In the Korean drama My Liberation Notes (Netflix, 2022), written by Park Hay-Young, three office workers sit in the human resources (HR) manager's room. They have been asked to meet with the HR manager to address a specific issue related to the company's HR policy. As part of a neoliberal workplace well-being initiative, the company encourages employees to join a club to explore their hobbies and other interests. According to its institutional logic, if employees are allowed to pursue their personal interests at the workplace, it will make them ‘happy’ and creative, eventually leading to greater productivity. The HR manager regularly emails employees about various clubs, such as photography, hiking, and pottery to encourage them to choose a club.

Three colleagues from different departments receive regular club invitations via email, but none of them find the clubs interesting enough to join. To them, the exercise seems absurd, especially given their challenges, such as the high cost of living, normalized overwork, and dignity violations in the workplace. The HR manager's attempts to persuade them to join a club seem meaningless and futile in the face of their existential crisis. They are tired of the monotony of their lives, which limits their hope and possibilities. Consequently, they frequently reject club suggestions. Eventually, the HR manager asks them to meet her in the office and they provide vague answers, but as they leave, they realize they can create their own club to avoid the pressure of joining one. They name it the ‘Liberation Club’, whose objective is to journal their existential struggles to overcome personal and social reifications.

The Poona Pact, 1932, was a watershed moment in the history of Dalit politics. Nearly a century later, it remains the subject of debate and discussion. A definite setback to the independent mobilization of the Depressed Classes, the Poona Pact deprived them of the historic right to a separate electorate with a double vote granted by the British government. This chapter seeks to describe and analyse the stance taken by Periyar and his Self-Respect Movement (SRM) towards what B. R. Ambedkar described as ‘a mean deal’ (Ambedkar, 2014 [1994], p. 40).1

The pact was signed at a time when the Indian National Congress was in the ascendant and had demonstrated its all-India character and strength through a series of mass agitations. In response to its rise, in south India, the non-Brahmin castes had mobilized under the Justice Party and Periyar's SRM. At the all-India level, the Depressed Classes had become a force to be reckoned with under the leadership of Ambedkar. Both Periyar and Ambedkar viewed the Congress primarily as a formation that represented the Brahmins and Hindu upper castes.

To understand the position taken by Periyar on the Depressed Classes’ question, we need to trace the emergence of Depressed Class consciousness and the formation of political organizations representing the interests of Depressed Classes in south India—a group that Eleanor Zelliot describes as ‘the other [apart from that of western India] politically vocal group of Untouchables’, the largest in terms of numbers in any region of India then (2013, p. 115). Even though the political demands of the Depressed Classes coalesced only at the time of the Simon Commission (1928), their roots can be traced back much further.

One of the most honoured figures in the state of Tamil Nadu, arguably home to the highest number of temples in India, is an atheist who profaned the gods. E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973), popularly called ‘Periyar’ (the Great One), was a rationalist and radical social reformer. A household name in the region and the central figure of the Dravidian movement, he is best known for his polemics against religion, fervent propagation of atheism, support for proportional representation for backward and scheduled castes, and demand for political autonomy for south Indian states. His opposition to the caste system and the oppression of women are exemplified in his writings and speeches spanning over five decades. One of the first things that Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader M. K. Stalin did on assuming office as chief minister of Tamil Nadu in 2021 was to declare Periyar's birth anniversary (17 September) as ‘Social Justice Day’—underscoring his reputation as a crusader for social justice.

In 2018, statues of Periyar were vandalized across Tamil Nadu, reportedly by Hindu right-wing activists. His statues outside temples, bearing the inscription ‘There is no god, there is no god, there is no god at all. He who invented god is a fool. He who propagates god is a scoundrel. He who worships god is a barbarian’ have been an eyesore for the Hindu right, and its leaders have been promising to have them removed.

Starting with a genealogical survey, the chapter charts how semantics shape epistemologies and explores how positionality, imagery, and the politics of referencing determine the meanings associated with certain concepts. Based on a deep reading of Murakami’s source compilations and translations, the chapter demonstrates how he forged an image of early modern gaikō by emphasizing specific events and actors and by singling out diplomatic documents. It traces how Murakami Naojirō, as the protagonist of the book, played an essential role in shaping the notion of narratives about Japan’s engagement with the outside world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through concrete terminological examples it also engages with the misconceptions and silences created through translational processes.

This chapter explains the rationale of the book and discusses Murakami Naojirō’s significance for Japanese historical scholarship. It sets the stage for exploring the practices institutionalized academic historians employed in constructing narratives of early modern Japan’s progressive foreign relations. Translation and hegemonic knowledge claims were major factors in this process, which had lasting consequences for global intellectual trajectories and perpetuated unequal power relations. The imperialist agenda of Murakami and his colleagues was at the forefront of hegemonic thinking about how history ought to be studied: which sources were relevant, whose actions and achievements were important, which groups had histories worth implementing into meta narratives, and whose voices were to be heard and included. The introduction also elaborates on key methodological frameworks such as entangled biography, empirical imperialism, and implicit comparison, and finally discusses important concepts as well as spatial and temporal dimensions of the study.

The epilogue discusses new and old challenges for history as an academic discipline that overemphasizes the written archive and fails to deliver on its promise to be transparent about the motivations behind and process of source selection. It highlights the shortcomings of the document-based and state-, male-, and literate-centric history-writing as a violent technology of European and Japanese imperialisms.

