E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker’s Critique of Gandhi and Congress

When a leader spends years working inside the Indian National Congress, even chairing its provincial committee, and then walks out to build a movement against it, something serious has gone wrong. That is exactly what happened with Erode Venkata Ramasamy Naicker, better known as Periyar. He joined the Congress in 1919, rose to become President of the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, and yet by 1925 he had resigned in disgust. His break with Congress and his sharp criticism of Mahatma Gandhi were not personal grudges. They flowed from a deep conviction that the freedom movement, as it then stood, was protecting Brahminical dominance and ignoring the social slavery faced by non-Brahmins. Understanding why he turned away tells us a great deal about the tensions hidden inside the nationalist movement.

Who was Periyar and why did he join Congress? 🔗

Periyar was born in 1879 in Erode in present-day Tamil Nadu, into a prosperous merchant family. He left formal schooling early and entered the family business, but his real interest lay in questioning religious orthodoxy, caste hierarchy, and superstition. According to Britannica, he was a social reformer who attacked the caste system, religious dogma, and patriarchy throughout his life.

He joined the Congress in 1919, drawn by Gandhi’s call for boycotting foreign goods and by the larger promise of the independence struggle. His entry was itself notable. As one academic study points out, the Congress of that period was dominated by Brahmins, so a powerful non-Brahmin leader rising within it marked a shift in the party’s social composition. Periyar took the work seriously. He gave up foreign cloth, picketed liquor shops, and by 1922 was President of the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee. From the inside, though, he began to see problems that he could not ignore.

The first cracks: communal representation rejected 🔗

Periyar’s earliest frustration was over communal representation, which meant reserving seats and posts in education and employment for non-Brahmin communities who had been historically shut out. He believed that without such guaranteed representation, the upper castes who already controlled education and administration would simply continue to control everything.

He repeatedly moved resolutions on this issue at Congress conferences. At a regional convention in Tiruppur, he proposed that Dravidian “untouchables” be allowed entry into temples, but the resolution was rejected, with most of the opponents being Tamil Brahmins. The same fate met his demand for communal representation, which Congress declined to accept at more than one annual conference. For Periyar, these refusals were not procedural setbacks. They revealed that the party was unwilling to disturb the caste arrangements that benefited its dominant members.

The Vaikom Satyagraha and Gandhi’s mild approach 🔗

The Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924-25 was a turning point. In the princely state of Travancore, lower castes were barred not just from entering the Vaikom Shiva temple but even from walking on the public roads around it. The protest demanded the right of all castes to use these roads.

Periyar threw himself into the agitation. He courted arrest twice, served time in jail, and earned the title “Vaikom Virar” or Hero of Vaikom. The movement eventually forced the Travancore authorities to open the roads, though the victory was partial. Gandhi supported the cause too and visited Vaikom in 1925, but here the two leaders diverged sharply in style. Gandhi took what Periyar saw as an overly mild and cautious approach, preferring negotiation and persuasion of the orthodox rather than confrontation. Periyar wanted a more radical assault on the structures of caste itself. This contrast in temperament hinted at a much deeper disagreement to come.

The Cheranmahadevi Gurukulam: the breaking point 🔗

If Vaikom planted doubts, the Cheranmahadevi Gurukulam incident confirmed them. This was a national training school near Tirunelveli, run by the nationalist V.V.S. Iyer and partly funded by the Congress. The school was meant to produce educated young people to carry forward the freedom struggle. But inside its hostel, Brahmin and non-Brahmin students were made to dine separately, with Iyer providing separate dining for Brahmin students at the request of their parents.

To Periyar this was unbearable. A school funded by the very party claiming to fight for the nation was practising open caste discrimination against the children it educated. He campaigned strongly to remove the segregation. When the Congress refused to act on his protest, he resigned from his post in the party. The episode crystallised his belief that Congress was not serious about ending caste privilege; it was content to manage social contradictions through symbolism rather than confront them.

The clash over varnashrama dharma 🔗

At the heart of Periyar’s quarrel with Gandhi lay the question of varnashrama dharma, the traditional doctrine dividing society into four varnas, each with its assigned duties passed down through birth. Gandhi, while opposing untouchability, publicly defended varnashrama. In July 1927 at Mysore, he declared his belief in varnashrama dharma, arguing that within it there were no high or low castes, only different functions.

