Review of The Cambridge Companion to Periyar, edited by A.R. Venkatachalapathy, Karthick Ram Manoharan

Explore "The Cambridge Companion to Periyar," a vital anthology illuminating Tamil Nadu's social justice and political history.

The Cambridge Companion to Periyar, edited by A.R. Venkatachalapathy and Karthick Ram Manoharan, is a significant addition for a non-Tamil reading public seeking to understand 20th century Tamil Nadu and its distinct political trajectory, with social justice as its operational fulcrum.

Most Anglo-American scholarship on the subject relied on anti-colonial narratives produced by nationalists. Both bodies of writing were conspicuously silent on larger questions, such as self-respect and the quest for dignity, and validated the entrenched, vertical social hierarchy that refused to imagine a horizontal social compact.

The then-dominant Cambridge School, led by David Washbrook and Christopher Baker, characterised the Dravidian movement not as a genuine ideological or social revolution, but as a product of elite competition for colonial resources. This reading was endorsed by nationalists both from the Congress and the Indian Left. The limitation of this view was first academically challenged by M.S.S. Pandian in his pioneering essay, ‘Beyond colonial crumbs: Cambridge school, identity politics and Dravidian movement(s)’ in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1995.

The last 30 years mark a significant shift in the writing of the history of Tamil Nadu. Rhetoric has taken a back seat, and evidence has become the building block of this new way of understanding Tamil Nadu from the late 19th century to the present. The Cambridge Companion to Periyar, in a sense, is part of this larger course-correction by academia. The editors should be commended for presenting a wide repository of the contemporary history of Tamil Nadu and succinctly summarising that knowledge for the non-Tamil universe.

The opening essay, written by the editors, titled ‘Introducing an iconoclast’, is not just a biographical summary of Periyar, but traces his political and social journey across its multiple strands, highlighting both areas of convergence with other political thoughts, and divergence. The brevity with which they have captured the full import of two defining words: suiyamariadhai (Self Respect) and samadharmam (equality principle) in the sub-section, ‘E.V. Ramasamy, before he became ‘Periyar’’, is an early indication that the Companion is intended to be a reader and not an encyclopaedia. Tamil readers are familiar with writer and independent researcher Pazha. Athiyaman’s book on Periyar and the Vaikom Satyagraha. This rather exhaustive book has been compressed into a long essay and translated by Venkatachalapathy. This essay should be read with Sundar Kaali’s essay, ‘The rationale for reason: Periyar on religion’, to get an insight into the profound difference between faith and bigotry in Periyar’s political and social praxis.

While every essay deserves mention and evaluation, the essay, ‘The social subsumes the economic: Periyar’s reading of economic power in caste society’, by M. Vijayabaskar, provides a glimpse into the breadth and depth of this anthology. Vijayabaskar explains how Periyar’s reading of social injustice was “rooted in a set of conceptual insights on how power shapes economic relations in caste society.” Vijayabaskar contends that in Periyar’s political imaginary, the ‘economic’ was a sub-set of the ‘social’. He explains how Periyar was able to see the limitation in redistribution of economic power and how “it could not be sustained without addressing the social institutions that help reproduce economic hierarchies and concentrate economic power.”