Iyers are an ethnoreligious community of Tamil-speaking Brahmins. Most Iyers are followers of the Advaita philosophy propounded by Adi Shankara and adhere to the Smarta tradition. This is in contrast to the Iyengar community, who are adherents of Sri Vaishnavism. The Iyers and the Iyengars are together referred to as Tamil Brahmins. The majority of Iyers reside in Tamil Nadu, India.
Thiruvalluvar, commonly known as Valluvar, was an Indian poet and philosopher. He is best known as the author of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, a collection of couplets on ethics, political and economic matters, and love. The text is considered an exceptional and widely cherished work of Tamil literature.
The Dalit Buddhist movement is a religious as well as a socio-political movement among Dalits in India which was started by B. R. Ambedkar. It re-interpreted Buddhism and created a new school of Buddhism called Navayana. The movement has sought to be a socially and politically engaged form of Buddhism.
Adi Dravida is a term that has been used since 1914 in South India to denote Paraiyars. At the time of the 2011 Census of India, they made up about half of Tamil Nadu's Scheduled Caste population.
Dalit is a term used for untouchables and outcasts, who represented the lowest stratum of the castes in the Indian subcontinent. They are also called Harijans. Dalits were excluded from the fourfold varna of the caste hierarchy and were seen as forming a fifth varna, also known by the name of Panchama. Several scholars have drawn parallels between Dalits and the Burakumin of Japan, the Baekjeong of Korea and the peasant class of the medieval European feudal system.
Paraiyar, Parayar or Maraiyar is a caste group found in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and in Sri Lanka.
Dravida Nadu is a name of a proposed sovereign state demanded by the Justice Party led by the founder of the self-respect movement, E.V. Ramasamy Periyar, and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) led by C. N. Annadurai for the speakers of the Dravidian languages in South India.
Dravidian parties include an array of regional political parties in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, which trace their origins and ideologies either directly or indirectly to the Justice Party and the Dravidian movement of C. Natesanar and Periyar E. V. Ramasamy. The Dravidian movement was based on the linguistic divide in India, where most of the Northern Indian, Eastern Indian and Western Indian languages are classified as Indo-Aryan, whereas the South Indian languages are classified as Dravidian. Dravidian politics has developed by associating itself to the Dravidian community. The original goal of Dravidian politics was to achieve social equality, but it later championed the cause of ending the domination of North India over the politics and economy of the South Indian province known as Madras Presidency.
Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy, revered by his followers as Periyar or Thanthai Periyar, was an Indian social activist and politician who started the Self-Respect Movement and Dravidar Kazhagam. He is known as the 'Father of the Dravidian movement'. He rebelled against Brahmin dominance and gender and caste inequality in Tamil Nadu. Since 2021, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu celebrates his birth anniversary as 'Social Justice Day'.
Diwan Bahadur Rettamalai Srinivasan, commonly known as R. Srinivasan, was a scheduled caste activist and politician from then Madras Presidency of British India. He is a Paraiyar icon and was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi and was also an associate of B. R. Ambedkar. He is remembered today as one of the pioneers of the Scheduled caste movement in India. He founded the Adi dravida mahajana sabha in 1893.
Mylai Chinna Thambi Pillai Rajah was an Indian politician, educationist, social and political activist from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Dr. C. Natesa Mudaliar (1875–1937), also known as Natesan, was an Indian politician and activist of the Dravidian Movement from what is now the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He was one of the founders of the Justice Party, along with P. Theagaraya Chetty and Dr. T. M. Nair. He is often mentioned as Dravida Thanthai.
The Tirukkuṟaḷ, or shortly theKural, is a classic Tamil language text consisting of 1,330 short couplets, or kurals, of seven words each. The text is divided into three books with aphoristic teachings on virtue (aram), wealth (porul) and love (inbam), respectively. It is widely acknowledged for its universality and secular nature. Its authorship is traditionally attributed to Valluvar, also known in full as Thiruvalluvar. The text has been dated variously from 300 BCE to 5th century CE. The traditional accounts describe it as the last work of the third Sangam, but linguistic analysis suggests a later date of 450 to 500 CE and that it was composed after the Sangam period.
Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819) was a British civil servant in the Madras Presidency and a scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit.
Dalit literature is a genre of Indian writing that focuses on the lives, experiences, and struggles of the Dalit community over centuries, in relation to caste-based oppression and systemic discrimination. This literary genre encompasses various Indian languages such as Marathi, Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, Sindhi, Odia and Tamil and includes narrative-styles like poems, short stories, and autobiographies. The movement started gaining influence during the mid-twentieth-century in independent India and has since spread across various Indian languages.
The Self-Respect Movement is a popular human rights movement originating in South India aimed at achieving social equality for those oppressed by the Indian caste system, advocating for lower castes to develop self-respect. It was founded in 1925 by S. Ramanathan who invited E. V. Ramasamy to head the movement in Tamil Nadu, India against Brahminism. The movement was extremely influential not just in Tamil Nadu, but also overseas in countries with large Tamil populations, such as Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore. Among Singapore Indians, groups like the Tamil Reform Association, and leaders such as Thamizhavel G. Sarangapani were prominent in promoting the principles of the Self-Respect Movement among the local Tamil population through schools and publications.
D. Ravikumar is an Indian Tamil intellectual, writer, lawyer, politician and an anti-caste activist. He was the editor of the magazine, Nirapirikai. Nirapirikai inspired several new writers in the 1990s in Tamil Nadu. He is an Ambedkarite and Buddhist. Ravikumar is the current Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha from Viluppuram and member of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
V. Geetha is an Indian feminist activist who writes on issues related to caste, gender, education and civil rights. She operates from Madras and has carried out research on the nature and proliferation of NGOs operating in Tamil Nadu. She has set up the federation of women's groups in the state and is also the editorial director at Tara Books. Other than this, she has translated two of Perumal Murugan's novels into English. Based on her research, she has observed that "Violence as an experience seemed to me to represent a point of intersection of trajectories of hurt, touch, love, fear, hunger and shame. It seemed to inhere as much in the grime of every day life, in habitual tone, gesture and touch, as it did in the particular and determined act of violence."
John Rathinam was the founder of Dravida Pandian magazine together with Iyothee Thass in 1885, focusing on the sufferings of the untouchables in Madras. An "untouchable covert", throughout the 1880s he was involved in the promotion of education for "the depressed classes" within Madras. Before founding the magazine, he founded an association for the promotion of welfare among them called Dravida Kazhgam.
The Casteless Collective is an Indian indie band based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The band was formed in 2017, with support from the Neelam Panpaatu Maiyam started by filmmaker Pa. Ranjith and filmmaker and film composer Tenma, founder of the label Madras Records.
