Anirudh Deshpande
Professor of Modern History,
Department of History,
Faculty of Social Sciences,
University of Delhi, Delhi.
In our opinion, any liberation movement created by men cannot give real liberation to women.
– Periyar, 1928
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When the views of Periyar E.V.Ramasamy (1879-1973) were publicly expressed in the 1920s and 1930s, they were not only novel in the Madras Presidency but would have been considered deeply offensive by most men and women anywhere in the world, not to speak of a contemporary deeply religious and patriarchal India.
Are most employed or self-employed women subservient to men or has their ability to earn money become their condition of liberation from caste and religious patriarchy? These are troubling questions in our times and call for a serious introspection of our culture from the standpoint of revolutionary leaders like Periyar who would, we believe, be as critical of our society today as he was before 1973 when he passed away.
It would be apposite to begin this essay with two quotations from Periyar’s writings. In February 1928, he wrote the following words:
If a man has the right to kill women, a woman should also have the right to kill men. If there is a compulsion that women should fall at men’s feet, then men should also fall at women’s feet. This is equal rights for men and women. Anything else is selfishness and stupidity and not love.
Then, two years later, in April 1930 he debunked procreation in the following words:
We recommend women to stop having children because pregnancy is an enemy to the freedom and liberation of women. Not only that, because of having many children, even men are unable to live with autonomy, courage and independence.
To place Periyar in context, a preliminary comment on the history of social reform in India in the nineteenth century is necessary. Indians began to consider reforming the condition of their women under the impact of British rule in the nineteenth century. The upper-caste social reform initiatives in India during the nineteenth century focused attention on many aspects of the wretched condition of Indians: education, child marriage, polygamy, widow remarriage and abominable practices like sati.
‘This reform was often based on a reinterpretation of Indian traditions in an attempt to bring them in line and modernity. While these reformers, almost all of them savarna males, were concerned about the condition of Indian women, the solutions they offered to the women’s question in colonial India were framed in a framework best described as liberal patriarchy, the ideals of which were provided to these reformers by the British rulers of India. After all, Victorian Britain was patriarchal in every possible way. In pre-colonial India social reformers, in general, were not preoccupied with gender questions as we see them today. Even the Shramanic heterodox tradition, opposed as it was to the Brahminic tradition, did not dwell much on the wretched condition of Indian women throughout the ages. Many of the nineteenth-century reformers shied away from the real causes of women’s enslavement even as they adopted a reformist public posture. In private life many of them practised selective reform.
Rammohan Roy opposed widow remarriage and advocated a chaste widowhood; widows were not supposed to entertain or fulfil their sexual desires in his scheme of things. M.G. Ranade, the Chitapavan Brahmin Maharashtrian social reformer, nationalist historian and one of the first graduates of Bombay University established in 1857, opposed child marriage which was rampant in his days. Personally, he caved in to social convention and married a girl child. He tried to lessen the impact of this regressive act by educating his young bride. Keshab Chandra Sen, with Brahmo roots, was a vociferous campaigner against child marriage who got his child-daughter married into a princely family when the opportunity arose. Ranade’s contemporary, Tilak, was a conservative traditionalist who opposed the Age of Consent Bill and Act which raised the age of marriage consummation by a mere two years. On almost all the issues of women’s reform the patriarchal Indian society failed the upper-caste reformers.
Take widow remarriage, legislated in 1856 by Lord Dalhousie, for instance. The saintly Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar advocated widow remarriage but Bengali society did not take him seriously. On the other hand, reform-revivalist movements like the Arya Samaj desired the conversion of Hindu women into ideal Arya women whose lives would revolve around family males, especially their husbands. The Hindu nationalist Gita Press publications would cast this role in stone during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. This jelled with the values of the sanatana males. From the late nineteenth century till independence and thereafter nationalism(s) wanted women to be ideal female nationalists dedicated to the family, a microcosm of the masculine patriarchal nation.
In contrast, Periyar understood and deconstructed the male-led and dominated social reform during the colonial period. The ideas and work of E.V. Ramasamy ‘Periyar’ (1879-1973) must be viewed against the patriarchal background of women’s reform in colonial India. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Brahminism was challenged and undermined by the Phule couple, the founders of the Bahujan Samaj movement, in the Bombay Presidency, and later, Periyar in the Madras Presidency from the 1920s onwards. At the same time Brahminism was attacked with productive results by the ruler of the Kolhapur State, Rajarishi Chatrapati Shahu and his descendants. Brahmin hegemony was also attacked by the anti-caste reformers in the princely states like Baroda and Travancore – Cochin. Periyar’s ideas emerged from a world view which developed in south India during the colonial period and dates back to at least the nineteenth century.
