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Anti-caste and anti-imperial political thought
‘A Critique of Periyar’s Anti-Aryanism’
He had hatred towards the Brahmins and preached violence against them’ is a common accusation laid against Periyar E.V. Ramasamy (1879-1973), social reformer from South India. This paper critically looks at Periyar’s approach to the Brahmin question, placing it within his politics of anti-Aryanism.
Amber Murrey (Chair)
Dr Amber Murrey is an Associate Professor of Political Geography at the University of Oxford. She was a 24/25 Fulbright Scholar at the Université de Yaoundé 1 in Cameroon. Her award-winning scholarship on political ecologies in Cameroon focuses on forms of what she calls ‘slow dissent’: community struggle and resistance amidst intergenerational and extractive violence. Amber is the co-author of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies (with P. Daley, 2023) and editor of A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara (2018). She is Editor-in-Chief of the African Geographical Review, a current British Academy Wolfson Fellow, and a multiple recipient of the British Academy Writing Workshop Award in support of her collaborative work on “defiant scholarship in Africa” with colleagues at the University of Buea (Cameroon) and Addis Ababa University.
Karthick Ram Manoharan is Smuts Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is most recently the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Periyar (CUP 2025).
Date:
20 January 2026, 14:00
Venue:
St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details:
Pavilion Room
Speakers:
Karthick Ram Manoharan (University of Cambridge),
Amber Murrey (University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Asian Studies Centre
Organisers:
Janaki Srinivasan (University of Oxford),
Prof Rebekah Lee (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
South Asia-Africa Seminar Series
Booking required?:
Not required
Booking email:
asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Audience:
Public
Editors:
Clare Salter,
Amy Crane,
Thomasina Eustace
