Periyar, An Acolyte To Antagonist

Nobody criticised Gandhi as fervently and unjustly as the Tamil leader did

- P.A. Krishnan

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy must easily be one of the most controversial political personalities of 20th­ century India. a people’s man, he spent the last 50 years of his long life practically on the move, haranguing at street corners, frequently getting abused and having stones thrown at him. The Tamils are rightly proud of him because he was one of his kind. Periyar was a proud person, but never selfish. His love for the Tamil people and the underprivileged was unquestionable. He did not know how to mince words and often went overboard. He truly detested religion, God, caste, social discrimination, Brahmins, the ideas of Gandhi and the very idea of India.

Of the three major leaders who stoutly opposed Gandhi, two, Jinnah and Ambedkar, are well-known and their works are available in English. The third, Periyar, is familiar to non-Tamils only through a minuscule, translated portion of his enormous output and some adulatory accounts of his life by his admirers. There is not a single biography of him in either Tamil or English, which satisfactorily covers his extraordinary journey. Not that contemporary historians, especially non-Tamil ones, are complaining. As far I know, none of them has made any serious effort to a get a complete picture of Periyar.

The lacuna is cleverly being exploited by Periyarist intellectuals who, without any compunction, attribute to Periyar views which they think he would have been better off possessing. Periyar was stark black and white—the person you get today is a highly colourised and heavily touched-up version of his real self. There is no doubt that his real self itself had much to commend. He was, by a long chalk, the greatest social reformer of Tamil Nadu who kept asking uncomfortable questions. The problem was he almost always thought he had all the right answers himself and came down heavily on those who said they too had a few alternative answers.

THE GANDHI DEVOTEE