In the nation-wide hustle and bustle over the prime minister’s birthday celebrations were drowned the subdued tributes paid to Tamil Nadu’s political icon on Wednesday, marking his 135th birth anniversary. Though Narendra Modi shares his birthday with that of Periyar E V Ramasamy, who died in 1973, the two leaders are from different historic eras and of diverse political thoughts. But like Modi, Ramasamy, too, was either hated or adored. Though the portrait of the man in flowing white beard is still a fixture in every regional party’s marquee in the state, the modern generation remembers Periyar only as a pioneering champion of OBC rights, an ardent atheist and a Brahmin baiter — all of which he indeed was.

But beyond his shrill political slogans, he propagated progressive ideas that were ahead of his times. If he fought for OBC reservation, which has become a reality in India now, he also advocated 50 per cent  reservation of jobs in offices for women in the 1930s. He suggested that as a means to prevent couple from longing for a son and in that pretext not going in for birth control even after having two daughters. But his advocacy of birth control, way back in 1930, was not to address the national problem of population explosion but to enable women make a free and independent choice on having a child or not.

He advised couples not to have children in the first five years of marriage. He saw marriage as an institution that enslaved women and wanted its abolition but  was not averse to a man and a woman falling in love and sharing a life. If modern day feminists find the depiction of women in media as unacceptable, Periyar attacked Tamil literature for describing women’s physical features and not their intellectual abilities way back in 1946. Perhaps it was only appropriate that the title ‘Periyar’ was conferred on him by a congregation of women.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Editorials / by The New Indian Express / September 18th, 2014