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Science and Self-Respect: Periyar on Modern Science

Senthil Babu D

This essay seeks to understand the place that modern science occupied in Periyars political discourse and what was the nature of the science that was constructed, in his reconstitution of Dravidian politics.

orn E V Ramasamy Naicker in 1879 in a middle class family in Erode, Periyar gave up formal schooling at the age of 10 to help his family business. He took to religious mendicancy at the age of 19 but soon gave it up, having become sceptical of religious faith and practice; he returned home soon, to abandon all faith in religion.1 He took to active politics soon after. In a climate of increasing politicisation of the non-brahmin movement, he joined the Congress and emerged as an important non-brahmin leader in the party. However, he quit the Congress Party on grounds of brahminical discrimination and started the Self-Respect Movement in 1925.2 Since then Tamil society witnessed one of the most influential propagandist at work, with a declared political agenda of no God, no Gandhi, no brahmin, no religion.3 He championed the cause of the socially oppressed through his selfrespect movement and later with the formation of Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944. His staunch radicalism and atheistic sensibilities have been attributed to many influences. However, he seems to have been influenced by the American Free Thought movement, especially R G Ingersoll.4 By the sheer force of his propaganda among the Tamil people, with whom he remained in constant touch through writings and public speeches, Periyar remained a major iconoclastic leader in Tamil politics till his death in 1973.5 In fact, it has been pointed out that Periyars thoughts and ideas could well be considered the thoughts and strategies of the Dravidian movement itself.6

Rationalising Science
Periyars goal was a new Tamil republic. He envisioned science to be endowed with rationality, a rationality he was professing in the struggle for this new Tamil republic. Science, in his case, was not generically founded on rationality but drew upon a political discourse of rationality. Science
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Senthil Babu D (senjay@gmail.com) is an activist with the peoples science movement in Tamil Nadu.
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was seen to guarantee a rational belief in progress, rendering in the process the much-needed legitimacy for the ideal of Tamil nationhood based on self-respect. Modern science seems to have been effectively appropriated to enable such a vision, at least the possibility of it. This article tries to reconstruct this process of appropriation, with a sensitivity towards both his political ideas and the terms in which modern science was embedded in his ideology. Rationality for Periyar was characterised by understanding based on evidence and its necessary anti-thesis was non-empirical understanding7 religion being the epitome of the latter. Religion, the root cause of all existent evils, was seen by him as fundamentally invalid for it did not contain the possibility of subjecting itself to scrutiny, It is only knowledge that could comprehend religion and not vice versa.8 Religion and rationality, written with a capital R, therefore were fundamentally irreconcilable. Such a materialistic understanding was sought to be substantiated through a reading of history where Periyar argued that the origin of religions was related to the evolution of disciplinary norms and rules in primitive societies. However, it was the elite, for their selfish interests, who legitimised religion with the notion of god, which he termed mans first mistake. Further, with changes over time, beliefs became dated and when the intelligentsia sought to change the ignorant masses refused, either persisting with the old or creating new beliefs through a process of selective appropriation from the old and addition of new forms. This process invariably results in religious conflicts, leaving no space for the growth of knowledge.9 For Periyar, in matters of this world and in human social life, there is no fruitful purpose that could be expected of revelling in the past with divine philosophies that are only used to avert change.10 Laws of such progress, then, dictate the nature of change that knowledge systems undergo. Accordingly, for him, it was science that relocated causality in worldly matters from god to Man.11 If any society has to progress, then, it is only scientific knowledge and a scientific way of life that could help attain the goal. There has

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been a progressive liberation of religious beliefs with the growth of scientific knowledge, with various aspects of scientific endeavour becoming known to people, including the illiterate masses, through facts like artificial rain, wireless and telegraphy and other modes of communication. Vested interests in society, in order to exercise their hegemony over the masses, still perpetuate religious beliefs, at times even using science to justify their irrational acts.12 It is due to the intervention of such vested interests in society that institutions like religion are sustained. Looking for reasons that help such a process, Periyar identified the lack of rational thought as one of the primary reasons. In fact, all extant evils inequality, ignorance, enmity and dehumanisation could be linked to this lack of rationality, which subverts the core of social life, that is, mutual help.13 Social reforms, therefore, for Periyar did not mean repairs here and there to make things appear apparently

coherent but to enact new foundations.14 Periyars vision of the new Tamil republic was strongly based on such an understanding of progress and change. What is interesting is the manner in which he envisioned the new republic.

