UC Berkeley

This dissertation documents and deploys the Non-Brahmin self-respect critique of Gandhian self-rule as a way to reconsider the once nascent but now growing field of comparative political theory. There are two audiences for this critique.

The first audience is composed of those interested in the field of comparative political theory. Many of this field's inaugural and subsequent methodological articulations have been wed to the figure of Gandhi and his demand for swaraj, suggesting that a self-ruling self is central to what it means to do political theory outside the Euro-Atlantic. Yet the Non-Brahmin members of the Self-Respect Movement (Cuya-Mariyātai Iyakkam) from the 1920s-1940s in Tamil-speaking South India were concerned that a priority placed on Gandhian swaraj would entrench, rather than erase, relations of hierarchy they called Brahminism. For Non-Brahmins, any meaningful self-rule would require a prior self, a self of self-respect, forged not in the opposition between colonial dependence and national independence but world-wide interdependence.

The second audience is composed of those interested in the history and politics of 20th century Tamil-speaking South India. EV Ramasami Naicker [EVR or "Periyar"], the founder of the Self-Respect Movement, persists as a central figure to the political parties of contemporary Tamil Nadu and remains associated with an ethno-linguistic separatism focused on Tamil language and Dravidian identity. This persistence, however, fails to grapple sufficiently with the internationalism behind his self-respect critique of self-rule and his subsequent investments in the wider world.

Focusing on Tamil archival sources related to the Self-Respect Movement as a way to appreciate the role of Tamil in the world and the world in Tamil, I suggest that the basic distinctions between regions or traditions presumed in demands for or of comparative political theory break down. Instead of framings involving encounter, I argue for a shared tradition of political theory forged across a long distance relationship between European Continent and Indian Subcontinent. This shared tradition involves mariyātai and Mission, dharma and Marx, Aryan and Pariah, Jew and Untouchable, Nazi and Congress, Palestine and Pakistan, secularism and love, householder and ascetic, Islam and equality, and innumerable other instances of embrace and refusal, translation and conversion, in order to challenge Brahminical forces of unfreedom in the world. I call this tradition "SubContinental Political Theory."