This world view developed and sharpened its edge in the political atmosphere of the time marked by intense competition between the savarna and non-savarna castes in all fields of life. An investigation of these socially subversive ideas also reveals their connection with widespread popularity of Shramanic movements in south Indian society, the roots of which can be traced to the medieval times. During the first half of the twentieth century, when Ambedkar established himself as a critic of the Congress and the Hindu, nationalist organisations and became the leading representative of Dalit voices in India, the movements referred to above created a large social space for anti-Brahminism politics in peninsular India. The rise of Brahminical Hindu nationalism and its main organisations, the Hindu Mahasabha (1916) and RSS (1925), were reactions to the growing pelf of the anti-caste movements.
Periyar was a unique libertarian long before the Feminist Movement arrived in India. He wrote a number of explosive articles between 1926 and 1930 on a variety of issues related to the slavery of women in a patriarchal society. In his considered view anything which hindered women’s liberation from patriarchy had to be destroyed both in theory and practice. These articles addressed a number of issues which together form the core of Indian patriarchy: chastity, love, divorce, widow remarriage, prostitution, plight of widows, property rights, birth control and finally, masculinity, which he said ‘must be destroyed for Women’s Liberation.”
Periyar preached the destruction of masculinity in a 1928 essay. As a libertarian he wrote:
Everybody knows that the number of associations and activities in the name of women’s liberation across the world keeps increasing day by day. Men pretend to be highly concerned and make a great deal of pretence. In our opinion, any liberation movement created by men cannot give real liberation to women.
Further, he was aware that the male-led women’s reform movements were in fact designed to reinforce ‘the restriction that enable the enslavement of women. His writing evinced an equivalence between the slavery of women and the slavery of non-Brahmins and he used allegories to buttress his argument: “Will rats be liberated by the effort of cats? Will goats and cocks be liberated by foxes? Will the wealth of Indians increase because of the British? Will the non-Brahmins attain equality by the efforts of Brahmins?’ This counter to the trusteeship theory of Gandhi was based on a simple but underestimated historical realisation – the oppressed can never be liberated by their oppressor; revolutions never occur from above.
Further, his reading of the Vedic texts convinced him that women’s liberation was impossible in a society dominated by upper-caste males. Without using the word ‘hegemony’, as Antonio Gramsci did in the case of the oppressed sympathising with their oppressors by the use of various ideological strategems, Periyar favoured destroying the masculine/feminine binary. This would be possible only when women stopped believing in this separation of idealised identities. But this destruction of idealised identities did not happen because, ‘even women hold this true on the basis of religion.’ Any religion which obstructed male-female equality had to be destroyed. Where the masculine and feminine both were exalted by a god ordained religion, it was ‘essential to destroy the concept of godliness that is responsible for the god-created ‘masculinity’ and femininity’.
In a time when children were considered gifts of the almighty by the great majority Periyar shocked everyone with his outspokenness. Unless child-bearing was abandoned, he said presciently, patriarchy would continue to rule the roost even if women had men on their payroll. To the question what would happen to the human race if women stopped bearing children. Periyar offered an acidic answer: ‘We don’t know of any benefit that has come out of the human race that has multiplied for so long’! Worried by the unsustainable human burden on earth, many would agree with him today.
Periyar’s view of love and divorce bordered on a Bohemian anarchism and militated against the common idea of heterosexual eternal love promoted by the scriptures, media and cinema. He believed that love, pleasure and satisfaction must coexist in a relationship because the ideal of romantic love is irrational and that too in a patriarchal way. Marriage and love often became incompatible because of the stark difference between the ideal and reality of marriage. What is the purpose of men and women living in matrimony without pleasure? ‘The world’, he wrote, ‘has attributed an extraordinary quality to the word “love” ingrained into the minds of people and unnecessarily dimmed the purpose of men and women living together.’ Quite often, he observed, ‘for the sake of love, people lead a troubled life lacking pleasure and satisfaction.’ If marriage degenerates into a loveless slavery of habit, it must be demolished by divorce. If love arises and disappears it is not eternal. Anyone who blows love ‘out of proportion is foolish by nature.” These ideas problematize marriage and negate sanatana marriage which enjoins being married to the same person till eternity. If the purpose of marriage is child bearing, sex and continuing the household, where is a love based on equality in it? If women’s conception of love differs from men, what does love mean? Periyar dismissed ‘true’ love as infantile:
Generally speaking, it is natural for human beings to look at and think of a particular thing and desire it, but have liking and kindness towards many. Likewise, it is natural for human beings to become frustrated with anything, to hate it and part from it. Is it not natural to get fooled at moments of weakness, to try to rectify the mistakes when we have become stronger, to get bonded when we are inexperienced and try to get liberated when we have gained experience?”
He concluded that the imagination of being in love is more important than understanding love to most people.
Because a lot of things have been imagined about love and fed into men and women, they too think that they have to put on an act to show that they are true lovers….. Because it has been said that pious people behave in such and such manner, a lot of people (who want others to call them pious) apply sacred ash on their bodies, keep visiting temples continuously, sing songs and cry, and always murmur ‘Siva Siva’, ‘Rama Rama’.
to be Continued…
(The above are excerpts from the A. Karunanandan Periyar Endowment Lecture 2023-24 delivered at the University of Madras on 8th January 2024)
