CHENNAI: The ‘Self-Respect Movement and its Legacies’ conference, held at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, on September 4 and 5, brought together scholars from across the world to present papers on Periyar EV Ramasamy and the influence of his movement on society. The event was organised to mark 100 years of the Self-Respect Movement.
The opening panel on ‘politics’ featured a paper titled ‘The Transitive Dravidian: Periyarism as a Universality’ by Abhimanyu Arni of the University of Oxford. The second panel, on ‘Selfhood,’ examined the notion of the ‘Self’ in Self-Respect. Sundar Sarukkai of the University of Hyderabad argued that the perceived opposition between Gandhi’s idea of swaraj (self-rule) and Periyar’s idea of self-respect is based on different approaches to the self, with swaraj focused on the idea of individual self and self-respect on the social self.
S Anandhi of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) spoke on the Dravidian movement’s role in shaping the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 and its 1967 amendment that recognised self-respect and other reformist marriages under Hindu law. Vignesh Rajahmani of KITLV-Leiden/King’s College London highlighted how the DMK in the 1950s-60s invested in reading rooms, which became “spaces for oppressed castes to access newspapers, periodicals, and engage in debate.”
Under the ‘Inheritance’ panel, Karthick Ram Manoharan of the National Law School of India University spoke on the predecessors of the Self-Respect Movement; J Jeyaranjan of the Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission explored the ideological foundations of the Dravidian model of governance, and A R Venkatachalapathy of MIDS presented a paper titled ‘The Fraught Engagement: Periyar and Communism’.
On the second day, the ‘Caste’ panel saw Christophe Jaffrelot of Sciences Po Paris delve into Dravidianism and Ambedkarism, noting that in both cases ‘a process of ethnicization of caste was intended to give the plebeians a new self-esteem by situating them out of the caste system’.
Martha Ann Selby of Harvard University examined how Periyar, despite claiming no affinity for language and literature, left an indelible mark on later trends in Tamil literature. The closing lecture, The Dravidian Geography and the History of Respect, was delivered by Arjun Appadurai of New York University.