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Why Do Dravidian Intellectuals Admire a Man as Prickly as Periyar?

BY P.A. KRISHNAN ON 21/09/2017 • 15 COMMENTS

The reason is simple. The national intellectual landscape is verdant. The Dravidian landscape, on the other hand, is an arid desert, and Periyar was the only cactus plant to have bloomed in it.

M. Karunanidhi (front row, third from left) and Periyar (fourth). Source: YouTube

P.A. Krishnan is an author in both English and Tamil. He regularly contributes to various journals and magazines.

“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).” These blatantly anti-semitic lines were penned on March 20, 1938, when Hitler’s flag was flying high. If you had read them in isolation and if you were familiar with the history of the Nazis, it is likely that you would think they must have been fished out of some sordid pro-Nazi tabloid.

These are the next lines: “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)?”

This is Periyar E.V. Ramasamy writing in his magazine Kudiyarasu, and he is being unusually mild here. (Naan Sonnal Unakku Yen Kopam Vara Vendum, vol. 4, p. 532, compiled by Pasu. Gowthaman)

Periyar was a selfless and incorruptible man of considerable personal charm. He spent his long life tirelessly working in support of what he believed in and against what he detested. What he believed in were self-respect, rationalism, gender equality and his own version of social justice. What he detested were caste discrimination, Gandhi, god, religion, Brahmins and the then-prevailing idea of India. Unlike B.R. Ambedkar, who was a prodigious scholar, Periyar was a street-fighter, and the things he said in anger are largely unprintable (though it is available in print in Tamil). What he said in cooler moments – rare though they were – are also available.

The Periyar that the non-Tamil intellectuals know is a sanitised version of his real personality, lovingly packaged and offered by his admirers.

Against the Brahmin

It is almost axiomatic in Tamil Nadu, and constantly parroted by non-Tamils too, that it was thanks only to Periyar that reservations in jobs and education came into being in the state. But as Granville Austin writes in his seminal book, Working a Democratic Constitution (1999), “After the Congress eclipsed the Justice party in the 1937 elections and later, it made ‘compulsory discrimination’ very much its own policy even while led by Tamil Brahmins like [Chakravarti] Rajagopalachari.”

In fact, reservations were first introduced in Tamil Nadu in 1927, when P. Subbarayan was the chief minister and had the support of the Swarajya Party, and when Periyar was just leaving the Congress. It was expanded in 1947 by the then-ruling Congress party, and when Periyar was busy demanding a separate ‘Dravida Nadu’. Similarly, while it is true that Periyar did agitate in 1951 when the Madras high court struck down the orders on reservation – and the Government of Madras subsequently lost its appeal with the Supreme Court – it was on the recommendations of the Congress Government of Madras and on consideration of the need for ‘removing man-made equalities’ (in Granville Austin’s words) that the Nehru dispensation brought in the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution.

Bear in mind that Periyar in the 1950s did not have the larger than life image that he has now. Though he was personally liked by almost all political leaders, almost all of them considered him to be maverick, unrestrained and irresponsible. Between 1949 and 1967, the former being the year his disciple Annadurai broke away from him and formed his own party and the latter being the year he formed the first non-Congress government, Periyar’s harshest abuses were reserved for his former disciples.

In all his agitations – and he had many – the lowest common denominator was the Brahmin. Even while criticising non-Brahmin national leaders like Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose and Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Periyar said that they were all victims of a Brahmin conspiracy. He said, without so much as a pause, that Gandhi was killed by Brahmins because Gandhi was turning into a Periyar himself!

Periyar was clear that he was against Brahmins, not Brahminism. However, this seems confused in hindsight. In his last ever speech, on December 19, 1973, he spoke that he had been striving for long to annihilate god, religion, the Congress, Gandhi and the Brahmin. One might think that by Brahmin he meant Brahminism. However, he stated the opposite in an earlier meeting on August 31, 1959:

Who do you hate? The Brahmin or Brahminism? What is Brahminism?’ – for questions such as these, my reply is Brahminism came from Brahmins and hence it is the Brahmins who should be annihilated. It is like asking whether you hate thievery or the thief. It is because one is a thief, one indulges in thievery. When someone says he hates thievery, it means he hates the thief, too, doesn’t it? Thus, [my stand is] Brahminism grew out of the Brahmin and I am striving to annihilate the root.

