We have postulated, through the first two chapters,that the populist logic that informed the DMK is thehegemonic assertion of non-Brahmin–Dravidian (thepleb) as Tamil (the populous) through dismantlingthe Aryan–Brahmin hegemony established in TamilNadu. If the name of the people, Tamil, the emptysignifier, is not to eclipse the internal frontiernecessary for the counter-hegemonic assertion, thecatachrestic naming of the non-Brahmin Dravidian asTamil is to be complemented by the synecdochic claimof Tamil Nadu to aspire for a Dravidian republicthat spread all over peninsular India. What we needto consider is that while this can be the populistlogic, whether such counter-hegemonic assertion canbe made without recourse to certain appeal to ahistorical sense of change, which came to be knownas “modernity” or “modernization.” The populistlogic will not work effectively if it does notinvolve what Charles Taylor has called the forgingof a new social imaginary which is involved in themaking of a modern identity through locating a rangeof sources of the self in tradition. Our postulatein that regard in this chapter is that the DMKmanaged to make connections, imaginatively andcreatively, to sources in Shaivite metaphysicwithout having to yield to the Tamil nationalistprodding of neo-Shaivites of the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, as argued by some.

We need to recognize that in the Tamil instance, thecreation of modern social imaginary with appeals totraditional sources of the self was fraught withinnumerable conundrums because the core of theimaginary consisted of removing caste from thepublic sphere by either sequestering it to theprivate lives or annihilating it fully to fashion acaste neutral self. This entailed a need torepudiate, challenge, or at least criticallyinterrogate traditional Brahminical mores enmeshedwith practices of rituals and piety. This placed ahuge demand on political actors of all kinds to makea statement on where they stood in terms faith,belief, customs on the one hand, and humanist credoand scientific rationality on the other.

Namakkal Ramalingam Pillai (1888–1972), a poet and anationalist, was arrested during the CivilDisobedience Movement in 1932 and was incarceratedin a B-class cell in Vellore where many frontlineCongress leaders were also jailed. Bulusu Sambamurtiof Andhra Pradesh was one of them. Sambamurti was awell-groomed person, genteel and energetic, who tooka liking to Ramalingam while the latter was alreadyan admirer of the former. One day, at the prayergathering in the evening, one person sangRamalingam's poems. Sambamurti was impressed withthe lyrics, which as a Telugu speaker he couldn'tunderstand and took help to comprehend fully, askingwhether the poems sung at the prayer were written bySubramanya Bharathi, the famous nationalist poet.People replied that they were written by Ramalingamwho was present there. Sambamurti was delightfullysurprised. After this incident, he starteddiscussing Ramalingam's poems and songs in theirprivate conversations, which were conducted mostlyin English as Sambamurti could somewhat understandTamil but could not speak the language, same asRamalingam who could not speak Telugu, though hecould understand it to some extent. Sambamurti'scell was located next to that of Ramalingam, whichperhaps allowed them to meet often. Ramalingamdescribes one significant conversation that led tohis writing a novel, Malaikkaḷḷaṉ (Thief of theMountains):

The context and tenor of the conversation in the prisonalmost makes it appear like writing a novel in proseis in public cause akin to the service of thenation. Much has been theorized about the intricatelink between nation and narration.

The central argument of the book has been that theDravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) accomplished thetask of construction of a people as Dravidian–Tamilthrough or alongside the formations of thepolitical. In borrowing Laclau's formulation ofpopulist reason, we have argued that Tamilfunctioned as the empty signifier that unified thepeople while the divide between Aryan–Dravidian orBrahmin–non- Brahmin functioned as the internalfrontier. We sketched this proposition throughChapters 1 and 2, providing a sum-up at thebeginning of Chapter 3. We will return to this laterto fully expand on its significance and also relateto two previous works on the DMK mobilization byMarguerite Ross Barnett and Narendra Subramanian. Wewill now focus on, in conclusion, our propositionrelated to the formations of the political. In acertain sense, formations of the political have alasting validity and importance that providesstability to the construction of a people. Ourunderstanding of the term “political” and itsformation in Tamil Nadu needs some parsing now.

POLITICAL: PLAY OF IMMANENCE ANDTRANSCENDENCE

In his recent work An Archaeologyof the Political, Elias Jose Palti hassuggested that it was with the separation of thespheres of immanence and transcendence and throughthe play of the two that a historical phase began inwhich regimes of power were organized in what cameto be referred to by the term “political.” He hassketched at least three distinct ages: “the age ofrepresentation” (the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies), “the age of history” (the nineteenthcentury), and “the age of forms” (the late twentiethcentury). Without going into the details of theseepochs and logic corresponding to each, what weborrow for our own analysis is his formulationsuccinctly expressed in these terms: “The political,as we have seen, is a play ofimmanence/transcendence, and the different regimesof exercise of power we have been analyzing arediverse modes of production of the transcendenceeffect out of immanence, a justice effect” (Palti2017, 143).

It rained that evening, September 18, 1949, at RobinsonPark, Royapuram, Chennai, where the public meetingto announce the founding of the Dravida MunnetraKazhagam (DMK) was held. People never fail tomention the rain whenever the legendary first publicmeeting is remembered. The rain has many valences ina narrative; it is primarily a cathartic device thatepitomizes the emotional surge of a moment. It ishard to imagine a greater moment of a mix of intenseemotions for the people gathered there than thatevening. They were sad, bitter, despondent, angry,hopeful, euphoric, and happy all at the same time.They had parted company with the father figure, theinimitable Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973), whohad adamantly refused to listen to their plea fornegotiation over the future of the organization, thefive-year-old Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), molded in 1944from the fragments of the Justice Party, also knownas the South Indian Liberal Federation (founded in1917), and the vibrant group of activists gatheredin the Self-Respect Movement nurtured by Periyar(since 1925).

The public meeting at Robinson Park was the culminationof the deliberations held on September 17 and 18 inseveral rounds. The decision to launch a new partywas first taken by a smaller group of those who wereholding offices in the DK closeted in a room and wasannounced to all those gathered outside. The name ofthe party and a provisional design of the party flagwere decided (the provisional design of thetwo-color flag, black strip on top and red strip atbottom, was later confirmed as the party flag). Thegeneral council, with 133 members, with severalsubcommittees were formed and office bearers wereselected on the 17th. The modus operandi of the newparty was discussed. Following these discussions,the public meeting was held on the 18th in theevening (Tirunāvukkaracu 2017, 325–332).

The most remarkable part of the DMK history is theincredible energy that went into grassrootsmobilization, which has remained so elusive to beingcaptured gainfully by the theoretical or analyticallens. We have already noted in Chapter 2 thesacrificial figure of Kilapaluvur Chinnasamy as anexemplar of the spirit of self-immolation thatCharles Taylor invokes in discussing the newer formsof the transcendental aspirations or moraldispositions in the age of modern politicalimaginary. However, such extreme acts of sacrificeshould not distract us from the predominantlypragmatic and programmatic aspects of associationallife, social mobility, and political empowermentthat characterized the lives of hundreds ofthousands of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) partyworkers at grassroots level all across the state inthe eighteen-year period of our study. However, itis obviously impossible to condense qualitatively,let alone measure quantitatively, the myriad formsthe grassroots mobilization assumed in the period,though this precisely is the most significant aspectof history. It should be possible to write anethnographic account of the history of theorganizational formation in a given place but thatwould demand a book-length narration.

When that is the case, to pick from the extensivematerial of ethnographic accounts we mobilized fromvarious locations in a short chapter like this islikely to render it purely anecdotal. For the sakeof brevity, we opt to provide a synoptic overview asan extraction of salient features from all thatmaterial, ethnographic and archival, in which wewill study the phenomenon under five distinctrubrics: the historicalbackdrop, the newsociality, theorganizational structure, fostering of politicalculture, thepolitical insurmountable, and finally acase study which would illustrate all of these.

THE HISTORICAL BACKDROP

It will be useful to conceptually segregate threedistinct dimensions of the formations of thepolitical to begin with: civil societyorganizational formations; discursive formationsthat include both ideational synthesis and diffusearticulations; and finally, popular uprisings,protest events of mass participation, organizedagitations, electoral victories, and so on. Itshould be borne in mind that these three dimensionsare not always welded together; it will often bedifficult to ascribe causal relationships and strictcorrespondences between them, as Shahid Amin hasconvincingly shown in his abundantly illustrativeaccount of the Chauri Chaura “event” in 1922 (Amin1996). More importantly, it would be misleading toidentify one for the other.

