When I was doing ethnographic fieldwork towards an anthropology of cinema during 2005-07 in the villages of Tamil Nadu, I became increasingly convinced of what many of us held as some kind of commonsensical understanding: That Tamil Nadu had primed itself for more inclusive development and greater redistribution through participatory governance when liberalisation and globalisation accelerated economic activity in the early 1990s.
Reading A. Kalaiyarasan and M. Vijayabaskar’s The Dravidian Model: Interpreting Political Economy of Tamil Nadu, one feels as if one is meeting in the middle of a conceptual jungle with people who had travelled into it from the other side.
What the much-awaited book presents is a thorough and insightful compilation of hard data on development indicators that calls for an explanation of the political processes that served as causal factors, which the authors undertake with a zest that is scholarly and erudite yet accessible to the non-specialist.
Case for the subnational variant
The Dravidian Model makes a compelling case for an interpretive schema of development that integrates processes of political mobilisation by reading it as a key subnational variant within India. The Dravid Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) mobilised people on the basis of the broad egalitarian, anti-caste, social justice themes which go by the tag ‘Dravidianism’ and the composite identity of Dravidian-Tamil. On coming to power in 1967, the ‘Dravidian’ state took key policy decisions focussing on everyday aspects of governance that included planning and delivery, all cumulatively determining the process of economic development in a certain manner. This is what qualifies it to be studied as a model.
The AIADMK which branched out of and alternated in power with the DMK in Tamil Nadu offered both continuity and variation to the policies pursued by the DMK, a point that is repeatedly made in the book. The developmental yields of the rule of the two parties are well documented in the book in eight succinct chapters.
A. Kalaiyarasan, M. Vijayabaskar, The Dravidian Model: Interpreting Political Economy of Tamil Nadu, Cambridge University Press (2021)
The first chapter makes the case for the need to study the subnational variant. Per capita income in Tamil Nadu that was nearly at the level of the national average in 1960-61 became more than 150% of the national average by 2010-11. At the same time, the reduction in both rural and urban poverty levels is also dramatic. From being more than the national average, it came down to being the third lowest in the country, less than Maharashtra and Gujarat which record greater per capita income. Hence, economic growth with reduction in levels of inequality places the Dravidian-Tamil subnational variant as a rewarding object of study.
The second chapter provides a rich theoretical look at the political mobilisation that developed a certain common sense in which redistribution was seen as the political norm with a sense of entitlement pervading the common people. The third and fourth chapters present the strides made in education and health – key sectors of exemplary achievement compared to most other Indian states.
The fifth chapter – a vital one – speaks of the broad-basing of growth and democratisation of capital that is followed by a study of rural transformation and urban labour in the sixth and seventh chapters.
The final chapter looks at the limits and pitfalls of the processes so that we have a balanced picture. Their attention to limits appears superfluous at times, in being discursive rather than demonstrative, like the allusion to essentialisation of the identity of the ruling elite suggested by Rosanvallon, which is not supported by empirical data or evidence.
In Tamil Nadu‘s context, such allusion to essentialisation will only point to the empirical reduction of caste identity and the discursive fetishisation of the same, instead of focussing on the hegemonic and ideological implications of the caste system that the Dravidian model sought to dismantle – and which is the implicit theme of the book. This theme in fact connects to the much more expansive fusion of capital and ideology undertaken by Thomas Piketty on a global scale.
Local history, global design
I am persuaded that The Dravidian Model (DM) is best read in conjunction with Piketty’s voluminous snapshots of the anthropological, structural-functional dimensions of world historical transformations on a global scale appropriately titled Capital and Ideology (CI). While the comparison of development indicators makes DM primarily rest on the comparison with the performance of other Indian states, the study of the ideological moorings of Dravidian political economy is best studied in the paradigm developed by Piketty.
While DM refers to CI in key moments, owing to its focus on the story of development in Tamil Nadu in empirical and conceptual terms, it does not connect to the speculative expanse of CI. On his part, Piketty, being aware of the primarily European template of his global analysis, makes the effort to pay attention to variations in India, China and the rest of the world.
Piketty refers to Tamil Nadu and even Periyar through a reading of the works of Nicholas Dirks and also to sub national variations in Indian postcolonial developmental history through reference to Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze but he stops with citing Kerala as an example. Hence the Periyar-inspired Dravidian model as a key variant of the global modes of transition will surely better inform his framework of analysis. Hence the proposition that DM and CI need to be read in conjunction. I will briefly present my case as to why this is inherently necessary.
The task undertaken by DM is to show that the sub-national variant in the developmental path produced in Tamil Nadu is the product of Dravidian political ideology. As we have seen, this variant mitigates the trend to rising inequality seen all over the world and ensures effective redistribution through state measures.
If this process is to be translated into the paradigm of capitalist transition that Piketty uses, it is possible to say that the Dravidian movement intervened in the transition of a society dominated by clergy and nobility to that of an ownership society resulting in the hegemony of the propertied class which once again accentuates inequality after a brief hiatus of reduction in inequality with the advent of democracy or social democracy.
The Dravidian formation was able to intervene and preserve the moment of hiatus by forging left populism that countered the ideology of the clergy, in this instance Aryan Brahminism, which had subsumed the nobility and landed gentry in medieval and early modern Tamil Nadu in the iron grip of an exploitative caste order.
In prioritising the counter hegemonic articulations of the plebes against the exploitative Brahminical social order – the disenfranchised sections of the ternary society in Piketty’s terms – for a fair share in economic growth and governance, Dravidianism evolved a new common sense of equity as the bedrock of popular, electoral democracy.
This could effectively counteract the emerging stranglehold of the still evolving new propertied class and their liberal ideology on the state and governmental measures. This became possible only because the term Dravidian stood for repudiation of the Brahminic casteist ideology. The rigour of the critical idiom forged against the old ternary or quaternary society of Aryanism, which Dravidian politics sought to dismantle, continues to animate the politics of the plebes in the era of globalisation/liberalisation. This analysis is the contribution DM makes to CI.
DM rightfully makes the contribution since in the very beginning of his account, Piketty, in listing the variety of theories about ethnic origins of dominant and dominated groups, which was used both to legitimise and delegitimise inequality, mentions: “…In India, nobles were said to be of Aryan origin, the commoners Dravidian.” This is the precise raison d’etre of the Dravidian model.
However, a more intriguing connection appears towards the end when Piketty describes the present ideological cleavage in electoral democracies as between “Brahmin left” and “merchant right”. He doesn’t use the term Brahmin in such naming to refer to the function of the clergy or priestly class in the old ternary society or even its reconfiguration in the ownership society as a new set of cultural advantages genealogically derived. He uses it to point to the alienation of the left – as an educated, intellectual class – from the working class it is supposed to represent. This is more or less the reason why Ernsto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe appeal to the emergence of left populism, as DM rightly points to.
DM sets up the empirical and conceptual ground to pose the question of how far Dravidianism has succeeded in de-Brahminising the left, making redistribution the norm of populist reason. Dravidianism has also implicitly endorsed socialist-federalist global immanence as against the inegalitarian merchant nativism of nation-states in Piketty’s formulation. A combined reading of The Dravidian Model and Capital and Ideology will hopefully energise future research into the ideological potential of Dravidianism.
Rajan Kurai Krishnan teaches at Ambedkar University, Delhi.