The Dravidian Movement and Regional Identity

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For more than half a century, every government of Tamil Nadu has been formed by a party descended from a single political tradition. Since 1967 the state has been governed alternately by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and the national parties that dominate elsewhere in India have held office there only as junior partners. No other large Indian state has kept national parties out of power for so long. Understanding why requires going back to arguments about language, caste and history that began in the nineteenth century.

The intellectual seed was linguistic. In 1856 Robert Caldwell, a missionary and philologist working in the Tamil country, published a comparative grammar arguing that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and related tongues formed a language family entirely separate from Sanskrit and the Indo Aryan languages of the north. That claim about grammar is uncontroversial today and remains the accepted scholarly position. What followed was not linguistics but politics: the idea that a distinct language family implied a distinct people with a distinct civilisation, older than and independent of the Sanskritic north, whose social hierarchy had been imposed from outside. Colonial race theory supplied a vocabulary of Aryan and Dravidian that many later scholars regard as a nineteenth century construction rather than a description of ancient populations, and modern genetic and archaeological work does not support any simple two race account of Indian prehistory. The framework nevertheless proved politically powerful.

From the Justice Party to the Self Respect Movement

The organised movement began as a grievance about access. In the Madras Presidency, Tamil Brahmins were a small share of the population but held a disproportionate share of English education, government service and professional positions, a distribution produced by long standing advantages in literacy and by colonial recruitment practices. In 1916 a group of non Brahmin professionals and landholders founded the South Indian Liberal Federation, universally known as the Justice Party after its newspaper. Under the dyarchy introduced by the Government of India Act of 1919 it won office in Madras and used it, issuing communal government orders reserving proportions of state appointments for various communities. This is the beginning of the reservation system in Indian public employment, and it predates independence by decades.

The movement's decisive figure joined later. E. V. Ramasamy, known as Periyar, left the Indian National Congress in the mid 1920s over what he saw as its unwillingness to confront caste, and in 1925 launched the Self Respect Movement. Its programme was radical by any standard: rejection of brahmin priesthood, of caste titles and of religious ritual in general, marriages conducted without priests or Sanskrit mantras, remarriage of widows, women's education and property rights, and outspoken atheism. In 1944 Periyar reconstituted the Justice Party as Dravidar Kazhagam, a social reform organisation rather than an electoral one, and argued for a separate Dravida Nadu.

Language provided the mass issue. When the Congress ministry under C. Rajagopalachari made Hindi compulsory in Madras secondary schools in 1937, the Justice Party and Periyar led agitations that continued until the order was withdrawn in 1940. The larger confrontation came in 1965, when the constitutional period during which English was to continue as an official language alongside Hindi approached its end. Protests across Tamil Nadu escalated into weeks of unrest, with deaths including self immolations, and the outcome was a national guarantee, later given statutory form in the Official Languages Act as amended in 1967, that English would continue as an associate official language for as long as any non Hindi speaking state wished. Tamil Nadu also adopted a two language formula in its schools, teaching Tamil and English and declining the three language formula used elsewhere. That refusal remains live policy and a recurring point of friction with the Union government.

Office, cinema and what the movement delivered

Periyar himself never sought power, but C. N. Annadurai broke with him in 1949, partly over Periyar's late marriage and the question of succession and partly over electoral strategy, and founded the DMK. It contested elections, dropped the demand for secession after the Sixteenth Constitutional Amendment of 1963 barred secessionist platforms, and won the Madras state assembly outright in 1967 on the back of the anti Hindi agitation and rising food prices. Annadurai became chief minister and in 1969 the state was renamed Tamil Nadu. After his death that year, M. Karunanidhi led the party; in 1972 the actor M. G. Ramachandran split away to form the AIADMK and won power in 1977, beginning the two party alternation that has held since.

Tamil cinema was central to this. Party writers wrote screenplays, film dialogue carried political argument, and the leading actors became the leading politicians. Annadurai and Karunanidhi were both scriptwriters; Ramachandran and later Jayalalithaa were both film stars. The result was a political culture in which mass communication, patronage and celebrity were fused decades before that became common elsewhere.

The policy record is substantial and measurable. Tamil Nadu reserves sixty nine per cent of seats in education and public employment for backward classes, most backward classes, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, a level above the ceiling the Supreme Court has generally indicated; the state protected it by having the relevant 1993 law placed in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution in 1994, and its status has been litigated since. The state legalised self respect marriages, weddings solemnised without priest or ritual, through an amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act in 1967. It built one of India's earliest and largest school midday meal programmes, expanded from a Madras city scheme into a state wide nutritious meal programme in 1982 under Ramachandran, and it has consistently posted among the better Indian records on literacy, life expectancy, maternal health and industrialisation.

Criticism is equally real and should not be smoothed over. Dalit writers and organisations argue that the movement redistributed opportunity mainly to intermediate castes and that untouchability and caste violence persisted in rural Tamil Nadu regardless of who governed. Others point to entrenched dynastic control of both major parties, and to a welfare politics of free goods that critics call clientelism and defenders call redistribution. The Aryan and Dravidian historical framing that gave the movement its name is treated sceptically by most historians today. What is not in dispute is that a regional, anti caste, language based politics captured a large Indian state and held it, and that Indian federalism has had to accommodate the result.

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