What is the reality? Was the Brahmin the bogeyman, the Baba Yaga of the Tamil country?

Brahmins in colleges and government jobs

There is no doubt that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, Brahmins dominated the educational scene in the state. Colleges swarmed with them. As a result, most of coveted government jobs went to the Brahmins. But statistically they were not very significant. The total number of students in both the arts and professional colleges was around 3,000 in 1890 (The Politics of South India, C.J. Baker, 1976, p. 46). Fewer than 1,000 students would have had to be passing out every year in the 1890s.

This number increased to around 14,000 in 1936. This would mean that around 4,500 students would have had to be passing out every year in the 1930s. The population of the presidency of Madras (a.k.a. Tamil Nadu today) in 1931 was around 46 million.

Thus, less than 1% of 1% of the population were graduating from these colleges. Also, by the 1930s, the majority of students in both arts and professional colleges were not Brahmins. On the employment front, the total number of Brahmin gazetted officers were 620 in 1928. Overall, there were about 15,000 Brahmins out of about 80,000 government employees (Political Career of E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, E. Sa. Viswanathan, 1983, p. 126).

(Baker points out in his book that there were 10,237 students in first grade colleges in 1931; the number of available government posts carrying a salary of Rs 35 per month were 29,081. He adds that in 1927, a ‘Staff Selection Board’ had to select 467 persons. Even if it had chosen every non-Brahmin applicant who possessed the barest qualification, it could not have met the stated quota.)

Even then it was clear that the trend was changing. The Tamil Brahmins started migrating to cities both within the Tamil land and without – whereas an overwhelming majority of them had been living in villages at the dawn of the 20th century. In 2001, about a hundred years later, around 4.3% of them resided in villages – the figure would be 5.6% if the non-Tamil Brahmins were also added. (Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle Class, Fuller and Narasimhan, 2014, appendix). Their land holdings dwindled to almost nothing as they had to sell them off to get higher quality education.

In short, while Tamil Brahmins used the opportunities that the British Government provided, it was not that they arm-twisted anybody to get where they did. The Justice Party came to power in 1920 and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in 1967. In the intervening years, Madras had a Brahmin chief minister for only four years (including the uncertain years between 1952 and 1954). The British had no love lost for them because most of the intellectual leaders of the Brahmin community were with the Congress.

A bias against Brahmins

Unfortunately, Periyar and his disciples could not look at the problem from this perspective. They attributed – exactly like Hitler did with the German Jews – grand conspiracies and clever manipulations by Brahmins for the plight of the non-Brahmins. It did not ever occur to Periyar that independence would open the sluice gates of education and other opportunities. He wanted the British to continue to remain in power – while simultaneously complaining that they were succumbing to the machinations of the Brahmins.

At times, Periyar issued blood-curdling threats to Brahmins, but in action he did not believe in violence. Many of his black-shirted followers were fine individuals personally. At the same time, Periyar was also paranoid that democracy would result in Brahmins completely taking over the reins of the government. His words: “India should never go anywhere near democratic principles. The reason is 90% of our population are fools and 97% of them are persons of low birth. How will their rule set right our country?” (Periyar’s writings compiled by Pasu. Gowthaman, vol. 4, 2017, p. 432)

Another case in point followed in 1968, when, in Tanjore district, 44 Dalits were butchered by the goons of a landlord. Periyar commented on the murders thus: “So long as democracy exists, the honest will have no other option except to fade away, giving the dishonest room to dance around. The people of India are barbarians. The dharma of India is the dharma of criminal tribes. As long as the ones who follow Manu dharma exist, the nation will never have discipline, integrity, honesty and justice. India has gone into the hands of scoundrels after the departure of the British.”

