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It situates Dalit activism within broader discourses of universal human rights, anti-caste ethics, and transnational solidarities, thereby demonstrating how Dalit claims-making resonates with, and contributes to, wider cosmopolitan frameworks of justice. The chapter underscores the ways in which Dalit aspirations for dignity, equality, and emancipation are no longer confined to the territorial boundaries of the nation-state but are increasingly embedded within global normative and institutional arenas.

The manifesto-like list prepared by the DMK included land reforms with ceiling on land holdings, limiting the Union Government’s power to tax the States, nationalization of industries, health care benefits for the working class, a casteless and classless society, promotion of the Tamil language and renaming the State as Tamil Nadu. Though the Kamaraj Congress won a decisive victory in the 1957 elections, the DMK’s fight for linguistic reorganization of States and its alliance with the CPI worked to its advantage. The DMK won 50 out of 142 seats it contested to the Legislative Assembly.

Alagirisamy shows how Tamil reform organizations drew on existing traditions of Tamil devotionalism to articulate a caste-transcendent, progressive Tamil identity, distinct from the politicization of caste in Tamil Nadu. Despite upper-caste resistance to Periyar’s visit, he found support among working-class and lower-caste migrants. However, the claim that Tamil identity politics produced a distinct Malayan national consciousness among Tamils remains underdeveloped. The political emergence of pan-Malayan identity appears abrupt and largely driven by Periyar’s exhortations to adopt Malayan citizenship.

The idea underestimates the inflexibility of its stranglehold on everyone who is subject to it, including the ‘upper’ castes. I wish to affirm that there are at least three major differences between caste discrimination and racial discrimination (in the American context) which need to be kept in mind while making this comparison. Firstly, the logic of racial discrimination is the colour bar, i.e.,

Having renounced his Brahminical heritage, he founded the Navratan Committee, an anti-caste rainbow coalition, aimed at challenging entrenched caste hierarchies. While he wrote two books on Buddhism, his book Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya (1930) is his most significant work, where he reiterated the argument about the indigenous inhabitants having been dispossessed by the Aryan invaders—a thesis already advanced by Phule and Acchutanand.