The Radical Discourse of E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker

Few thinkers in modern India provoked as much debate as Erode Venkatappa Ramaswamy Naicker, the man most people simply call Periyar, meaning “the revered one.” His discourse was not a polite plea for reform. It was a frontal assault on the foundations of caste society, religious orthodoxy, and patriarchy. To understand his ideas is to confront some of the most uncomfortable questions about power, faith, and identity in South Asian society. This post breaks down the core threads of his radical thought and why they still spark argument a century later.

Who was Naicker and what shaped his discourse 🔗

Born in 1879 in Erode, then part of the Madras Presidency, Naicker came from a family of traders who guarded their religious beliefs closely. Yet from a young age he questioned the inconsistencies he saw in Hindu practice. A turning point is said to have come during a visit to Kashi (Varanasi), where he was reportedly denied free food meant for Brahmins and left to scrounge for scraps in the streets. This humiliation hardened his hostility toward caste hierarchy and religion, an experience that fed directly into his later ideology.

He first worked within the Indian National Congress but left it in 1925 after accusing it of favouring Brahmins and rejecting his proposal for non-Brahmin reservations in education and employment. That break set the stage for an independent ideological project: the Self-Respect Movement, founded the same year. From this point, his discourse developed along several connected lines, each radical for its time.

The war against Brahminism 🔗

The single thread running through everything Naicker said was anti-Brahminism. He saw Brahminical religion and culture not as one tradition among many but as the central tool used to exploit the lower castes. One contemporary observer described him as a “utilitarian with a vengeance,” noting that while rationalism, atheism, and socialism were milestones in his career, the theme uniting them all was opposition to Brahminism. In short, his atheism flowed from his anti-caste politics, not the other way around.

His Self-Respect Movement aimed to abolish Brahminical hegemony, secure equal rights for backward classes and women, and revitalise Dravidian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. The movement encouraged ordinary people to abandon caste-based rituals, reject priestly authority, and assert their own dignity.

Dravidian identity as resistance 🔗

Naicker reframed caste oppression as a story of cultural domination. He argued that Brahmin dominance in administration, education, and social life was tied to a North Indian, Aryan, Sanskritic order imposed on the Dravidian south. So he built a counter-identity: pride in a Dravidian past that pre-dated and stood apart from Brahminical Hinduism.

This is why he could embrace mythological figures rejected by orthodox tradition. The asura king Ravana, for example, became for him a useful symbol to counter the hegemonic claims of the Hindu gods and the Hindu state. The point was never devotion; it was inversion of the dominant narrative.

Rationalism and the rejection of superstition 🔗

If anti-Brahminism was the target, rationalism was the weapon. Naicker insisted that reason was the foundation of human dignity, claiming that a man without reason was no better than an animal. He treated religion and rationality as complete opposites. In his framing, self-willed reason alone could restore the worth of those enslaved by religion, because anyone bound by notions of god and fate had nothing they could call their own.

His rationalism was relentless and consistent. He did not only attack Brahminical ritual; he equally ridiculed the popular religious beliefs, festivals, and practices of non-Brahmins, urging them to examine every custom with a spirit of inquiry. The philosophy of self-respect taught that human actions should be guided by reason and that refusing to submit to anything irrational was a form of freedom. For Naicker, blind submission to the irrational was itself a kind of slavery.

His atheism in context 🔗

Naicker is best known, and most controversial, for his atheism and his sharp attacks on the Hindu gods. But his godlessness was not an abstract philosophical position like that of a Western academic. His atheism was located within a mass movement for social justice and remained alert to the political problems of his day. He even said on occasion that if god or religion could stand on the side of social justice and against oppression, he would have no quarrel with them. Since, in his view, they did not, he opposed them.

Borrowing from Rousseau, Marx, and Ingersoll 🔗

Naicker’s discourse was not built in isolation. After a tour of Western countries beginning in December 1931, including a visit to the Soviet Union, he returned and published Tamil translations of works advocating atheism and socialism. These included the Communist Manifesto, Bhagat Singh’s “Why I am an Atheist,” Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am not a Christian,” Lenin’s writings on religion, and the essays of Robert Ingersoll.

