Dravidian Movement Research Articles

How Political History Is Reflected in Autobiography: Reading of Kalaignar Mu Karunanidhi's Nenjukku Needhi

The relation between autobiography and history is always strong. Exploring the extent of incorporating political history in writing autobiography is interesting feature as it reflects both self-defense and self-denial. Nenjukku Needhi (Justice to Heart) is an autobiography written by Mu Karunanidhi, popularly called as Kalaignar. He is a man of letters and a pragmatic political leader. His autobiography is rich in narrating the political history of Tamil Nadu and India. The story of his life is skillfully combined with the concrete political events of Tamil Nadu. So far six volumes have been published covering the political history of pre and post independent era. Right from the foundation of Justice Party, it narrates all major events, issues and struggles. Unlike several political leaders, who had neither time nor capacity to write autobiography, or who usually depend upon some ghostwriters and hagiographers to write their life histories, he personally wrote his autobiography in his own capacity and knowledge. Apart from the story of his life, his autobiography covers the history of Dravidian Movement, the growth of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, importance of Tamil language and culture, the struggle for social justice, the philosophy of constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy, and state autonomy. Sometimes, political history generates multiple answers for a single question. This autobiography is not free from such issue. It is true when it narrates certain events or confrontations with opposition parties and their leaders. However, deviations from facts and deliberate distortions are very meager in his autobiography. His autobiography would remain an authentic source of political history of Tamil Nadu.

Singapore. Indians in Singapore, 1819–1945: Diaspora in the colonial port city By Rajesh Rai New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pp. xxix + 325. Tables, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

Indians in Singapore, 1819-1945: Diaspora in the colonial port city By RAJESH RAI New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pp. xxix + 325. Tables, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. The Indians of Singapore constitute a small but uniquely situated part of the larger mosaic of what once used to be called 'overseas Indian communities' but now come under the rubric of 'Indian diaspora'. Their history of migration and settlement goes back to the early years of the nineteenth century, but it was for the most part seen as a segment of the Indian community in the Malay Peninsula rather than as a separate and distinct component of it. Moreover, the political and social concerns of this small community settled in a port-city in Southeast Asia did not quite resonate with the interests and concerns of Indian communities elsewhere, preoccupied as they were with issues of citizenship and political representation in colonial legislatures. The Indians of Singapore and Southeast Asia more generally were thus separated from Indian communities elsewhere by both geography as well as history (and historiography). Rajesh Rai's latest book goes a long way towards bridging this gap. He has now given us the historical evolution of the Indian community in Singapore in great detail with sober and authoritative research, and his book will remain the standard text on the subject for the foreseeable future. It is an important contribution to the literature on the Indian diaspora. The British settlement of Singapore goes back to 1819, but Indian merchants and traders had been arriving in the region long before then, and joined later by sepoys and lascars. Convicts and political prisoners arrived after the middle of the nineteenth century along with workers who came under an unregulated system of indentured labour. With time, the community diversified as its numbers increased, factions developed and social and educational institutions emerged. In a chapter titled 'Diasporic formations in the inter-war years', Rai describes the social and cultural evolution of the Indian community (religion, vernacular language education, regional and subregional movements), and the impact on the Singapore Indians of political and religious tensions and frictions on the Indian subcontinent, though not to the extent of having a 'monopolistic hold on diasporic political loyalties' (p. 195). Nonetheless, in contrast to other areas where Indian immigrants settled, the Indian influence on social and political developments in Singapore was far greater. Given the physical proximity of Singapore to India, it could not have been otherwise. The persistence of caste politics and prejudices among Singaporean Indians and the presence of the sectional, South Indian 'Dravidian Movement' among them are illustrations of this. These developments and others like them had no resonance in the more remote sugar colonies across the globe. …

“To be or not to be”: the double consciousness of the Tamil Muslims during the early 20th century

ABSTRACTWhen the nation building process was gaining momentum during the early 20th century, all the communities in British India had to participate in the process and the Muslims were no exception. Although the Muslim community in British India was as diverse as any other community, there was an attempt to unite its members under the identity of “Muslims” during the first half of the 20th century. But the Tamil Muslims remained aloof from the idea of an “Indian Muslim Community.” They had a double consciousness of being a Tamil as well as a Muslim. They highlighted their “Tamilness” more than their “Muslimness.” More than the Muslim League, their involvement with the Dravidian Movement was substantial. They supported both the movement for Dravidasthan as well as Pakistan. This paper will look into the process of “nation making,” particularly a “Muslim nation” and the anxiety of the Tamil Muslims during these processes. It will analyse the reasons behind the Tamil Muslims being alienated from the other Muslims, the British colonialist denying the identity of “pure” Muslims to the Tamil Muslims and their involvement in the Dravidian Movement.

