“Brahminical dominance“: Education, Employment, Governance and Arts and Culture
Throughout the post-Independence decades, until the very end of the 20th century CE, the Dravidian Movement launched in the State of Tamil Nadu by Periyaar and later crusaded by leaders such as C.N.Annadurai and M.Karunanidhi, became a social revolution of the non-Brahmins, by the non-Brahmins and for the non-Brahmins... against the Brahmins. The revolution became synonymous with the fight of the “backward castes” and Dalits against what was called “Brahminical dominance” of Dravidian space in the land of the Tamils. It was a transformative societal churn in the new, modern history of the Tamil peoples. Amidst themselves, never before in Tamilian history had overwhelmingly so many people openly shown so much rancor so relentlessly against so very few… .
The social dimensions of the real extent and degree of “brahminical dominance” have already been briefly but comprehensively described earlier in Part-36. What remains to be explained here is only how that “dominance” was broken, diminished and degraded over the decades by the Dravidian Movement and how its protagonists were able to successfully exploit to the hilt every inch of the legal and federal space that had been created and enabled by the Constitution of India. Elected State Governments lost no time in enacting their own state-laws aimed at banishing social injustice and caste discrimination and building a “level playing-field” of “equal opportunities” for all “sections of a democratic society“. Nowhere in any other state in India as in Tamil Nadu did political leaders and local governments go the whole hog to use… and at times even abuse… the legitimacy and latitude granted to them by the Constitution of India while legislating and then implementing far-reaching social re-engineering programs under the vaulting banner of fighting Caste.
Such “caste-busting” legislation was intended to serve and enable both social-engineering reforms as well as powerful weapon to end “Brahmin-dominance” in all its forms in Tamil Nadu — i.e. in Education, Employment, Governance and Arts and Culture. That weapon was called Reservations.
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Ms.V. Geetha is a writer, translator, social historian and activist who has written widely in English and Tamil on modern Tamil history, caste, gender, education and civil rights. She is most recently the author of ‘Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India’. . Geetha has written essays on the Dravidian movement and politics published in the ‘Economic and Political Weekly’, and the book, ‘Towards a Non Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar’.
The story of how the Dravidian Movement, from its very inception since pre-Independence era right up to this very day, conceived and used the affirmative-actions policy of Caste Reservation as legitimate Constitutional weapon in wearing down and eventually wiping out the so-called cultural dominance of Brahmins in Tamil Nadu is best narrated in V.Geetha’s own words that appear in a blogpost of hers on the internet https://www.forwardpress.in/2018/08/karunanidhi-and-social-justice/
QUOTE: “Periyar had taken over leadership of the old and almost moribund Non-Brahmin Justice Party, renamed it the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) and galvanized it into social action in favour of a sovereign Dravidian nation. To him and his Self-Respecters, the Dravidian nation was, in essence, a society free of the authority of the Brahmin and Bania, and the guiles of Brahminical Hinduism. For Periyar, this was not merely a question of upholding the right to national self-determination but of thinking through an alternative vision of the nation, and one that was not captive to Brahmin-Bania interests.
“The Self-Respect Movement was actively present in Tamil civic life, and denunications of faith, Brahmin hegemony and the indecencies of caste were urged from the stage, in newspapers and in everyday conversations. Unsurprisingly, Karunanidhi (who took over the mantle of leadership of the Dravidian Movement after Periyar and C.N.Annadurai) took to featuring these themes in his writings from as early as the 1940s, distilling, as it were, an available mass of rich ideas for a new generation – for people like himself, who had grown up in the heyday of the Self-Respect Movement and were now enthused by the possibility of taking its ideas far and wide through the evolving modern stage and film.
“Karunanidhi had a key role to play in establishing the coordinates of this Tamilness: through his writings and speeches, replete with quotes from ancient Tamil literature, he took on the brahminical culture and Hinduism, and substituted for it a distinctive Tamil ethos that drew on an array of classical literary texts. He made available this ethos in a language that could be easily understood. Thus it was generations of Tamils, from the 1950s onwards, who enthusiastically proclaimed their anti-caste politics or at least their disinterest in expressing their caste identities through an invocation of shared Tamil values. Dalits were drawn to the DMK for precisely this reason: that they could unite with others as fellow Tamils and since through the 1950s and 1960s, the DMK did agitate around issues of caste across the state, it did seem that Tamilness would edge out caste!” UNQUOTE
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In 1967, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the successor to Periyar’s Dravida Kazhagam (DK), won a historic State election and was swept into power. Karunanidhi became undisputed leader of the Party and the Chief Minister of the State. The Dravidian Movement never looked back again! It dominated Tamil Nadu politics like a colossus ever since then. And it was principally its policy of Caste Reservations that sustained it in power for several terms of office in decades that followed.