The extent of diffusion of the Hindu Puranic corpusover a couple of millennia among the people of TamilNadu is inestimable. Innumerable would be the extentof local variations and interpretations ascirculated through folk performances, oralnarratives, and many a mode of textualizations frompalm leaves to early access to print during theeighteenth and nineteenth century. Hence, it is hardto hazard a guess whether a commoner would, in themiddle of twentieth century, be aware of, say forexample, the story of churning of the “ocean ofmilk” to extract amṛ́ta, or nectar, a signal Puranicincident, is difficult since a lot would depend onwhat kinds of access he or she had to folk culturalforms and oral narrative traditions, let alone printliterature. We could think of the example ofMenocchio, the sixteenth-century miller of Italy,whose cultural world was so painstakingly laid outto us by Carlo Ginsberg, for thinking of whatconstitutes a common person's view and knowledge ofthings, say as he or she is immersed in “popularculture” (Ginzburg 1992). Unlike the Italian case,much of what informed a commoner in Tamil Nadushould be oral and folk narratives, occasionally, ifever, supplemented by reading due to the high rateof illiteracy reported in mid-twentieth century.What notion of the asura of the puranic lore the commonermight have carried is a matter of speculation. Wecan however be certain that he or she had a rich andvaried sedimentation of cultures to choose from. Itis in such an open field of imaginations that theDravidianists sought to make a case for theassertion of the asuras over the allegedly unjustcharacterizations the Puranic imagination had castthem in.

If we, the authors, were to speak of our ownassimilation of the cosmic scheme of the Puranas,not from studying the Sanskrit texts or the works ofIndologists but as people who had been immersed inpopular culture as we grew up, we should first notethat there were three worlds to contend with. TheDevaloka is the heavenly abode where the devas resided. The Bhulokais the world of the humans. The Patalaloka, thenetherworld, is where the asuras and rakshasas lived.

On the day the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) wasfounded, September 17, 1949, the debates on theDraft Constitution of India were being held in theConstituent Assembly. They were concluded in amonth's time; the draft was approved by November 14,1949, and was formally adopted on January 24, 1950,four months from the day the DMK was founded. Itcould be said that the Republic of India and the DMKwere born simultaneously. The information issignificant because the party mirrored and shared anantinomy of the new republic. The DMK vowed to workfor another republic, the south Indian federation ofstates known as Dravida Nadu. It decided to work forthe goal under the conditions of possibility madeavailable by the Indian republic, a Union of States.We can thus say that the political mobilization ofthe DMK is constituted by an antinomy. This antinomyimmediately mirrored the antinomy of centrifugal andcentripetal tendencies of power consolidation inIndian polity. As per the Constitution, the term“state” is applied to the regional governments thatconstitute the Union. The “union of states” iscentrally governed. There is a lasting antinomy inthe formation. On the one hand, in effect, thepowers are largely concentrated at the Union, makingthe Union government a unitary state with theprovincial governments, grandiosely called States,increasingly becoming dependent on the centralpower. On the other hand, popular politics,particularly electoral outcomes, have beenstrengthening party formations at the regionallevel, thus constituting the antinomy of therepublic in the practice of popular electoraldemocracy.

The DMK was an exemplar of the autonomous politicalformations at the regional level. It was alsodistinguished by the fact that the very building ofthe party structure involved elections to varioustiers of party positions. The way the party wroteits constitution and conducted organizationalelections pointed to the liberal streak of politicsit endorsed, which aligned it with a possibleelectoral participation.

The political rise of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam(DMK) was intimately connected to the use of theTamil language, the recovery and circulation of itsliterary corpus of the last two millennia, and acelebration of Tamil difference, its past, itscivilization, and its glory. However, officially,and for all intents and purposes, the DMK aspired towork for an independent federation of the southIndian states speaking four languages, to be calledDravida Nadu. This was the only form of secession itarticulated from 1949 to 1963. It never demanded thesecession of the state of Tamil Nadu alone. Hence,whether one likes it or not, the DMK was not a Tamilnationalist party. This disambiguation is necessaryif we are to understand how exactly the relationshipbetween Tamil, as a signifier that can stand for notonly the language but also a people and a land, andthe politics of the DMK are intimately connected. Itwill be rewarding to begin with a text that bestbetokens the ambiguity surrounding this issue.

