The Dignity in Self-Respect

How Periyar and the Self-Respect Movement took shape in Tamil Nadu and why the state has done better than the rest of the country on many social, civil and public parameters

- By S. V. Rajadurai

2025 is the centenary of the Self-Respect Movement of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy. The term ‘self-respect’ encapsulates the main ideals of the movement—abolition of the distinctions between untouchables and Brahmins, the rich and the poor and the man and the woman—the distinctions undergirded by the hierarchical caste order with Brahminism as its ideological prop.

Though the movement was centred in the Tamil-speaking areas of the Madras Presidency and Pondicherry, it reached out to the downtrodden masses in Dharavi and Pune, the princely state of Travancore, and migrant Tamil communities in Malaya, Singapore, Ceylon and Burma.

Privileging ‘self-respect’ as the birthright of human beings as against the claim of B. G. Tilak’s Swaraj, Periyar argued that caste does not make for a healthy sense of the self, and to develop such a sense, one would have to practise self-respect, learn to value one’s self. In fact, this had to precede all other values and objectives, including freedom and self-rule, in short, even Swaraj. Periyar defined self-respect in diverse ways, and depending on the context of his utterance and the historical moment in which that utterance was required, self-respect was aligned to socialism, Islam and to the Buddhist notion of samadharma. Periyar’s use of the word ‘samadharma’, as a counter to Manudharma, and as an adjunct of socialism, which he argued had to do with the logic of just distribution, whereas ‘samadharma’ required a just and equal ethics which implicates all of us, the form of that ethical consensus that we forge with each other, that we shall hold and exercise rights and compassion in common.