There is no doubt that Periyar genuinely wanted the Dalits to break out of the shackles of caste oppression but his approach was more paternalistic than what Gandhi was being accused of. He was miffed that the Constitution did not provide reservations for non-Brahmins. He accused Ambedkar for selling himself to the Brahmins: “The Brahmins had paid him a price. The price is this: he asked for 10% reservation and they gave him 15%. They knew that even if they gave him 25%, not even three or four percent of qualified people would be available [among the Dalits]. He accepted the Constitution written by the Brahmins and signed on the dotted lines. He did not think about others.” (Periyar E.V.R. Chintanaikal, Anaimuthu, 1974, p. 1,860)

It is nobody’s case that the Brahmins were angels. They were arrogant, casteist and possessed a general contempt for the ‘unwashed’ millions, and even the washed others. Then again, they were not alone. The problem with Periyar was that he used his bludgeon only against the Brahmins while the oppressing classes belonged to a wider spectrum. He either ignored the prejudices of others or simply admonished them to behave well in the future. He did so because he considered all the upper caste non-brahmins, many of whom were landlords, money lenders, traders and merchants, to be victims – when the reality was that they, too, were part of the machinery of oppression.

Periyar’s atheism was crude and obnoxious. His so-called research on the Ramayana dwelled on such grave issues as whether Sita slept with Valmiki. His rationalism was hollow and lacked any useful content. Though his love for science was childlike, he did not have the intellectual rigour to understand what the scientific enterprise was all about. He once said that the white people who lived in the temperate regions were less brainy than the ones who lived in Tamil Nadu. The reason? Their flowers were less fragrant than the flowers of Tamil Nadu. Their snakes don’t have venom but the Tamil snakes do.

Given all this, why is he being heralded as a great thinker by the Dravidian intellectuals?

The reason is simple. The national landscape is verdant. It has such giant trees as Gandhi, Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Ambedkar, Ram Manohar Lohia, Jaiprakash Narayan and a score others. The Dravidian landscape, on the other hand, is an arid desert. Periyar was the only cactus plant to have bloomed in it. And prickly though he was, he did have a few beautiful flowers. The only flowers.

Note: This article was corrected on September 22, 2017, to state that reservations were first introduced in Tamil Nadu in 1927 with the support of the Swarajya Party, not the Justice Party as was stated earlier. In 1927, the Justice Party had been in the opposition.

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Periyar’s Blinkers Made Him See Only the Brahmin Hegemon, None Else

BY P.A. KRISHNAN ON 07/10/2017 • 11 COMMENTS

Tamil Nadu’s public institutions have been exorcised of the Brahmin ghost and are now ruled by non-brahmins and non-Dalits. It is to hide this that a fake Brahmin-ghost is continuously being exorcised.

A statue for Periyar in Vaikom, Kerala. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

P.A. Krishnan is an author in both English and Tamil. He regularly contributes to various journals and magazines.

Reading the article written by Karthick Ram Manoharan and S. Anandhi on Periyar, I was reminded of the famous Chinese face-changing trick of bian lian. The performers of this trick use vividly coloured masks which they change almost instantaneously with a swipe of a fan or a wave of a hand. The audience are thrilled with the rapid changes of masks but they do know that the performer has a real face which has nothing to do with these masks. My article was about the real face of Periyar and not the ever-changing masks that he wore owing to political and other compulsions. The professors’ article, on the other hand, problematises the idea of truth by giving Periyar a few more brand-new Gramscian masks.

The professors say that Periyar’s works would span over 40 volumes and there is a need to translate him into English but nothing much has happened. I fully agree with them. But who should take the blame? When he died, Periyar left a huge fortune to his faithful followers. Today, the value of his accumulations will run into several hundreds of crores of rupees. The Tamil Nadu government is being run by the Dravidian parties for the last fifty years and the universities in the state are stuffed with staunch Periyar supporters. Despite these enviable advantages, there is not even one authoritative biography either in English or Tamil on Periyar, leave alone his collected works. This is the arid landscape I was talking about in my earlier article.