Sumathi Ramaswamy's Passions ofthe Tongue (hereafter PoT) opens with the dramaticscene of Chinnasamy, a well-known martyr for theTamil cause and a DMK cadre, walking out of hishouse early in the morning on January 25, 1964, witha fuel can in his hand to douse and set himself onfire. His death cry “Inti oḻika! Tamiḻ vāḻka!”(Death to Hindi! May Tamil flourish!), launches thetrain of reflection for the book. In other words, ina semiotic sense, Chinnasamy's self-immolationprovides the token for the whole enquiry; assumingthat he belonged to the type called Tamil devotee,the enquiry turns out to be about the passioninvoked by language. The book PoT is a history of Tamiḻ paṟṟu, a composite of terms“Tamiḻ” and “paṟṟu”—the latter standing forattachment or allegiance—the act of holding on tosomething, which PoTglosses as Tamil-language devotion.

If every key text authored by Annadurai in the 1940sthat functioned as ammunition for the ideologicalpropagation of the DMK at its inception wascontroversial in some sense, there is one text thatparticularly makes even his supporters feel awkwardto speak about. In drawing-room conversations inmiddle-class, educated households, the text iswhispered as Annadurai's all-time low. Hisdetractors always lay it against him as anexhibition of bad taste. This text, Kamparacam (Aṟiñar Aṇṇā2008b), is a critical albeit selective reading ofKamparāmāyaṇam.Kamban is the twelfth-century Tamil poet whorendered Valmiki's Ramayana in Tamil as Irāmavatāram (The RamaIncarnation). The text however is popularly known asKamparāmāyaṇam.Annadurai's Kamparacamis a close reading of some of the verses of the textwith explicit and “inappropriate sexual references”that a common reader feels embarrassed to speakabout. However, it is really surprising that in theseventy-five years since Annadurai wrote the text,no critical tradition has developed in Tamilscholarship to actually study what Annadurai triedto do as critical hermeneutics and how far his workcould be validated.

For the limited purposes of this chapter, we would liketo contextualize the work and a pamphlet thatpreceded it known as TīParavaṭṭum (Let the Fire Spread), acompilation of debates that Annadurai had withscholars on the question of whether Kamparāmāyaṇam should beburnt along with another twelfth-century Shaiviteclassic Periya Purāṇamas a program of spreading awareness among the peopleagainst Brahminical Hinduism (Annadurai 1995). Thecall to burn these two texts was given by theSelf-Respect Movement. Since Tamil scholars had cometo be aligned to the Self-Respect Movement from thedays of the first wave of anti-Hindi agitations in1938–1939, their objections to the burning of thetwo literary texts were engaged with in the mode ofpublic debates, a significant gesture in thestill-emerging public sphere. Though there were twotexts to be consigned to flames, what whollypreoccupied the debates was Kamparāmāyaṇam, which excited a sharpconflict in views particularly because of the highliterary value the text was accorded.

The Dravidianist journey in the terrain of arts andliterature that we call the domain of imaginationpreceded and substantially contributed to thefounding of the DMK. Of the many key interventionsAnnadurai made in the mid-1940s writing plays forthe stage assumes a unique significance sinceimagination takes the form of the performative andthe theatrical in a highly potent combination. Wehave already discussed AryanAllure, the seminal treatise he wrote in1944, which was to function as a kind of manifestofor the party that he would launch a few years laterin 1949. We will be discussing the intervention inliterary criticism, or rather a challenge to canonformation in Tamil that he made with regard to thetwelfth-century rendition of Ramayana in Tamil byKamban in the next chapter. We will also bediscussing the writing of prose fiction that hepopularized among the party men in Chapter 8. Of allthese, there is a reason to feel that the stageplayed the most crucial role. Given the fact of lackof literary training of the subaltern populace whenthey were barely literate, not to speak of the bulkof illiterate people, theater or plays had theunique facility to combine refined expression inlanguage with melodramatic imagination through whicha certain political sensibility could be cultivated.The language used in the play synchronized with themode of public address that the DMK leaderscultivated in terms of its rhetorical flourish. Suchdiscursive synergy was further enhanced by the factthat the DMK leaders themselves acted in these playswhich they wrote. In fact, perhaps it was the turnto imagination that created the ground for a newparty, the DMK, to be headed by Annadurai, who leadDravidianists in this new battlefront, recruitingable lieutenants like Karunanidhi to wage theculture war on the turf of imagination. The foray ofthe DMK leaders into cinema, enabled by the relativenewness of that cultural form that catered to thewhole of society than any other form that catered toselective audiences, has been muchoveremphasized.

