New Indian-Chennai News + more

Members Login
Username 
 
Password 
    Remember Me  
Post Info TOPIC: EV Ramasamy -- The Man Who Opposed Mahatma Gandhi's Idea Of India


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
EV Ramasamy -- The Man Who Opposed Mahatma Gandhi's Idea Of India
Permalink  
 


Periyar EV Ramasamy -- The Man Who Opposed Mahatma Gandhi's Idea Of India

Not as famous like a Jinnah or Ambedkar, Periyar fervently criticised Mahatma Gandhi but his extraordinary journey is not well documented, writes Tamil author PA Krishnan

Periyar EV Ramasamy -- The Man Who Opposed Mahatma Gandhi's Idea Of India
IN BAPU’S FOOTSTEPS
­Coloured adaptation of a black-and-white woodcut print by Nandalal Bose
 

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/india-news-periyar-ev-ramasamy-the-man-who-opposed-mahatma-gandhis-idea-of-india/302169

140 days Total count of Gandhi’s fasts

21 days Gandhi’s three ­longest fasts

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

 

Initially, Periyar said of Gandhi: “All countries cry for his help. Even Westerners compare him to Jesus Christ.”

Periyar entered Tamil Nadu politics in his middle age as a follower of Gandhi, at the ­instance of Rajaji, with whom he remained a steadfast friend throughout his life.  “The ­momentum of ‘Swaraj within one year’ swept me away. My relatives and neighbours thought I had gone mad… There were several others who were as mad as I was. Rajaji, Ramasamy Naicker (as Periyar was known then)…and others too were roaming around and thousands gathered to hear these madmen speak.”  This is T.S.S. Rajan, a freedom fighter, writing in his Tamil memoir published in 1947. Rajan is talking of the ­euphoria that captured the ­nation when Gandhi ­announced the non-cooperation movement in 1920. Periyar was then one of the star speakers of the Congress. His earthy way of approaching problems and his simple and direct Tamil ­attracted people all over the Tamil country. He picketed toddy shops and advocated temple entry for Dalits and other downtrodden communities, went to prison for the ­effort, sold khadi and started a magazine called Kudiayarasu (The Republic) which, for a ­period, had on its masthead the slogan ‘Long live Mahatma Gandhi’. He was so reverential of Gandhi that he chided, in one of the issues, all those who criticised Gandhi as political schemers. “All subjugated countries cry for his help. Even the Westerners, who have all the independence needed, compare him with Jesus Christ,” he said.

The Schism

The same Periyar, in his very last speech made in December 1973, said: “These are our five principles—annihilation of God, annihilation of religion, annihilation of Gandhi, annihilation of Congress and annihilation of Brahmins…Before we could annihilate Gandhi, the Brahmins did the task for us.” In the intervening years, there was not a single leader who criticised Gandhi as ­intensely—and as unjustly—as Periyar did. Yes, he was shocked when Gandhi was killed and wrote that India should be renamed Gandhi Desh. But he quickly recovered and started calling Gandhi names again.  

How Did The Break Happen?

Periyar’s supporters keep harping that his rift with Gandhi occured because of Gandhi’s views on varnashrama dharma (caste system). But then Gandhi’s notions of varnashrama dharma were known much before Periyar became his admirer. They troubled many other leaders too, who continued to be with the Congress. Periyar himself says his demands were of a higher order: “My friend Rama­nathan and I told the Mahatma (when we met him) that three tasks had to be completed for India attaining ­independence and self-respect. The first would be the destruction of the Congress party, the second the destruction of Hindu religion and the third the destruction of the domination of Brahmins. The third would automatically happen when the first two tasks were completed. Gandhi’s response was not to our satisfaction.”  This was in 1927.

Gandhi’s views on varnashrama dharma became less rigorous as he evolved. The Gandhi of 1948 was not the Gandhi of 1927. On the other hand, Periyar regressed. He became more bitter, more abusive, especially after India won independence. This was what he said in 1957 when he called for the burning of Gandhi’s pictures: “We were cheated by Gandhi. Our land (the Tamil land) has been ­enslaved to the Northerners and Brahmins by Gandhi. It is because of Gandhi that people lost all great qualities they had…(and) it is now impossible to live without being ­immoral, dishonest, deceitful and traitorous”.

OUT OF THE FOLD

Periyar (right) with Ambedkar in 1954.

The Bitter Antagonism

Periyar’s formula during those days was simple—listen to what Gandhi says and take a diametrically opposite stand. He was among the few leaders who welcomed the Simon Commission. He vigorously opposed the Salt Satyagraha and joined the Justice Party, which was embarrassingly pro-British. In the party convention held under Periyar’s leadership in December 1938, the Justice Party resolved that Tamil Nadu should be made a separate state, loyal to the British and directly under the secretary of state for India. In 1939, Periyar became more ambitious. He organised the Dravida Nadu Conference and advocated a separate and independent Dravida Nadu. There was practically no support for him from either within Tamil Nadu or from the other three states of south India, but it did not deter him from repeating the demand the following year when Muslim League came out with the Lahore resolution demanding the establishment of Pakistan.

