![]() The history of Brahmanisation of south India A southern pressure on the Bharatiya Janata Party's power centres can be exerted if the old brothers from the Sangam age unite and stand together. The Neo Buddhism of Guru’s leading disciples Sahodaran Ayyappan and Mitavadi Krishnan is also a key critical and rationalist praxis for the greater struggle and resistance to caste and its hegemonic, homogenising religion. ![]() Pinarayi, who hails from the Avarna Thiyya/Ezhava caste, brings to the table the secular and polyphonic legacy of Narayana Guru and his anti-caste teachings. Arattupuzha initiated a series of struggles for breast-cloth and ornament-rights of Avarna women in Karthikappally and Karunagapally taluks. The Ezhavas had Buddhist legacies up until the early middle ages when Brahmanism established its militia and sexual colonies among the Shudra women of Kerala. A parallel can also be seen in the social reforms and cultural struggles of Arattupuzha Velayudha Panicker, a legendary leader of the people from the Avarna Ezhava community, from 1840s to 1870s in Kayamkulam region of Travancore. The struggle was also accented by the community reforms initiated by Ayya Vaikundar or Vaikunda Swami, a leader of the Nadar community who established the Society for Equality (Samatva Samajam) in 1836, trying to bring together the untouchable Avarna castes, even before Jyotiba Phule founded his Satyashodhak Samaj in the 1850s. The most vibrant, yet hard, phase of the agitation, MSS Pandian wrote in 2016, was fought by the Nadars from 1822 to 1859, when the Travancore regime that was ruling Nanjilnad (now part of Kanyakumari and Nagercoil districts of Tamil Nadu) released the official sanction for all women, especially Avarna women, to use breast-cloths in public. Many brave Nadar women like Sakuntaladevi, Yesu Adial, and Neeti Adial became martyrs in the long struggle. This made the other Nadar women also want to cover their breasts. The breast-cloth struggles, called Thol Seelai Porattam in Tamil and Mel Seela Kalapam and/or Channar/Nadar Revolt in Kerala, began with the Nadar Christian women wearing blouses. The breast-cloth struggles of the Nadars of Nanjilnad They were not allowed decent clothing and ornaments, access to public roads, and to cover their breasts before caste Hindus. As I have previously written in my books Sahodaran Ayyappan: Towards a Democratic Future, Puthan Keralam: The Buddhist Foundation of Kerala Culture, and Buddhism and Kerala (edited), Buddhist Bahujans who did not submit to Brahmanism were humiliated with these taxes and the caste practices of untouchability. He forced the regent queens of Travancore to end the barbaric taxes inflicted upon the Avarna, the castes outside the Varna system, who have lived in the region from the early middle ages after the suppression of Buddhism in Kerala till the modern age under the Brahmanical regime. Colonel Munro was the British Resident and Diwan of Travancore and Kochi from 1811-1813. The initiative of abolishing breast tax was taken up in 1812 by the missionary and colonial British administrator Colonel John Munro, whom CM Stalin remembered at the Nagercoil meet.
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