The Strangeness of Tamil Nadu: Contemporary History and Political Culture in South India

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M.S.S. Pandian (1958-2014) was an eminent historian of South Indian politics, caste, culture, and cinema. His writings offer distinctively Tamil insights on these areas. In this book his chief focus is Tamil political culture for roughly thirty years since 1985. His success lies in bringing a historical understanding to bear on what he called "the strangeness of Tamil Nadu".

A key figure in Pandian's thinking was E.V. Ramasamy "Periyar". Pandian argues that Periyar's ideals and strategies long remained popular among Tamil progressives, but that their survival became difficult because of radical changes in pan-Indian political culture. To show these changes, this book is organised chronologically as well as along thematic sections that reflect the themes of Periyar's Dravidian ideology: linguistic identity, state politics, religion, and caste.

Periyar's ideas, Pandian argues, can still provide productive standards for critical analysis of politics in India. But because they are not widely known or appreciated outside Tamil Nadu, they represent the "strangeness" of Tamil politics instead of being adapted as progressive in the country as a whole.

M.S.S. PANDIAN was, at the time of his untimely demise, Professor, Department of Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was co-editor of the twelfth volume of Subaltern Studies. His books include The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Films and Politics (1992), and Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (2006).

LET ME OFFER Two sets of stories to delineate what this book is about. Within the first set of stories, one is about a statue of an unrepentant atheist and the other is about the Indian national flag. Together they give us a feel of the local texture of politics in Tamil Nadu.

The second set of stories has to do with the life of a Tamil text translated into Hindi and its connection with the Socialist leader Rammanohar Lohia. Lohia's engagement with Tamil Nadu's re- sistance to Hindi provides an understanding of how a section of Hindi-speaking North India reacted to the "strangeness" of Tamil Nadu. The contrast between the two regions, which is in no way absolute, signposts how regional specificities, with their particular historical inheritances, shape contemporary politics.

But let me begin with the stories from Tamil Nadu, the first of which relates to a court case on the installation of a statue of E.V. Ramasamy-himself ironically a life-long iconoclast who broke the idols of Hindu gods and is remembered in Tamil Nadu as "Periyar" (meaning "the great one"). Periyar, as is well known, was the founder of the rationalist Self-Respect Movement (SRM) in 1926 and the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) in 1944. In 2009, the Periyar Statue Installation Committee decided to erect a bronze statue of their idol at the Government Boys' Higher Secondary School in Kaveripattinam, Krishnagiri district. The statue was to occupy a vacant space measuring ten sq. ft. The school sought the permission of the state education department and a Government Order (G.O. Ms. No. 331) issued on 11 December 2009 gave them the go-ahead.

Two and a half years later the local unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a minuscule political formation in the state, raised an objection to the statue. It demanded instead a statue of Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, founder of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Prompted by the Hindu Right, one P.D. Sundaresan, claiming he was president of the Parent-Teacher Association of the school, filed a writ petition in the Madras High Court. His argument was that since Periyar had professed atheism, a statue memorialising him would corrupt the minds of students.

This writ petition was dismissed by Justice K. Chandru of the Madras High Court in 2012. His grounds for dismissing it are significant and his judgment, which questions the petitioner's understanding of Periyar's politics, deserves to be quoted at length:

The portrayal by the petitioner in his affidavit regarding Periyar's teaching only betrays his ignorance about the role played by Periyar in the transformation of the Tamil society in many respects. He cannot be merely labelled as the propagandist for atheism. His view on caste oppression, social equality, women liberation surpasses the teachings of many contemporary leaders of India. Men like Iyothee Thass and Periyar, like [Jyotirao] Phule and [B.R.] Ambedkar, were men of remarkable insight, keen sympathy and endowed with a great and original imagination. They were profoundly sensitive to the nature of ignorance, suffering and injustice in their societies and brought to their understanding a robust critical vision which helped them evolve universal categories of understanding, analysis and ac- tion. Through a creative deployment of these categories, they were able to identify the extent of hurt, oppression and injustice in caste society as well as challenge its existence. Thus they shook the Hindu social order to its very roots and, to use Periyar's favourite figure of speech, stood it on its head.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages