It has been more than a month since the Tamil Nadu election results were declared. The massive electoral wave swept aside both the DMK, AIADMK and brought the newly formed TVK to power. The results are highly consequential not for the electoral realignment but for the two distinct political implications it carries. One is the failure of the formidable alliance of all progressive forces under DMK. The very alliance projected as a model for resisting the advance of BJP’s fascism was itself displaced by a flamboyant populist formation.
Second, and more fundamentally, the verdict signals the historic decline of the Dravidian hegemony itself.1 For nearly six decades, Tamil Nadu stood as an impregnable bastion of the progressive Dravidian politics. During a period in which national politics underwent profound transformations—including the consolidation of Hindutva—the state appeared relatively insulated from these shifts. That historical exceptionalism is now eroding.
These developments are of immense significance for progressive forces across India and therefore demand serious analysis. Beyond immediate electoral contingencies, they point toward deeper changes in the underlying social structure and the class configurations that sustained the Dravidian order. This article attempts to trace the historical development of social forces and processes that underpinned the emergence, consolidation, and gradual decline of Dravidian politics. the analysis primarily emphasizes long-term structural and historical developments rather than any specific aspects of it. A separate article will examine the character of the BJP’s rule and the political strategies required to confront it.
Significance of the Dravidian movement –
To a significant extent, Tamil Nadu’s contemporary social achievements are inseparable from the historic accomplishments of the Dravidian movement. Whether in relatively high human development indicators, the normalization of self-respect marriages free from Brahminical ritual mediation, or the broader weakening of overt caste authority in social life, the movement’s imprint has been profound. While regions such as Maharashtra possess equally important histories of anti-caste struggle, it was arguably in Tamil Nadu that anti-caste politics produced the most enduring social and institutional transformation.
Modernization, conceived merely as a technical, industrial, or economic process, does not automatically produce a society liberated from earlier pre-capitalist hierarchies and values. Structural transformation requires radical social movements capable of consciously confronting them while cultivating new cultural values. Although communist movements in twentieth-century India organized sections of Dalits and fought against caste oppression, they did not develop a comprehensive anti-caste struggle. In Tamil Nadu, it was the Dravidian movement that most systematically attempted such a project, which is precisely what makes it so historically significant in modern India. Yet the trajectory of the movement also reveals the limitations of anti-caste struggle when it fails to develop into a broader project of social emancipation and instead becomes accommodated within prevailing class interests.
The Justice Party: Laying the Foundations of the Non-Brahmin Movement
The formation of the Justice Party in 1916 marked the inauguration of the twentieth-century non-Brahmin movement, although its ideological foundations had been laid earlier by figures such as Ayothee Thass. Four years after its formation, the party contested and won the 1920 elections to the Madras Presidency Legislative Council. Once in power, it introduced a series of reforms that institutionalized non-Brahmin politics within a legislative and administrative framework. So pioneering were many of these measures that they helped shape not only the political trajectory of Tamil Nadu but also the broader agenda of backward-class movements across India.
The Communal Government Order of 1921 introduced reservations in government employment for non-Brahmins, Muslims, Christians, and the others. The expansion of schools, along with welfare measures such as the mid-day meal programme, widened access to education and sought to weaken the near-monopoly of Brahmins in education and administration. Temples and religious endowments were brought under state supervision, directly challenging the institutional domain of Brahmanical authority. The Madras legislature also became the first in India to extend voting rights to women. By renaming the “Depressed Classes” as Adi-Dravidas2, it legally prohibited discriminatory practices against them.
Reservations soon emerged as the principal instrument through which non-Brahmin communities articulated demands for social mobility and political representation. While backward-class political formations in northern India would assert themselves much later in the twentieth century, Tamil Nadu witnessed a non-Brahmin movement capturing state power in the very first round of legislative politics in 1920. This was facilitated in part by the boycott of the elections by the Congress, which enabled the Justice Party to emerge victorious within that political vacuum.
A somewhat parallel development had taken place in the Bombay Presidency. In 1902, Shahu Maharaj introduced reservations for non-Brahmins in the administration of the princely state of Kolhapur. Yet Kolhapur remained a relatively small princely domain. In contrast, in Madras it was an elected legislative government that institutionalized caste-based reservations across an entire presidency. Through such measures, the Justice Party succeeded in consolidating “non-Brahmins” into a durable and politically meaningful category within the framework of modern democratic politics.
The class origins of the non-Brahmin movement –
Even a cursory glance at the founders of the Justice Party reveals the class forces underlying the non-Brahmin movement. Among its principal leaders, Pitti Theagaraya Chetty was one of the wealthiest industrialists in Madras, possessing extensive landed, commercial, industrial interests and ownership of a large shipping fleet numbering around 100 vessels travelling regularly to Europe and east coast of USA. Another founder Dr. T. M. Nair was educated at the University of Edinburgh and practiced medicine abroad before emerging as a prominent physician, journalist, and political leader in Madras. Dr. C. Natesa Mudaliar was likewise a highly educated medical professional who had served as a lecturer at Pithapuram Maharaja College and later worked in major colonial commercial establishments. The initial social basis of the movement thus lay among wealthy landlords, merchants, and highly educated professionals — in short, among the non-Brahmin elites.
While the socio-economic backgrounds of a movement’s founders constitute a relevant line of inquiry, treating them as the sole basis for determining the movement’s class character is inadequate. Hence we look at it from historical perspective which is when it becomes very clear that they were not random individuals but part of the class that emerged from a much longer process of historical transformation under colonialism. In the eighteenth century, as the East India Company expanded its commercial operations in Madras, it lacked familiarity with local languages, social structures, and trading networks. It was in this context that the dubashes emerged as indispensable intermediaries. Dubash literally means the one who is acquainted with two languages and hence can act as translator. So those who could interact with company officers and at the same were well acquainted with local socio-economic structures and could influence them rose to prominence. Initially functioning as translators and commercial agents, they gradually evolved into a powerful comprador3 class that mediated between British capital and Indian society. They served simultaneously as merchants, brokers, financiers, and political intermediaries for company officials and commercial firms.
The wealth and influence accumulated by this class became immense. They emerged as major political brokers and sovereign financiers. The Nawab of Arcot, for instance, became heavily indebted to financial networks controlled by powerful dubashes who later inflated the debts and dictated the terms to the sovereign ruler. In another revealing episode, the influential merchant Sunga Rama Chetty became so indispensable to colonial commerce that the Governor of Madras granted him a residence within the restricted “White Town” of Fort St. George — a privilege rarely extended to Indians.