V.Geetha continues to narrate that story:
QUOTE: “In office, Karunanidhi was faced with the challenge of translating ideals into practice: as an opposition party that had urged the case of Tamil self-rule within the Indian Union, the DMK had proved quite popular. With the linguistic reorganization of states in 1956, its political instincts regarding language and culture in free India appeared to have been affirmed.
“In 1969, barely a few months in power, he set up a Backward Classes Commission – to enquire into the status of these classes in the state, with a view to revamping the reservation policy. Based on its findings, his government increased reservation for these classes from 25 per cent to 31 per cent. Reservation for Dalits was enhanced by 2 per cent taking it to 18 per cent. The Commission had divided the backward classes into two group: backward castes and most backward castes and recommended 16 per cent reservation for the former and 17 per cent for the latter. This distinction was not maintained when Karunanidhi’s government further increased the quota from 25 per cent to 31 per cent.
“…….. (subsequent) governments had already expanded the backward classes’ quota – to 50 per cent – …. (and) Keeping with what had happened, …. Karunanidhi’s government carved out a 20 per cent quota for (other castes agitating for reservation quotas like the Vanniyars) …. within the backward classes category. An additional quota of 1 per cent was fixed for the Scheduled Tribes, who were henceforth not to be considered only within an overall scheduled castes and tribes list. Interestingly, ….. in 2006 – Karunanidhi’s government (also) introduced a quota for the backward class Muslims within the general backward classes quota! And in 2008, in response to claims put forth by the Arundathiyars, a Dalit community in the State, he agreed to carving out a quota within the overall 18 per cent meant for the Scheduled Castes. UNQUOTE
The net outcome of all the decades-long maneuvering and electoral machinations that the DMK and other Dravidian political parties resorted to through Caste Reservation Policy was that they successfully managed to hold power in a tight grip in the State. The success was achieved partly thanks to the Dravidian version of the old British colonial axiom of governance, “Divide and Rule”. The cardinal aim of the Reservation Policy which was to eliminate Caste in society was sadly never achieved. Caste identities and consciousness proliferated as did caste tensions and old animosities that had festered and plagued Tamilian society.
The policy of reservations resulted in fact in a Tamil society that became a smorgasbord of castes and sub-castes: Vanniyars, Ambalakarars, Maravas, Kallars, Punnan Vettuva Gounder, Telungapatti Chettis, Thottiya Naickers, Urail Gounders, Valayars and Vettaikarars, to name only a few. They became some of the major castes in the Backward Community which, to date, is said to have a total strength of 68 castes. The number of castes in the Most Backward Communities (MBC) is 109. The Other Backward Castes (OBC) list in Tamil Nadu has a total of 252 castes.
In spite of the Supreme Court of India in 1990 ruling that Reservation on the basis of Caste should not be more than 50 per cent, the Tamil Nadu government passed a special legislation — the Tamil Nadu Act of 1994 in the State Legislature — and received Constitutional protection for defying that same limit by getting it included it in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution of India…. thereby putting the matter completely under the sole purview of the State Government .
As at February 2022, there is 69 per cent of reservation quota in education and public employment and in other government sponsored institutions and establishments etc. in Tamil Nadu. The tally is: Backward Class Total: 30 per cent (Non Muslim 26.5, Muslim 3.5); MBC 20 per cent (Vanniyars 10.5, DC 7, other castes 2.5); Scheduled Caste 18 per cent (Arunthathiyar 3.5); Scheduled Tribes 1%; Total 69 per cent.
Looking at the profile of Tamilian society today, who knows? Manu’s much-maligned spirit while hovering somewhere up there in the high heavens, is looking down at it with a wry, all-knowing and self-vindicating smile!
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Reservation policy indeed broke the back of the entire Brahmin community in Tamil Nadu. Regarded as a “forward caste“, Sri Vaishnavas too who were included as brahmins were seen to be leaving their rural and traditional homesteads in droves and migrating in masses to urban Tamil Nadu. Throughout the 1960s through the 1980s, many young highly educated Sri Vaishnavas together with their parents and entire families left native shores and sought immigration outside India. Many settled in America and became part of the ever increasing numbers in the global Sri Vaishnava diaspora.
Within Tamil Nadu however, they found themselves being either denied opportunities for social advancement or being able to avail it only in severely limited “quota-driven” numbers. Over the period 1970s through the 1990s, Reservation rapidly led to the large-scale exit or eviction of brahmin presence in educational institutions such as schools, colleges, universities and research institutions as well as from government civil-services, bureaucracy, and other centers of state governance. The Sri Vaishnavas too suffered the same fate.
