Periyar E. V. Ramasamy
E. V. Ramasamy, known as Periyar, was a Tamil social reformer who founded the Self-Respect Movement and made anti-caste rationalism the dominant political idiom of southern India. Born in Erode in 1879 into a wealthy merchant family of the Balija caste, he received little formal education and ran the family business. He spent a period as an ascetic in Varanasi, where he was refused food at a free kitchen reserved for Brahmins and, by his account, ate from a rubbish heap. He dated his rejection of religion to that experience. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1919 and became a leading Tamil organiser. He left it in 1925 over its refusal to guarantee communal representation and over the treatment of non-Brahmin children at a Congress-run school in Cheranmadevi, where they were fed separately. He founded the Self-Respect Movement in 1925, which held that caste and Hinduism were inseparable and that Tamil people should reject both. It promoted marriages without Brahmin priests or religious rites, widow remarriage, inter-caste marriage, and women's right to divorce and to contraception. He was an unusually forthright advocate of women's autonomy for his time. He took over the Justice Party in 1939 and renamed it Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944. He opposed the imposition of Hindi as a national language, leading agitations from 1937 that shaped Tamil politics for decades, and at times argued for a separate Dravida Nadu. His movement split in 1949 when C. N. Annadurai left to found the DMK, which entered electoral politics and has governed Tamil Nadu ever since. Periyar himself never held office. He died in 1973.
- Lived: 1879 CE – 1973 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: social_reformer
