Country: India

Group: Adi Dravidar/Parayar

Date Finalized: November 1, 2023

Team: Gordon Kok (lead), Natasha Chandra, Emily Allan, Esha Kubavat, and Hannah Lux

Content Warning:

Approximate Time Period: 1880s – Present Day

Adi Dravida, also known as Adi Dravidar and formerly as Parayar, is a term used since 1914 for the caste group found in Tamil Nadu. They comprise about half of Tamil Nadu’s lower caste Dalit population (Raman, 2010). The term pariah came from a French missionary named Jean-Antoine Dubois who described the Parayars as living outside the moral statutes set in the Hindu tradition (Raman, 2010). The Adi Dravida speak Tamil and Malayalam and have a variety of religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Judaism (Raman, 2010).

Forced labor occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Paraiyar worked as bonded laborers in the Chingleput district during the 1880s and 1890s (Irschick, 1994; Jain, 1993). In recent years, lower caste groups in India have come together to fight the caste system. Many have rejected Hinduism and the caste system (Basu, 2011). There is a movement to eradicate the connotations behind the words “slave” and “Paraiyar” and transform both the terms and the meaning to form the new category of “Adi Dravidar” (Irschick, 1994).

Despite these efforts, many Dalits, including Adi Dravida, are burdened with debt and are compelled to work off their debts as laborers, even though this practice was legally abolished in 1976 (Minority Rights Group). 

Data Quality 2/3 : There are quite a number of reputable sources online but not too many regarding present-day sources

Sources

  1. Raman, R. (2010). Global Capital and Peripheral Labour: The History and Political Economy of Plantation Workers in India. In Google Books. Routledge. https://books.google.com/books?id=Nq2MAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA67&pg=PA67#v=onepage&q&f=false
  2. Jain, R. K. (1993). Tamilian Labour and Malayan Plantations, 1840-1938. Economic and Political Weekly, 28(43), 2363–2370. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4400321
  3. Irschick, E. F. (1994). Dialogue and history: constructing South India, 1795-1895. Univ of California Press.
  4. Minority Rights Group. (2021, February 5). Dalits. https://minorityrights.org/minorities/dalits/ 
  5. Basu, R.J. (2011). The Making of Adi Dravida Politics in Early Twentieth Century Tamil Nadu. Social Scientist. Vol. 39, No. 7/8, p. 9-41