In addition to the Chettiars, Pillais, and sections of the Vellalars, the Mudaliars emerged as a particularly prominent component of this comprador order. Over time, they acquired considerable influence within the colonial economy. During the eighteenth century, many Mudaliars transitioned from a landed elite associated with military and administrative service under pre-colonial regimes into some of the most prominent dubashes in Madras.
A striking example was Pachaiyappa Mudaliar, born in 1750 into a Thuluva Vellala family in North Arcot. Rising to prominence as a dubash at a remarkably young age, he accumulated immense wealth through banking, commercial trade, and revenue operations, becoming one of the richest and most influential figures in Madras. More broadly, the relatively non-cultivating and service-oriented social background of many Mudaliars facilitated their adaptation to the intermediary roles created by colonial rule.
The nineteenth century, however, witnessed a major transformation in colonial rule itself. The East India Company increasingly evolved from a trading corporation into a governing power. As the British constructed a vast administrative apparatus to govern the colony, English education expanded in order to cultivate a new class of administrators and professionals. After 1857, limited legislative participation for Indians was also introduced as a mechanism of political incorporation. These developments led to the emergence of a highly educated urban administrative and professional class.
In Madras, this shift significantly altered existing class relations. As the colonial state apparatus expanded, administrative and professional occupations acquired unprecedented importance. Brahmins, owing to their long historical access to literacy and scholastic traditions, entered English education in disproportionately large numbers and came to dominate the emerging bureaucratic and professional sectors.
For the older non-Brahmin commercial and intermediary elites — particularly merchants and dubashes who had enjoyed considerable prominence during the eighteenth century — this represented a relative decline in political influence, even if not necessarily in wealth. Many Chettiars, for instance, redirected their commercial expansion toward Southeast Asia, particularly Malaya and Burma, following the broader expansion of British imperial networks. The Mudaliars, owing to their proximity to Madras and their earlier scribal and intermediary traditions, adapted more successfully to the new order. Recognizing the significance of English education earlier than many other non-Brahmin communities, they invested heavily in schools and colleges in Madras. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, they maintained a near-monopoly among non-Brahmins in segments of the colonial bureaucracy, serving as tahsildars, revenue officials, senior clerks, lawyers, doctors, and teachers.
Over time, they also accumulated substantial institutional and cultural influence. Pachaiyappa Mudaliar, for example, dedicated much of his vast fortune toward religious and educational charities, contributing to the establishment of enduring institutions. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, the center of gravity of political and social power had decisively shifted. The earlier dominance of the comprador-commercial elites was increasingly overshadowed by a new administrative and professional order in which Brahmins occupied a disproportionately influential position.
It was this larger historical transformation of class relations under colonialism — and the tensions generated by it — that formed the structural basis for the emergence of the non-Brahmin movement in the early twentieth century. The movement challenged Brahminical predominance and demanded a greater share within the colonial order.
The non-Brahmin manifesto therefore reflected primarily the interests of non-Brahmin elites rather than those of the non-Brahmin masses as a whole. Yet the social conditions of the period ensured that Brahmin dominance in education, bureaucracy, and legislative institutions objectively placed them in opposition to broad sections of non-Brahmin society, thereby enabling the movement to acquire a wider social legitimacy that extended beyond its elite leadership.
Nonetheless, despite introducing several pioneering reforms, the Justice Party entered into decline within a relatively short period. It suffered a major setback in the 1926 elections, and although it briefly returned to office in 1930, its political erosion continued steadily thereafter. The heterogeneous social composition of the non-Brahmin bloc contained deep internal contradictions that ultimately limited its cohesion. The Vanniyars provide an instructive example of the phenomenon.
Class Formation and Its Caste Articulation: The Case of the Vanniyars –
The Vanniyars of northern Tamil Nadu were historically small cultivators and agricultural labourers. The implementation of British land-revenue policies—particularly the Ryotwari settlement, individual land assessments, and legally enforceable property rights—proved highly consequential. These measures weakened the dominance of the mirasidars and enabled sections of Vanniyar cultivators to secure occupancy rights over land. The commercialization of agriculture and the expansion of cultivation further benefited a segment of these proprietary peasants. Consequently, by the late nineteenth century, a section of the Vanniyars had emerged as an intermediate peasantry.
This transformation, however, was uneven and did not extend uniformly across the caste as a whole. Indeed, the roots of this unevenness lay in the pre-colonial social structure of the Vanniyars themselves. In the eighteenth century, the Vanniyars did not constitute a homogeneous caste but rather a broad and internally differentiated agrarian social formation marked by significant regional variations. In some regions, a thin stratum of Vanniyar families had acquired small palayam (chieftaincy) holdings, forged marriage alliances among themselves, and risen to positions of local dominance as Palayakkarars (sub-regional chieftains). Elsewhere, they were smallholder cultivators, owning modest plots of dry land and supplementing their livelihoods through military service. A substantial section, however, consisted of agricultural labourers. Known as Pallis, they worked as labourers on the lands of others.
The upward mobility experienced by a section of the community was articulated through the organized initiative to claim a higher ritual status as “Vannikula Kshatriyas.” More importantly, the concentration of the caste in the four districts of North Arcot, South Arcot, Chengalpattu and parts of Salem facilitated the emergence of caste associations as instruments of negotiation within the new colonial administrative and political framework that was essentially bourgeois.
These developments should not be understood simply as a continuation of traditional Brahmanical mechanisms of Sanskritization. While the claim to Kshatriya status appeared to follow the similar logic, the social process underlying it was more complex. The emergence of caste as a broader regional identity assimilating previously localized and internally differentiated groups was closely linked to the rise of an upwardly mobile stratum capable of initiating and leading such projects of collective organization.
In this context, claims to higher ritual status functioned less as an end in themselves than as a means of mobilization and consolidation. They provided a symbolic framework through which dispersed local groups could be integrated into a wider caste community and represented within the institutions of the colonial sphere. Understanding the class dynamics underlying these caste associations and movements is therefore crucial. Rather than representing a simple continuation of the pre-colonial caste order, they reflected the reproduction of caste under new material, administrative, and political conditions created by colonial rule.
