Having grown up predominantly in the northern parts of the country, I noticed the slightly different way my friends filled the columns of ‘First Name’ and ‘Surname.’ It began with their ‘personal name’ followed by a ‘surname’. Living in a caste society, this meant that often a person’s caste location was inherent in their surnames, enabling people at the very first meeting to be categorised within the four-fold hierarchical varna system (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya & Shudra) and those who don’t fall into these four categories are labelled as Avarnas. This, in turn, becomes a significant factor in the kind of social intercourse that a person is put through. A recent report by the Social Justice Ministry recommended against the revelation of caste surnames and the details about the candidates’ social background at the interview stage in civil services. This increases the chances of discrimination, revealing the inherent prejudice that plagues Indian society.[i]

Traditionally in Southern India, the naming pattern consisted of the name of your native village. The name of your father,  third would be your name and then finally followed by the caste title (Jayaram, 2005). My grand-uncle told me, parents in our family increasingly dropped the practice of giving their children caste titles as surnames around the time he was born, that is, in the 1930s. However, this wasn’t the case with just members of our family, but rather this practice was catching with the whole of Panchalingapuram (our ancestral village) or, even better, the whole of Tamil Nadu.

This reminded me of a line that I read in Mill’s The Promise (1959) – “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” While a person or a few dropping a conventional practice could be said to be borne out of free will but could that still be a cause when we talk about an entire state with a population of about twenty-three million (Census, 1931). The answer would be a firm ‘no.’ Were Mill to work on this today, he would have suggested to not limit ourselves to an individual’s immediate surroundings and rather have asked us to look beyond. Beyond the private realms and onto the public realm, a realm where we assume ourselves to be mere spectators, not realising we’re active participants. And the public realm of Tamil Nadu in the 1930s was helmed by E.V.Ramasamy, affectionately known as Thantai Periyar, who laid the foundations for the social justice politics in the state.

In 1927, Periyar, when publishing the Tamizh weekly Kudiarasu, of which he was the founder and editor, consciously decided to drop his caste title ‘Naicker’ when writing his name under the editorial category.[ii] This significant act encompassed Periyar’s broader objective of reforming and rationalising the Tamizh society through the Self-Respect Movement set in motion transformative forces that continue to challenge and disgruntle the non-rational and traditional social structures of Tamil Nadu.

The Self-Respect Movement initiated by Periyar in the 1930s was a continuation of the attempt to secularise and modernise the Tamizh society that began with the start of the Dravidian Movement in the 1920s. The rise of the Dravidian Movement is read within the context of the growing monopoly of the Brahmins over the civil and political society of the Madras constituency. The Brahmins made up only a little over three per cent of the total population of the Madras constituency, yet their presence was overly visible in the Madras government. In 1886 they held about 58% of the elite posts in the executive and judicial services, and the representation of Non-Brahmins further dwindled by the 1900s. At the same time, even within the social sphere, the Brahmin’s hegemony was maintained owing to their location within the hierarchical varna system. Their presence in both the spheres was marked by bilingualism – their alternating reverence for English and Sanskrit, which differed with the contempt they held for Tamizh, the language of the masses. This monopoly over both the worlds provided them with easier access to socio-economic resources putting them on a higher pedestal than the rest (Pandian, 1994).

The quest to then dilute this hegemony began with the foundation of the South Indian Liberation Federation by Dr Natesa Mudaliyar, Sir PT Theyagaraya Chetty and TM Nair on November 20, 1916. It was popularly known as the Justice Party (later renamed as Dravida Kazhagam) after the ‘Justice’ newspaper it published. This saw the beginning of the Dravidian Movement. With the declaration of the Non-Brahmin Manifesto in December 1916, a firm ideological basis was laid down for the movement.[iii] The movement further gained momentum with Periyar leaving the Congress party in 1925 due to ideological differences, who began working closely with the Justice Party. Periyar agreed with everything the Justice Party stood for, yet he felt that they worked more towards empowerment than emancipation from the system. Periyar’s more radical approach to fight the forces of Brahminical oppression culminated with the start of the Self-Respect Movement in the late 1920s (Aloysius, 2019).

