Write short note: Self-Respect Movement. (2006, 2005, 2000)
The Self-Respect Movement (Suyamariyathai Iyakkam), launched in the Tamil country from 1925 by E. V. Ramasamy (“Periyar”, 1879–1973), is the most radical of India’s non-Brahman movements. Where most anti-caste reform sought better terms inside Hinduism, this one sought exit from it — a rationalist counter-culture rather than an upward claim.
Origins
Periyar led the Madras Presidency Congress but broke with it in 1925: the Congress-funded Gurukulam at Cheranmadevi fed Brahman and non-Brahman students separately, and the Kanchipuram provincial conference refused his resolution on communal representation for the backward classes. The Vaikom Satyagraha (1924) over temple-road entry, where he was imprisoned, had already convinced him that nationalism would not deliver social equality. He founded the Tamil weekly Kudi Arasu in 1925 as the movement’s voice.
Ideology and method
- Rationalism and atheism — religion and scripture were treated as instruments of Brahmanical domination, to be subjected to reason rather than reinterpreted.
- Anti-Brahmanism as anti-hierarchy, aimed at the ideology of ritual superiority, not at Brahmans as persons.
- Self-respect marriages without priest, mantra or homa, the first in December 1929; widow and inter-caste remarriage were promoted.
- Women’s emancipation — Periyar attacked the ideology of chastity, endorsed divorce, widow remarriage and contraception, arguing that caste is reproduced through the control of women’s sexuality.
- Organisation moved from propaganda to power: the Justice Party, taken over in 1939 and renamed the Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944, and, after the 1949 split led by C. N. Annadurai, the DMK.
Sociological assessment
In M. N. Srinivas’s terms this is the deliberate refusal of Sanskritisation: dignity was to come from rejecting the reference model, not copying it — which is why M. S. A. Rao’s use of reference group theory must be applied with care here, since the movement manufactured a new reference group, the rationalist Dravidian. Its results are visible in Tamil Nadu’s 69 per cent reservation, protected by the Ninth Schedule since 1994, in the Hindu Marriage (Madras Amendment) Act, 1967, which gave such marriages statutory validity, and in the appointment from 2021 of trained temple priests drawn from all castes.
Critique
Charisma was routinised into parties (Max Weber): atheism was quietly shed as the DMK and its successors mainstreamed. Dalit scholarship notes that the gains accrued disproportionately to the intermediate non-Brahman castes, leaving the adi-dravida still subordinate — anti-Brahmanism is not yet the annihilation of caste.
Conclusion
The Self-Respect Movement remains India’s most successful attempt to build an alternative cultural order instead of negotiating within the existing one — and the clearest demonstration that dismantling ritual hierarchy does not automatically dismantle caste itself.