Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy was born on September 17, 1879, in Erode, a commercial town in the Madras Presidency of British India ^[1]. His father, Venkatappa Naicker, was a prosperous merchant from the Balija trading community, and the household was devout, hosting religious discourses and supporting Hindu charities. Ramasamy received only a few years of formal schooling before joining the family business as a boy, an experience that gave him a lifelong preference for practical argument over bookish learning ^[2].

Even as a young man he showed a streak of irreverence. Listening to visiting scholars expound the Ramayana and other texts in his father's home, he began posing awkward questions about contradictions in the stories, to the irritation of his elders ^[2]. At nineteen he married Nagammai, who later became an active participant in his public campaigns rather than a conventional companion confined to the home ^[1].

A turning point came around 1904, when he traveled to Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges. Accounts of the journey describe him being turned away from free feeding houses that served only Brahmins, leaving him hungry and humiliated in a city he had been raised to revere ^[3]. The episode is usually cited as the moment his skepticism about religion hardened into hostility toward the caste order that religion appeared to sanction. He returned to Erode, rebuilt his position in trade and civic life, and eventually served as chairman of the Erode municipality, earning a reputation for honest administration ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in the early 1920s would have received a surprising answer: a rising Congressman. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1919, gave up his municipal offices, and threw himself into Gandhian campaigns, promoting khadi cloth, picketing liquor shops, and courting arrest during the non-cooperation agitation ^[1]. His wife Nagammai and his sister were among the women drawn into these protests alongside him.

His national reputation was made at Vaikom, in the princely state of Travancore, where lower caste Hindus were barred even from walking on roads surrounding the Mahadeva temple. When the local satyagraha of 1924 faltered after its leaders were jailed, Ramasamy traveled south to lead it, was imprisoned twice, and came to be celebrated as Vaikom Veerar, the hero of Vaikom ^[3]. The agitation eventually secured the opening of the approach roads to all castes.

His break with Congress came soon afterward. Ramasamy pressed the party to support communal representation, meaning reserved places for non-Brahmins in education and public employment, and he objected publicly when a Congress-supported training school in Cheranmadevi seated Brahmin and non-Brahmin students separately at meals ^[2]. Convinced that the party would never confront caste privilege within its own ranks, he resigned in 1925. That year he launched the Self-Respect Movement, declaring that political freedom meant little without social equality and personal dignity ^[4].

Any honest account of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy achievements begins with the Self-Respect Movement. Through his Tamil weekly Kudi Arasu, founded in 1925, and relentless speaking tours, he attacked untouchability, ridiculed superstition, and urged ordinary Tamils to reject the idea that birth determined worth ^[4]. The movement popularized self-respect marriages, simple ceremonies conducted without Brahmin priests or Sanskrit rites; the government of Tamil Nadu gave such marriages legal validity in 1967, and the reform was later upheld across the state's law ^[5].

In 1938 he was invited to lead the Justice Party, the non-Brahmin political organization of the Madras Presidency, and in 1944 he transformed it into the Dravidar Kazhagam, a social movement that renounced electoral office ^[1]. It was during the 1938 agitation against compulsory Hindi instruction in Madras schools that the title Periyar, conferred by admirers including women's conference delegates, became permanently attached to his name ^[3]. The anti-Hindi campaigns he led in 1938 and supported again in later decades made language a defining issue of Tamil politics.

His advocacy helped entrench reservation policy in South India. Agitation by Periyar and his movement contributed to the political pressure that produced the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution in 1951, which protected caste-based reservations in education and employment after a court had struck down the Madras government's communal order ^[2]. Tamil Nadu's unusually extensive reservation system owes much to the climate his campaigns created. He also argued consistently for women's rights: for widow remarriage, for property rights, for access to contraception, and against child marriage and the devadasi system, positions that were radical for his time and place ^[4].

Periyar's rationalism was uncompromising. He treated God, scripture, and priesthood as instruments by which one small group had persuaded the majority to accept inferiority, and he said so in blunt, often deliberately shocking language ^[4]. His followers broke idols of the god Ganesha and burned images from the Ramayana at public demonstrations, acts intended to strip sacred symbols of their power to intimidate ^[2]. Critics called this gratuitous insult; he called it necessary surgery on a diseased social body.