Once a thief…

Nevertheless, there are a few collections of his works compiled privately by a couple of selfless persons and my admiration for them is boundless. One is the Anaimuthu collection in three volumes compiled in the 1970s and the other, Gowthaman’s, collection in five volumes published earlier this year. There are also collections of his Kudiyarasu articles between the years 1925 and 1938. Thus, until the fabled 40 volumes get published, we have no other option but to depend principally on these collections. Together, they run into a few thousand pages.

In these pages, god, religions (especially the Hindu religion), the Puranas and the epics do receive special treatment – but the main devil looming large in them happens to the Brahmin. Periyar sprinkles the works liberally with vile abuses of Brahmins and Brahminism is hardly mentioned. In fact, Annadurai, who was the chief disciple of Periyar, lamented in a piece written in March 1956 that Dravidar Kazhagam members considered it rank cowardice to speak about Brahminism when the intention was to annihilate Brahmins.

Periyar keeps making it clear that Brahmins, having been born Brahmins, are irredeemable. For instance, in an interview given to the Current magazine on March 6, 1959, there is a question asked: “Do you mean to say that Brahmins, by the very fact that they were born Brahmins, can never have honest intentions?” Periyar’s reply: “I do. They can never have honest intentions.” In the same interview, he says that there was no difference between Chettiar, Naicker, Pillai, Gounder, Pallar and Parayar. So much for his concern for the subaltern classes!

His views on Brahmin women do not fit well with his image of a great liberator of women either. In an editorial written in Viduthalai on March 4, 1969, he says the Brahmin priests act as pimps for their wives in a few religious places. In another piece written on June 21, 1956, he makes this startling assertion:

Had the British continued for another ten years, more than half of the Brahmin women would have been ours and Tamils would have been their husbands and the dominating caste would have been destroyed [by] more than half. Only after Brahmin women had started chasing our boys did the Brahmin men become very angry with the British.

The Tamil poet Kannadasan describes in his book Vanavasam a typical speech of Periyar’s, in which the latter calls Brahmin women ‘prostitutes’ and accuses Brahmin men of using their women to gain ground in the Dravida land.

I said in my article that Periyar kept issuing blood-curdling threats to the Brahmins. One such threat was issued in 1947. In an article written in Viduthalai on July 27, 1947, he says Aryans – read Brahmins – living in the Dravida land (which he calls “our land” and distinguishes it from Hindustan) would be solely responsible if Noakhalis happened there. He exhorts Aryans not to be the agents of northern imperialism and betray the Dravida land. History tells us that those were dangerous times, and if a few lunatics had taken Periyar’s call to violence seriously, the outcome would have been disastrous.

No shelter to North Indians

I am in good company when I say that Periyar behaved like a fascist many a time in his long and illustrious career. His own principal disciple, the redoubtable Annadurai, called his methods fascist when he broke away from Periyar in 1949. Visswanathan says in his biography of Periyar, “This despotism is best illustrated in his own speech made at [the] Salem conference in 1944. In that speech, he said emphatically, ‘In a way I was doing things as I pleased as president, and I could not be consulting too many opinions. I believed myself to be right… As a president I could only take the lead and it was for others to do the work.”

This special brand of fuhrerprincip was in force in the Dravida Kazhagam until his death. For other disobedient undesirables not in his immediate circle, Periyar was all for using rough and ready methods to tackle them. When the Hindi agitation was in full swing in 1965 – the agitation that catapulted the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to power – Periyar was fully supporting the government. He suggested that there should a general gag order and nobody should be allowed to speak about the agitation. To rub it in, he wanted the government to ban all newspapers. After the gruesome murders of Dalits in 1968, he recommended that all political parties, including the Communist parties, be banned except the Congress and the DMK!

The professors speak of a splendid umbrella that Periyar made all by himself to give shelter to the victims of social of economic oppression, an umbrella so capacious that it could accommodate even the Palestinians. I am not sure who all were accommodated but it certainly did not allow the North Indians to rest under its shade. There could be an Arab Dravida but there was no such thing as a North Indian Dravida.