Beyond the Politics of Identity: The Left and the Politics of Caste and Identity in Tamil Nadu, 1920–63

Wedged uncomfortably between the gathering pan-Indian nationalist movement and the locally resonant and divisive anti-Brahman, Tamil ethno-nationalist movement, Left leaders in the Tamil region in India were faced with a difficult and complex set of political choices and challenges in the early twentieth century. These political challenges brought to the fore the social and political contradictions between an anti-colonial Indian nationalism led mostly by upper-caste liberal–bourgeois leaders and an equally entrenched and locally resonant ethno-nationalist movement which, despite its social reformist and anti-Brahman platform, was led by dominant non-Brahman caste leaders committed to the continuation of British rule. In this paper, we will be looking at two of the most prominent Tamil Left leaders who attempted to work with and bridge these contradictory movements in Tamil society. M. Singaravelu (1860–1946) and P. Jeevanandam (1907–63) were prominent Left leaders and intellectuals in the Tamil region and were well known for their close engagement with and sensitivity to issues of social reform, caste and linguistic and cultural hegemony. Both joined various political movements including the Indian National Congress, the Dravidian movement and the Indian communist party in different phases of their careers. It is their participation and engagement with such diverse and contradictory movements that make their intellectual interventions unique and a close study of their work valuable for providing a window into how the Left attempted to deal with such thorny issues as the politics of caste and language in India.

Re-Inscribing Religion as Nation: Naveenar-Caivar (Modern Saivites) and the Dravidian Movement

The powerful shadow cast by the Dravidian movement on its very scholarship has meant that the focus of scholarly attention has been on the recent, institutional and secular history of the movement, with scant attention paid to its earlier religious roots. While the important role played by the pioneer Neo-Saivite elites has been noted, there have been few attempts to understand or theorise either the significance of this Neo-Saivite factor or the strategies and methods through which the Neo-Saivite revivalists fashioned and articulated a form of non-Brahmin Tamil nationalism. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by examining the largely untapped accounts of the Neo-Saivite movement written by orthodox Saivite contemporaries, who were highly critical of the movement and sought to expose both its deviation from ‘true’ Saivism and its political agenda. It is these criticisms of the Neo-Saivites that best illuminate how Saivism was deployed for a Dravidian and non-Brahmin Tamil nationalist project. The paper also argues that it is through a critical study of the Neo-Saivite movement that we can adequately address the question of the social base of the Dravidian movement, which has long continued to haunt its scholarship.

Political Mobilization of Tamils in India and Sri Lanka: A Historical Note

In South Asia, Tamils have a legacy of distinct past and preserve their language and culture intact with their lives. Modern democracy paves way for different methods of political mobilization. Colonial legacy and postcolonial decision-making system in terms of resource allocation for competing groups have caused social conflicts and group rivalries. The process of political mobilization is envisaged at the cost of anti-group feeling. The hostility towards the ‘other’ is articulated for optimum political mobilization. In India, the Tamils were initially mobilized on Brahmin and non-Brahmin categories. The concept of Dravidian was constructed ethnically to empower the non-Brahmins. Political parties and successive leaders initially appropriated with the help of colonial support. The postcolonial construction is legitimated by constitutional and democratic authorization. At the same time, the resistance and challenges to Dravidian mobilization did assume within the purview of parliamentary democracy. The evolution of Dravidian movement has crossed from separatism to coalition and the sub-nationalism did not terrify the gross nationalism. The conflict was perceived at provincial level and not at national level. In other words, there is no conflict between Tamil and non-Tamils at national level. Rather, the conflict is perceived within the province. The case of Sri Lanka is entirely different as the Tamils are minorities and the conflict is perceived at national level. Besides, decision-making process did not assure the features of parliamentary democracy. An alternative course of political mobilization happened justifying the growth of militants. The state in Sri Lanka failed to sustain the values of plural society and representative democracy. In reaction to the state failure, rebels, militants and state-supported violence have resulted in mass killing. In India, multiple factors such as the struggles of Dravidian leaders, colonial legacy, national attitude, constitutional values have assisted to empower the Tamils. In Sri Lanka, colonialism did not hinder the progress of Tamils. But, the postcolonial state augmented the ethnic strife which gradually alienated the Tamils. It is the role of the state to restore peaceful co-existence, parliamentary democracy and social justice. There are lessons which should be learned or forgotten both from India and Sri Lanka. This paper discusses how the ethnic categories are used to mobilize the Tamils for political ends.