He was equally provocative on politics. In 1947 he opposed the transfer of power, fearing that independence under Congress would simply install North Indian and Brahmin dominance over Dravidian South India, and for years he campaigned for a separate Dravida Nadu, a sovereign Dravidian state ^[1]. The demand never came close to fruition and was effectively abandoned after India banned secessionist advocacy in 1963, but the underlying claim, that Tamil society had interests distinct from those of the Hindi-speaking north, became a permanent feature of the region's politics.

A visit to the Soviet Union in 1932 left him impressed by state-led social transformation, and socialist ideas colored his rhetoric in the following years, though he never subordinated his social program to any economic doctrine ^[2]. What remained constant was his insistence that self-respect came first: before nationalism, before religion, and before party loyalty.

Ramasamy's first wife, Nagammai, shared his public life fully, leading women volunteers in the temperance and Vaikom campaigns and helping run his publications. Her death in 1933 deprived him of his closest collaborator ^[1]. The couple's only child, a daughter, had died in infancy decades earlier, and he never had other children.

In 1948, at the age of sixty nine, he married Maniammai, a young associate who managed his affairs and travel. The marriage scandalized many of his own followers because of the age difference, and a large faction led by C. N. Annadurai split away in 1949 to found the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the DMK, which entered electoral politics ^[3]. Periyar defended the marriage as a practical arrangement to secure the movement's future, and after his death Maniammai did in fact lead the Dravidar Kazhagam and its institutions.

In person he cultivated simplicity: a black shirt worn as a badge of protest, a flowing white beard, and a punishing schedule of village meetings that continued into his nineties. He entrusted his considerable properties to the movement's trusts rather than to heirs ^[2].

The split of 1949 might have finished a lesser organization, but Periyar kept the Dravidar Kazhagam active as a pressure group while his former lieutenants contested elections. Relations with the DMK swung between rivalry and rapprochement; by the mid 1960s he had reconciled with Annadurai, and when the DMK swept to power in Madras State in 1967 he described the outcome as a victory for the movement's ideals even though his own organization stayed out of government ^[3].

He remained a working agitator to the end. He supported the renaming of Madras State as Tamil Nadu in 1969, continued to campaign for temple entry rights, and pressed the new state governments to appoint people of all castes as temple priests, a reform enacted in principle during his lifetime ^[2]. His speeches in these final years returned again and again to a single theme: that social reform was unfinished and that political power without it was hollow.

Periyar addressed his last public meeting in December 1973, urging action for social equality, and died on December 24, 1973, in Vellore at the age of ninety four ^[1]. His body was buried, not cremated, in Chennai, in keeping with his rejection of Hindu rites, and the site later became a memorial and library complex.

Half a century after his death, every major party in Tamil Nadu claims some part of his inheritance. The DMK and its offshoot the AIADMK, which together have governed the state without interruption since 1967, both emerged from the movement he built, and even his fiercest critics operate within a political culture of social justice rhetoric that he did more than anyone to create ^[3]. UNESCO material cited by his admirers in 1970 honored him as a prophet of the new age and the Socrates of South East Asia, phrases that remain attached to his memory in Tamil Nadu ^[2].

His institutional legacy is tangible. The Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institution continues to publish his writings, Periyar University in Salem and numerous colleges carry his name, and his statues, often bearing his declaration that there is no god, stand in towns across the state ^[5]. Reservation in education and employment, self-respect marriage law, and the appointment of non-Brahmin temple priests all bear his imprint.

Assessment of the man remains contested. Admirers credit him with breaking the psychological grip of caste on millions; detractors point to his iconoclasm, his hostility to religion, and his opposition to independence as evidence of extremism. Scholars of the Dravidian movement generally agree on his significance while debating his methods ^[4]. For readers seeking basic Periyar E. V. Ramasamy facts, the essentials are clear: a merchant's son with little schooling who became the most influential social reformer in modern Tamil history, and whose long life connected Victorian-era Madras to the politics of the present day. Any Periyar E. V. Ramasamy biography must reckon with that unusual combination of destroyer and builder.