From Non-Brahmin Self-Respect to Dravidian Self-Rule

From Non-Brahmin Self-Respect to Dravidian Self-Rule: Anti-Caste Internationalism, Anti-Colonial Nationalism, and the Complexity of Interwar Figures 

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents a talk by Matthew Baxter of Syracuse University. 

The rising centrality of “comparison” in the opening decades of 21st-century political theory invites attention to how local articulations of power rely on distant relationships—whether concrete or imagined.  This presentation focuses on the rising salience of the Continental Jew during the 1930s and its subsequent appropriations on the Indian Subcontinent by elements associated with the radical social reformer EV Ramasami (EVR, 1879-1973). 

I argue that the Jew’s riven image in Western Europe—“logically contradictory but psychologically consistent…appear[ing] both as…victim of persecution and persecutor” (Lowenthal & Guterman, 1949)—became bound to dramatic shifts in EVR’s challenge to caste-based injustice in South India.  

Matthew H. Baxter (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is the regional programs manager, Asia, at the Moynihan Institute and assistant professor by courtesy appointment, political science, at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.  He previously served on the political science faculty at Ashoka University, was a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s South Asia Program, held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and Rutgers University, and worked as the associate editor for South Asia at Asian Survey.