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno-nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy-four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long-standing external threats of ethno-linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro-Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno-nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth-century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti-Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.

Blaming the Brahmins

Tamil literary history abounds in legends about texts lost and found. The theme resurfaces in modern literary history in descriptions of the rediscovery of classical Can.kam poetry at the end of the nineteenth century. If this poetic corpus has never been literally lost but has merely been invisible, circulating in the small circle of scholars, it is said to have been kept away by brahmins from its rightful owner, the Tamil people. Instead, the brahmins forced their own Sanskrit texts upon the Tamils. Curiously, this scenario, which is clearly indebted to the political idiom of the Dravidian movement, finds its most explicit expression in the works of two scholars, A.K. Ramanujan and K.V. Zvelebil, who, contary to their colleagues, past and present, working in Tamil Nadu itself, could easily have ignored any form of pressure from the political side. At the same time, both were men with strong literary ambitions, who as such have been carried away by literary fancy itself.

Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader Farina Mir Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. Edited by Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Women and Social Reform in Modern India, edited by India's eminent modern historians Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, is a wonderful asset that will be of immense value to a wide range of scholars and students of gender, empire, and more specifically, those interested in the history of gender in colonial India. The volume is comprised of two distinct parts: the first is a collection of twenty-three scholarly essays and the second contains five primary source documents. While all of the materials included here have been published before, the value of this volume lies in the editors' selections. They have collected a diverse range of materials that together provide a comprehensive picture and considered analysis of social reform and its impact on women and gender relations in colonial India. This is a noteworthy achievement for any book, but particularly so for a collection bringing together essays that were not originally conceived as part of a shared project. Part A, "Historical Research," has twenty-three essays. Some of these were initially published as journal articles, while others are excerpts from books. The majority are by (eminent) historians and focus on the nineteenth century. Included here are some seminal essays—such as Lata Mani's "Production of an Official Discourse on Sati in Early-Nineteenth-Century Bengal"—that pushed historical inquiry on gender in colonial India in new directions, opening up in the process important questions about the impact of the colonial state on Indian society and women's agency. The collection also includes valuable contributions by literary critics (Gauri Viswanathan and C.M. Naim) and interdisciplinary feminist scholars (Madhu Kishwar, for example). Some of the essays engage pre-1800 events and Reba Som's contribution considers postcolonial developments. While most of the essays address histories of north India, it is a signal contribution that this collection brings this work together with studies of south India (John and Karen Leonard on social change in Andhra, S. Anandhi on the Dravidian Movement, and G. Arunima on matrilineal kinship in Malabar). Similarly, the volume brings Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh reform, often treated as separate phenomena, into the same frame. At the same time, some of the essays do not fit neatly into such a religious typology. Gauri Viswanathan's essay on conversion explores the difficulty—and varying expectations of those involved in the process—of transitioning from one religious identity to another, while Mrinalini Sinha's contribution engages issues of nationalism and gender. Part B, "Contemporary Documents," is significantly shorter than Part A, comprised of only five excerpts. These are from the writings of Rammohan Roy, Kailashbasini Devi, Tarabai Shinde, M.G. Ranade, and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The selection once again emphasizes intellectual breadth, bringing together a very diverse range of thinkers who span a long nineteenth century. Each of these excerpts is historically significant, as suggested by the fact that these individuals surface in the essays in Part A. It would have been helpful, however, if the editors had included in Part B brief biographical sketches of the authors and introductions to their excerpts. This would have provided those less familiar with South Asian history an important context for these primary sources. The volume opens with a short introduction by the editors. Their framing focuses on the issue of how the history of social reform has been taught in Indian curricula, and the place of this volume in providing important correctives to traditional approaches. This seems fitting as Women and Social Reform in Modern India was first published in India. While the introduction made for both informative and engaging reading, a slightly different framing, one that addressed the state of the field, perhaps, or the editors' considerations in republishing these particular authors and essays may have been more appropriate for a North American or European audience. This is a very minor point, however, one overshadowed by the fact that this collection will be an asset to students and scholars, a valuable resource for having brought together...