When referring to the class processes underlying caste mobilization, the issue is not simply that some individuals within a caste improved their economic position or experienced upward mobility. Such an interpretation remains too narrow. Rather, the phenomenon must be situated within the wider totality of colonial social transformation.
Three interconnected processes are particularly important. First, the colonial administrative approach played a significant role. As scholars such as Nicolas Dirks have argued, the British attempt to render their subjects legible through fixed categories of caste and religion, reinforced through systematic enumeration and classification, contributed to the consolidation of these identities. Colonial knowledge practices did not create caste, but they reshaped and institutionalized it in new ways.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the development of capitalism in colonial India unfolded in an uneven and combined manner upon an already stratified and graded caste society. With a few exceptions, most castes were not coherent regional entities. Rather, they existed as distinct and localized social formations, often divided across sub-regions with distinct economic, social, and cultural characteristics. The Vanniyars exemplify this pattern. Concentrated primarily in the Tondaimandalam region rather than across the whole of present-day Tamil Nadu, they were themselves internally differentiated and locally rooted rather than constituting a unified cultural community. In this sense, unevenness was not merely a feature of the caste system as a whole; it was prevalent within individual castes themselves.
Colonial capitalist development did not proceed uniformly in a linear fashion. Following the logic of uneven and combined development (Trotsky), the colonial restructuring of underlying material conditions would produce different kind of class structure in different sub-regions. Areas located near urban and administrative centres such as Madras experienced social and economic transformations distinct from those of the hinterland. Consequently, the restructuring of agrarian relations, markets, and state institutions generated different class configurations across sub-regions within a caste.
This produced a growing differentiation within the Vanniyar caste itself. While some sections benefited from new opportunities created by colonial agrarian change and emerged as proprietary peasants or intermediate agrarian classes4, others remained small cultivators or agricultural labourers. The rise of caste associations and the articulation of a broader Vanniyar identity must therefore be understood against the backdrop of this internal class differentiation. The emerging upwardly mobile strata sought a wider social and political constituency through which their interests could be organized and represented.
A third factor was the colonial state’s gradual opening of administrative, educational, and legislative spaces to individuals from different castes and religious communities. Although access remained highly unequal and continued to be dominated by certain groups, particularly Brahmins, the principle underlying colonial recruitment was not one of exclusive caste privilege. Indeed, the colonial state had its own reasons for preventing any single social group from monopolizing the administrative apparatus.
The 1851 Standing Order (No. 1282) issued by the Board of Revenue in the Madras Presidency illustrates this concern. The order arose from official anxieties regarding the concentration of revenue administration in the hands of a small number of Brahmin families, which was seen as obstructing transparency and fostering corruption. Measures of this kind reflected a broader tendency within the colonial state to widen access to administrative employment and thereby facilitate the entry of newly emerging elites from non-Brahmin communities.
The significance of this process extends beyond the mere creation of opportunities. Colonial institutions brought members of different castes into a common arena of competition. Class formation is always relational. Social groups become conscious of their collective interests not in isolation but through their position vis-à-vis other groups within a shared structure of opportunity and exclusion. For an upwardly mobile Vanniyar, the experience of competing with Brahmins within the same institutional framework—and frequently encountering barriers to advancement—could generate a consciousness that was simultaneously shaped by class position and articulated through caste identity. Non-Brahmin consciousness, therefore, emerged not from the persistence of traditional caste relations alone but from new forms of interaction, competition, and exclusion created by colonial conditions itself.
It was within the totality of these processes—colonial classification, uneven capitalist development, and the opening of new arenas of competition—that caste was reproduced and reconstituted in a modern form. Rather than representing a simple survival of the pre-colonial order, caste adapted to and was reshaped by the social transformations under colonial rule.5
Coming back to the topic of caste associations, the formation of the Vanniyakula Abimana Sangam in 1882 was followed by the establishment of the Vanniyakula Kshatriya Maha Sangam in 1888. Through these organisations, the community increasingly entered the sphere of modern socio-political activity. Access to education, government employment, and political representation came to be pursued and negotiated through caste associations, which emerged as important vehicles for collective advancement.
As members of emerging non-Brahmin intermediate classes entered new arenas of competition, Brahmin overrepresentation in these fields came to be perceived as a structural obstacle to their advancement. Consequently, when the Justice Party emerged in the early twentieth century as the principal political expression of non-Brahmin aspirations, sections of the Vanniyars readily identified with its programme. Community journals and caste associations increasingly adopted the language of non-Brahminism, social justice, and communal representation, articulating demands for greater access to education, legislative representation, and reservations in public employment. The political mobilisation of the Vanniyars during the early decades of the twentieth century thus unfolded within the broader ideological and political framework of the non-Brahmin movement, which provided a language through which their emerging social and political aspirations could be expressed.
Non-Brahmin unity : The possibilities and the fragmentation –
The formation of the Justice Party and the inauguration of non-Brahmin movement opened up new possibilities. Its elite character gave it the clout to influence the colonial government to further the interests of non-Brahmins. In anticipation of 1920 elections, a high level delegation of the Justice Party visited London in 1919 to lobby for communal representation and reserved seats for non-Brahmins in the Madras Presidency Legislative Council6. Incidentally, this was not the first time, that the demand was raised. In fact, a year earlier the Montagu-Chelmsford Report published in July 1918 had rejected the Justice Party’s demands for separate communal electorates. Nonetheless, the Justice Party pursued relentlessly. Remarkably, two of the delegates (Sir A. Ramaswamy Mudaliar and Sir K. V. Reddy Naidu) carried the title of ‘Sir’, the most prestigious civil and political honour conferred upon an Indian by the British. The delegates actively toured major British cities, addressed public meetings, engaged with Members of Parliament, and published letters in local newspapers to garner Liberal and Labour backing.
The persistent lobbying paid off. The Joint Select Committee, a parliamentary review body examining the Government of India Act 1919 explicitly recommended communal representation for the Madras and Bombay Presidency. Arbitrated by Lord Meston, 28 seats were reserved for non-Brahmins in Madras Legislative council. This was so significant. In the elections conducted in 1920, the Justice Party won 63 out of 98 elected seats and formed the government. It was a landmark victory opening up the new era of non-Brahmin politics.
If it was the united plank of non-Brahmins against Brahmin dominance that opened up new possibilities, it was the very fracturedness of the non-Brahmin bloc that ultimately foreclosed them. The category of non-Brahmins was deeply contradictory. While sections of the Vanniyar community experienced upward mobility under colonial rule, they were far behind other prominent non-Brahmin communities like Mudaliars, Chettiars, and Naidus. These communities possessed substantially greater control over land, stronger mercantile networks, deeper penetration into urban life, and far greater influence within the colonial state apparatus. Not to mention the Dalits and tribal communities, who had barely entered the corridors of the state power.
Dalits split away –
After assuming power in the Madras Presidency, the party further expanded non-Brahmin access to local governance through reservations in local representative institutions. The Madras Local Boards Act (1920) and the Madras District Municipalities Act (1920), followed by subsequent Communal Government Orders, attempted to weaken Brahmin dominance over local bodies and public employment.
Yet, the expansion of opportunities within these representative institutions disproportionately benefited the foward communities among non-Brahmins. This contradiction increasingly became a source of tension within the non-Brahmin coalition itself. One of the key figures leading this battle against the monopoly of forward castes was none other than M.C. Rajah, one of the most prominent Dalit (or Depressed Class as official term) leaders. In 1922, as the Secretary of the Adi-Dravida Mahajana Sabha, he successfully introduced a legislative resolution to officially replace derogatory colonial terms like “Panchamas” or “Pariahs” with the dignified term Adi-Dravida. He was also one of the leading advocates of the pioneering mid-day meal scheme introduced by the government. He was actually one of the founding member of the South Indian Liberal foundation (the Justice Party). In 1920, he got election on the Justice Party leader and served as its deputy leader in the house. And yet, someone of his stature, was continuously getting disenchanted with the party.
The friction began way back in 1921 when communal reservations for government jobs were introduced. The order did not recognize the Depressed class as distinct category, instead lumped them together in residual category of ‘others’. Despite Rajah ‘s constant protest it did not change and no gains of communal order could reach Dalits. The Pulianthope Incident same year, laid bare the acute caste bias of the Justice Party elites when they sided with caste Hindu workers who violently attacked and set fire to over hundred Dalit huts in the village of Pulianthope. Incidentally, the party mouthpiece Justice blamed the riots on the Government’s pampering of the Dalit workers. Subsequently in 1923, M.C. Rajah ultimately split with the party to independently pursue the Dalit cause. Same year, he led a deputation to the Governor accusing the Justice Party of failing to ensure adequate representation for the Depressed Classes in legislative nominations, local bodies, and government services. It was a significant split of Dalits from non-Brahmin bloc.
The split of backward classes and the breakdown of the non-Brahmin bloc –
Elites within the Vanniyar community also grew increasingly anxious about the dominance of forward castes, which effectively limited their access to the opportunities made available through reservations. Consequently, although many Vanniyars identified with the broader non-Brahmin movement, their leaders continued to maintain independent caste associations and invested heavily in them as instruments for securing political influence and thereby further their class interests.
It was within this political climate that M. A. Manickavelu Naicker, a Vanniyar lawyer from North Arcot, was elected to the Madras Legislative Council in 1926 as a candidate of the Swarajya Party faction of the Congress. However the upper caste bias within Congress soon disillusioned him. As both the Congress and the Justice Party failed to adequately represent the interests of the more disadvantaged non-Brahmin communities — he continued to advocate specifically for the rights of “backward” non-Brahmins. In 1934, Naicker, along with several other leaders, founded the Madras Provincial Backward Classes League to champion the interests of educationally and socially disadvantaged non-Brahmin communities. The League drew attention to official statistics showing that out of 608 non-Brahmin Hindu gazetted officers, only 13 belonged to the “backward Hindu” communities (G.O. No. 247, Public Department, 4 February 1940). Petitions submitted in 1938 further emphasized that even when marginalized communities succeeded in producing graduates against considerable odds, they remained largely excluded from government employment. For example, despite the Vanniyar community having more than 200 qualified graduates, it occupied only 6 out of 1,713 gazetted officer posts across the Presidency.
These developments exposed a deep internal divide within the broader non-Brahmin category. Following sustained political mobilization and lobbying, the movement eventually succeeded in securing the official sub-categorization of reservations, leading to the creation of a distinct quota for “backward Hindus” in November 1947. This marked the virtual breakdown of the non-Brahmin bloc that had once seemed poised to usher in a new politics.
The National Movement and Its Social Contradictions –
The decade of the 1920s marked a major turning point in the history of modern India. It was during this period that sections of the masses began entering the political arena, a space that had until then remained largely confined to elite groups. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the national movement had taken shape under the leadership of the educated upper strata of society — urban professionals such as lawyers, professors, civil servants, and wealthy merchants. Their proximity to the colonial state, familiarity with the functioning of modern bureaucratic institutions, and exposure to liberal and nationalist ideas had elevated them socially and politically above the largely agrarian and labouring masses. From this vantage point, they inaugurated India’s struggle for freedom.
However, the limitations of elite-led politics soon became evident. The constitutional and legislative methods pursued by the moderate faction reached a political dead end, while the extremist tendency, despite moments of militancy, lacked the mass base necessary to sustain a prolonged struggle. It became increasingly clear that without mobilizing the peasantry and the broader toiling masses, the anti-colonial movement could not advance significantly. At the same time, the Indian national bourgeoisie was consolidating itself economically and politically, raising the stakes of the nationalist struggle considerably. It was under these circumstances that Gandhi’s leadership emerged as decisive.
In an effort to transform the Congress into a mass organization, a series of campaigns aimed at generating national consciousness were launched. The agenda of the movement was broadened to include the grievances of peasants and other labouring classes, drawing sections of the masses into active politics for the first time. Yet this expansion also generated a fundamental contradiction. For large sections of peasants and toiling communities, the abstract opposition between “imperialism” and “nationalism” was often too distant from the realities that structured their everyday lives. Their immediate experiences of exploitation and survival were shaped far more directly by caste hierarchies, landlordism, indebtedness, and class oppression.
Thus, even as the national movement acquired a broader and more developed organizational form, parallel social forces questioning caste and class domination also began to take shape, though still in relatively embryonic forms. For the Congress leadership, the central challenge lay in mobilizing peasants and laboring masses into the anti-colonial struggle while simultaneously ensuring that their demands remained subordinated to the broader nationalist framework of “national versus imperial,” rather than developing into autonomous struggles against indigenous structures of caste and class power.