Relieving the Past

How did such an understanding of societal progress bear upon Periyars own location in the history of the Tamils? First, it required Periyar to contend with the past at two different levels. Referring to the Aryan invasion theory in the reading of the Tamil past, he embarked on a criticism of Sanskritic Hinduism, whose contemporary embodiment were brahmins; and a range of entities that included the Saivites, their Puranas and Tamil literature of the past. Politically contesting these entities in the present would also mean questioning their past. Periyar, not merely questioned but invalidated it15 for it was the past that institutionalised social oppression and inequality. The past had

to be relinquished, in order to create new foundations. It was the Aryan invasion that subjugated the Dravidians as sudras and sustained their subjection in the garb of religion; thus Tamil society was subverted in its march towards knowledge. That is why, Tamil society, ...today stands pathetically unable to produce a Newton, Edison or Marconi.16 On the other hand, the Tamil past was also not all that glorious. For, he asks, if our Rishis, Saints, Alwars and Nayanmars had made a glorious past for us, why is it that we are not even in a position to manufacture a sheet of metal that would not bend?17 The Saivites were part of that past. Periyar made this clear when he points out the trajectory that his movement had taken.
We brought down upon ourselves the fury of the Brahmins... who hated us for our disagreeable task of exposing them to masses. Then came the Saivites (Saiva Siddhanthists), who were worse than the Brahmins in the cruel suppression of the thousand communities below them...18

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Therefore, if the goal of new Tamil republic was to be achieved, it could be possible only by relieving the people from the clutches of the past, which, in turn, meant the recovery of self-worth by the oppressed. Periyar thus denied any possibility of a dialogue with the past because it was incessantly brahminical and oppressive. If it were so, where would the cultural resources, including historical legitimacy, necessary for the nation in the anticipatory come from? It should be understood here that, Periyars quest to invalidate the past was part of his political programme to empower the oppressed who were victims of this very past. In such a context, political empowerment would involve denying authority not just to the conservatives/ status-quoists traditions, but to all constructible traditions, thus leaving his utopian projection as the only guide to action. It would follow that future society would have to be fundamentally different from the past models. Historical legitimacy, then, would have to be anchored upon a new interpretation of history, a different relationship between the past and the present that, in his wider efforts to institute a new social order, simultaneously renders current tradition false and his map of the future as true.19 Periyar conceptualised such a philosophy of history, wherein the local past is set aside and the focus is on civilisational processes as a hallmark of history. In civilisational terms, progress, rationality and science were the prime movers. For Periyar, a true history of world civilisation would have to be read in terms of the victory of the non-believers vis--vis the believers. It was with the efforts of the former, helped by modern science, that the incorrect beliefs of the latter have been exposed. However, such a civilisational march came at a price in the shape of martyrs like Bruno, Galileo and Copernicus.20 Lamenting the non-cognisance of such developments among the people, who had learnt nothing from history and science, he further explains how inevitable it is to repose faith in progress. Here, progress is associated not merely with materialistic values but also the ever-changing values that had accompanied the civilisations march. For
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instance, he delineates from the past, the changing centres upon which values have been contingent upon in culture. In the past to deliberate upon religion and puranas were respectable values, that acquired central place in that culture. But today, they are replaced by matters substantiated by practical evidence science and scientists are most respected today.21 Extending the same logic to political realm, he argues that nationalism and patriotism were things of the past, while in the present values like world citizenship and universal brotherhood were gaining currency. Therefore, in his scheme of civilisational advance, marked by development of rationality and science, progress was a never-ending process conditioned by what he calls the taste of the times. Then, values considered valid today would be absurd in the future; to use his words, todays rational beliefs would be tomorrows ignorance, including my own legacy.22 It was this self-reflexivity that gave Periyars political ideal its strength and appeal. Such a faith in history and rationality seems to have been the key sustaining factor in the enormous task of social reconstruction on the basis of equality and justice.
...we have come to the painful but inevitable conclusion that the task of thoroughly revolutionising an age-old system in a country of antiquated culture and habits cannot be done effectively without taking a rationalist view of life.23

