The Dravidian-Tamil Counter Public Sphere: Reading Rooms and the Politics of Mobilisation in Tamil Nadu
Can subaltern groups forge inclusive public spheres that lead to political power? Vignesh Rajahmani (KITLV) examines how a political party in southern India used subaltern-run reading rooms to create a resilient counter-public sphere and achieving electoral success.
This lecture will be held in the IIAS Conference Room in the Herta Mohr Building, room 0.28, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon (not online).
Everyone is welcome to attend, but we kindly ask you to register as seating is limited.
The Lecture
This talk engages with two questions; can subalterns forge and sustain a counter-public sphere? Can such a public sphere enable the electoral consolidation of political parties run by and promoting the interests of subalterns? Using the case of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a regional party from southern India originating in the Dravidian Movement, the paper diverges from the existing literature on ‘Adda’ as put forward by Dipesh Chakrabarty (1999). Chakrabarty's concept of ‘Adda’ refers to a site of deliberation, debate, and the dissemination of ideas among the general public. However, this talk offers an alternative account based on evidence from a town in the then Madras State, where reading rooms run by subalterns were more inclusive, not marked by exclusion or domination as in the case of Addas. These spaces eventually created a resilient counter-public sphere, which continues to enable the electoral consolidation of Dravidian parties, particularly the DMK. By examining the period between the works of AR Venkatachalapathy (1994) and Francis Cody (2013), the talk explores the creation of this counter-public sphere in the late 1940s, leading up to the DMK’s first electoral success in 1967.
The Speaker
Vignesh Rajahmani is a postdoctoral research fellow of Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden. He is also a research affiliate at the King’s India Institute, King’s College London, and CITAP, University of North Carolina. He holds a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy from King’s India Institute, completed in 2023. Rajahmani’s research interests include public policy, democratic development, and political communication. With over five years of experience in political consulting, he has contributed to election strategies and policy development for India’s national and regional political parties. His forthcoming book, The Dravidian Pathway: The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Politics of Transition in South India, will be published in 2025 by Hurst (UK) jointly with Oxford University Press (US).
Registration (required)
Everyone is welcome to attend. Please register using the web form on this page, as seating is limited.