Periyar

At the end of the film, when the hero defeats the Pakistani terrorists, it's a religious Hindu hymn that plays in the background, right? It's not the Indian national anthem.

And it's a very distorted view of what India is because India, in reality, or at least the way, you know, I do subscribe to the Nehru way of thinking, um, to the Periyar way of thinking and, and so on and so forth, and, and this idea of India as this multi-civilizational, multi-religious cultural continent.

The whole point of the right-wing ideology is to use nativism and legitimacy found from the past as a way to validate current political decisions, right? It's like the reason why we can make certain policy decisions now is because the past tells us that the Malays were here first.

Mm-hmm.

And the man who would go on to challenge Brahminical dominance in Tamil Nadu is this guy named E. V. Ramaswamy.

He was also called Periyar.

There were others before him, like Ayothi Das and Marai Malai Adigal.

But it was Periyar, or E. V. Ramaswamy Naikar, who really, really took the fight to Brahmins in the 1910s.

He was with the Congress.

He quit the Congress because he felt the Congress was not quite as serious about eliminating caste-based discrimination as he was.

So my first recommendation is, it was also the birthday of a gentleman called Erode Ramasamy yesterday.

who we also known as Periyar a man truly amazing who made a huge impact in Tamil politics which is apparent till today and I guess it's his influence that till today that is one bastion that the Hindu right cannot penetrate so Indian Express had a really nice piece on him on his birthday by Nikita Mohan who was Periyar remembering the atheist who profaned the gods I mean if you see some of if you read some of his writings and things he said I mean, you'd be like, even if you're an atheist, you might be scandalized.

But yeah, I think it's important that he's remembered just as much as the yajnas that have been conducted across the country.

The second is because someone had said, why do I recommend him so much? And why do I consume? I've consumed all his podcasts.

And, you know, following this period, you take us through how the Congress was particularly invested in alcohol policy as the flashpoint, right, for mass mobilization.

So could you share with our listeners why prohibition was so crucial to the rise of a Congress-led Indian nationalism? And how did it interact with Periyar and the Justice Party in the Madras presidency? So what was really going on at the province level and how was it sort of intersecting with the nationalist impulse towards mobilizing around alcohol policy led by the Indian National Congress?

So for the Congress, alcoholic drinking surfaced as an especially emotive issue of what the colonial state had done to India.

Here, there was a deliberate parallel that was drawn between the body of the drinker as what that was destroyed, that was debilitated as a result of drinking to the body politic of India itself.

was using it to express Indian culture and tradition because the Congress was also making the argument at the time that drinking was never Indian to begin with, that it was never part of Indian culture to begin with, that it was a borrowed foreign cultural import that had to be watered against.

So a policy like prohibition then ticked multiple boxes.

How did it interact with Periyar and the Justice Party in the Madras presidency? As we know, Periyar was a former congressman who had grown up disillusioned with Gandhi and the Congress, particularly in terms of what he saw as the Congress's undue tolerance for caste.

And so with a policy like prohibition, which was in fact in the Madras presidency spearheaded by the Brahmin Tamil Brahmin leader, C. Raja Gopalacharya, that played into the Justice Party and Periyar's critique of Congress Raj as Brahmin Raj.