Periyar expectedly gave full support to the demand for Pakistan and tried to enlist the League’s support for the creation of his Dravida Nadu, only to be rebuffed by Jinnah. The underlying ideology of Dravida Nadu was pure racism. He held that south Indians, ­especially Tamils, were a separate race and the Brahmins who came from the north were intruders and possibly Jews.  Later, when India attained independence Periyar boycotted the day, much to the horror of his own disciples like Annadurai.

The Ghost Of Democracy

Gandhi was a democrat. He was clear that India would be run by a government elected by its own people through adult suffrage. This is what he said: “I am wedded to adult ­suffrage... Adult suffrage is necessary for more reasons than one, and one of the ­decisive reasons to me is that it ­enables me to satisfy all the reasonable aspirations, not only of the Musalmans, but also of the ­so-called untouchables, of Christians, of labourers and all kinds of classes.” Periyar’s views on democracy were spectacularly opposite to Gandhi’s. There is a haphazard collection of Periyar’s sayings curiously called The Collected Works of Periyar, compiled by K. Veeramani, the head of Dravidar Kazhagam. It has a quote by Periyar which can be summarised as follows: The ­entire country is in the clutches of three ghosts and five diseases—God, caste and democracy are the three ghosts; Brahmins, newspapers, political parties, legislatures, and cinema are the five diseases.

 

“Gandhi cheated us. Tamils have been ­enslaved to the north and Brahmins by Gandhi,” Periyar said in 1957.

The apologists of Periyar hold that he was a democrat in a fundamental intellectual sense, which clearly means he was not one in practice. They add “he was a radical republican and imagined the state as embodying an instrument of rule that ought to represent the greater common good and that was sovereign only ­because it was a people’s state”. That he most certainly was not. Whenever the state came down on helpless people with all the force in its command, Periyar usually sided with the state. During the ­anti-Hindi struggle of 1965, he sided with the rampaging government and demanded even harsher measures on the agitators.  When 44 helpless Dalits were burned alive in Kilvenmani in 1968, he came out with two ­astounding statements. In the first, he said as long as democracy existed, the honest would have to disappear and the dishonest would take centre ­stage. He went on to state that Indians were barbarians and the Indian dharma was the dharma of criminals. In the second, he wanted democracy to be destroyed and the rule of kings to be established!

Periyar was a spontaneous man. His spontaneity was his problem. As his admirers say, he was certainly a man of the street, though none of the streets he frequented could ­really be called an agora. He was no Socrates either. Socrates took up complex problems and tried to find solutions to them. Periyar thought every complex problem had a simple solution—readily available with him.


(P.A. Krishnan is a well-known author in Tamil and English. Views are personal.)



-- Edited by Admin on Friday 27th of September 2019 06:28:05 PM

__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

Sundar Raja Cholan

#நினைவோடையில்

பழைய தஞ்சாவூர் மாவட்டத்தில் கடுமையான பண்ணையாரிய முறை இருந்தது.அதன் தலைமையாக வடபாதிமங்கலம் தியாகராஜ முதலியார் இருந்தார்.

இடதுசாரிய புரட்சி இங்கெல்லாம் தெலுங்கானாவை விட கொழுந்துவிட்டு எரிந்த காலம்.பிராமணர்,வெள்ளாளர்,உடையார் போன்றவர்களிடம் அதிக அளவில் நிலம் இருந்தது.

அப்போதைய சமயத்தில் அந்த பண்ணை அடிமை முறைகளை எதிர்த்து கடுமையாக போராடியவர்கள் பி.ராமமூர்த்தி,சீனிவாசராவ்,மணலி கந்தசாமி,மணலூர் மணியம்மாள்.இதில் மணலி கந்தசாமியை தவிர மற்ற மூவரும் பிராமணர்கள்.கிட்டதட்ட அழிதொழிப்பு போராட்டமாக மாற வேண்டிய அளவிற்கு நடந்தன அதன் வீரீயம்.

மணலூர் மணியம்மை என்பவர் விதவை "மொட்டை பாப்பாத்தி" என்று கேலி செய்யப்பட்ட காரணத்தால் ஜிப்பா,வேஷ்டி அணிந்து காந்தியின் முன்னாள் காங்கிரஸ்ஸில் இணைந்து பின்னால் இடதுசாரிகளோடு சேர்ந்து பயணம் செய்தார்.இவரைப்பற்றி ராஜம் கிருஷ்ணன் ஒரு நாவல் எழுதியுள்ளார் அதன் பெயர் 'பாதையில் பதிந்த அடிகள்' என்று.

இதை சொல்லக் காரணம் இப்படி தன்னலம் கருதாமல் ஒரு கொள்கையின்பால் நடந்த போராட்டங்களில் திராவிட இயக்கத்தவர்களின் மூலவர்கள் கலந்து கொண்டது எது?

பெரியார் தலித்துகளுக்கு ஆதரவாக கலந்து கொண்ட போராட்டம் என்ன? கீழ்வெண்மணி படுகொலைகள் பெரியார்,அண்ணா,கருணாநிதி யார் பக்கம் நின்றார்கள்? அதோ அந்த படத்தில் பின்னால் மூன்றாம் கலைஞர் நின்று கொண்டிருப்பது போல்தானே😊



__________________
Page 1 of 1  sorted by
 
Quick Reply

Please log in to post quick replies.

Tweet this page Post to Digg Post to Del.icio.us


Create your own FREE Forum
Report Abuse
Powered by ActiveBoard