TY  - BOOK
AU  - Rajan Kurai Krishnan
TI  - Rule of the Commoner: : DMK and Formations of the Political in Tamil Nadu, 1949–1967
T2  - Metamorphoses of the Political: Multidisciplinary Approaches
SN  - 9781009197175
U1  - 324.254 
PY  - 2022///
CY  - UK
PB  - Cambridge university press
KW  - South Asian government
KW  - Politics and policy
N2  - The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has been singular in heralding and establishing a firm regional polity among the Indian states after the Indian Union was inaugurated as a republic. Academic scholarship has often treated the DMK as a Tamil nationalist or ethno-nationalist formation without conceptual clarity or critical insight. Rule of the Commoner demonstrates with persuasive evidence that the DMK appealed to a federalist and not nationalist imagination. The DMK's combining of the non-Brahmin Dravidian identity and allegiance to Tamil language led to a counter hegemonic formation of the plebes and left populism. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau, the book argues that the DMK achieved the construction of a people as Dravidian-Tamil, with Tamil being the empty signifier of the social whole, Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin divide functioning as the internal frontier leading to the formations of the political. It elaborates the conceptual scheme under the three rubrics of Ideation, Imagination and Mobilization
ER  -