The clash of non-Brahmin and National movements –
As part of the Non-Cooperation Movement, the Congress leadership decided to boycott the legislative elections of 1920 nationwide. The movement proved to be a defining moment in the anti-colonial struggle, giving the freedom movement a far broader and mass character than before. The political vacuum created by the Congress boycott was quickly occupied by other political forces that entered the legislative arena and acquired governmental power. Some of these formations represented landlords, landed elites, or comprador interests whose political and economic positions were closely aligned with imperial rule. What happened in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies was however significantly different. Despite the comprador roots of forward caste elite in Madras, the issue raised by it was of profound importance. They challenged the homogenizing category of the “nation,” arguing that nationalist politics, unless accompanied by social restructuring, would primarily benefit the Brahmins while subordinating other communities.
In the absence of Congress participation, the Justice Party secured a major victory in Madras. However, when legislative elections were again held in 1926, a faction within Congress — the Swarajya Party — defied the official boycott line and entered the electoral contest. The Swarajya Party conducted an energetic and highly effective campaign. Led by figures such as S. Srinivasa Iyengar and S. Satyamurti, it successfully capitalized on growing anti-incumbency sentiment and internal divisions within the Justice Party. More importantly, it framed the election in explicitly nationalist terms, presenting it as part of the patriotic struggle for India’s freedom. The Justice Party was denounced as a group of “loyalists” and “British stooges” accused of compromising national interests in exchange for political office.
Justice Party in turn labelled the Swarajya Party as ‘Brahmnical oligarchy’ and a Trojan horse designed to restore traditional upper caste hegemony. It pointed out that Swarajya Party was led by elite Tamil Brahmins with deep roots in the conservative social networks of Mylapore. It accused Brahmnical press of systematically brainwashing to suppress the voices of non-Brahmins. More importantly, it warned that if Brahmical party won, it would immediately dismantle historic caste-based reservations and push back non-brahmins out of public administration. Ultimately, the Justice Party suffered a major defeat, while the Swarajya Party emerged victorious. The nationalist discourse had gained currency though social tensions remained unresolved.
Enlisting of non-Brahmins by Congress –
Meanwhile, the Swarajya Party adopted a strategy that the Justice Party itself compared to a “Trojan horse.” In order to neutralize the Justice Party’s anti-Brahmin plank, the Swarajya Party fielded a socially diverse slate of candidates drawn from prominent non-Brahmin communities, thereby directly challenging the Justice Party’s claim to represent non-Brahmin interests. The Justice Party dismissed these candidates as mere “puppets” who were being used to capture political power on behalf of a concealed Brahmin leadership.
As mentioned earlier, Manickavelu Naicker contested on a Swarajya Party ticket and won. The Swarajya Party’s strategy—or, one might say, the strategy of the elite Tamil Brahmins within it—had worked. The Justice Party—or, more precisely, the entrenched elites among the non-Brahmin forward castes—stood exposed. Manickavelu, in a sense, represented the arrival of an educated young voice from the agrarian Vanniyar community into the legislative arena.
Was this merely a question of caste dynamics, or was something deeper at work? Beneath these caste rivalries lay a bourgeois-landlord constitutional order that institutionalized the dominance of propertied classes through representative institutions. Although members of many castes entered electoral politics, political representation remained largely confined to their elite strata. The legislature thus became not simply an arena of caste competition, but also a mechanism through which emerging and established elites contested power within the framework of colonial constitutionalism.
The Government of India Act 1919 imposed strict property qualifications that restricted the franchise to wealthy landowners, major taxpayers, merchants, and professionals. Consequently, many of the non-Brahmin leaders who emerged through the Justice Party in 1920 were themselves men of landed, mercantile wealth. Yet within communities such as the Vanniyars, new aspirational layers were emerging — groups seeking education, public employment, and professional mobility. They increasingly searched for representatives who reflected these changing class aspirations rather than the authority of the old landed order alone.
Naicker, born in 1896, pursued higher education, graduated in the arts, and subsequently qualified as a lawyer. He sought entry into the legislative sphere as part of a newer professional class. He spoke for sections of the peasant and intermediate castes against seasoned elites who had long consolidated their dominance through wealth, administration, and legislative influence.Yet he himself was not outside the propertied order. \
Contesting elections under the colonial constitutional framework required property and tax qualifications. Fortunately for him, he belonged to a prosperous urban family that could afford higher education in the 1910s. As a practicing lawyer with taxable income and municipal standing, he could satisfy the qualifications necessary to contest elections. He and the Swarajya Party campaigned among the small minority of Vanniyar and other backward-class voters who themselves possessed sufficient property or income to qualify for the franchise. In that sense, it was still a propertied candidate appealing to propertied voters, though from a newer and socially expanding intermediate layer. The Swarajya Party ticket proved equally crucial. It gave him access to campaign finance, organizational machinery, and elite urban political networks that would otherwise have remained inaccessible to someone of his social location.
The Congress and the class character of its national agenda –
Despite the Congress being the dominant political force, it was never the only one. Throughout the twentieth century, it faced challenges from both above and below. One of the most significant came from the Justice Party, though the Congress managed to diffuse that challenge with the help of prominent non-Brahmin leaders such as Naicker. While this was an important achievement for the Congress, it was perhaps less so for Naicker himself. He soon grew disillusioned with the indifferent attitude of the dominant Congress leadership, particularly the Mylapore faction — representing socially conservative elite Brahmins within the party — and leaders such as C. Rajagopalachari. Their opposition to caste-based reservations was not merely passive; at times, it was openly hostile.
And how could it have been otherwise? The Congress’s national agenda essentially reflected the class interests of the national bourgeoisie. It sought to build a nation-state without fundamentally disrupting or transforming the existing social order, instead attempting to accommodate and gloss over prevailing inequalities. Its nationalism aimed at political independence from colonial rule while preserving existing social hierarchies. In the name of fostering national consciousness and national unity, it sought to impose a single national language to bind together India’s multilingual provinces. National unity was treated as supreme, while considerations of caste and class were often viewed as distractions or digressions from the larger nationalist project.
