Taking Periyarism Seriously: The Dravidian Identity as a Universality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Erode Venkatappa Ramaswami Naicker, known as ‘Periyar’ to his followers, is seen as both a ‘Non-Brahmin’ leader and as the father of Dravidianism, an identity politics that sought to secure the interests of the Dravidian people, variously imagined but most commonly associated with Tamil-speakers. This paper traces the ways in which the precolonial and colonial sense of being Tamil enabled Periyar’s Dravidianism, which was not a racial or ethnolinguistic chauvinism but a conditional particularism, instrumentalising an identity in order to secure a rationalist and egalitarian future by reconnecting with an idealised Tamil past. This paper also builds on M.S.S. Pandian's interpretation of the ‘transitivity’ of Periyar's various mobilisational categories to argue that Periyar's Dravidian becomes an identity constructed by history, but also a transitive universality that can evoke an indefinite number of categories of the oppressed. In making this argument it engages with certain conclusions about Periyar offered by Karthick Ram Manoharan, an active and insightful scholar of Periyar’s thought. More broadly, by taking Periyarism seriously, I explore some limitations in some theoretical approaches to identity by demonstrating how collective identity and universality are not necessarily opposed.