CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 42 of 120

Correct — C, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker. The Self-Respect Movement began in Tamil country in 1925 and is inseparable from the man everyone calls Periyar. Its programme was rationalist and anti-caste at the same time: it attacked the ritual authority of the Brahmin priesthood, rejected the religious sanction claimed for caste hierarchy, and argued that a person who acquires self-respect stops being led by others. Its most concrete innovation was the self-respect marriage, conducted without a Brahmin priest and without Vedic rites — the first fully non-religious ceremony of the kind was performed on 8 December 1929 with Periyar presiding, and Tamil Nadu gave such marriages statutory recognition in 1967 by amending the Hindu Marriage Act for the State. Periyar had left the Congress in the mid-1920s over precisely these questions, and the movement he built became the seedbed of Dravidian politics.

• (a)B. R. Ambedkar — B. R. Ambedkar led the anti-caste struggle in western India through the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha, the Mahad and Kalaram temple satyagrahas and later the Scheduled Castes Federation, and drafted the Constitution. He was in correspondence with the Tamil movement but did not initiate it.
• (b)Jyotiba Phule — Jyotiba Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in Pune in 1873 and is the earlier figure in the same tradition of rationalist anti-Brahminism. He died in 1890, thirty-five years before the Self-Respect Movement began.
• (d)Jawaharlal Nehru — Jawaharlal Nehru was a Congress leader whose concerns were national independence, planning and foreign policy. He is on the list only as a familiar name.

The Self-Respect Movement was a social rather than an electoral project in its first phase — an attempt to detach Tamil society from Brahminical ritual authority by changing marriage, naming, worship and everyday deference. Its long-term political effect was enormous: Periyar took over the Justice Party in the 1930s and converted it into the Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944, from which the Dravidian parties that have governed Tamil Nadu since 1967 descend.

The list of names is arranged so that three plausible reformers surround the right one, and the way through is chronology plus region. Phule belongs to nineteenth-century Maharashtra, Ambedkar to twentieth-century Maharashtra, Periyar to twentieth-century Tamil Nadu. One honest complication worth knowing: some accounts credit S. Ramanathan with starting the movement in 1925 and inviting Periyar to lead it, but both this key and the standard textbooks name Periyar, who gave it its ideas and its public identity. Present-day note: self-respect marriages remain legally valid in Tamil Nadu, and the Supreme Court has since confirmed that advocates may solemnise them.

• The Self-Respect Movement was launched in Tamil country in 1925 and led by E. V. Ramaswamy, known as Periyar.
• It combined rationalism with an attack on caste hierarchy and on the ritual authority of the priesthood.
• Self-respect marriages dispense with a Brahmin priest; the first such ceremony was held on 8 December 1929.
• Tamil Nadu legalised them in 1967 through a State amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act.
• Periyar took over the Justice Party and converted it into the Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944, the parent of the later Dravidian parties.

• Placing Periyar in Maharashtra alongside Phule and Ambedkar because all three attacked caste.
• Assuming the movement was primarily electoral from the start; the party phase came later.
• Treating self-respect marriage as a purely symbolic gesture — it acquired statutory force in Tamil Nadu in 1967.

As a founder-to-movement match, or inside a matching list of reform movements and their leaders.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Dravidar Kazhagam was formed in 1944 by the reorganisation of which earlier body?

  • (a)The Madras Mahajana Sabha
  • (b)The Justice Party
  • (c)The Satyashodhak Samaj
  • (d)The Servants of India Society

  Answer(b) The Justice Party — Periyar took it over in the later 1930s and renamed it Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Satyashodhak Samaj, founded in 1873, was established by

  • (a)E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker
  • (b)Jyotiba Phule
  • (c)Narayana Guru
  • (d)B. R. Ambedkar

  Answer(b) Jyotiba Phule — founded at Pune to challenge Brahminical ritual authority and to open education to the lower castes and to women.