It did not mean that Congress entirely ignored these questions. Rather, it engaged with them only insofar as they could serve as expedients for mobilizing the toiling masses behind the national cause. On the question of caste exploitation, Gandhi advocated the abolition of untouchability while continuing to uphold the varnashram dharma that underpinned caste hierarchy itself. By referring to Dalits as “Harijans,” Gandhi sought not to annihilate caste but to morally sanitize and depoliticize caste oppression, recasting a question of social struggle into one of paternalistic reform within the caste order. In the sphere of class relations, the doctrine of “trusteeship,” was to replace class struggle with faith in the moral responsibility of the bourgeoisie. In Gandhi as leader and the Congress as party, the national bourgeoisie found its most effective political instrument for managing the acute social contradictions that characterized Indian society.
Assertion of backward class leadership –
In Madras, the effectiveness of the instrument was proven. Congress weakened the Justice Party and absorbed sections of non-Brahmin leadership, including figures like Naicker. But this accommodation proved temporary. By the 1930s, when Naicker broke with Congress and began articulating the demands of the backward classes, he was refusing to dissolve their distinct interests into an abstract project of “national unity” that, in practice, threatened to consolidate the dominance of upper-caste elites. Having earlier resisted subsumption under the broad non-Brahmin category, he now went further by challenging even the homogenizing “national” category itself and instead foregrounded the political claims of the backward classes.
Through the Madras Provincial Backward Classes League, Naicker continued to press for separate reservations and political safeguards for backward classes. Legislative forums increasingly became arenas where such demands were forcefully articulated, much to the frustration of Congress leaders committed to a more homogenizing nationalist politics.
Following the 1937 provincial elections held under the Government of India Act of 1935, the Congress secured a sweeping victory in the Madras Presidency, and C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) became Premier. When backward-class leaders renewed demands for separate reservation quotas, Rajaji sharply criticized them, describing reservations as “crutches” and warning that “if a community relied on crutches for too long, its limbs would wither.” He further dismissed such demands as a form of “retrograde communalism.”
Rajaji argued that, at a moment when the Congress was attempting to forge a “casteless” and unified Indian national identity in the struggle against British imperialism, demands for caste-based representation were divisive and politically regressive. Through this nationalist framing, backward-class assertions were often portrayed as being contrary to the larger national cause.
Nonetheless, backward class leaders like Naicker pursued relentlesly. Their refusal to abandon demands for representation, reservations, and the political advancement of backward peasant and labouring communities reflected a crucial development in the democratization of Indian politics: the recognition that formal nationalism alone could not resolve deeply entrenched social inequalities.
Ultimately, in 1947, at the dawn of independence, the long-standing demands of the backward classes achieved a significant breakthrough when the Communal Government Order was revised to grant them a separate sub-quota. Once again, Madras pioneered a political development that backward-class movements in North India would take up more forcefully only decades later.
Even before this achievement, Naicker had turned to grassroots mobilization, organizing mass conferences to rally the Vanniyar community around demands for political representation and social advancement. At the same time, another young leader from the community, S. S. Ramasami Padayachi, began his political career as an independent candidate. At the remarkably young age of twenty-four, he was elected to the Cuddalore Municipality in South Arcot. Within four years, in 1947 his growing popularity and organizational abilities led to his election as Chairman of the Cuddalore Municipality. Together, these leaders worked extensively to consolidate caste associations and articulate the socio-political demands of their communities.
Charting an Autonomous Path –
By this time, the Vanniyars had come to recognize themselves as one of the largest single caste groups in the province, and their caste association, the Vanniyakula Kshatriya Maha Sangam, founded in 1888, had already traversed a long political journey. Having successfully campaigned to remove the disparaging “Palli” label and secure official recognition under the more assertive identity of “Vanniyakula Kshatriya,” the Sangam increasingly turned its attention toward economic and political questions.
In 1949, when elections to the local district boards were announced, the Sangam submitted a formal petition and deputation to the Madras Congress, demanding proportionate ticket allocation in the four northern districts where the community had substantial demographic strength. The demand was rejected, as such explicit caste-based claims sat uneasily within the Congress’s secular-nationalist framework. In response, the Sangam fielded independent candidates in the district board elections and achieved a remarkable success, securing 22 out of 52 seats in the South Arcot District Board. This was a major political breakthrough and paved the way for an even more assertive phase of mobilization.
In anticipation of the provincial legislative assembly elections, the Maha Sangam convened a massive state-wide conference in 1951. The resolutions passed at the conference sharply indicted the regional Congress leadership as an elitist and hypocritical establishment dominated by Brahmins and forward-caste landlords. Simultaneously, the Justice Party was condemned for betraying the broader non-Brahmin movement. Invoking this “double betrayal,” the Sangam declared a policy of political untouchability toward both legacy formations, refusing any longer to serve as “coolie voters” for them.
The Sangam leadership clearly understood that the community’s large and geographically concentrated population in the northern districts provided it with substantial electoral leverage. What had emerged by this point was a backward peasant community—many of whose members still toiled on small agricultural holdings—that had nevertheless developed a politically conscious leadership that fully grasped the semantics of electoral politics. Their politics reflected a refusal to be fully appropriated either by the homogenizing nationalist discourse of the Congress or by the broader non-Brahmin framework. Instead, they sought to chart an autonomous path of political representation grounded in their own organizational strength and demographic weight.
In this sense, the movement revealed not merely the fragmentation of older political categories, but also what some subaltern scholars have interpreted as a deepening of democracy itself: marginalized communities increasingly sought to become autonomous political actors rather than passive constituents within elite-led coalitions.
Act of democratization –
Later, regional differences within the movement led to a split, resulting in the emergence of two separate political parties. The Commonweal Party, led by Manickavelu Naicker, drew its primary support from North Arcot and Chengalpattu, while S. S. Ramasami Padayachi’s Tamil Nadu Toilers’ Party (TTP) represented the Vanniyar belt of South Arcot and Salem.
In the provincial elections of 1952, hundreds of thousands of Vanniyars turned out to vote. Despite widespread illiteracy, many carefully navigated a complex electoral process with remarkable determination. When the results were announced, the Commonweal Party won six assembly seats, while the Tamil Nadu Toilers’ Party secured nineteen assembly seats along with four Lok Sabha seats. Together, the two parties sent twenty-five Vanniyar legislators to the assembly—an extraordinary achievement for a backward peasant community that had, only decades earlier, remained politically marginalized.