The American freethinker Robert Ingersoll, famous in the nineteenth century for his public attacks on organised religion, was a clear influence; admirers noted that Naicker matched Ingersoll in loudly proclaiming his denial of god on countless platforms. From the broader rationalist tradition came the idea, echoing thinkers like Rousseau, that human dignity rests on liberty and reason rather than inherited authority. The Indian rationalist current he drew on was itself shaped by Western figures such as Ingersoll and George Holyoake.

His engagement with Marx was real but selective. He enthusiastically supported socialism, yet distrusted the Indian Communist parties because he saw them as dominated by Brahmin leadership that would perpetuate hierarchy rather than destroy it. He admired the Soviet experiment but doubted it could be copied in India without first removing Brahmin supremacy and Hinduism. In other words, he filtered every borrowed idea through his core concern: dismantling caste.

Women, marriage, and the critique of patriarchy 🔗

Naicker recognised that caste and patriarchy reinforced each other, both sanctioned by religion. His discourse on women was strikingly radical for the early twentieth century. He campaigned for widow remarriage, divorce, property rights, and inter-caste marriage, and used his journal Kudi Arasu to spread these ideas.

He believed economic independence was the key to women’s liberation. He argued that women must inherit parental property, reasoning that without that right their dependence violated their self-respect. He condemned child marriage, opposed compulsory motherhood, and even supported a woman’s right to control over her own body.

Self-Respect marriages 🔗

One of the movement’s most striking innovations was the Self-Respect marriage, a wedding conducted without a Brahmin priest, religious rituals, or Sanskrit chants. These marriages carried a threefold meaning: removing the priest, asserting inter-caste equality, and asserting equality between man and woman. Periyar claimed to have conducted them unofficially from 1925 and officially from 1928. They were finally given legal recognition in 1967 by the DMK government in Tamil Nadu, a concrete legacy of his discourse.

From social reform to political movement 🔗

Naicker’s ideas did not stay confined to pamphlets and meetings. He gave them organisational and political form. He had earlier earned the title “Vaikom Hero” for leading the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924-25 in Kerala against caste restrictions on temple roads. In 1937, when the Congress government in Madras tried to make Hindi compulsory in schools, he opposed it as an attempt to undermine Tamil identity and impose Brahminical dominance, becoming a central figure in the anti-Hindi agitations.

In 1944, he reorganised the Justice Party into the Dravidar Kazhagam, turning it into a platform for Dravidian ideology and social reform. This laid the intellectual foundation of the Dravidian Movement that later reshaped Tamil Nadu’s politics through parties like the DMK. His discourse, in effect, became the ideological backbone of an enduring regional political tradition.

Why his discourse remains contested 🔗

Naicker’s legacy is genuinely double-edged. To supporters he is a champion of equality, reason, and the dignity of the oppressed. To critics, his confrontational atheism and uncompromising attacks on religion went too far. His framing of an “essential Hinduism” identical with Brahminism has also been questioned by scholars, who note it sometimes mirrored the very Orientalist assumptions he opposed.

What is hard to dispute is the scale of his ambition. He did not want to soften caste society at the edges. He wanted to replace its religious and hierarchical foundations with secularism, rationalism, and modernity. Whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, his discourse forces a confrontation with questions most reformers preferred to avoid.

What do you think? Can a movement for social justice succeed by attacking religion head-on, or does that risk alienating the very people it hopes to liberate? And how much of Naicker’s relevance today comes from his answers, rather than the questions he refused to leave alone?

References

1. https://en.themooknayak.com/bahujan-nayak/periyars-vision-the-self-respect-movement-and-its-enduring-legacy
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Periyar
3. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/1/10
4. https://prepp.in/news/e-492-self-respect-movement-modern-india-history-notes
5. https://modernrationalist.com/why-have-i-chosen-periyar-ideology/
6. https://scroll.in/article/871440/he-who-created-god-is-a-fool-periyar-believed-religion-and-rationality-are-complete-opposites
7. https://shuddhashar.com/periyars-political-atheism/
8. https://modernrationalist.com/let-us-learn-periyarism/
9. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34722
10. https://www.civilsdaily.com/news/100-years-of-the-self-respect-movement-in-tamil-nadu/
11. https://anubooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/RJPSS-Vol.-47-No-1-Mar-22-7.pdf
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periyar_E._V._Ramasamy_and_women's_rights
13. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/dravidian-movement/