as Travancore) Kingdom, local Congress leaders and social activists affiliated to the religious reformer Narayana Guru, launched a struggle for the untouched, that is socially excluded, communities like Ezhava and Pulaiya to gain entry to the streets surrounding the temple. The Brahmin Namboodiri caste priests with the help of the government resisted them citing scriptural sanctions. The protestors launched a satyagraha mode of agitation with the consent of Gandhi. As most of the local leaders of the struggle got arrested, they invited Periyar to lead the struggle further.
Periyar, hailing from an affluent merchant family, had hosted Thiruvidangur royalty in his hometown Erode. Hence, when he went to Vaikom, the royal family was ready to receive him as guest. Periyar however plunged straight into the struggle trying to mass base the movement through intense mobilization of support. This made him the person to be imposed with longer and harsher spells of imprisonment. Gandhi himself came down for a negotiation with the priestly class. The Brahmins told him that people who are born in the ostracized caste are suffering divine retribution for the sins committed in their previous births. Hence it would be against the will of God to allow them entry into the streets. Gandhi, who claimed to be a devout Hindu challenged them on this “birth as punishment” hypothesis. He asked them what mode of resolution of the dispute they would agree to: whether they would consent to a constitution of the collegium of learned pundits to adjudicate the matter on the basis of the scriptures or whether they would allow the government to decide on the matter or whether they would agree to a vote among the public. The Brahmins remained intransigent on the occasion. After an extended and protracted struggle for 20 months from March 1924 to November 1925, the streets were thrown open to all the people making it perhaps a nationally significant occasion for the new ethic on the common use public spaces. Periyar’s fierce leadership of the struggle earned him the title “Vaikkom Veerar” (the Warrior of Vaikkom). This experience also compelled Periyar to engage with the deep entrenchment of the casteist Brahmin hegemony in the political life of the country.
This was soon followed by another famous controversy relating to Brahmin exclusivity. V.V.S.Iyer, a revered scholar and a Congress leader founded a nationalist school modeled as Gurukula at a place called Cheranmadevi. He invited students to the boarding school from various families. A couple of orthodox Brahmins said that they would send their wards if only they were allowed to dine separately, a fiercely enforced custom among Brahmins in those days. Brahmins demanded secluded dining rooms in public spaces like restaurants and railway canteens. It was a routine for progressive associations to organize a communal feast called Samabhandi Bhojanam to break the customary practice of secluded dining of the Brahmins. Concerned about adequate enrolment and patronage, VVS Iyer accepted since they would only eat the same meal that others eat but in a secluded enclosure. The school also obtained some financial support from the Congress party as the experiment was in the nationalist cause. When the news of the practice of the taboo of secluded Brahmin dining at the school spilled over into the public sphere there was a furor from the non- Brahmin leaders of the Congress about the school practicing Brahmin privilege and exclusivity. The Congress leadership tried to soft peddle the issue leading to much disgruntlement from the non- Brahmin sections including Periyar.
The proverbial last straw was the refusal of the Congress even to table the resolution on communal award or representation moved by Periyar. This resolution was to seek Congress endorsement for a model of reservation in proportion to the population of a community in various domains of education, employment, and representation. It was a measure to break the dominance of Brahmins in the government and emergent service sectors which intensified their hegemonic sway in politics. Since the Congress was hesitant to alienate the powerful Brahmin community, it was not willing to table the resolution. This angered Periyar, prompting him to quit the Congress that he had helped mobilize extensively during the six-year period from 1919 to 1925. He launched his journal Kudi Arasu (Republic) and travelled incessantly all over Tamil Nadu to gather widespread support for what came to be known as Self-Respect Movement.
Periyar is often misunderstood by those who do not read him as someone opposed to Brahmins as a social group even to the extent of charging him with Brahmin hatred. A more nuanced criticism is that he put all the blame on Brahmins for caste system, thereby inadvertently absolving the landed non-Brahmin castes who ruthlessly exploited Dalits. Periyar is also accused vigorously by sections of Tamil nationalists for confounding the people with Dravidian identity instead of fostering Tamil national identity. The leftists too were sore with him for the failure to foreground the class contradiction, even after his visit to Russia in the early thirties and a public embrace of the cause of communism, allowing non-Brahmin landed gentry and proto capitalists to forge a progressive façade in the name of opposing Brahmin domination and hegemony. These three broad strands of criticism of the left, the Tamil nationalists and Dalits keep rearticulating themselves periodically to dent the radical image of Periyar as one who sought to transform the society on rationalist egalitarian ideals. It is in this context a careful study of the life and articulations of Periyar becomes essential to recover the vestiges of the revolutionary potential of his thought and propagation. In order to do that we need to grasp the extent of the penetration of casteism as the Ontopolitical constitution of the society as exemplified by the examples given above. The term Ontopolitical refers to a set of originary propositions that constitute the political actors as defined by political philosopher William E. Connolly (b.1938)
Deontologizing Caste
Periyar realized that the discourse of caste is what constituted every individual subject. The very name of each person carried caste as surname. The caste system was effectively maintained through the successful implementation of graded equality interpreted and enforced by Brahmins. It is not that the Brahmins were simply the top most tier; they provided the model of exclusionary practice that demanded that every layer of caste system enforced against the one lower to it in the deemed hierarchical scale. All these should be well known to those who read Ambedkar.
