The Dravidian Movement

The foundations of politics in Tamil Nadu today are rooted in the rising consciousness and various organizations of what may be broadly termed "the Dravidian Movement" of the late nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century. This book focuses on the emergence of a new awareness of Tamil identity though a range of organizations for Dravidian uplift such as the Non-Brahmin Movement, the South Indian Liberal Federation (popularly known as the Justice Party), the Self-Respect Movement, the Dravida Kazhagam (DK), and its dynamic off-shoot, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The most prominent leaders of the Dravidian Movement were E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, known as Periyar, "Great Sage," and C. N. Annadurai—Anna—who in 1967 was to become Chief Minister of Madras State. Today there are many books on Tamil politics, but until the 1960s no book had addressed the movement that was to become the dominant force in the political life of Tamil Nadu today. It was a young American, Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., in 1960 who took up the project to portray the Dravidian Movement. With several months in Madras, he met leaders of the DMK and attended a number of conferences, and he collected all the pamphlets and papers he could find on the movement, many going back to the 1930s. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he brought this together for his Master’s degree thesis, completed in 1962. It was published as a book, The Dravidian Movement, in Bombay in 1965. Long out-of-print, the pioneering volume is again available in this new reprint edition.