The movement being called ‘Suyamariyathai’ or Self-Respect is symbolic of the fact that ‘Maanam’ or honour is a basic human instinct that distinguishes us from other animals. Periyar asserted that the actualisation of self-respect is what would make one human. He called on the marginalised to recognise the shackles of Brahminical oppression, binding them down and break-free by actualising self-respect. He strongly believed each one had to fight for themselves as relying on others for upliftment wouldn’t establish true freedom as the relationship here would represent the one between god and individual, thereby defying the very purpose of the movement. Periyar identified the notion of self-respect with three other important concepts, which are ‘Samathuvam’ (Equality), ‘Suthanthiram’ (Freedom) and ‘Samadharmam’ (Communism). The actualisation of self-respect is bound up within the attainment of these (Aloysius, 2019).

While providing a firm theoretical basis on which the movement was based, Periyar also provided practical suggestions that would propel people towards actualising their self-respect. The individual was now the site of transformation and revolution. The conscious personal choices made, on the one hand, were a result of the emergence of a new consciousness at the public level and at the same time helped reinforce the structural changes taking place. Personal choices beginning from what newspapers one read, what one wore and how they wore it, how one got married and the collectivities and festivities one decided to be a part of – all reflected the historical changes taking place.

Sarah Hodges, in Revolutionary family life and the Self-Respect Movement in Tamil South India, 1926-49 (2005), has documented these individual emancipatory practices. Self-Respecters preferred reading Periyar’s Kudi Arasu & Viduthalai over nationalistic newspapers, women in the movement shunned thali, pottu and followers donned black shirts and sarees, which then became a colour of resistance against Brahminical hegemony at a time when people from the marginalised castes weren’t even allowed to wear thundu over their shoulders. Suyamariyathai thirumanam, or self-respect marriages that shunned Brahminical rituals and priests, particularly, was a direct attack on the institution of family – a site that reproduced unequal social relations. While staying away from traditional gatherings and festivities, the Self-Respecters created their own alternative spaces for socialisation and education.

This sustained collective action of the Tamizh people led by Periyar encompassed redemptive, reformist and revolutionary elements, which aimed to rationalise all spheres of human life to achieve complete humanity. In present-day Tamil Nadu, Periyar’s ideologue intersects the various sections within the Dravidian political spectrum and continues to threaten and destruct the status quo of the Brahminical forces.

[i] https://theprint.in/india/governance/caste-surnames-religious-symbols-should-not-be-revealed-in-civil-services-interview-report/605613/, accessed on 26^th July 2021.

[ii] https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/all-in-your-name/article22986770.ece, accessed on 26^th July 2021.

[iii] https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/100-years-justice-party-movement-which-defined-tamil-nadu-politics-53163, accessed on 26^th July 2021.

1. https://www.periyarbooks.in/blog/the-non-brahmin-manifesto-english/, accessed on 26^th July 2021.
2. Jayaraman, R. (2005). Personal Identity in a Globalized World: Cultural Roots of Hindu Personal Names and Surnames. The Journal of Popular Culture, 38(3), 476–490.
3. Pandian, M. S. S. (1994). Notes on the Transformation of “Dravidian” Ideology: Tamilnadu, c. 1900–1940. Social Scientist, 22(5/6), 84–104.
4. Aloysius, G. (2019). Periyar and modernity (1st ed.). Critical Quest.
5. Hodges, S. (2005). Revolutionary family life and the Self Respect movement in Tamil south India, 1926–49. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(2), 251–277.
6. Venkatachalapathy, A. R. (1995). Dravidian Movement and Saivites: 1927–1944. Economic & Political Weekly, 30(14), 761–768.
7. S., A. (1991). Women’s Question in the Dravidian Movement c. 1925–1948. Social Scientist, 19(5/6), 24.
8. Mills, W. C., & Gitlin, T. (2000). The Sociological Imagination (40th anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press.
9. NCERT. (2017). Social change and development in India, Textbook in Sociology for class XII (Revised ed.). NCERT.

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K. S. Vaishnavi is a 2^nd-year student studying Sociology & Political Science in the Department of BA Programme, Miranda House, University of Delhi.