For many Western observers, the 1952 elections—held on the basis of universal adult franchise in a deeply poor and largely illiterate society—appeared to be a democratic experiment destined to fail. Sir Penderel Moon, a former British ICS officer, dismissed the exercise of recording the votes of millions of largely illiterate people through universal franchise as an “absurd farce.” Yet the success of India’s first general elections decisively confounded such skepticism. If India succeeded in laying the foundations of mass democracy, it was because millions of ordinary people—many poor, rural, and illiterate—traversed long distances, learned unfamiliar electoral procedures, and participated in the political process with extraordinary seriousness. The participation of communities such as the Vanniyars was thus an act of democratization.
From Democratization to Appropriation –
Meanwhile, the Congress emerged as the single largest party in the 1952 Madras Assembly elections, securing 152 seats in a House of 375—well short of a majority. The result dealt a major political setback to the Congress and soon produced a legislative crisis marked by a hung assembly. At the urging of Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajaji – who by them turned into a towering national figure having served as India’s Governor-General between 1948 and 1950—was persuaded to step in and mobilize support for the formation of a Congress government. The stakes were particularly high because the Communist Party, whose influence was concentrated largely in the Andhra regions of the Madras Presidency, had emerged as the second-largest political force and was viewed by Congress leadership as a serious threat.
Despite his initial reluctance, Rajaji—an avowed anti-communist and socially conservative Brahmin leader—ultimately accepted the responsibility. Drawing upon his immense political authority, he began negotiating with smaller parties and independents to secure the numbers required for government formation. One of such party that he brokered the deal with was the Commonweal Party.
This marked a striking political reversal. Despite his earlier sharp disagreements with Manickavelu Naicker over reservations and backward-class politics, Rajaji succeeded in bringing the Commonweal Party into the Congress-led coalition. Naicker accepted ministerial office as Minister for Land Revenue, and within two years dissolved the Commonweal Party into the Congress.
At the time, S. S. Ramasami Padayachi appeared to represent a more uncompromising position. He criticized Naicker’s move as a betrayal and resisted pressures to align with Congress. The betrayal of the community was not forgotten. In this context, Padayachi seemed to embody more faithfully the defiant spirit of the Vanniyakula Kshatriya Maha Sangam. Yet this resistance, too, proved temporary. Two years later, after Rajaji resigned and K. Kamaraj became Chief Minister, Congress once again extended an invitation to the Tamil Nadu Toilers’ Party. This time, the TTP accepted. The party was dissolved into the Congress, and Padayachi entered the government as Minister for Local Administration.
What had begun as an autonomous assertion of backward-class political power was thus gradually absorbed into the broader Congress system. The very process of democratization that had enabled subordinated communities to emerge as independent political actors now also revealed another dynamic of postcolonial democracy: appropriation through incorporation. If the electoral success of backward-class parties is to be celebrated as a “silent revolution,” as suggested by Christophe Jaffrelot and broadly echoed by sections of subaltern scholarship, then their subsequent appropriation by the Congress may equally be interpreted as a counter-revolution.
Class dynamics and its political articulations –
Was this a betrayal? A betrayal of the very caste association that had once denounced the Congress for neglecting backward-class interests? Were these leaders condemned by their own constituents? Far from it. The move was widely celebrated. At the South Arcot Sangham’s Tenth Annual Conference in June 1954, the integration into the Congress was greeted enthusiastically, and ministerial positions were treated as collective trophies won by the community itself.
The movement, after all, had achieved its central objective—one that was never merely abstract or ideological, but deeply material. It sought access to state patronage, government employment, educational opportunities, and political influence. In this sense, class interests lay at the heart of caste association politics, even if articulated through the language of caste solidarity. Caste simultaneously masked and expressed underlying class interests.
These class interests however cannot be understood through a mechanical binary of bourgeois versus worker or landlord versus peasant. The uneven and combined development of colonial and postcolonial society produced far more complex social formations, demanding a nuanced analysis rather than the imposition of rigid class categories from above. At the same time, dismissing these developments simply as “caste politics” is equally unhelpful and analytically sterile. The real task is to grasp the specific class dynamics embedded within caste formations and the manner in which they were articulated through political sphere.
The emergence of separate Vanniyar parties illustrates this dynamic clearly. The call for Vanniyar solidarity issued at the 1951 Maha Sangam conference did not endure for long, and soon two distinct political formations emerged under the leadership of Manickavelu Naicker and S. S. Ramasami Padayachi respectively. Was this merely a personality clash? More fundamentally, the split reflected the differing socio-economic structures of the regions they represented.
The northern belt—comprising North Arcot and Chengalpattu—lay closer to Madras city and had experienced earlier processes of urbanization and administrative integration. Naicker’s support base in these regions was tied to educated professionals, urban litigants, and relatively prosperous and established landholders. Consequently, the class interests represented by his faction were oriented toward legalistic negotiation and accommodation with the Congress in order to preserve and expand institutional influence. Such caste associations often functioned as vehicles through which emergent intermediate groups negotiated entry into modern political institutions7.
South Arcot, by contrast, remained far more deeply agrarian, characterized by concentrations of smallholding peasants, tenants, and agricultural labourers. Padayachi’s political strength rested upon mobilizing these rural masses. The very name “Tamil Nadu Toilers’ Party” reflected less a socialist ideological orientation than the social composition of its support base.
Thus, although both parties emerged from the same caste community, they represented different regional economies and therefore distinct configurations of class interests. In that sense, they could not remain organizationally united. Yet at a deeper level, both remained expressions of the same broader historical process: the political articulation of emerging class interests within democratic politics. This underlying convergence became evident in the trajectory both parties eventually followed. Despite their earlier rhetoric of autonomy and defiance, both sought accommodation within the Congress system through ministerial office, legislative influence, and access to state resources. This was bourgeois democracy functioning through incorporation rather than exclusion.
Bourgeois Democracy : Retreat, accommodation and co-option –
The forward-caste elites of the Justice Party who had once championed the unity of the non-Brahmins found themselves in a precarious position following the party’s collapse in the 1930s. Some, like Ramakrishna Ranga Rao, who had served as the Justice Party Chief Minister from 1932 to 1937, retreated into their vast landed estates, occasionally engaging in local industrial ventures or elite social pursuits such as racing clubs. Others adapted more pragmatically to the changing political order. M. A. Muthiah Chettiar, the immensely wealthy banking magnate, increasingly shifted his attention toward Annamalai University, founded by his father, helping transform it into a premier educational institution while coexisting comfortably with the new political establishment.
