The Cambridge Companion to Periyar

The Cambridge Companion to Periyar is a timely academic intervention which brings together scholars working on different aspects of modern Tamil politics, taking diverse perspectives, to comment on Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, the significant thinker whose thoughts inform political practices in contemporary Tamil Nadu. As the chapters seek to demonstrate, Periyar’s thoughts can have a pan-Indian and a global significance, informing conversations on caste, gender, religion, regionalism, nationalism, and social justice. Likewise, in the wake of wider conversations on bringing diversity to the academic disciplines, this volume on Periyar will draw attention to a non-canonical thinker whose important intellectual and political contributions transcend the limits of his context. The volume brings together established academics in the field as well as early career researchers to provide the first of its kind companion to Periyar. Tapping new sources, challenging myths, and crossing disciplinary boundaries, this volume presents a Periyar for the times.

Author Biography

A. R. Venkatachalapathy is Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. Apart from his many books in English he has also written or edited over forty books in Tamil. His contribution to Tamil has been recognised by two lifetime achievement awards. Karthick Ram Manoharan is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. He is the author of Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism (2022), Frantz Fanon: Identity and Resistance (2019), and the co-editor of Rethinking Social Justice (2020).