Kudi Arasu
Overview
Kudi Arasu, also rendered Kudiyarasu and translated as Republic, was a Tamil weekly published by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in the Madras Presidency, in present-day Tamil Nadu. Periyar started it at Erode on 2 May 1925, with K. M. Thangaperumal Pillai as its first editor. Its early issues appeared weekly on Sundays, ran to sixteen pages and sold for one anna. Within months of its founding the paper became the mouthpiece of the Self-Respect Movement, the radical social reform movement that Periyar led, and it carried that movement's arguments on caste, religion, women's rights and rationalism to readers in Tamil Nadu and across the Tamil diaspora.
Kudi Arasu survived bans, arrests and the repeated absence of its founder through imprisonment and touring, and members of Periyar's family sustained it as publishers during those absences. It ceased publication on 5 November 1949, after a life of twenty-four years that made it the longest-lived and most consequential of Periyar's journals. Its files preserved the founding record of the Self-Respect Movement in print, and scholars treated those files as a primary source for the history of Dravidian politics, of the anti-caste movement and of women's writing in Tamil.
The Launch at Erode on 2 May 1925
Periyar published the first issue of Kudi Arasu from Erode, his home town, on 2 May 1925. He was then a leader of the Indian National Congress in the Madras Presidency who had presided over its provincial committee and had pressed, without success, for reservation for non-Brahmins in government jobs and education. The weekly gave him a platform of his own at the moment when his frustration with Congress on the question of communal representation approached its breaking point. K. M. Thangaperumal Pillai served as the paper's first editor, while Periyar directed the venture and wrote for it as its presiding figure.
The physical form of the new paper matched its ambitions to its means. It appeared on Sundays with sixteen pages at a price of one anna, the small coin that placed a weekly within the reach of ordinary readers. A sixteen-page Sunday paper at that price was a substantial offering for a provincial Tamil town in 1925, and its size allowed it to carry editorials, essays, news of the movement, correspondence and literary contributions in a single issue. The year 1925 later acquired a double significance in Tamil history, because it marked both the founding of the paper and the launch of the movement that the paper came to serve.
The Break with Congress and the Self-Respect Movement
In November 1925 Periyar quit the Indian National Congress after his failed attempt to secure reservation for non-Brahmins in educational institutions and government jobs. S. Ramanathan, who had founded the Self-Respect Movement with like-minded friends, invited him to spearhead that movement and to propagate self-respect among Indians, especially Tamils. Kudi Arasu became the mouthpiece of the movement, and through its columns the movement acquired the printed voice that carried its message beyond the meetings and conferences where Periyar spoke in person.
The movement that the paper served emphasised rationalism, equality and the dignity of the individual, and it challenged caste oppression and patriarchy together. Its characteristic institutions included self-respect marriages conducted without priests or caste rituals, advocacy of widow remarriage and of women's rights to divorce and property, and encouragement of inter-caste marriage. Kudi Arasu argued those positions week after week, and it thereby turned a programme that its opponents dismissed as eccentric into a body of doctrine that readers across the Tamil country debated, adopted or resisted in print and in public life.
What Kudi Arasu Published
Periyar wrote several articles in Kudi Arasu on women's rights, on atheism and against the caste system, and those three subjects defined the paper's editorial identity. Its treatment of women's rights was unusually radical for its time and place, and the anthology of self-respect literature compiled by scholars from the paper's files between 1928 and 1936 preserved a substantial body of writing by women, which demonstrated that the paper gave women contributors a platform as well as arguing their cause in men's voices. M. Singaravelu, the pioneering South Indian labour and socialist leader, wrote many articles on socialism in its pages, which connected the paper's anti-caste argument to a wider critique of economic hierarchy.
A single editorial illustrated the paper's willingness to confront the most revered figures of Indian public life. In an editorial dated 29 March 1931 Periyar criticised Mahatma Gandhi in connection with the execution of Bhagat Singh, arguing in substance that the whole country had condoled the hanging and condemned the government for it, and that patriots had turned their anger on Gandhi for his part in the events that preceded it. The Hindu newspaper's later reporting on that editorial treated it as a notable document of the relationship between Periyar and the Gandhian movement, in which admiration for Bhagat Singh's courage coexisted with a fundamental refusal to subordinate social revolution to the Congress programme.
Circulation Among the Tamil Diaspora
Kudi Arasu circulated beyond the Madras Presidency among the Tamil diaspora, in the plantation and commercial communities of Malaya, Singapore, Ceylon, Burma and South Africa where Tamil labour and trade had carried the language. Thamizhavel G. Sarangapani, the Singapore-based Tamil publisher and reformer, played a prominent role in that overseas circulation. His work connected the Self-Respect Movement's printed arguments to diaspora readers who faced their own structures of caste and racial subordination, and who remitted both money and attention to the movement's paper in Erode.