also recognised the importance of language, as a cultural resource and also because it was vital for the acquisition of knowledge. His scathing critique of brahminical hegemony and the Saivite claims was developed through the manner in which he elucidated the language question. He tried to fundamentally alter the terms in which the language debates were being conducted. One of the most common arguments, from both sides, was the antiquity of their languages, Sanskrit and Tamil, respectively. For Periyar, who had no reverence for the past per se, antiquity of a language meant not pride and glory, but the necessity of more reforms in that language.24 He detested Sanskrit, for it epitomised brahminical oppression. In fact, he even claimed that it was Sanskrit that carried germs of some evils. Citing reasons for this claim, he shows how words like jati and kannigadhanam, for instance were non-existent in Tamil meaning there was no caste and womens oppression in the then Tamil society. It were the Aryans, who had brought with them such evils. So, Sanskrit had to be rejected.25 Tamil was also likewise criticised. A nnoyed with the claims of antiquity of Tamil over Sanskrit, he asks,
even if one concedes that Tamil was older than the Aryan language, what has it done to the Tamils. It is completely useless for science...in the age of [the] spread of science, Tamil has kept Tamilians in a world of absurdities...what is there in Tamil that enables us to understand the intricacies, nuances and techniques involved in experiments and in the constitution of proper knowledge as in medicine, engineering and law?26

Colonial Conundrum
The anticipated Tamil nation then, in Periyars understanding, would have to draw its cultural resources for legitimisation from the human civilisational and its engine of progress science, which is endowed with rationality and has become a cultural universal. This requires further qualification, for such a shaping of science as a cultural universal was, at a different level, also conditioned by the colonial presence. This, we try and explain with an effort to understand Periyars views on language, was yet another important cultural resource for him. During the period under investigation, the question of language was one of the primary concerns upon which social conflicts seem to have been enacted. Periyar,

However, Tamil had to be privileged vis--vis Sanskrit not in terms of utilitarian values but on moral terms for, he says ...there is no doubt that Tamil is better than Sanskrit in terms of character and purpose.27 But, it had to improve a lot, if it was to play an enabling role in empowering the oppressed. For Periyar, in the given circumstances, it was knowledge of English that was the required in founding the Tamil republic. In English, Periyar conceived the best possible resources knowledge. Therefore, English would make the Tamil society move faster to the world of knowledge. English

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was seen as an embodiment of rationality and science.

It is the English who introduced the telegraph, electricity, cinema, aeroplane, radio and x-rays not Tamil or the northern language that came and spoilt Tamil. Sanskrit, its shastric and epical traditions enslaved our rationality. English freed us from slavery and subjected our thought to reason... it has brought us to reject anything beyond the bounds of rational thought, practical experience and history... In fact, it would not be an overstatement to say that it was English that infused in us the quest for freedom.28

