On November 15, 1938, two days after the first Tamil Women’s Conference in Chennai, a group of women walked to the Hindu Theological School and sat in front of its gates. They had come to protest the Congress government’s order of making Hindi compulsory in schools across the Madras Presidency. Five of them were arrested that morning.
These women were Dr S Dharmambal, her daughter-in-law Seethammal, Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar, Neelambikai Ammaiyar, and Malarmugathammaiyar. In the first phase of the anti-Hindi struggle, 73 women and 32 children were jailed alongside 1,164 men. Several died. A woman named Padmavati was arrested and she died from the injuries police inflicted on her in custody. These women have a prominent place in Tamil memory, yet they occupy remarkably little space in written history.
The conference that started it all
The government order arrived in April 1938. C Rajagopalachari, the then Prime Minister of the Madras Presidency, announced that Hindustani would be taught compulsorily in 125 secondary schools. However, opposition erupted across Tamil Nadu. Dr Dharmambal founded the Thyagaraya Nagar Munnetra Kazhagam and organised the first women’s conference on the issue, held on November 13, 1938, shares writer and publisher Nivedita Louis. She says, “Many political organisations that later shaped Dravidian politics adopted the same term, but Dharmambal’s association appears to be the first documented example.”
In Nivedita’s book ‘1938 Mudhal Mozhi Poril Pengal’, she records the second declaration of that conference, which called on Tamil women to defend the language because the tradition itself demanded it. “Since land, country, language, art, and wealth are all referred to with feminine names in Tamil tradition, it is the duty of women, even more than men, to safeguard the language,” the declaration read.
The conference brought together the Thanithamizh Iyakkam, Islamic associations, and Dravidian groups under a single roof. Among the women who led it were Neelambikai Ammaiyar, daughter of Tamil scholar Maraimalai Adigal; Thamaraikanni Ammaiyar; Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar; Pandithai A Narayani; Meenambal Sivaraj; and Kalaimagal Ammaiyar. It was at this conference that EV Ramasamy was conferred the title ‘Periyar’.
Thamaraikanni addressed the gathering with a directness that cut through political caution. Nivedita quotes her, “If Hindi remains in its rightful place, we have no issue with it. But when it forcefully takes the place of our mother tongue, we resist it. In Tamil Nadu, I have no objection to those who voluntarily learn Hindi. That is my stance.”
WOMEN JAILED IN THE 1938 AGITATION
Dr S Dharmambal: Founded the Thyagaraya Nagar Women’s Munnetra Kazhagam. Arrested on November 15, 1938. When warned of imprisonment, she said, “Then arrest us.” Sentenced to six weeks. Welcomed back from Vellore jail on December 28, 1938, by more than 1,000 people.
Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar: Educated only till the third standard. Arrested and sentenced. While she was in jail, the authorities seized her daughter-in-law’s gold bangles, worth six sovereigns from Mayavaram, to recover the ₹50 fine. Declared on release: “The spirit of the protesters cannot be suppressed by such measures.”
Neelambikai Ammaiyar: In 1937, she compiled a Hindi–Tamil dictionary in which more than 7,000 technical terms were provided with a Tamil equivalent. She founded the ‘Saiva Madar Sangam’ in 1942 in Palayamkottai, which despite its religious garb actively engaged with women’s issues.
PS Pappammal: Unmarried young woman from Vannarapettai, Chennai. Arrested on December 16, 1938, at the school picket. Nivedita identifies her as “the first unmarried young woman arrested in the Anti-Hindi agitation” and calls this “truly revolutionary” for 1938.
Rajammal: Aged 72 at the time of her arrest on November 28, 1938. Held a long debate with the magistrate upon inquiry. Sentenced to 15 days. Released on December 10, 1938.
Abaranjitham Ammal: Arrested on December 16, 1938, with her one-year-old child Elangovan. Both fell from the police lorry owing to its speed and sustained injuries.
Kannammal: Sister of Periyar, who also edited Kudiyarasu. Wrote the article ‘Indraya Aatchi Murai Yen Ozhiya Vendum’ (October 1937); charged with sedition; fined ₹300; was arrested in January 1938. Refused to defend herself in court, and stood by every word she wrote.
Padmavati: Arrested for wearing a sari bearing the slogan ‘Tamil Vaazhga’. Died from police injuries in 1938.
Dhanalakshmi: Forcibly loaded into a police truck during the 1948 protests, driven 40 miles from home and abandoned. Suffered a miscarriage and died from the ordeal.
Why the record is thin
Writer Leena Manimekalai argues that the absence is structural. Political histories favour formal leadership, and those positions went mostly to men. Women worked through social reform networks, literary circles, and grassroots mobilisation rather than party hierarchies, and that work left fewer institutional traces. “Later political narratives,” Leena says, “particularly those centred on party formation after the 1965 agitations, tended to foreground charismatic male leaders, compressing the earlier decades of feminist and social reform activism that nourished the movement.”
Prof Anandhi echoes this, and notes that after the language agitation ended, women moved more into social welfare activities. The movement itself then faded for a period, its urgency absorbed by Congress’ adjustments to language policy and the quieter settlement of federalism. The story of women’s disappearance from the record, she says, mirrors the story of the movement’s own disappearance. “The battle for language itself was lost for some time. It’s not just a story of women who were not there. The movement itself was not there.”
