Rationalist social reformer Periyar EV Ramasamy was remembered on the event of his 146th beginning anniversary in Chennai on Tuesday (September 17). DMK president and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Okay Stalin supplied floral tributes to Periyar’s portrait in Chennai.
Born in 1879, Periyar is remembered for the Self Respect Motion to redeem the identification and self-respect of Tamils. He envisaged a Dravida homeland of Dravida Nadu, and launched a political social gathering, Dravidar Kazhagam (DK).
Periyar began his political profession as a Congress employee in his hometown Erode.
He quarrelled with Gandhi over the query of separate eating for Brahmin and non-Brahmin college students at Gurukkulam, a Congress-sponsored college owned by nationalist chief V V S Iyer in Cheranmahadevi close to Tirunelveli. On the request of fogeys, Iyer had supplied separate eating for Brahmin college students, which Periyar opposed.
Gandhi proposed a compromise, arguing that whereas it might not be a sin for an individual to not dine with one other, he would moderately respect their scruples.
After failing to bend the Congress to his view, Periyar resigned from the social gathering in 1925, and related himself with the Justice Occasion and the Self Respect Motion, which opposed the dominance of Brahmins in social life, particularly the forms.
The Justice Occasion had a decade earlier advocated reservation for non-Brahmins within the forms and, after coming to energy within the Madras Presidency, issued an order to implement it.
Periyar’s fame unfold past the Tamil area through the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924, a mass motion to demand that decrease caste individuals be given the precise to make use of a public path in entrance of the well-known Vaikom temple.
Periyar took half within the agitation along with his spouse, and was arrested twice. He would later be known as Vaikom Veerar (Hero of Vaikom).
Throughout the Nineteen Twenties and 30s, Periyar mixed social and political reform, and challenged the conservatism of the Congress and the mainstream nationwide motion within the Tamil area.
He reconstructed the Tamil identification as an egalitarian best that was initially unpolluted by the caste system, and counterposed it towards the Indian identification championed by the Congress.
He argued that caste was imported to the Tamil area by Aryan Brahmins, who spoke Sanskrit and got here from Northern India.
Within the Thirties, when the Congress Ministry imposed Hindi, he drew a parallel with the Aryanisation course of, and claimed it was an assault on Tamil identification and self-respect. Below him, the Dravidian Motion turned a wrestle towards caste and an assertion of Tamil nationwide identification.
Within the Nineteen Forties, Periyar launched Dravidar Kazhagam, which espoused an impartial Dravida Nadu comprising Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada audio system. The Dravidian linguistic household was the inspiration on which he primarily based his concept of a Dravida nationwide identification.
These concepts had a seminal affect on the shaping of the political identification and tradition of the Tamil talking areas of Madras Presidency, and proceed to resonate in present-day Tamil Nadu.
Periyar died in 1973 on the age of 94.
What legacy did Periyar depart behind?
For the typical Tamil, Periyar as we speak is an ideology. He stands for a politics that foregrounded social equality, self-respect, and linguistic satisfaction.
As a social reformer, he targeted on social, cultural and gender inequalities, and his reform agenda questioned issues of religion, gender and custom.
He requested folks to be rational of their life selections. He argued that girls wanted to be impartial, not mere child-bearers, and insisted that they be allowed an equal share in employment.
The Self Respect Motion that he led promoted weddings with out rituals, and sanctioned property in addition to divorce rights for girls.
He appealed to folks to surrender the caste suffix of their names, and to not point out caste. He instituted inter-dining with meals cooked by Dalits in public conferences within the Thirties.
Over time, Periyar has transcended the political divide in addition to the faultlines of faith and caste, and are available to be revered as Thanthai Periyar, the daddy determine of contemporary Tamil Nadu.