In the period before independence,
we had the emergence of what's called the Non-Brahmin Movement.
And essentially, it represented the sequential involvement of different
groups, different caste groups in particular into the modern economy.
And the fact that the first group to get English language education,
the first ones to be able to take up positions in the government,
to take up positions in the modern sector as lawyers,
as schoolteachers, as journalists, were Brahmins.
They were the traditional literary class, they were the first to take up
the opportunities provided by English education.
They moved in even though they are a minority, less than 5% of the population
probably, they colonized the majority of the positions in the modern economy.
The majority of the population, let's call them two-thirds,
who are essentially the equivalent of OBCs are the backward castes.
Then came on the scene, especially those in the advanced section and
realized that their hopes for
moving into the sect here were being bought by the position of the Brahmins.
Now the Brahmins, as for as the ideology and probably the actuality
were a group who had originally come into India from somewhere,
maybe originally in Turkey, but who had come in to India and it come to the South.
Sanskrit, the traditional religious language of the Brahmins is one of
the Indo-European languages.
So the terms of political struggle were cast in
Tamilnadu in terms of Tamil and in terms of the fact,
that Tamil had imported many words from Sanskrit.
So the struggle against Brahmin domination had it's
form in the structure of the purification of the language.
And the rejection also of many aspects of caste and caste hierarchy and
the place played in it by the Brahmins.
So the groups that come forward have social reform, rejection of caste and
promotion of things like self-respect marriages.
You marry yourself, you don't need a Brahmin priest and
that opposition to the place of the Brahmins continued in a much stronger
way when we come into the electoral politics after independence.
One of the leaders of that movement was this chap here,
EVK Ramaswamy Naicker,
otherwise, known as Periyar.
I met him when I was first doing my fieldwork in India.
Funny old bloke, but he was a very sharp polemicist in his youth.
And if there's time, we can talk about some of the things that Periyar did,
but he was one of the ones who promoted the cause of the Dravidian speakers.
He had hopes of uniting all the Dravidian speakers.
And he promoted or created this party, the DK,
the Dravida Kazagham, the Dravidian Party.
And they promoted various things, like a separate nation or
maybe separate nations or maybe including all of them.
But in 1949, Periyar who was already getting on,
married a young woman in her late twenties.
And other follows of his and he also made her his successor in the party.
Other followers in the DMK, which is the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham,
Dravidian Progressive Party who rejected that,
split off and created the DMK.
Those people were people who'd been part of the party in the anti-Hindi agitations
before independence.
But what's really striking and one of the most interesting things,
if you want to follow it up is their involvement in the Tamil film industry as
we'll see in a second.
The Tamil film industry and the DMK and
the success of the AIADMK have all grown out of film, quite amazing.
It's hard to imagine a parallel anywhere else in the world.