The research project 'Freedom from Caste: The Political Thought of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy in a Global Context' (acronym CasteFree) engaged the MSCA Individual Fellow, Dr Karthick Ram Manoharan supervised by Professor Meena Dhanda at the University of Wolverhampton. It specifically built on the Fellow’s expertise, aiming to synthesise the political thought of a critical South Asian thinker, Periyar, who is well known for his anti-caste politics as an influential public figure of his times but is under-appreciated in academic studies. The project has taken the Fellow’s work on this important egalitarian thinker from modern South India to a broader global audience.
The project had the objective of evaluating Periyar's contribution and highlighting its contemporary significance to global conversations on social justice. The Fellow crafted an intellectual portrait of Periyar exploring the contours of his political discourse, giving thematic coherence to his thoughts from a huge corpus of writings, and providing new insights from the study of this important rationalist anti-caste leader from India. As the title suggests, the focus was Periyar’s concern with ‘freedom from caste’ as both duty and a human right. Comparing Western and non-Western thinkers, the Fellow discussed in theoretical detail Periyar’s approach to religion, atheism, caste, nationalism, state, and gender, highlighting his contemporary relevance. Periyar is presented as an atheist and rationalist with socialist leanings, who militantly participated in several protests for social justice during his public life. His comprehensive and complex insight on the specificity of caste in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu was highlighted by the project. Any understanding of modern Tamil and Indian politics is incomplete without a reference to the contributions of this foundational leader of the Dravidian Movement in South India. Caste has become a subject of research in global academia including contributions by the Supervisor: CasteFree served to bring the work of the Fellow into conversation with these global discussions. Likewise, the rise of the religious identity politics of Hindu nationalism within India has become an issue of concern outside India too. The project deepened the understanding of the complex role played by Periyar’s thought in checking the rise of caste-inflected religious identity politics.
A two-day conference on anti-caste thought and a special issue of the journal Caste: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, jointly edited by the Supervisor and the Fellow, fostered discussion between young scholars and senior academics. Periyar became the reference point for an international knowledge exchange on anti-caste thought. The Fellow's monograph on Periyar, a key project output, was released in Tamil Nadu by Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, an Indian Member of Parliament well known for her feminist views, in a public event including the Fellow and the Supervisor. The book has not only generated academic discussion on caste and anti-casteism from a new Periyarist angle, but also gained praise from intellectuals from minority communities for its commitment to secularism at a time when the concept faces severe political challenges in India.
