Around the turn of the 20th Century, a distinctive set of social and cultural reformist movements emerged in the Tamil-speaking region of Madras Presidency, one of the major administrative divisions of British colonial India. These movements, which were affiliated with thinkers such as Iyothee Thass, Maraimalai Adigal, and "Periyar" E.V. Ramasamy, articulated their reformist ideologies through the lens of a shared historical narrative that told the story of the "Aryan" or "Brahmin" subversion of an ancient and enlightened "Dravidian" or Tamil society indigenous to the Tamil South. This thesis argues that individual discursive terms such as "caste", "religion", "Tamil", and "Brahmin" in the "Dravidianist" discourse of these movements cannot be understood in isolation from each other; rather, they all participate in a semantic field that coheres around the core narrative of ancient Dravidian history.

Since the late 19th century, many important non-Brahmin Tamil thinkers, authors, orators, and social movements have used the terms “Dravidian” and “Aryan” to structure their social, religious, political, and cultural statements about Tamil society. Although these various figures and movements represent very different political, social, and cultural interests, they show striking similarities in the ways they describe social, cultural, and political issues in the Tamil present in terms of an ancient racial conflict between indigenous “Dravidian” Tamilians and the invading “Aryans” who imposed Brahmanical Hinduism and its social and cultural values on the Tamil country. This idiom, which I label “Tamil race talk”, casts non-Brahmin Tamilians as the descendants of the ancient Dravidians, a people that established a prosperous civilization in the ancient Tamil country. This ancient Dravidian society was disrupted by the influx of Aryans, who brought with them a self-serving Brahmanical Hindu ideological system by which they unjustly established themselves as superiors- Brahmins- over the indigenous peoples of the Tamil country. Numerous Tamil social movements and thinkers have used and continue to use this conceptual framework to present their social, religious, cultural, and political platforms.

Given the outsize importance of Tamil “race talk” in socially, culturally, and politically influential Tamil discourses of the last two and a half centuries, it is worthwhile to investigate the question of where the terms and concepts found in Tamil race talk originated in the first place, and how it became a fixture of modern non-Brahmin Tamil social thought. This dissertation presents a brief history of Tamil “race talk”, beginning with its origins in Western scholarship on Indic peoplehood and missionary writings on Tamil religion, and concluding with its emergence as a Tamil-authored theory of transhistorical Tamil identity and an ideological frame for various Tamil thinkers’ conceptions of equity and social progress in contemporary Tamil society. This dissertation draws both from secondary source literature on Tamil history and from close readings of primary source material by both Western and Tamil authors. Tracing this history of ideas offers a wide array of insights into the nuanced meanings of the terms “Dravidian” and “Aryan” in the major works of social thought associated with these Tamil thinkers and their influential organizations.