Thus, English, as a language would make possible scientific thought and a scientific way of life. However, appropriation of a particular language did not mean, for him an unqualified recognition of political structures that come along with the language. For Periyar, British rule among many things was also a harbinger of modernity, but it was not spared of criticism. Social issues were essentially political in Periyars estimation.29 His critique of colonialism was not on the plane of knowledge but on moral terms. He says,
the record of the English is also not so clean. Their history shows how much worse they had been in matters of religion, than us. But where did their Gods and priests go? They are here. They were packed off from England to be sent here along with provision for maintenance costs.30

literature of natural knowledge, an irrefutable literature of science.33 Periyars politics was characteristically made distinct by the concept of Self-Respect, that is, self-worth and dignity for the socially oppressed, who had lost it in the past due to brahminical hegemony. The idea of a new Tamil republic then was fundamentally contingent on this notion of self-respect a polity where there was no place for inequality and oppression. The anticipated Tamil nation would be an embodiment of self-respect; the movement to achieve this goal would be an embodiment of rationalism. Thus, the ideal of self-respect and rationality were to empower each other.

Purposive Pedagogy
The purpose of education was to inculcate self-respect and rationality. Periyar develops his critique of the education system on this basis. The education system, being a communicative process, was ideological the ideologies being determined by learned elite/upper caste who try and subvert the process of education by legitimising religiosity and nationalism. This system produced learned men who were slaves of such ideologies. Moreover, the prevailing pedagogic system was wrought with contradictions between textbooks and life experience.34 Rejecting education based on books that does not serve the purpose of inculcating knowledge, Periyar envisaged alternative pedagogic strategies. Such an alternative conception was anchored on teachers, for it was they who get implicated in machinery that perpetuates ignorance. The lifeline of education was therefore dependent on a set of rational minded teachers who could abide by the results of knowledge and definitely not on the so-called pandits who, with their obsession with the past, could only work against change.
They could never encourage research that could lead to newer and newer d iscoveries, for their complacent and self-envisaged task would forever remain studying the Tolkkapiyam.35

The Englishmen at home instead involved themselves in scientific research leading to progress. While he was critical of colonialism,31 Periyar, on the other hand decidedly overlooked the contradiction, for what matters was the utility of a particular language, not beauty or any other values. For the sake of acquisition of knowledge there could be no boundaries, be it linguistic or territorial. There exists no appropriate word, book or language for the acquisition of knowledge,32 for knowledge is universal. As mentioned earlier we see how Periyar builds up the image of science endowed with rationality as a cultural universal. Thus, a local culture in the process of knowledge appropriation reconstitutes particular images and values associated with science. It followed that the anticipated Tamil nation should also contribute towards the march of civilisation. The Tamil nation, then had to create ...a literature unbounded by religion, a universal

He also pleaded for extra-institutional mechanisms for inculcation of scientific knowledge, which he saw as a part and parcel of ones popular culture. In particular, he stressed the importance of

