Periyar’s Critique of Hinduism and Brahminical Domination

When E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, known across Tamil Nadu and beyond as Periyar, resigned from the Indian National Congress in 1925, he did so with a sharp accusation: the party served the interests of Brahmins alone. That break marked the beginning of one of the most radical critiques of religion in modern Indian thought. Periyar did not want to reform Hinduism. He wanted to expose it as a structure of power. His argument was direct-Hinduism, as practised, was less a faith and more a system designed to keep the masses subordinate while a small priestly class held the keys to knowledge, ritual, and authority. Understanding his critique is essential to understanding how social and political thought developed in twentieth-century India.

Who was Periyar and why his critique mattered 🔗

Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy was born in 1879 in Erode, in present-day Tamil Nadu. He led the Self-Respect Movement in the 1920s and later founded the Dravidar Kazhagam, becoming a fierce critic of the caste system, religious orthodoxy, and patriarchy. His significance lies in the fact that he attacked the problem at its root. Where many reformers wanted to cleanse religion of its worst practices, Periyar argued that the practices were not accidents. They were features.

His break with Congress was decisive. He left in 1925, accusing the party of favouring Brahmins and rejecting his proposal for non-Brahmin reservations in education and employment. From this point, his energy went into building an alternative vision of society-one founded on rationalism, dignity, and self-respect rather than scripture and ritual.

Hinduism as a tool of Brahminical domination 🔗

Periyar’s central claim was that Hinduism functioned as an instrument of oppression. He viewed religion, especially Hinduism, as a tool that maintained the status quo of caste hierarchies, gender discrimination, and social injustice. For him, the religion was not a path to the divine but a carefully constructed apparatus of social control.

This is what set him apart. He did not believe the inequalities within Hindu society were corruptions of a pure original. He believed inequality was the design. The texts, the rituals, and the social rules all pointed in one direction: keeping the majority-particularly the Dravidian masses-in a state of permanent subordination while sanctifying the supremacy of a privileged few.

Religion as divine justification for inequality 🔗

One of Periyar’s most powerful arguments concerned how religion supplied a moral cover for an unjust social order. He believed that religious teachings were designed to legitimise inequality, making the lower castes accept their subordination as a divine decree. This is a crucial insight. If a person believes their low status is the will of god, they are far less likely to rebel against it. Oppression dressed as destiny does not need police or armies to enforce it. It enforces itself through belief.

Periyar saw this as the genius and the cruelty of the system at once. By converting social hierarchy into religious truth, the structure protected itself. Questioning your place in society became the same as questioning the cosmos.

The critique of scriptures 🔗

If Hinduism was a system of domination, then its sacred texts were its instruction manuals. Periyar reserved some of his harshest criticism for the scriptures themselves. He condemned the Manusmriti, Vedas, and Puranas as instruments that reinforced social and gender inequalities, arguing that they promoted superstition and legitimised caste-based discrimination.

He argued that these texts were used to establish the authority of Brahmins over lower castes and of men over women, and he dismissed them as fanciful and irrational. His objection was not merely that the texts were old or strange. It was that they actively assigned ranks to human beings and called those ranks holy.

Burning the Manusmriti and the Ramayana 🔗

Periyar’s opposition was not confined to lectures and writing. When a resolution demanding temple entry for Dravidian communities was rejected-largely by Tamil Brahmin opponents-he responded dramatically. He announced that he would boycott and burn the Manusmriti and the Ramayana, two works he saw as promoting the notion of Brahmin supremacy.

This was deliberate political theatre with a serious purpose. By publicly attacking revered texts, Periyar wanted to shatter the aura of sacredness that made them immune to criticism. His reinterpretation of the Ramayana was especially provocative. He read episodes such as the killing of Shambuka-a Shudra punished for performing penance reserved for higher castes-as evidence that the epic encoded and celebrated caste hierarchy rather than mere devotion.

The monopoly over education and public life 🔗

A key plank of Periyar’s argument was economic and educational, not only theological. He pointed out that although Brahmins were a small minority of the population, they had a strong presence in fields such as education and administration in the Madras Presidency. For Periyar, this was no coincidence. It was the practical result of a system that had reserved knowledge for one community for centuries.