Periyar found this position impossible to accept. He linked the very survival of untouchability to the continuation of varnashrama itself. As long as society accepted a system where birth fixed a person’s occupation and rank, he argued, inequality would remain. He compared the varna system to the rigid European guild system, which locked people into a destiny they could not escape. Gandhi’s silence on caste privilege, in Periyar’s eyes, simply matched the view held by Brahmins in general.

The disagreement was recorded in a now-famous exchange. When Gandhi insisted that varnashrama contained no notion of high and low, Periyar responded that this might be the theory, but in practice it never worked that way, placing Brahmins above and the rest below. Periyar also said that he and his colleague S. Ramanathan had personally asked Gandhi to lead an effort to end Brahmin dominance within the Congress, and that Gandhi declined. This convinced him that Gandhi wanted varnashrama to continue, and he resolved to mount a strong rebuttal of what he called “political Brahminism.”

The birth of the Self-Respect Movement 🔗

Having left the Congress in 1925, Periyar channelled his energy into building an alternative. Along with S. Ramanathan, he founded the Self-Respect Movement, known in Tamil as Suya Mariyadhai Iyakkam. The phrase “self-respect” captured its core idea: human dignity could only exist once the notions of superior and inferior caste were abolished.

The movement was, at its essence, a critique of Congress nationalism and of Brahminism. Periyar made a striking argument here. He held that the Self-Respect Movement, not the Congress freedom struggle, was the genuine freedom movement, because political independence would mean nothing for the masses without individual self-respect first. He even charged that the so-called freedom fighters were neglecting the more fundamental freedom of social dignity.

What the movement stood for 🔗

The Self-Respect Movement aimed to dismantle Brahminical hegemony, abolish the caste system, and promote rational thinking over religious superstition. It pioneered self-respect marriages, conducted without priests or religious rituals, directly challenging the role of Brahmins as gatekeepers of social ceremony. It also championed the dignity and equality of women, with Periyar attacking notions of chastity and the treatment of women as ornaments. The weekly journal Kudi Arasu, founded in 1924, became the movement’s main voice for spreading these radical ideas.

Periyar also held a view that set him apart from the socialists of his time. He argued that social inequalities rooted in birth would survive under any economic system unless caste was tackled first. Even full implementation of communist doctrines, he insisted, could not reform a society organised on caste hierarchy. For him, the destruction of caste came before everything else.

North Indian hegemony and the anti-Hindi agitation 🔗

Periyar’s critique was not only about caste. It extended to what he saw as the cultural domination of North India over the Dravidian South. He believed that Brahminical practices and the promotion of Sanskrit and Hindi were tools that undermined the rich, distinct heritage of Dravidian languages like Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada.

This came to a head in 1938. After the Congress won the 1937 elections in the Madras Presidency, Chief Minister C. Rajagopalachari introduced Hindi as a compulsory subject in schools. Periyar led a historic agitation against the imposition of Hindi, framing it as cultural imperialism by the North. The protest hardened the sense among many Tamils that they were culturally separate, and it pushed the Dravidian movement towards demands for greater autonomy. What had begun as a fight against caste discrimination increasingly took on the colour of a North-South, Aryan-Dravidian divide.

Why his critique still matters 🔗

Periyar’s break with the Congress and Gandhi forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth about the nationalist movement: the fight for political freedom and the fight for social equality did not always move together. He argued that swaraj led by the existing elite would simply transfer power from British hands to upper-caste Indian hands, leaving the social order untouched. This was the same anxiety that B.R. Ambedkar voiced in other parts of the country.

His legacy is visible in the politics of Tamil Nadu even today, where parties tracing their lineage to the Dravidian movement and the Self-Respect Movement remain dominant. The ideas of rationalism, anti-caste reform, and regional self-respect that he sharpened in the 1920s continue to shape political debate. Whether one agrees with all his positions or not, Periyar’s insistence that social reform must accompany, and even precede, political freedom remains one of the most challenging questions in modern Indian thought.

What do you think? Was Periyar right that political independence would mean little without first dismantling caste, or did Gandhi’s gradual approach make more sense for a society as diverse as ours? And how should a national movement balance the goal of unity against the demand to confront deep social inequalities head-on?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Periyar
2. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-024-1188-1_4
3. https://www.forwardpress.in/2018/09/periyar-challenged-aryan-supremacy-brahmanism-and-caste-divisions/
4. https://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/periyar-and-gandhii-1503174077.html
5. https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/periyar-memorial-built-alappuzha/
6. https://countercurrents.org/2025/11/the-self-respect-movement-and-periyar-e-v-ramasami/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-North_Indian_sentiment