exhibitions scientific and otherwise. Exhibitions meant the public display of machines, technologies and discoveries which would then help in the process of making scientific rationality and its end technology accessible to the whole of society, which at the moment was only at the hands of a few. Scientific knowledge will have to be recovered from the elite to be relocated at the public domain.36 Periyar, influenced by socialist doctrines,37 also believed that technology which could provide leisure to labour had been subverted by the capitalists who control it.38 The role of technical education was equally stressed, that would properly accommodate the varying interests of students from different social backgrounds.39 Thus far, we have tried to show that science, as an embodiment of rationality was to ratify a New World order.40 In the process it assumes distinctive roles and embodies particular values that would suit the needs of a radical political agenda. To this extent it was instrumental knowledge. But it was also seen as a cultural universal, made possible by the construction of an alternative philosophy of history marked by progress on a civilisational plane. The dialogue that Periyar entered into with modern science was on his own terms, wherein science, embodied in a political discourse of rationality, legitimated his vision of a new Tamil republic. In this mode of dialogue, interestingly, efforts at domesticating new knowledge denied any place for the indigenous traditions of knowledge for they were all overwhelmingly brahminical and oppressive.41 Freedom was thus interlocked with rationality and freeing oneself from the clutches of the intolerable past. If the brahmin could take to science as occupations, without imbibing the culture and the values associated with its source, the anti-brahminical discourse then, reconstitutes a social order where hierarchies could only be dependent on who is more rational and who is less.42 Science then was not generically founding rationality but drawing upon a primarily political discourse of rationality. In this case, solutions to the problem of social order are to be modeled on knowledge. The protagonist delineates what meaningful knowledge could be and what absurd,
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within the public space, which is also simultaneously a cultural domain. For the practices involved in the generation and justification of knowledge were themselves assigned political credence, a possibility that emerges out of a society that was trying to come to terms with its present. Against such a background of cultural consolidation, what happens to institutionalisation and professionalisation of modern science in indigenous society? Speaking for this particular case, it seems that the agenda was to postpone it till the birth of the new nation. Perspective from the studies of science and colonialism seems to indicate that nationalism was often an important stimulant in the process of institutionalisation. However, at least in this case, when nationalism was sought to be subverted, institutionalisation was to occur in the future. When utopian projections become the only possible guide for action and when simultaneously, any recourse to the past was to be blocked using a reading of the past, in terms of its local, particular, transient causes and contexts, the radical thus frees himself of any criticism of judgment.43 How could, then, one say that science was domesticated, but incompletely so?
Notes
1 For a detailed biography, see Sami Chidambaranar (1983). 2 For Periyars emergence in Dravidian politics, see Nambi Arooran, Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism 1905-44, Koodal publishers, 1980, Madurai: 152-251. 3 S Chidambaranar, op cit, p 85. 4 The influence of American free thought in the constitution of Dravidian nationalism is best documented in B Rajannan (1978). 5 A closer look at Periyars life is rendered by Anitha Diehl (1978). 6 S Chidambaranar (1983), op cit, p 21. 7 V Anaimuthu (ed.), Thoughts of Periyar E V R, 1974, Thinkers Forum, Trichy, Vol II: 1062. 8 V Anaimuthu (ed.), (1974), Vol II: 1166. 9 Ibid, p 1054. 10 Ibid, p 961. 11 Ibid, p 1052. 12 Ibid, p 1053, passim. 13 Ibid, p 1116. 14 Ibid, p 1065. 15 M S S Pandian, Denationalising the Past Nation in E V Ramasamys Political Discourse, Economic & Political Weekly, 6 October 1993. 16 V Anaimuthu, op cit, p 972. 17 Ibid, p 1122. 18 V Anaimuthu (ed.), (1974), op cit, Vol I, pp XV-XVI. 19 For interesting parallels in the context of European Renaissance, see Stephen Pumfrey, The Renaissance Science of History in S Pumfrey et al (1991). 20 V Anaimuthu (1974), Vol II, p 1128. 21 Ibid, p 1152. 22 Ibid, p 1120. 23 V Anaimuthu, (1974), Vol I, pp XV-XVI.
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24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42

V Anaimuthu, (1974), Vol II, p 960. Ibid. Ibid, pp 987-92. Ibid, p 989. Ibid, pp 970-71. For Periyar, society and politics were not two different entities that they had to be dealt with separately. He says, since politics encompasses everything that is borne on the people and therefore society including economy, education, business, industry, knowledge and so on...to separate the two is to negate social change...it is the minority that rules that has a vested interest in separating the two, ibid, p 309. Ibid, p 1094. For a more recent reading of Periyars standpoint towards colonialism and the language question, see M S S Pandian (1996). V Anaimuthu (1974), op cit, p 1000. V Aniamuthu (1974), op cit, p 977 (emphasis added). Ibid, p 1178. The Tolkkapiyam is an ancient Tamil treatise on grammar and linguistics, ibid, p 1250. Ibid, p 1211. Especially after he undertook a tour to Russia and other countries in Europe. He considered atheism as the organising principle of Soviet Russia. For a discussion, on his brief encounter with communism see S V Rajadurai and V Geetha (1996). V Araimuthu (1974), Vol II, p 1117. Ironically, the DK of today runs coaching classes for UPSC examinations. Perhaps bureaucratic structures would legitimate a Tamil republic, yet to arrive. Arnold Thackray (1974). Dhruv Raina postulates three hypothetical stages of assimilation. One, the auto-didact situated in indigenous systems of knowledge and pedagogically trained in modernity who assigns himself the task of setting up the terms dialogue; two, the auto-didact becomes professional and becomes a participant in the nationalistic struggle; and three, science comes of age on its own with the First Science Congress. Would political appropriation in popular culture, follow any such pattern at all, seems to be a challenging task to answer. See Dhruv Raina (1997). V Anaimuthu (ed.), (1974), Vol II, p 1052. Periyar demarcates the possibility of only three types of belief in society less rational, rational and more rational the scientist representing the extreme right of the spectrum.