In the months of January and February 1965, Tamil Naduwitnessed the eruption of mass protest and violencethat shocked almost all political actors in itsintensity and scale. The protests carried severalfeatures of subaltern uprisings such as lack ofcentral directives, spontaneity of action, role ofrumors, destructive and homicidal violence, staterepression, and finally, unverifiability of theprecise nature of events in many places whereseveral lives were lost. Though the Dravida MunnetraKazhagam (DMK) had spearheaded anti-Hindi movementsuntil the moment of eruption, it was the studentswho took the lead in “direct action,” which thenpropelled mass action in many places, the scale ofwhich is still a matter of oral histories and “folk”narratives. A perusal of the events between January25 and March 15, 1965, most particularly the threecataclysmic days between February 10 and 12, wouldscarcely leave anyone in doubt that these daystransformed Tamil politics forever. The party, as anorganization, was not directly involved in the wavesof spontaneous agitations in most places, eventhough students and activists belonging to the partyjoined the “public” in action. However, the eventswere bracketed by the DMK's sustained opposition tothe imposition of Hindi as well as a demand forDravidian political independence from its inceptionand its subsequent gain of popular support in theelectoral arena. It was as though the DMK wasairlifted in the most difficult part of its climb topower by the event of anti-Hindi uprising of 1965,as we will have occasion to analyze in detail in thesubsequent chapter on electoral participation.

In what follows in this chapter, we need to focus onmaking sense of the scale and spread of the uprisingwithin a span of a month, though a short-lived one.Before we narrate and analyze the event itself, weneed to gather the larger historical context inwhich it happened. We shall do so under threerubrics: the constitutive roles of the elite and thesubaltern in the linguistic public sphere, theconstitutional conundrum of designating the nationalor sole official language, and the Damocles sword ofofficial language implementation that theConstituent Assembly left hanging on the Indianrepublic.

When the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), formed in 1944 underthe leadership of Periyar and the stewardship ofAnnadurai, made a concerted effort to moot thedemand for an independent south Indian republic tobe known as Dravida Nadu, one question that had tobe confronted was, if a plebiscite was to be held onthe question, would people vote for the idea ofDravida Nadu? This naturally formed the corollary,whether there could be mass participation in protestaction or agitation to press for Dravida Nadu.Annadurai realized that they were in no position tobe assured of either. The origin of the Dravidianidea was a counter-hegemonic assertion againstBrahminic and casteist hegemony. If the JusticeParty elite who ruled the state under dyarchy werekeen on ensuring that Brahmins did not monopolizepower in the emerging state machinery and civilsociety, the Self-Respect Movement of Periyar waswaging a battle on the turf of the common sense ofthe people against Brahminism and casteism, andpatriarchy. As we have repeatedly noted, it was onlyafter the attempt to make Hindi learning compulsoryin 1937 by the Congress ministry underRajagopalachari did the threat of Brahmin hegemonytransforming into north Indian hegemony become apalpable reality, in and through the politicalvehicle of the Congress party with leverage fromfringe groups like the Hindu Mahasabha with theideational content of Hindutva, as we noted in ourreading of Arya Mayai(Aryan Allure) inthe first chapter. Since the transformation fromcounter-hegemonic struggles and articulations to ademand for an independent Dravidian country wasrecent in origin, there was a long way to go tomobilize people towards that end. Annadurai wasprescient in realizing that the idea of freedom, thedesire to become a self-governing republic, that hadspread in the process of the independence strugglethat the Congress had led should now form the basisfor the demand for an independent Dravidian countryas well. He saw them as successive stages ofhistory. This was in contrast with the stillcounter-hegemonic approach of Periyar, which madehim declare August 15, 1947, as a day ofmourning.