Scholars Revisit Periyar's Legacy at Oxford Event

THE 'Self-Respect Movement and its Legacies' conference, held at St Antony's College, University of Oxford, on September 4 and 5, brought together scholars from across the world to present papers on Periyar EV Ramasamy and the influence of his movement on society.

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The event was organised to mark 100 years of the Self-Respect Movement.

The opening panel on 'politics' featured a paper titled The Transitive Dravidian: Periyarism as a Universality by Abhimanyu Arni of the University of Oxford. The second panel, on 'Selfhood,' examined the notion of the 'Self' in Self-Respect. Sundar Sarukkai of the University of Hyderabad argued that the perceived opposition between Gandhi's idea of swaraj (self-rule) and Periyar's idea of self-respect is based on different approaches to the self, with swaraj focused on the idea of individual self and self-respect on the social self.