43 Pumfrey while discussing the various ways that historicism was used by conservatives and radicals, points out how they were all part of (a) changes in Renaissance culture and beliefs, and (b) ideological conflicts. His interpretation of radical historicists is paralleled with Periyar, here. S Pumfrey, The Renaissance Science of History in S Pumfrey, 1991, op cit, see note 19.

References
Anaimuthu, V, ed. (1974): Periyar E V R Sinthanaigal (Collected Works), Vols I, II and III, Thinkers Forum, Thiruchirapally. Chidambaranar, Sami, Thamizhar Thalaivar Periyar E V R, Periyar (1983): Self-Respect Propaganda Association, Madras (1931). Cooter, Roger and Stephen Pumfrey (1994): Separate Spheres and Public Places: Refelctions on the History of Science Popularisaion and Science in Popular Culture, History of Science, Vol XXXII. Diehl, Anitha (1978): Periyar E V Ramasamy (New Delhi: BI Publications). Pandian, M S S (1996): Towards National Popular: Notes on Self-Respectors, Tamil, Economic & Political Weekly, 21 December, pp 3323-29. Pumfrey, Stephen, Rossi, L Paolo, Slawinski, Maurice (ed.) (1991): Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe, Manchester University Press. Raina, Dhruv (1997): Evolving Perspectives on Science and History: A Chronicle of Modern Indias Scientific Enchantment and Disenchantment 18501980, Social Epistemology, Vol 2, No 1, pp 3-24. (1997): The Young P C Ray and the Inauguration of the Social History of Science in India 1885-1907, Science, Technology and Society, Vol 1, No 2. Rajadurai, S V and V Geetha (1996): Periyar: Suyamariyathai Samadharmam (Coimbatore: Vidiyal Publishers). Rajannan, Busangi (1978): American Free Thinkers and South Indian Free Thought 1875-1947, University of Kansas, PhD Thesis, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor. Schaeffer, Simon and Steven Shapin (1985): Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Thackray, Arnold (1974): Natural Knowledge in a Cultural Context: The Manchester Model, American Historical Review, Vol 79, pp 672-702.

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The Law, Gender and Women Kalpana Kannabiran Nonconformity Incarnate: Women with Disabilities, Gendered Law and the Problem of Recognition M Pavan Kumar, S E Anuradha Indian Muslim Women, Politics of Muslim Personal Law and Struggle for Life with Dignity and Justice Razia Patel Bringing Rights Home: Review of the Campaign for a Law on Domestic Violence Indira Jaising Conjugality, Property, Morality and Maintenance Flavia Agnes Women, Forestspaces and the Law: Transgressing the Boundaries Sagari R Ramdas Womens Land Rights in South Asia: Struggles and Diverse Contexts Meera Velayudhan Outside the Realm of Protective Labour Legislation: Saga of Unpaid Labour in India Padmini Swaminathan Judicial Meanderings in Patriarchal Thickets: Litigating Sex Discrimination in India Kalpana Kannabiran
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