MARRIAGE AND FEMALE AUTONOMY IN PERIYARITE IDEOLOGY – AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

Abstract

Marriage in early twentieth-century Tamil society operated within a Brahmanical legal and ritual framework that denied women autonomy in matters of consent, property, widowhood and marital dissolution. Between 1928 and 1944, E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar) advanced a sustained critique of this structure through speeches, organisational resolutions and writings in Kudi Arasu. The Self-Respect Conferences at Chengalpattu (1929) and Virudhunagar (1931) openly rejected priestly mediation, Sanskritic rites, enforced widowhood and caste endogamy, while advocating inter-caste unions, widow remarriage, divorce and marriage based on mutual consent. Such interventions emerged at a time when child marriage remained prevalent despite the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 and when Mitakshara inheritance norms reinforced women’s economic dependency. Self-Respect marriages, conducted without Brahmin priests and grounded in rationalist vows, redefined conjugal authority and questioned the sacred status of indissoluble Hindu marriage. Marriage was recast as a contractual and social relationship rather than a sacrament rooted in scriptural sanction. Female autonomy thus appeared not as a moral concession but as a juridical and political claim directed against caste patriarchy. The reconfiguration of marriage formed an integral component of the wider Self-Respect Movement’s programme of social transformation in colonial Tamil society.