Periyar found that the sources of such making of caste subjectivity consisted of Brahminical religious practices and discourses. He surmised that it was necessary to de-Brahminize society to remove the venom first from snake of caste society. Hence he focused on the critical destruction Brahminic discourses through which he rallied the non-Brahmin castes to generally rid themselves of casteist notions. It should be obvious that so massive a task cannot be achieved in a single life time. But Periyar managed to create a field of agonistic politics that would forever deny an unchallenged adherence to Brahminic social order. This fact is demonstrated by the absence of caste surnames in the public sphere of Tamil Nadu, perhaps the only state to have done so in the whole of India. No Reddys, Gowdas or Nairs in Tamil Nadu. Of course, mere obliteration of caste surnames is not obliteration of casteist practices. However, it functions as an effective reminder of the political task that remains unfinished.
Periyar also found patriarchy to be the effective scaffolding of the caste order. His most radical articulations were about the subjugation of women. Right in 1928, he gave a call for women to rid themselves of the burden of bearing children. He said anatomy should not constrain freedom. It was only in a women’s conference, the title of Periyar (meaning a revered person) was bestowed on
E.V.Ramasamy by a group of women activists lead by a Dalit woman, Meenambal Sivaraj.
Periyar’s radicalism was based on a philosophical conception of the self. In a tract called Prakritivatam or Materialism, he elaborately argued that the self-referential “I” had no specific content. In other words, “I” is just an empty signifier. He said that the human body is endowed with the neurological system that made memory possible thereby making self-reflexivity possible. However, the subjectivity socially bestowed on the self has no essential connection to such a biologically enabled reflexivity. Hence, it is an ethical imperative of a human self to critically reflect on the nature of subjectivity imposed on it. Only such critical reflexivity entitles one to respect his self – thereby fashioning and earning self-respect.
Periyar was not just satisfied with such a philosophical concept or wisdom. In fact, he did not even try to brand it as such. He was interested only in a philosophical praxis through which a new social foundation could be laid. Hence his investment in republicanism as against nationalism or national sovereignty in politics. It was only because he found the Congress to be so north centric accentuating its Brahminic slant and the championing of Sanskritic Hindi as national language, he endorsed the demand for a separate South Indian republic known as Dravidian Republic, a federation of southern states. He did not make that as his sole political agenda since he was keener on establishing a set of republican values devoid of Varna/caste ontology. If such republic could only be founded in South India or only Tamil Nadu, he would endorse the demand for such a separate republic. This is why both Indian and Tamil nationalists are unhappy with him.
He was constantly associated with political mobilization for various causes, Gandhian social reconstruction, Vaikom struggle, anti-Hindi agitation, burning of the Indian constitution in 1957 for upholding casteist practices as tradition, often courting arrest, to just name a few. Thousands of his followers courted arrest with a handful dying in prisons in the agitation burning Indian constitution. He led iconoclastic demonstrations like breaking Ganesh idols (self-made and not the ones in temples) and burning of the pictures of Ram. He also campaigned for different political parties in the elections though he or the organizations he headed never contested in the elections.
Nevertheless, all through his active political life in the span of fifty-four years, from 1919-1973, he only believed in constant propagation, agitation, and demonstration to make common people think critically and reflexively. When asked to deliver the convocation address in a university, he declared that he was only fit to speak in the noisy market square. Contemporary accounts say that he could speak for hours securing the rapt attention of the audience while all the time provoking them to think. He constantly cautioned the listeners not to accept what he says or anyone else says without critically and reflexively engaging with it. He freely accepted invitation from all kinds of forums and caste-based organizations where he never hesitated to criticize them with due civility. His remarkably courteous personality was complemented by a no holds barred fiery denunciation of Brahminical casteism. In engaging the masses in an incessant Socratic dialogue, he laid the agonistic foundations of the democratic republican spirit in Tamil Nadu