The very publication of the Cambridge Companion to Periyar is a striking canon-breaking moment. Periyar is only the fifth Indian to have a Cambridge Companion dedicated to him, after Salman Rushdie, Gandhi, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, and Tagore. While Rushdie and Tagore feature in the Cambridge Companion to Literature series, Periyar is only the third Indian to be featured for his contributions as a socio-political thinker and activist. For someone who is so often dismissed as a regional icon and indeed as a divisive, unsophisticated, prickly, and ‘anti-national’ figure, to get a Cambridge Companion before a Nehru or a Bose is a striking reflection of the importance anti-caste philosophy has gained in the world of global political theory. The Companion to Ambedkar has also been in the works, at least since 2019. Other than the fact that the companion to Periyar is the first companion dedicated to a South Indian, it also differs from the companions to Gandhi (2011) or Tagore (2020) in another important way. The earlier companions had to contend with the challenge of synthesising and best reflecting a vast corpus of scholarship that had benefited from the many volumes of their works being available in English and many other regional languages for decades. As the editors A.R. Venkatachalapathy and Karthick Ram Manoharan note this was not the case with Periyar. Due to a combination of the lack of availability of Periyar’s writings to the non-Tamil world and the biases of the Indian academia that has been predominantly occupied with the ‘national’, ‘anti-colonial’ and thus invariably upper-caste history, Periyar hasn’t received nearly the same scholarly attention.The Cambridge Companion to Periyar, Karthick Ram Manoharan A. R. Venkatachalapathy, Cambridge University Press, 2025.This presents the editors with the distinct challenge of producing a volume that has to serve as both the introductory reader to Periyar and also as a critical appraisal of his thought and legacy. The difficulty of this balancing act is only compounded by the fact that the task of introducing Periyar does not come with the comfort of a blank slate. To introduce Periyar is also to clear the numerous misapprehensions about him stemming both from deliberate propaganda and catastrophic misunderstanding of the context of his politics, not to ‘defend’ him but simply to establish the facts about him and his times. In undertaking this unenviable task, the editors have chosen to err on the side of caution and have produced a volume that serves largely as a great introductory volume. The volume has focused on setting the basics right rather than delving into thorny abstractions or contradictions. The resulting volume is an extremely readable book that gives a taste of Periyar’s thought world and his context, but doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the task of taking Periyar beyond the Dravidian world and making him speak to complex debates on caste, identity, and culture. The introduction by the editors quickly narrativises the life of Periyar as an iconoclast – one who literally broke idols and challenged deeply entrenched values, be it faith or family. The Companion then explores the life and thought world of Periyar in five parts. The first part contains two essays on ‘Events That Made Periyar’. Here, Venkatachalapathy introduces English academia to two landmark works on Periyar in Tamil that settle the debates on two crucial contestations – one regarding the role played by Periyar in the Vaikom satyagraha and the other regarding Periyar’s articulations and efforts towards the Dalits in Tamil Nadu. The first essay, by Pazha. Athiyaman, demonstrates with ample historical evidence the central role played by Periyar in what could be called the first organised non-violent movement specifically against untouchability. The second essay, by Thiruneelakandan, documents Periyar and the self-respect movement’s (SRM’s) strong support for the demand of separate electorates for Dalits, even when it was far from the consensus among Dalit leaders in Tamil Nadu. It also documents Periyar and the SRM’s consistent championing of Dr. Ambedkar as the sole representative and the uncompromising leader of Dalits in the subcontinent. Parts two and three of the companion contain interpretive accounts of Periyar’s politics and his views on religion, caste and identity. The most critical essay in the companion is that of Matthew Baxter, who helpfully delineates two strands in Periyar’s thought – a ‘cosmopolitan’ strand that pertains to EVR’s ‘non-brahmin’ and a ‘nationalist’ strand that pertains to Periyar’s ‘Dravidian’. The former, Baxter argues, revolved around the equality of humankind, prioritising ‘self-respect’ over self-rule and refusing deference to any kind of authority. The latter prioritised the independence of a kind of human, Dravidian, and accommodated authority and embraced nationalism to some extent, compromising its ability to challenge Brahmanism comprehensively. The helpful delineation of these two strands is, however, compartmentalised into two different periods and the latter is read as the failure of the former. The framing risks oversimplifying Periyar’s evolution and misses the more curious phenomenon – the uneasy and tense coexistence of the two strands in Periyar’s articulations throughout his life. Vignesh Karthick’s essay traces the tenets of the social justice politics of the Dravidian parties back to Periyar. Not only are the attributions of ‘constitutional state autonomy’ and ‘federal ethos’ to Periyar questionable, the retroactive tendency of the reading goes so far as to claim that ‘questioning caste’ or ‘advocating self-respect’ were not ends in themselves but ‘ways of crafting a layered Dravidian-Tamil identity that could claim socio-economic mobility and socio-political representation for marginalised communities’.Also read: Why Do Dravidian Intellectuals Admire a Man as Prickly as Periyar?To claim that Periyar’s anti-caste politics have led to mobility and representation for various marginalised communities is one thing. To argue that