He argued that Hinduism had long restricted the reading of religious texts to a narrow group, prohibiting all except a small minority of Brahmins from accessing the scriptures. When modern education arrived under British rule, those who already held the advantage of literacy and learning were best placed to dominate the new schools, universities, and government offices too. The old monopoly simply transferred itself into a new form.

The religious economy 🔗

Periyar also saw a financial engine running beneath the rituals. He observed that Hinduism created numerous gods and festivals that provided an assured income to a small Brahmin group at the expense of everyone else. Every birth, marriage, and death required priestly services. Every festival needed ritual sanction. In this reading, religion was not only a belief system but a continuous source of revenue for those who controlled its ceremonies, while the masses paid in money, labour, and submission.

The Self-Respect Movement: critique turned into action 🔗

Periyar’s ideas were not meant to stay on paper. In 1925 he founded the Self-Respect Movement (Suya Mariyathai Iyakkam), which sought to dismantle priestly authority and oppressive customs. Its central goal was the eradication of caste-based hierarchies and the promotion of rationalism and individual dignity among non-Brahmin populations.

The movement turned philosophy into practice through concrete reforms. It promoted self-respect marriages conducted without Brahmin priests or religious rituals, replacing elaborate ceremonies with simple exchanges that allowed inter-caste and inter-religious unions and widow remarriage. It encouraged people to drop caste titles from their names. It championed women’s education, property rights, and equality in marriage. These were not abstract gestures-they directly removed the priest from the centre of social life, which was precisely the point.

The Vaikom Satyagraha 🔗

One of the defining episodes of Periyar’s early career was the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924-25. This was a nonviolent movement demanding that marginalised communities be allowed to use the public roads around the Vaikom Temple in the princely state of Travancore. Periyar travelled across the region delivering speeches, was arrested twice, and spent more than seventy days in jail for his role.

The episode also exposed a deep ideological gap. The final compromise opened only three of the four roads, keeping one reserved for Brahmins, and Periyar was bitterly disappointed. The disagreement revealed a rift with Gandhi, who saw the campaign as a Hindu reformist movement while Periyar saw it as a fight against caste-based atrocities. This difference captures everything about Periyar’s position. He had no interest in improving Hinduism. He wanted to confront the power it protected.

Dravidian identity and resistance 🔗

Periyar’s critique was tied to a broader vision of Dravidian self-assertion. He argued that the very assumption that Hinduism was the Dravidians’ religion, and that India was naturally their nation, had contributed to the historical subordination of the Tamil people. In his analysis, Hinduism preached the superiority of Brahmins, the inferiority of Shudras, and the untouchability of Dalits-a hierarchy he linked to what he saw as Aryan domination over Dravidians.

This framing transformed a religious critique into a question of identity and political power. To accept the religion, in his view, was to accept a position at the bottom of someone else’s order. To resist it was to reclaim dignity. The Self-Respect Movement later evolved into the Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944, and from this tradition emerged the major political parties that would go on to shape Tamil Nadu’s politics for decades.

Why Periyar’s thought endures 🔗

Periyar’s significance is not limited to his time. An Oxford scholar once compared his contemptuous attitude toward the influence of Hinduism in public life to the anti-clerical critiques of the European Enlightenment philosophers. The comparison is apt. Like those thinkers, Periyar insisted that nothing-however sacred-was beyond the reach of reason and questioning.

His method was confrontational, and it remains controversial. But the underlying questions he raised continue to matter: who controls knowledge, who benefits from tradition, and how does power disguise itself as faith? Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, his work forces a hard look at the relationship between religion and social structure.

What do you think? Was Periyar right that genuine social equality required dismantling religious authority rather than reforming it from within? And in a society where tradition and power are often intertwined, how do we tell the difference between faith and a system of control?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Periyar
2. https://ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2501266.pdf
3. https://brainly.in/question/61754782
4. https://www.forwardpress.in/2018/09/periyar-challenged-aryan-supremacy-brahmanism-and-caste-divisions/
5. https://grokipedia.com/page/Self-Respect_Movement
6. https://www.sanskritiias.com/current-affairs/the-centenary-year-of-the-vaikom-temple-street-entry-movement
7. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/34465