Also read: Questioning Periyar is necessary for forging a progressive anti-caste politics

In Periyar’s view, all North Indians were pot-bellied exploiters. For a time, the umbrella must have given shelter to the other three unfortunate Dravidian clans, but when the reorganisation of the states happened, they must have unceremoniously been kicked out. His Dravida Nadu later became Tamil Nadu when the people of the other three states were reluctant to join the Dravida Nadu – and Periyar was not the man to excuse such disrespect. He kept scolding them; he even chose Malayalis for special abuse because of their social practice of sambandam. Even in his very last speech, he averred that every Malayali was of doubtful parentage.

It is really touching that Periyar is mentioned in the same breath as Martin Luther King, Jr., Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, James Baldwin and Steve Biko. There is one crucial difference between them and Periyar, however. All of them were inveterate enemies of imperialism and colonialism. Periyar made no bones about the fact that he preferred the colonial rule to an independent India, which, in his view, would be dominated by the Brahmin-ridden Congress. Thus, the dirtiness or cleanliness of the chit given by Periyar to colonialism did not matter at all. The British, it must be added, were not exactly anxious to know how clean the chit was or how he was ‘problematising what freedom meant’. To them, he was just one of the spanners that they used to throw in the works of the freedom movement.

An analysis of Periyar’s agitations throws up a surprising fact. The first major agitation under his leadership was against the imposition of Hindi in 1938. After independence, he led several other agitations that involved idol-breaking and burning of copies of our constitution and maps (without the sacred Dravidian Land), and of course pictures of Gandhi. None of his agitations was primarily about caste or Dalit oppression. Though he kept riling against caste, there is not even a single worthwhile suggestion in the entire corpus of his works as to how caste could be annihilated. He recommends the usual inter-caste marriages but, being Periyar, he also suggests that governments pass a law stipulating that only inter-caste marriages will be recognised as legal (Viduthalai, January 10, 1947).

Complexity of hegemony

Next: the Gramscian theory of hegemony and consciousness is used by all professorial Periyarists as a last resort when they don’t find a straightforward way out. Let me counter-quote here. This is Raymond Williams:

A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realised complex of experiences, relationships and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be singular. Its internal structures are highly complex, as can readily be seen in any concrete analysis. Moreover (and this is crucial, reminding us of the necessary thrust of the concept), it does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own.

Williams speaks of the non-singularity and the complexity of hegemony. The hegemony that the professors say Periyar was addressing is starkly singular. Periyar had his blinkers on and they made him see only the Brahmin hegemon and none else. I would like to redirect the professors’ attention to the Sattanathan Commission’s report in 1971, which says that nine dominant backward castes that constituted 11.3 % of the population held 37.3% of non-gazetted posts and 48.2% of gazetted posts.

Let me also quote a scholar who has written on Periyar:

Ramasamy’s interventions in caste politics in Tamil Nadu involved discursive strategies directed towards three groups: the intermediate castes, whose social status as ‘Shudras’ he used as a weapon to incriminate the Brahmins; the Brahmins, who were the Other who, according to Ramasamy, by their very presence condemned the rest of the population to the status of Shudrahood and untouchability; and the untouchable Dalit castes whose particularism he respected and whom he considered allies in the struggle against casteism. Comparing with Fanon’s identity politics, I explore what are the pitfalls in Ramasamy’s discursive strategies. Drawing from Fanon, I conclude that a transformative praxis in search of a post-casteist society must be based on a universalism that, while being cognizant of particulars, nevertheless unsettles both the identities of the oppressor and the oppressed.

This is an abstract of a paper by Karthick Ram Manoharan. It speaks of Brahmins and not Brahminism – Brahmins whose very presence is so terrifying. I humbly submit to the author that we also aim to unsettle the identity of the oppressor so abusively portrayed by Periyar and at identifying certain oppressors merrily wearing the cloak of the oppressed.

Tamil Nadu’s political, educational and social systems were exorcised of the Brahmin ghost long ago. The systems have now been taken over by other ghosts, all pristine non-brahmins and non-Dalits. It is only to hide this uncomfortable fact that a fake Brahmin-ghost is continuously being exorcised by vested interests.

The author would like to thank N. Kalyan Raman for inputs.