Periyar’s Influence: The Meaning Of Mariadhai

This year is celebrated as the 100th year of the Self-Respect Movement. Self-respect is an important and essential component of Periyar’s radical critique of caste society. Periyar’s influence on the politics and society of his time cannot be underestimated. His formulation of self-respect (suyamariadhai) was a conceptual tool to produce social equality, for both for the non-Brahmins as well as women. After a hundred years, what has happened to this idea of self-respect in contemporary Tamil society? As well as terms like non-Brahmin and Dravidian?

The idea of self in Periyar is most often related to the opposition between Brahmins and non-Brahmins. The category of non-Brahmins produces a self in opposition to the self of Brahmins. But this raises one fundamental question about this opposition. In such a structure, the Brahminical self becomes primary and the other selves are defined with respect to it. The Brahmin self remains an autonomous self that defines other selves in relation to itself.

Defining non-Brahmins in opposition to Brahmins produces a secondary sense of self. The self of non-Brahmins in this context is one whose reference is another self, not itself. The political shift from the language of non-Brahmins to Dravidian is an important step in reclaiming the primacy of the non-Brahmin self, but whether such formulations escape the category ‘non-Brahmin’ remains an enduring problem. (A term that does not privilege the Brahmin self is ahinda, which is an acronym for minorities, backwards and Dalits, and has been powerfully used in Karnataka.)

This problem is socially manifested in the internal contradictions between the non-Brahmins and Dalits in Tamil Nadu. As Gopal Guru notes: the category of non-Brahmin is “politically aggressive but theoretically weak” since it fundamentally connotes anti-Brahmin and is not really non-Brahmin. His point, like many of the Dalit activists in Tamil Nadu, is that the reference point for social change cannot be Brahmins or non-Brahmins, but only Dalits or women. Extending Guru’s point, Tamil writer S. Ramanujam points out that the self in self-respect is “conceptually inclusive, but socially exclusive”.

To add to this problem, the category of Dravidian has not found any foothold in the other Southern states, both politically and socially, to the extent that today Dravidian in public discourse has become synonymous with Tamils as an ethnic category.

Self-respect is much more than being respected or respecting oneself. For Periyar, it is fundamentally about the capacity to think, analyse, be critical and to possess freedom. In talking about the genesis of the Self-Respect Movement, Periyar writes about self-respect as follows: “Before doing anything, one should think whether it is right or wrong, see the causes, analyse things, do research, and respect the truths. This is what self-respect means. Freedom and self-respect are closely related… Without self-respect, there will be no good of freedom. It is the self-respect ideal that commands feelings of freedom.” Here, it seems to be the case that it is the concept of freedom that most powerfully embodies the notion and ideal of self-respect. He recognises that it is the self that is in a state of unfreedom, and self-respect will be an agential move towards the state of freedom.

However, while Periyar’s self-respect was an influential idea, its meaning gets eroded due to the cultural significance of respect (mariadhai) in Tamil societies. While the core idea of respect is relational, there is also a deep implication of authority present in it. Temples, including non-Brahmin ones, ritualise the idea of mariadhai in various ways. It is a recognition of status, as well as a mark of authority. Mariadhai, as a cultural category, is manifested in many Tamil films—look at the movies with the word mariadhai in their title! As an interesting anecdote: Aniyathipravu (younger sister dove/pigeon) from 1997 was one of the biggest hits in Malayalam at that time. It was remade in Telugu as Nenu Premisthunnanu (1997), in Hindi as Doli Saja Ke Rakhna (1998) and in Kannada as Preethigagi (2007). In Tamil, the title was Kadhalukku Mariyadhai (1997), the only title with mariadhai! The cultural world of Tamil society resonates with the idea of mariadhai in so many locations.

The manifestations of mariadhai in the social space have to do with power and authority, and not respect and dignity. It is repeatedly invoked in marriages where rituals are designed to respect the groom’s side. In the stories of honour killings to do with caste transgressions, which unbelievably have an ugly face in Tamil Nadu today, the spectre of respect is always invoked—respecting the family, the father and many times, the brothers as well. Mariadhai is an essential component of the Tamil patriarchy. While Periyar’s use of mariadhai in the Tamil context is a rhetorical masterpiece, the inability of the larger political movement to articulate an autonomous idea of an inclusive self has led to increased alienation between the Dalits and the non-Brahmins, and many times between the non-Brahmin castes themselves.

Respect as a conceptual term is caught between the two poles of authority and fraternity, both of which have to do with particular notions of the self. Thus, it is first necessary to define the self that can do the required task. An autonomous, rational self without a sense of the social will only reproduce elements of the Brahminical self, namely, a self that is authoritative. A self that is based on fraternity, the Ambedkarite self, is needed to produce the meaning of respect that is present in self-respect.

The cultural manifestation of respect moves towards authority, while Ambedkar moves towards fraternity. It is the latter that can help society to get out of the individual, panoptic Brahminical self and move towards the relational, experiential social self.

It is important to position the opposition to Brahminism in terms of the rejection of this autonomous self, from whose standpoint others are defined. Moreover, if respect is based on an autonomous self, then there is always a strong possibility that respect becomes pride, which excludes others in order to achieve the state of pride. So, self-respect becomes self-pride and an assertion of one’s superiority over others. This is exactly what Periyar was warning against.

In a caste society, the fundamental tension is between the individual self and the collective/social self. The emphasis on the individual self makes the group identity reducible to self-identity. If we begin with the claim that the self is fundamentally a social self, and not an autonomous individual agent that defines others with respect to it, then it gives us a platform to critique hierarchies between communities.

As Gopal Guru and I discussed in our book Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social, caste operates as a sensory social. An approach like this challenges the assumption that senses (and feelings) are fundamentally internal and individualistic. If we are cognisant of these views, they offer ways to understand individual agency within a group identity, as well as the nature of an autonomous group agency.

To do this, it is necessary to articulate the nature of the social self as well as social agency. One way is to critique the Brah­mi­nical self, not only by denying it but by reducing it to the same social self that characterises the non-Brahmins, including Dalits. Furthermore, one of the strongest arguments to support Periyar’s assumptions about the self can be found in the new app­roaches to senses as being social. Individual experiences are actually social senses, and using these formulations will radically displace the stability and self-assuredness of the Brahmi­nical self and place it on par with all other communities.

(Views expressed are personal)

This story appeared as The Meaning Of Mariadhai in Outlook’s December 11 issue, Dravida, which captures these tensions that shape the state at this crossroads as it chronicles the past and future of Dravidian politics in the state.

Sundar Sarukkai works primarily in the philosophy of the natural and social sciences. His latest book is the novel Water Days