the former was only a means towards the latter is a very different claim. Venkatachalapathy, in his chapter, vividly narrates the story of the period between 1949 and 1967, when Periyar’s Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) and C.N. Annadurai’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) functioned from the opposite camps but together contributed to the ‘Dravidian agenda’ occupying the central stage of Tamil politics. Sundar Kaali lays out the contours of Periyar’s critique of religion and argues that it was founded primarily on his anti-caste ideology and on his own version of ‘ethical reason’ capable of responding to historical change. Manoharan provides a genealogy and a synopsis of Periyar’s anti-aryanism and responds effectively to some of the most bizarre criticisms that it has invited, including even likening it to a genocidal ideology. Darinee Alagirisamy traces the influence of Periyar and his self-respect among the Tamil community in Singapore and documents its role in bridging the divide between community and nation among the Tamils of Singapore. It further reiterates that Periyar’s response to nationalism was not based on a priori concepts but was sternly based on the social consequences of the corresponding nationalisms.Parts four and five deal with Periyar’s articulations on ‘Women and Culture’ and ‘Labour and Dignity’. Manoharan and Vilasini Ramani forcefully argue that Periyar’s articulations on gender were grounded not only in a rights-based discourse, but also in a freedom-based discourse, hence advocating not only freedom from patriarchy but also sexual freedom in a radical libertarian sense. Anthony Arul Valan and Swarnavel Eswaran, in their essays, document Periyar’s contested engagement with literature and cinema, respectively. Together, they effectively outline Periyar’s keen suspicion towards the ‘culture industry’ and the dangers and limitations of mobilising the past, even for purportedly progressive goals. Vijayabaskar, in his essay, argues that Periyar believed that economic justice can be secured only through ‘waging a counter-hegemonic struggle against caste-sanctioned hierarchies’ and thus contends that, in Periyar’s political imaginary, the economic was only a subset of the social.The last chapter by Mahalingam Ramaswamy is instructive about what the companion does well and where its silences lie. It presents Periyar as a radical cultural psychologist by narrating the anecdotes of four people who listened to Periyar and decided to change their lives, genuinely rejecting the subjectivities of castes and the stigmas of widowhood. It overcomes the tendency in scholarship to approach socio-political figures primarily through texts as if they were just ‘thinkers’ and shows the human impact of the tireless social activism of over five decades. Yet, there is also a very loud silence here. The social history of Tamil Nadu in the last century is also the story of the tens of thousands of people who listened to Periyar, revered him, but nevertheless chose to hang on to the mental habitudes of caste. It is this paradox that can be crucial to not just understanding the resilience of caste, but also to problematising the Dravidian consensus on what Brahmanism is as an ideology and practice, and what the antidote to it should look like.This silence regarding the persistence of caste echoes loudly through the frustrations Periyar expressed in his final years. In the period after the DMK came to power in 1967, Periyar praised and defended the DMK government and appreciated its qualitative difference from the previous Congress governments and the governments in other states. Yet, when talking about society, Periyar spoke with increasing frustration, almost as if he were a defeated man. In one of his final public appearances, in his last speech at the Thinkers Forum commemorating his 95th birth anniversary, Periyar thanked the speakers for praising fifty years of his activism. He confessed that it brings him great satisfaction that he has received the love and support of large numbers of people. Yet, he argued he cannot be a happy man because, despite fifty years of struggle, the structure of the caste Hindu society remains perfectly intact. In fact, the caste structure has found an additional layer of security in Indian law and the judiciary. He did not deny that there has been progress. He recognised that there are now ‘lower-caste’ ministers and millionaires, but asked if caste would go if only there were more ‘lower-caste’ ministers and millionaires. If those who lived as fourth and fifth castes (Shudras and Dalits) before he was born continue to live as fourth and fifth castes, Periyar asked what indeed can be celebrated as the great successes of his life. He spoke with great urgency about somehow striking a more effective fatal blow to the caste order before his imminent death. In his last years, Periyar wrote and published books on the new forms of power that Brahmanism seems to have acquired, through institutions such as the judiciary, the banking sector and so on. Until his death, he was burdened by the indignity of caste and was animated by the urgency to annihilate it. He was anxious for change. His openness to newness, his various evolving and sometimes contradictory stances, were not just a result of his inherent rebellious iconoclastic soul, but were informed by this anxiety. The Dravidian movement owes its political success to its ability to extricate a coherent, almost self-evident logic from these articulations and forge a popular consensus upon it. However, this coherent consensus has also had serious social limitations. Most unfortunately, the social anxiety that animated Periyar has almost evaporated from the Dravidian public sphere. While the Companion has been successful in laying out the tenets of this powerful consensus, its success will be measured by its ability to potentially inaugurate a period of rigorous research into the complexities, contradictions and the extraordinarily rich legacy of the life and times of Periyar. Ganeshwar S. is a research scholar at the University of Hyderabad.