The Cambridge Companion to Periyar has been jointly edited by two researchers belonging to two different generations. When the first editor began his writing career in the mid-1980s, Periyar's was not a name that could be taken in genteel, academic circles. By the time the second editor began his doctoral work at a British university in 2011, the topic was a study in political theory, comparing Periyar with a major international thinker (Frantz Fanon). In the intervening generation, much had changed in the fortunes of academic writing on Periyar. After decades of being ignored or consigned to the margins by Indian sociologists and historians, we can say that Periyar has arrived in global scholarship. This volume exemplifies this turn.

Paralleling Periyar's rising influence during these intervening decades, there has been vigorous academic interest in studying the Dravidian movement. Newer and newer editions of Periyar's writings—covering the spectrum from multivolume sets to popular paperbacks—are being published every year. Any visitor to the annual Chennai Book Fair would be amazed by the piles of books by and on Periyar. The transformation of the Periyar Library and Research Centre housed in the Chennai headquarters of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) from a sweltering hall roofed by an asbestos sheet in 1981, when the first editor first consulted it, to a comfortable air-conditioned hall with expanded print resources indexes the growing academic interest in Periyar. Social media is also abuzz with young readers discussing animatedly the ideas of Periyar.

A little over a hundred years after the non-Brahmin manifesto put forth by the South Indian Liberal Federation, better known as the Justice Party, in 1916 that advocated for adequate representation for non-Brahmin groups, Tamil Nadu's legislative assembly is India's most diverse in terms of caste representation (Verniers et al., 2021).

This legislative assembly's diverseness has been often attributed to the capacious Dravidian– Tamil1 identity and its ethos, which continue to inform the politics of the Dravidian parties that have governed the state since 1967. The capaciousness of the ethos that defines the Dravidian– Tamil identity, which has allowed for horizontal solidarities across caste groups that otherwise share a hierarchical relationship, stems from the socio-economic and cultural aspirations of these groups. These horizontal solidarities and aspirations continue to derive both their legitimacy and sustainability from the ever incremental and yet radical, anti-caste episteme and activism of Periyar. This chapter is an attempt to engage with him and the way his ideas may be located or traversed both within and outside the literature of other academics, intellectuals, and scholars not just of the subcontinent but across the world. His anti-caste episteme and the vocabulary of his activism are informed by a demand for adequate representation of non-Brahmins—grounded either in their demographic weight or in a historically embedded sense of tension with Brahminical hegemony.

This chapter portrays the multifaceted connections that shaped narratives of early modern Japanese–European encounters and colonial expansion in Southeast Asia. It achieves this by applying an entangled biography approach to Murakami’s knowledge networks, which integrated contemporary Japanese academia, foreign archives, and historical actors. An in-depth study of two ‘great men’ of the seventeenth century, Yamada Nagamasa and Sebastián Vizcaíno, illustrates the material and historiographical dimensions of myth-making and cultural diplomacy in the early twentieth century. The chapter finally evaluates the extent to which Murakami’s scholarship and his exposure to colonial sources contributed to the meta-narrative of early modern Japanese superiority.

Ideologue, reformer, feminist, firebrand secessionist: these are some of the many things E. V. Ramasamy Periyar has been called. If there is one strand of Periyar's thought that runs through all these titles and the politics that informed them, it would be his clarion call for self-respect. Not one to stop at dismantling the hegemonic power structures that he saw around him in India, Periyar was committed to the cause of reform in and for the Tamil diaspora as well. His views on nationhood thus ‘constantly violated the certitude about boundaries, identities, agents of change, and went beyond the territoriality of the nation’ (Pandian, 1993, p. 2282). Periyar emphasized that foreign settlement could enable the regeneration of Tamil society abroad, unfettered by India's oppressive traditions. Moreover, he saw the diaspora as an important source of financial support for the Dravidian movement. To this end, Self-Respect literature often asserted that Tamil people everywhere were bound by obligations of mutual assistance and reciprocity (Alagirisamy, 2016). Periyar visited British Malaya and Singapore twice in his lifetime: once in 1929–1930 and again in 1954–1955. Both visits were pivotal in aiding the development of a settled Tamil political consciousness in Singapore.

Scholars of the Indian Ocean world continue to trace the comings and goings of sojourners and settlers, privileging the ocean itself as a key agent of change (Moorthy and Jamal, 2010; Amrith, 2013; Menon et al., 2022). Yet, settlement also brought with it a sea-change in the lived presents and anticipated futures of migrant communities that aspired to citizenship.

The popular focus on Periyar and Dravidian—as a person leading his loyal people—may invite placing nationalism's assertion, rather than critique, at the heart of political thought in twentieth-century Tamil-speaking South India. ‘Nationalism’ names the intuition that ‘France [is] for the French, England for the English … and so forth’ (Shaw, 2013) or, more generally, ‘nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy … requir[ing] that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’, insisting on ‘congruence of state and nation’, and refusing ‘ethnic divergence between rulers and ruled’ (Gellner, 1983, pp. 1, 134). Much turns on ‘ethnic’. Considerations include whether ‘ethnic’ is ‘racial’ or ‘historically constituted’ (Lenin and Stalin, 1970, pp. 66–68) and nationalism's ‘inherent contradictoriness’, both because its ‘rational and progressive’ promises of modernity are often premised on ‘traditional and conservative’ gestures to the past and because its anti-colonial articulation usually adopts the very imperial ‘representational structure … nationalist thought seeks to repudiate’ (Chatterjee, 1986, pp. 22, 38). So, when the August 1944 creation of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) was heralded with ‘Long live Periyar, Dravida Nadu for the Dravidian, let the Dravidar Kazhagam flourish’1—entrenching an ‘ethnic’ idiom for Tamil-speaking South India's politics—an invitation for ‘a chapter on Periyar and nationalism’ encourages the interrogation of a twinned presumption of coherence: not simply of ‘Dravidian’ as a people loyal, but of ‘Periyar’ as a person leading.