POLITICS

Remembering Periyar: The Rebel Who Made India Question Its Traditions

By Open Vaartha Desk · 2026-09-16

What happened

Every September 17, India marks the birth anniversary of E.V. Ramasamy—Periyar—honouring a firebrand social critic who challenged caste, gender and religious orthodoxy. His Self‑Respect Movement, advocacy for women’s rights, and role in the Vaikom Satyagraha continue to shape debates on equality and rationalism. Periyar’s legacy endures because his relentless questioning of caste, gender and religious traditions still resonates in today’s India.

TL;DR

Periyar’s legacy endures because his relentless questioning of caste, gender and religious traditions still resonates in today’s India.

Key points

Periyar launched the Self‑Respect Movement in the 1920s to dismantle caste‑based dignity loss
He championed women’s rights, promoting Self‑Respect marriages that rejected Brahminical rituals
He participated in the 1924 Vaikom Satyagraha, linking his fight against caste beyond Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu’s Periyar Ninaivu Samathuvapuram and Vaikom Award keep his egalitarian ideals alive today

Remembering Periyar on his 147th birth anniversary: the iconoclast who made self-respect a political force.September 17 marks the birth anniversary of Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy (1879–1973), known as Periyar or Thanthai Periyar. In 2026 it is his 147th. Tamil Nadu observes the day as Social Justice Day. Leaders across parties garland statues, take pledges, and recall a man who spent decades attacking caste hierarchy, religious orthodoxy, and the idea that dignity should depend on birth.Born into a prosperous Balija Naidu trading family in Erode, Ramasamy first worked in municipal administration and joined the Indian National Congress in 1919. He took part in the Non-Cooperation Movement and prohibition campaigns. The turning point came with the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924–25 in Travancore, where he and his wife Nagammai joined the fight for lower-caste access to public roads around a temple. He was arrested twice and earned the title “Vaikom Veerar.” Disillusionment with Congress followed quickly. He opposed separate dining for Brahmin and non-Brahmin students at a Congress-linked school and found the party unwilling to treat communal representation as a core demand. In November 1925 he left Congress.That same year he launched the Self-Respect Movement (*Suya Mariyadai Iyakkam*) and the Tamil weekly Kudi Arasu. The movement’s aims were equality, annihilation of caste, and women’s liberation. It promoted self-respect marriages without priests or caste rituals, inter-dining, dropping caste suffixes from names, and education as the route out of subordination. Periyar argued that human actions should rest on reason rather than scripture, custom, or priestly authority. “Wisdom lies in thinking. The spear-head of thinking is rationalism,” he said. He also insisted that titles and wealth were worthless without self-respect and scientific knowledge.He later became president of the Justice Party and, in 1944, transformed it into Dravidar Kazhagam, a social movement that stayed out of electoral politics so it could remain uncompromising on reform. He opposed compulsory Hindi in the late 1930s, seeing it as cultural imposition, and at times advocated a separate Dravida Nadu. His ideas on proportional representation and reservations for backward classes fed into later constitutional and state-level social-justice policies. Both DMK and AIADMK trace ideological roots to the Dravidian current he helped shape.Periyar was an atheist and an iconoclast. He treated gods, temples, Manusmriti, and mythological texts as instruments of hierarchy when they justified degradation. One of his most quoted lines runs: if god, religion, or scripture is the root of degradation, destroy it. He compared sending food to dead ancestors through priests with modern science sending messages to planets. He was equally blunt on gender: husband and wife should be companions of equal status, not owner and property. “Only education, self-respect and rational qualities will uplift the down-trodden.” These positions made him a hero to many non-Brahmin, Dalit, and women’s-rights activists and a target for those who saw him as attacking Hindu tradition itself.His record is not simple. He used harsh language against Brahmins as a class and against religious practice. Critics argue some of his rhetoric shaded into community-wide hostility; supporters reply that he was attacking a system of ritual and occupational monopoly, not individuals. Statues of him have been vandalized and defended for decades. That tension is part of the legacy.On this anniversary the useful question is not whether every slogan still applies, but whether the core demand still does: that people should not have to trade dignity for custom, that women should not be treated as lesser by default, and that a society that stops asking questions is in greater darkness than one that argues. Periyar’s own formulation remains the most compact: oppression, in whatever form it appears, was the enemy. Remembering him means testing present inequalities against that standard rather than treating him as an unexamined icon.