The Limits of Inventing Tradition

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers’ influential volume, The Invention of Tradition, remains a milestone in scholarly approaches to the study of tradition. However, in emphasizing conscious manipulations of tradition, and in employing a notion of invention that lacks nuance, the authors of that volume do not sufficiently acknowledge the degree to which invented traditions draw from prior traditions. I explore here the limits of conscious constructions of tradition, arguing that traditions that serve as powerful touchstones for identity cannot be invented ex nihilo. I look at an instance of elite formulation of tradition, the Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu, South India, in the first half of the twentieth century, which articulated a new formulation of Tamil tradition based largely on European models and ideals. The leaders of this movement envisioned an ancient Tamil community that was egalitarian, scientific, and non-Hindu, and they employed this vision in their development of policies for education, religious institutions, and industrialization. Their failure to mobilize popular support for their cause was repeatedly demonstrated in their electoral defeats at the hands of the Congress Party, which promoted a reformist tradition based on Hindu symbols and ritual practices. I argue that the Dravidian Movement failed to win political support because they discarded nearly all the components of prior Tamil tradition, and the novel tradition they authored in turn was unrecognizable to ordinary Tamils.

Contested past

SummaryDuring the British colonial regime in the 19th century Western Indologists and missionaries, with the participation of the indigenous scholars who controlled traditional systems of knowledge, formed models for the description of early religious history which was especially inspired by linguistic ideas whose central concept was the so-called ‘Aryan immigration’ into Northern India. This Orientalist historiography concerning events that lay back several thousand years found its way into political and religious discourse in one form or another. These projections developed into highly significant ingredients of the various political, ethnic, and religious movements and parties, such as the Dravidian Movement or the Nationalist Hindu groupings. The present paper tries to map out the corner stones of modern-day discourses concerning Indian pre- and early history which has developed into something of a veritable battle about the past..

Revolution and Rank in Tamil Nationalism

From the 1920s to the late 1960s, Tamil nationalism in India was characterized by elements of radical innovation which made the Dravidian movement a mobilization for cultural revolution, in Tamil terms, as well as for the defense of Tamil interests vis-à-vis the central government. In the last twenty years concern for the ordinary person has manifested itself in extravagant displays of state largess and the encouragement of personality cults directed toward Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. I delineate below major ideological themes of the nationalist cultural revolution and argue that these ideological elements, while representing change in Tamil political culture, were in many ways deeply anchored in prerevolutionary political concerns supported by institutions and symbolic systems with precolonial antecedents. I link these ideological elements to the dissolution of radicalism in Tamil nationalism and to the emergence of a style of governance which has undermined standards of public administration.

Krishna and catir nāccu: Feature film as a political medium

From the 1950s the South Indian Dravidian Movement used feature films extensively for the dissemination of its political propaganda. Adapting itself to traditional aesthetics, religious and political sentiments, the modern medium‐with its visual potential for conveying analyses and slogans‐proved to be most efficient in reaching a public which was mostly illiterate.

Women's Question in the Dravidian Movement c. 1925-1948

Women's Question in the Dravidian Movement c. 1925-1948

Trends in the Study of Dravidian Movement

Trends in the Study of Dravidian Movement

The DMK and the Politics of Tamil Nationalism

C ONFRONTED BY A CONTINUING BARRAGE of factional demands, from the Muslim League to the Jan Sangh, the Jharkhand, and the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham, Nehru often denounced the mentality of the Indian communities. Since his death, many fear that India's new leadership will be unable to hold the nation together. Like many of the new states of Africa and Asia, India is a mosaic of communities-religious, ethnic, and linguistic: she has six major religions; two major language families (Aryan and Dravidian), of which there are fourteen major languages, as well as innumerable dialects and tribal tongues; racial varieties of Aryan, Dravidian, and proto-Austroloid; and some two thousand castes, endogamous, occupational, and hierarchially ranked. She poses all too clearly the question of whether a multi-national society can become a viable democracy. One of the most serious fissiparous tendencies with which India has had to contend is the Tamil separatist movement. Led first by the Dravida Kazagham and later by the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK), the movement advocated the secession of Tamilnad from the Indian Union and the creation of an independent and sovereign Dravidasthan.' In the i962 general elections, the DMK, vanguard of the Dravidian movement, emerged as the strongest opposition ever to challenge the entrenched Congress Party in Madras, capturing fifty seats in the Legislative Assembly and seven in the Lok Sabha. These electoral successes, in part, led the National Integration Council to appoint (in June, i962) the Committee on National Integration and Regionalism. The Committee, chaired by Dr. C. P. Ramaswami Aiyer, consisted of the Chief Ministers of Maharashtra, Madras, Assam, and Orissa, and Mr. Asoka Mehta, M. P. In its report, the Committee recommended that