A little over a hundred years after the non-Brahmin manifesto put forth by the South Indian Liberal Federation, better known as the Justice Party, in 1916 that advocated for adequate representation for non-Brahmin groups, Tamil Nadu's legislative assembly is India's most diverse in terms of caste representation (Verniers et al., 2021).

This legislative assembly's diverseness has been often attributed to the capacious Dravidian– Tamil1 identity and its ethos, which continue to inform the politics of the Dravidian parties that have governed the state since 1967. The capaciousness of the ethos that defines the Dravidian– Tamil identity, which has allowed for horizontal solidarities across caste groups that otherwise share a hierarchical relationship, stems from the socio-economic and cultural aspirations of these groups. These horizontal solidarities and aspirations continue to derive both their legitimacy and sustainability from the ever incremental and yet radical, anti-caste episteme and activism of Periyar. This chapter is an attempt to engage with him and the way his ideas may be located or traversed both within and outside the literature of other academics, intellectuals, and scholars not just of the subcontinent but across the world. His anti-caste episteme and the vocabulary of his activism are informed by a demand for adequate representation of non-Brahmins—grounded either in their demographic weight or in a historically embedded sense of tension with Brahminical hegemony.