That diaspora reach distinguished Kudi Arasu from most provincial weeklies of its period. A paper founded in a mofussil town for a provincial argument acquired an international Tamil readership, and its editorials on caste and self-respect entered debates in Singapore and Penang as well as in Madras and Madurai. Later accounts of Sarangapani's career in Singapore treated his promotion of the paper as a significant chapter in the history of Tamil journalism outside India, which confirmed the scale of the circulation that he had built.
The Family Publishers and the Paper's Survival
The paper's survival through its founder's absences rested on his family. Periyar's wife Nagammai, his sister Kannammal and his brother E. V. Krishnasamy served as the publisher of Kudi Arasu for periods when he was on tour or under arrest. That arrangement was not a formality. Periyar's movements repeatedly took him away from Erode on propaganda tours, and his campaigns repeatedly brought him into custody, and on each occasion the paper continued to appear under the responsibility of a family member who shared its commitments. Nagammai's role in particular entered the movement's own memory, as the partner who sustained its press while its leader travelled or sat in prison.
The pattern also explained the paper's resilience against official pressure. A journal whose publisher could be replaced from within a committed family, and whose editor's authority rested on a movement rather than on a commercial company, presented the authorities with a harder target than a conventional newspaper business. The government nevertheless returned to the paper repeatedly with the instruments that it possessed, and the record of those encounters formed a substantial part of the paper's history.
Bans, Sedition and the Arrests of 1935
The Madras government of the British Raj banned Kudi Arasu on several occasions for various reasons, including sedition and the propagation of communism. The bans testified to the breadth of the official anxiety that the paper provoked. Its anti-caste and atheist arguments alarmed the guardians of social order, its socialist contributors alarmed the guardians of property, and its contempt for Congress moderation denied it the protection that a more conventionally nationalist paper might have claimed from Indian public opinion when the state struck at it.
In 1935 the authorities banned the Tamil version of Bhagat Singh's essay Why I Am an Atheist, which the paper's circle had published, and they arrested its translator P. Jeevanandham and its publisher E. V. Krishnasamy, Periyar's brother. The episode linked the paper's atheism directly to state repression. A text by a martyred revolutionary, rendered into Tamil by a leading communist and issued by the founder's own brother, combined every element that the Madras government regarded as dangerous, and the prosecution that followed demonstrated that Kudi Arasu operated throughout its life at the edge of what the colonial state was willing to tolerate in print.
The Anti-Hindi Agitation and the Paper's Later Years
Kudi Arasu remained a combat paper into its second decade. Its front page of 3 September 1939 carried a headline that called, in the English rendering preserved by reference works, for Hindi to fall, during the anti-Hindi agitation of 1937 to 1940 that followed the Madras government's introduction of compulsory Hindi in schools. Periyar led that agitation, and his paper served as one of its instruments, which extended the paper's concerns from caste and religion to language and to the cultural relationship between Tamil Nadu and the north. The surviving front page became one of the most reproduced images of the paper, because it captured its typography, its vehemence and its politics in a single sheet.
The paper continued through the 1940s, the decade in which Periyar transformed the movement's political organisation into the Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944 and in which India moved through war to independence and partition. Kudi Arasu ceased publication on 5 November 1949. Its closure came twenty-four years after its founding and closed the founding era of Self-Respect journalism, although Periyar's movement and its successor parties carried its doctrines into the government of Tamil Nadu in the decades that followed.
Republication and Legacy
The paper's writings retained an authority within the Dravidian movement that republication later formalised. In 2010 works from Kudi Arasu between 1925 and 1938 were reproduced and published as books, and The Hindu reported the release of Periyar's speeches and writings in that year. Scholars had already mined the paper's files for the anthology of self-respect literature that documented women's writing in the movement between 1928 and 1936, and historians of the anti-caste movement, Gail Omvedt among them, drew on its record in reconstructing the construction of a Dalit and non-Brahmin political identity.
Kudi Arasu was remembered as the founding journal of the Self-Respect Movement and as one of the most consequential Tamil periodicals of the twentieth century. It was founded at Erode in 1925 as a sixteen-page Sunday weekly for one anna, it became within months the printed voice of a social revolution, it circulated across the Tamil diaspora, it survived bans and arrests through the labour of its founder's family, and it argued for women's rights, atheism, socialism and the annihilation of caste until its closure in 1949. Few Indian weeklies of its size carried arguments that altered the politics of their region as durably as the doctrines that Kudi Arasu first set in type.
