A refused meal in Kashi turned a pilgrim into Periyar, India's great rationalist
In 1904 a young merchant's son from Erode went on pilgrimage to Kashi, was turned away from a free meal reserved for Brahmins, and ate scraps from the street. He left a believer and returned an atheist. As Periyar, he went on to reshape the politics of southern India.
Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy was born on 17 September 1879 into a Kannada-speaking merchant family in what was then the Madras Presidency. He spoke Kannada, Telugu and Tamil, left school after five years and joined his father's trade at 12. Listening to religious teachers who visited the family home, he began questioning contradictions in Hindu myths. In Kashi he tried to slip into a Brahmin-only eatery wearing a sacred thread, but his moustache gave him away and the gatekeeper pushed him into the street. Discovering that a wealthy non-Brahmin had funded the place deepened his disillusion.
He joined the Indian National Congress in 1919, chaired Erode's municipality, promoted homespun cloth and picketed toddy shops, winning concessions once his wife and sister joined in. As president of the Madras Presidency Congress he was invited to lead the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924, a campaign to open the roads around a Travancore temple to lower castes. He and his wife were arrested on arrival, and he was jailed again later. Gandhi negotiated a compromise that opened three roads but not the eastern one, which Periyar criticised; in 1925 the provincial Congress hailed him as the Hero of Vaikom, and he left the party that same year.
Travels through Malaya, Europe and the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1932 shaped his Self-Respect Movement, which championed caste equality, rationalism and women's rights, and aimed to give non-Brahmins pride in their Dravidian heritage. In 1929 he publicly dropped his own caste title. He took over the Justice Party in 1939 and in 1944 turned it into the Dravidar Kazhagam; a faction led by C. N. Annadurai broke away in 1949 to form the DMK. He also argued for an independent Dravida Nadu.
His campaigns often attacked Brahmins directly and resisted what he saw as the imposition of Indo-Aryan culture. The name Periyar means elder or respected one in Tamil. He died on 24 December 1973, and his second wife, Maniammai, carried on his work. Since 2021 Tamil Nadu has marked his birthday as Social Justice Day.
Source: Periyar