Some sections of the old Justice Party elite later gravitated toward Dravidian politics. For instance, the son of P. T. Rajan eventually aligned with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Yet many others crossed over directly into the Congress—the very party they had once denounced as a “Brahminical” organization.
Among the most striking examples was Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, often described as the “brain of the Justice Party.” Leveraging his formidable legal and administrative expertise, Mudaliar successfully adapted himself to shifting structures of power and carved out not merely a national but an international career. After serving on the Indian Council in London, he represented India in Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet during the Second World War. In independent India, he later represented the Mysore State in the Constituent Assembly. When the ICICI Bank (Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India) was established in 1955 to promote industrial development, Mudaliar was appointed its founding chairman.
Thus, even as the Justice Party as an organization disintegrated, many of its forward-caste elites successfully reconstituted their influence within the emerging order. Their ideological hostility toward the Congress often proved secondary to the preservation and advancement of class interests, which were secured through varying forms of accommodation with the incumbent structures of power. This was bourgeois democracy functioning through accommodation rather than ideological confrontation.
For the Congress, navigating the 1930s and 1940s was an increasingly difficult task. As the national freedom struggle expanded, so too did a range of social and political movements that refused to be subsumed within its framework. Militant peasant struggles, anti-caste movements—especially in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu—and the emergence of communist forces across several regions posed a profound challenge to the upper-class and upper-caste character underlying the Congress’s “national” vision.
The decade of 1930s opened with the heroic martyrdom of the HSRA (Hindustan Socialist Republican Association) revolutionaries, whose had exposed the class content of the Congress agenda and inspired a generation of radical youth across the country. Simultaneously, waves of industrial strikes swept major urban centres, particularly the textile mills of Bombay, signalling the growing militancy of the working class. In western and southern India, anti-caste movements moved beyond the limited framework of abolishing untouchability and began questioning the very Brahmanical social order that sustained caste hierarchy itself.
The pressures also emerged from within the Congress. In 1934, the Congress Socialist Party was formed as a left-wing caucus inside the organization. At the 1936 Lucknow session, Jawaharlal Nehru as the President publicly advocated a socialist restructuring of society, marking perhaps the high point of his Marxist phase. Toward the end of the decade, the All India Kisan Sabha emerged as a major peasant organization, while leaders such as Swami Sahajanand Saraswati broke with the Congress, denouncing it as being heavily influenced by landlords and zamindars.
The 1940s did little to ease these tensions. It was against this backdrop that the national bourgeoisie consolidated itself more firmly behind the Congress leadership. Through figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, and Rajendra Prasad, the Congress increasingly sought to contain the possibility of a more radical social transformation.
The concern was especially acute in the Madras Presidency, where anti-Congress and anti-Brahmin mobilizations had acquired organizational strength much earlier than in many other regions. Yet by the time of independence, it increasingly appeared that the most serious threats had been contained. The Justice Party had virtually collapsed. Its forward-caste elites had either retreated from politics or been absorbed into the new order. Following the 1952 elections, one of the two Vanniyar parties—perhaps the last significant legislative expression of non-Brahmin legacy—was successfully incorporated into the Congress. By 1954, the second had followed the same path.
More importantly, in K. Kamaraj, the Congress had discovered perhaps its most effective backward-class and subaltern face. A year earlier, the Andhra region—where communist influence had been particularly strong—had been separated from Madras State. Bourgeois democracy now appeared fully realized. The Congress seemed well positioned to implement its broader national agenda—or at least such was the appearance within the legislative sphere.
And there was Periyar –
Yet this capitulation unfolded largely within the framework of bourgeois democracy and among competing class elites. Outside the corridors of the legislature, the deeper social contradictions that had produced these movements remained unresolved. Outside, there were streets, there were classes, there were masses and there was Periyar, EVR Ramaswamy.
[The next part of this article will examine the class dynamics underlying Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement and its subsequent transformation into a broader Dravidian political phenomenon that has profoundly shaped the region over the past eight decades. It will trace how the class basis of Dravidian politics evolved over time, leading ultimately to its present decline, as graphically demonstrated by the electoral defeat of both the DMK and the AIADMK in this election. It would also investigate the relation of Dalits, communists to the Dravidian movement. On this historical basis, the article will seek to draw perspectives for advancing the struggles of the working masses against the prevailing structures of caste and class exploitation.]
- Youvraj,
New Socialist Alternative
31/05/2026
[email protected]
Ph – 7709045058
Notes :
1 – The decline of Dravidian hegemony should not be understood merely in electoral terms. It does not refer to a decline in the electoral performance of the major Dravidian parties, the DMK and the AIADMK, both of which retain enduring social and political bases that may sustain them beyond individual elections. Nor does it signify the disappearance of Dravidian rhetoric, symbols, or iconography from the public sphere. The continued invocation of Periyar, including by newer political formations such as TVK, suggests that these symbols may retain their resonance for some time. Rather, the decline refers to the weakening of Dravidian politics, not merely as an ideology but, more significantly, as a social force capable of driving structural social transformation in accordance with the principles and objectives it historically espoused.
2- The term “Adi-Dravida” had earlier been conceptualized and popularized by Ayothee Thass, who rejected caste-Hindu labels such as “Pariah” and argued that the oppressed castes were the original inhabitants of the Tamil land. By invoking the category “Adi-Dravida” (original Dravidian), he sought to provide an alternative historical identity rooted in dignity rather than caste degradation.)
3 – We firmly reject the notion that the Indian capitalist class as a whole can be characterized as a comprador class, as is often argued in Maoist analyses. Such a view is fundamentally flawed. As we demonstrate later, a national bourgeoisie emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century and became a distinct and significant social force in the early decades of the twentieth century.
4 – The usage of intermediate here indicate the flowing process of formation of classes where in based on new property relations a section of peasantry could accumulate some capital though not till the level as few other layers of peasantry could achieve. Dialectics does not look at the categories in binary sense but traces them in the motion, in the process of development. The process of class formation may span over the decades. The further elaboration of the political economy and the associated stratification within peasantry however would deviate the topic and hence not attempted.
5 – A fuller discussion of these processes will be presented in a separate article.
6 – The significant role played by colonial administrative and legislative apparatus that was of the bourgeois character in crystallizing the class politics in India is much less appreciated. This argument is fully developed in the document we will be publishing elaborating the development of capitalism during colonial period.
7 – Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph note in The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (1967)