She adds that what exists in the archive is more than people realise. “One cannot say that women were invisible. Newspapers of the movement carried regular reports of women’s speeches, arrests, and participation. In fact, I have collected these writings in the Encyclopedia of Women’s Writing prepared for the Tamil Nadu Textbook Committee. One can’t say that the movement gave no importance to their participation. It was there.”
The case for recovering this history is not merely academic. Prof Anandhi notes that the ideological resistance to Hindi imposition, which women in 1938 articulated from their own lives, shaped the political and educational landscape of Tamil Nadu for generations. “By prioritising education in Tamil and English, the Dravidian movement ensured that Tamil Nadu continues to thrive in terms of education and social mobility. This linguistic strategy has also played a crucial role in its broader human development,” she says.
In The C section of the jail
S Anandhi, a professor who has studied women’s participation in the Dravidian movement, points to the composition of those who were arrested as evidence that the agitation reached far beyond educated elites. “Police records show that the women arrested were put in the C section of the jail, where women from lower-class backgrounds were placed,” Anandhi says. “Since the C section was quite full, it shows that women from subaltern groups actively participated in the movement.” The A and B sections held detainees of higher class or social status. The C section’s crowding tells a different story.
She continues, “Unlike many male participants who were educated, the women who joined were not necessarily well educated. The movement also had a large number of lower-caste women participating, including Dalit women such as Meenambal Sivaraj.” Ramamirtham Ammaiyar herself had studied only till third standard. Almost all the women came from non-Brahmin, lower-caste communities. Prof Anandhi notes that Brahmin women were absent from this movement entirely, in sharp contrast to their strong presence in the civil disobedience movement and women’s reform associations of the same era.
What the magistrate heard
Inside the courtroom, the attempt to diminish these women continued. Prof Anandhi recounts one exchange that has stayed in the archive. A magistrate asked a woman with small children why she had chosen to go to jail. The police told the judge that these women were poor and had come to the protest hoping to receive milk for their children. In other words, hunger had brought them, not conviction.
The woman replied. Anandhi quotes her, “We have a larger ideological conviction. Any imposition of a language threatens Tamil interests and also affects mothers who raise children.” She said the women did not follow their husbands into the streets. “They decided to participate autonomously. We were not pushed by our husbands to come into the protest, as the police claimed,” Prof Anandhi says.
She reads the exchange carefully. “The police, standing for the Congress government, tried to trivialise it. The women themselves asserted that they had a clear political understanding of the language question and their rights. This shows that women seized the opportunity to participate in a public mass movement with full awareness of what they were doing.”
Anandhi says Kudiyarasu carried news about women’s participation, their arrests, their speeches, and even judicial inquiries verbatim. The front page of the paper on September 3, 1939, carried the headline ‘Veezhga Hindi’ denoting the downfall of Hindi and a memorial for those who died in the agitation.
Language and the women who carried it
Historian Vijaya Ramaswamy, in her monograph on Neelambikai Ammaiyar published by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, traces how Neelambikai became the intellectual and political centre of the Tani Tamizh Iyakkam, the Pure Tamil Movement. Born in 1903 to Maraimalai Adigal, one of the movement’s co-founders, Neelambikai delivered her first public lecture at the age of 13. By 1925, she had published Tani Tamizh Katturaigal, a collection of essays arguing for the purging of Sanskritic influence from the Tamil language.
Vijaya writes that it was Neelambikai who, as chair of the 1938 women’s conference, conferred the title ‘Periyar’ on EV Ramasamy. Neelambikai died in 1945, before independence, having written 13 books while raising 11 children. Her biographer T Tirunavukkarasu recorded that she wrote while carrying one child and cradling another in her arms.
Prof Anandhi draws a line from the Dravidian movement’s broader intellectual project to the women who filled those courts and jails. She argues that women in the movement connected the language question directly to their lives. “They argued that mothers are the ones who impart language to children, so the language question is closely connected to women’s lives. They approached it pragmatically — how language functions in everyday life, how it relates to their daily experiences.”
She also points to the body of writing women produced in the Dravidian movement’s journals from as early as 1914. “A number of women wrote articles discussing the language question and connecting it to women’s liberation. They argued why language mattered for women and how it is related to their rights. There has been a very conscious articulation of it.”
KEY DATES IN THE ANTI-HINDI AGITATIONS
1918
MK Gandhi established the Dakshin Bharath Hindi Prachar Sabha in Madras to spread Hindi across South India
April 1938
C Rajagopalachari’s government ordered Hindi made compulsory in 125 schools in the Madras Presidency
Nov 13, 1938
First Tamil Women’s Conference held in Chennai, led by Dr Dharmambal, Neelambikai Ammaiyar, Moovalur and others
Nov 15, 1938
Women staged satyagraha in front of the Hindu Theological School. Five leaders were arrested
1938–39
73 women and 32 children were jailed. Padmavati died from police torture. The government eventually withdrew the compulsory Hindi order
1948
Second Language War began when the Omandur Ramasamy government reintroduced compulsory Hindi. Dhanalakshmi died after police harassment
January 1965
Student protests erupted across Tamil Nadu after Hindi was declared the official language of India. Multiple self-immolations. Police opened fire on marchers
1967
DMK won state elections. CN Annadurai implemented the Two-Language Policy, establishing Tamil and English as Tamil Nadu’s official languages