Karunanidhi

Chennai, Sept. 24: M. Karunanidhi’s statements on Ram are not a sudden burst of BJP-baiting by a former scriptwriter for Tamil films.

They are statements typical of a stalwart of a political tradition based on iconoclasm that has for decades targeted “Brahminical” heroes such as Ram and Krishna.

The Tamil Nadu chief minister’s party, the DMK, feeds on Periyar’s atheistic Dravidian movement that has defined Tamil Nadu politics since the pre-Independence era.

Karunanidhi’s remark about Ram being a fictional character is almost a throwback to Periyar’s statement that “he who created god was a fool, he who spreads his name is a scoundrel, and he who worships him is a barbarian”.

In his days in the movie industry in the ’40s and ’50s, Karunanidhi pushed the Dravidian anti-Brahmin agenda by pioneering a new genre of screenplay for films championing social reforms.

For instance, in Paraskathi, he penned a dialogue for Sivaji Ganesan that went on to become a classic: “We are not against temples, but we don’t want temples to become havens for immoral goons.”

He wrote similar lines for M.G. Ramachandran, who became his ally in politics before parting ways to form the ADMK.

After the 1962 Chinese war, the DMK under C.N. Annadurai dropped its separatist agenda and toned down its anti-Brahmin rhetoric. But since Annadurai’s death in 1969, Karunanidhi has never fought shy of mining Periyar’s more hardline legacy if he thought it politically expedient.

He had once remarked jocularly “Vendraal, Anna vazhi; thotral, Periyar vazhi”, implying he would follow Annadurai’s moderate line if the DMK won an election, but would return to Periyar’s stridency if the party lost.

However, as with the “we are not against temples” dialogue, the politician in him would temper the rhetoric to keep an escape hatch open. “Our attack is not against Brahmins, it is only against Brahminism and what it stands for,” he would say.

When the DMK had to cohabit with north Indian parties in the post-1989 coalition era, he declared: “We are not against Hindi as a language but its imposition.”

His remarks now reflect that astuteness. He has pointed to Ram’s enjoyment of alcohol, but has been careful to attribute it to Valmiki, adding that there’s nothing wrong “in factually narrating what has been said about someone”.

In support of his denial of Ram’s existence, he has cited how Jawaharlal Nehru had described the Ramayan as a piece of fiction portraying an aspect of the age-old Aryan-Dravidian conflict.

In this, he has occupied the middle ground between Annadurai and Periyar, who had organised a march with a picture of Ram garlanded with slippers and destroyed the portrait in public in 1956.