Rethinking Social Justice edited by S Anandhi, Karthick Ram Manoharan, M Vijayabaskar and A Kalaiyarasan, with a foreword by Partha Chatterjee, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2020, pp 368, `795 (paperback).
In light of the recent announcement by the minister for Hindu religious and charitable endowments for Tamil Nadu regarding the government’s willingness to facilitate resources and training for women who wish to be priests in temples, the article examines the debates regarding the right of women to Hindu religious realm by revisiting the political episode of women’s assertion of their constitutional right to enter the Sabarimala temple in the neighbouring state of Kerala as well as the gendered dimensions of situating the protests within the larger histories of the self-respect movement and navodhanam.
Not a day passes in Tamil Nadu without a protest by common people. In fact, some protests have been going on for months. Why is Tamil Nadu in ferment? Why are more and more people hitting the streets in anger? It is all because of a general distrust of the central government and the popular media. The people’s agitations crossed a certain line in the case of the demand to stop the Indian Premier League matches being played in Chennai, thus creating a divide in Tamil Nadu.
Rajinikanth’s Kabali was expected to be a pro-Dalit movie, but the universalist focus on Tamil unity makes it a product of alternate Tamil nationalism instead. Kabali’s radicalism could have been strengthened by the inclusion of Periyar.
I read Aditya Nigam’s observations on an epistemology of the dalit critique of modernity with great interest. His formulations are both fascinating and suggestive, therefore, I would like to complicate them. Firstly, while I accept that dalit politics and ideologies represent the “problematic ‘third term’ that continuously challenges the common sense of the secular modern”, I am not sure that these exist as an ‘absent presence’; or that they advance a notion of citizenship that is premised on the notion of the community as a rights-bearing subject. It seems to me that the non-brahmin, lower caste engagement with the ‘secular modern’ does two things: it contends with the contradictions of modernity, as Nigam so ably demonstrates, but it also dips beyond and across the wide arc of the secular-modern to articulate an expressive ideology and world view that is still recognisably modern. I would like to illustrate this with reference to the thought of Periyar Ramasamy.
