The popular focus on Periyar and Dravidian—as a person leading his loyal people—may invite placing nationalism's assertion, rather than critique, at the heart of political thought in twentieth-century Tamil-speaking South India. ‘Nationalism’ names the intuition that ‘France [is] for the French, England for the English … and so forth’ (Shaw, 2013) or, more generally, ‘nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy … requir[ing] that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’, insisting on ‘congruence of state and nation’, and refusing ‘ethnic divergence between rulers and ruled’ (Gellner, 1983, pp. 1, 134). Much turns on ‘ethnic’. Considerations include whether ‘ethnic’ is ‘racial’ or ‘historically constituted’ (Lenin and Stalin, 1970, pp. 66–68) and nationalism's ‘inherent contradictoriness’, both because its ‘rational and progressive’ promises of modernity are often premised on ‘traditional and conservative’ gestures to the past and because its anti-colonial articulation usually adopts the very imperial ‘representational structure … nationalist thought seeks to repudiate’ (Chatterjee, 1986, pp. 22, 38). So, when the August 1944 creation of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) was heralded with ‘Long live Periyar, Dravida Nadu for the Dravidian, let the Dravidar Kazhagam flourish’1—entrenching an ‘ethnic’ idiom for Tamil-speaking South India's politics—an invitation for ‘a chapter on Periyar and nationalism’ encourages the interrogation of a twinned presumption of coherence: not simply of ‘Dravidian’ as a people loyal, but of ‘Periyar’ as a person leading.