“The Dravidian Deception: Periyar’s Poisonous Legacy Masks Racism, Anti-Hinduism and Anti-National Politics Part 3”, My Ind Maker, April 19, 2026
“The Making of a Demagogue
Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy — who styled himself Periyar, meaning ‘the great one’ — is today celebrated by Dravidian parties as a social reformer, a rationalist, and the father of Tamil self-respect. Statues of him dot Tamil Nadu’s public squares. His image adorns government buildings. His birth anniversary is a state holiday. Yet an honest examination of his ideas, his politics, his personal conduct, and his ideological alliances reveals a figure far more complex and troubling: a man whose legacy is inseparable from racial hatred, anti-national politics, contempt for his own Tamil civilisation, alignment with colonial and separatist forces, and a brand of ‘rationalism’ that was selective, opportunistic, and ultimately in the service of power rather than truth.
Born in 1879 to a prosperous Naicker trading family in Erode, Ramasamy did not emerge from the dispossessed communities whose cause he claimed to champion. He was a wealthy man of the dominant non-Brahmin landed class who found in the Justice Party’s anti-Brahmin politics a vehicle for his personal ambitions. His early involvement with the Indian National Congress ended in acrimony — he resigned in 1925, claiming that the Congress was dominated by Brahmins — and he thereafter became one of the Congress’s most venomous critics, aligning consistently with colonial authority and separatist forces.
The Self-Respect Movement: Whose Respect?
Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement, launched in 1925, presented itself as a campaign for social dignity and against Brahmin priestly monopoly over Hindu religious life. Some of its goals — encouraging inter-caste marriages, challenging untouchability, promoting widow remarriage — aligned with genuine reform impulses that were also present within the Hindu reform movements of the period, including the Arya Samaj and various Vaishnava and Shaiva reform groups……..”
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