The impact of the Reservation Policy was thus yet another trauma suffered indeed by the Sri Vaishnavas. It not only caused communitarian identity to crumble and splinter — i.e. in terms of the “Class A and Class B” socio-economic class-groupings as described in Part-36 — but also drastically shrank their relative demographic size and presence in the State’s population relative to other Tamil communities. This is evidenced in the chart below.
According to a 2014 research finding in the book “Tamil Brahmans:Making of a Middle Class Caste” written by C.J.Fuller & Haripriya Narasimhan, https://www.scribd.com/document/575191056/C-J-Fuller-Haripriya-Narasimhan-Tamil-Brahmans-The-Making-of-a-Middle-Class-Caste-University-of-Chicago-Press-2014, the total population of Tamil Brahmins in India as per the 2011 Census of the Government of India was reported to be 1.850 million. There was however no estimate given of the Sri Vaishnava population in the overall count. However, based on my own very approximate estimate which is no more than an educated “guesstimate“, I have reckoned the size of the Tamil Nadu Sri Vaishnava community to be more or less around 438,000 to about 500,000 today. (Please note that the population of Vaishnavas including other sects of Ramanand, Nimbarka, Chaitanya, Vallabhacharya and Ramanujis etc. across India is estimated to be 500 million).
Against the total population of Tamil Nadu today which is reported to be 72.15 million, it would thus not be inaccurate to conclude that the total Tamil Brahmin population in the State is not more than 2.5% to 3% of the total. And the size of the Sri Vaishnava community within that statistic is perhaps no more than 0.6% to 0.75% of the total State population!
It also reveals that the Sri Vaishnava population in the State is no more than c.25% of the Tamil Brahmin population. (These estimates of course will have to be reviewed once the Census of the Government of India that was due to be held in 2021 and is on date yet to be undertaken).
V.Geetha commenting in her blog on precisely the above situation in Tamil Nadu observes:
QUOTE: “DMK chief Stalin (and the present Chief Minister of the State in 2022) in his keynote speech at a (DMK) party conference in Erode in 2018 began his speech with the words “from then to now, those who are 3 in 100 among us have never failed to show their true colors. But while that 3% community is united the remaining 97% isn’t, which is why ‘Varnashrama Dharma’ is rearing its head again. Periyar spent his life solely for the purpose of making us be aware of this fact and understand (the situation)”.
“DMK and fellow Dravidianists create a bogey of Brahmins controlling every field despite being only 3% of the total population of the state. They have successfully established this narrative and now are on to the next step, which is removing/relocating even those who remain in the state. This is a bogey used to keep the 97% in a state of trance so that they are ignorant of the fact that it is the political dynasties among the land-owning intermediary (i.e. higher non-Brahmin) castes (in Tamil Nadu) that have sprung up as the new elite, that control and suppress the marginalized.” UNQUOTE
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As for any community in India, for the Sri Vaishnavas of Tamil Nadu too, their religious identity had always been very important to them since to have an identity was to feel empowered. Identity is empowerment, after all. But then Sri Vaishnavas, reduced to no more than 0.6% of the total Tamil population, became voiceless ciphers…. an utterly insignificant and inconsequential constituency in the wilderness of Indian democracy at large. For them to talk of Identity became rather comic, ironic and embarrassing. The Sri Vaishnava was a non-entity trying to assert whatever was thought remained still of his identity….
The word “identity” in the political ecosphere of Tamil Nadu has increasingly come to connote aggressive assertion of identity. Terms such as “social dynamics of caste”, “Dravidian pride”, “elimination of caste-discrimination and distinctions” etc. has become common, stock language of the politics of Tamil identity. Caste-groups or community such as the Backward or Dalit castes that had for long carried the historical baggage and burden of social grievances — and demanded redressal from the rest of the country — have a single-point agenda to achieve their goal: create a grand narrative about their own identities and then convert that narrative into a burning social issue. And at the very heart of such a narrative is “anti-Brahminism”. All of the politics of Tamil Nadu is caste-politics… “identity intoxicated“!
Amidst all the social churn and upheaval happening around him, the disempowered Sri Vaishnava’s search for an identity has nothing to do with social “assertion”, nor empowerment, nor “intoxication”. He is really not agitating for any social space or recognition, nor advancing any community interest. In fact, he realises he would look foolish if he did so because, in sheer demographic terms, his presence in the population of Tamil Nadu is insignificant and infinitesimal 0.6%….!
Demography alone is not everything in the world for a Sri Vaishnava identity. He believes he has deep roots in the history, heritage and ancestry of Tamil Nadu dating back to more than a millennium. The “ubaya-vedaanta” community’s search for a new identity has become a deeply spiritual quest to rediscover a reinvented version of an old ideal of ethical life… a search for a certain way of living, for a certain human behavioral pathway that could lead to personal freedom, fulfilment and salvation. It is also a very deeply troubled quest.
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(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi