Inclusion through modernity: Dravidian urbanisation in Tamil Nadu state,India

Abstract

Tamil Nadu state in India boasts high levels of economic growth, human development outcomes and urbanisation. How might we understand these concurring outcomes in this particular region? We propose that the Dravidian Movement’s vision for social and economic justice in the state centred a quintessentially spatial imaginary. Recognising that a socio-spatial ordering was central to the upkeep of traditional divisions of labour and associated hierarchies, Dravidian thinkers and leaders emphasised the need to transform the spatial order to create a more egalitarian society. The urban, in particular, was seen as a site of potential transformation, and urbanisation, as a way to break traditional caste-based oppressions and hierarchies. Until the 1980s, inclusion in Tamil Nadu was fostered through intentional, ideologically backed state processes to spatially involve many parts of the state in urban processes, and socially include multiple caste groups in turn, thus influencing urbanisation trends. In a contribution to scholarship on urban trajectories and the role of politics in spatial transformation, this article attempts to locate the role of political and ideological mobilisations in driving particular spatial and urban outcomes in Tamil Nadu state that are relatively different compared to the rest of the country. The critical differences between Nehruvian visions of modernity at the national level and those in Tamil Nadu, historical and geographical specificities of the region and the ideological and implementational bases of Dravidian mobilisation help explain the diffused – but not quite decentralised – urbanisation model in the state.

Tamil Nadu state is among the most urbanised states in India, with 48.4% of the population living in urban areas as of the 2011 Census, compared to the all-India rate of 34%. In what is a distinguishing factor, most of the urban populace does not live in big metropolitan centres; instead, it is spread across a large number of small and medium-sized towns and cities in the state. ¹ Tamil Nadu’s urbanisation is therefore diffused, without relying on metropolitan-driven agglomeration growth as is the case in the rest of the country.

Alongside, the trajectory of development in Tamil Nadu has been acknowledged as relatively inclusive, combining economic growth and human development with high per capita incomes and degrees of structural transformation. Only 30% of its workforce is dependent on agriculture, a sector that contributes less than 6% to the state’s income. Also notable are its educational and health outcomes: it boasts the largest share of population in tertiary education including those from marginalised castes, and a robust public health infrastructure enabling among the lowest out-of-pocket expenditure incurred by households in the country (Das Gupta et al., 2009; Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021). It is indeed this ability to achieve social outcomes through progressive social reform and welfare initiatives alongside high growth, credited to the early and ongoing efforts of the Dravidian Movement and associated political parties, that has been characterised as ‘the Dravidian Model’ in recent literature (e.g. Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021) and popular discourse (e.g. Yazhini, 2023).

While urbanisation appears to be key for high levels of economic growth, it does not always automatically translate to high human developmental outcomes (Mehrotra and Parida, 2021). How might we understand these two phenomena, of a high but diffusive urbanisation model alongside relatively impressive human development and economic growth in Tamil Nadu? We suggest that a historical sensitivity to caste in the region, particularly its spatiality, is a key explanation.

The impact of the Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu, a potent social and political force for intermediate and oppressed caste empowerment since the early 20th century, is significant. The movement, spearheaded by prominent rationalist and social activist Periyar EV Ramasamy, was initially centred around fighting caste and gender oppression and a politics of secession from India based on the distinctive practices of Tamil Nadu state (Subramanian, 1999). It emerged as a force against elite caste dominance in education, socio-economic spheres and associational politics. Eventually the movement took a populist turn by transforming from a social movement into an electoral force that leveraged the demands of emergent non-Brahmin groups (Subramanian, 1999). The electoral party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), formed in 1949, has remained one of two dominant parties in the state, the other being a splinter party from the DMK. While there is some recent work on the Dravidian Movement’s emphasis on economic justice (Karthik and Vasanthakumar, 2022), there is very little work on how its ideology has driven economic transformation and urban outcomes in the state. Our proposition is that a spatial imaginary was central to Dravidian thinking on social and economic justice: this is visible in its attentiveness to both uneven development and investment bias towards the northern parts of the country, as well as in the socio-spatial ordering of traditional caste hierarchies. Dravidian thinkers and leaders emphasised the need for specific kinds of economic transformation, and consequential material, spatial transformation as the route to address socio-economic injustices faced by the South (‘Dravida Nadu’) and those in lower caste positions. The urban, in particular, was seen as a site of potential transformation, and urbanisation as a way to break traditional caste-based oppressions and hierarchies.

By focusing on the Dravidian Movement’s spatial sensitivity to uneven development and caste society, we offer an explanation for the inclusive outcomes it has produced that has not been accounted for so far. Inclusion in Tamil Nadu was fostered through ideology and processes to spatially involve many parts of the state in economic transformation, and socially include multiple caste groups in turn, thus influencing urbanisation trends.

The Dravidian theory of change in the 20th century involved a two-way conceptual understanding. The first is a view of caste as a social structure that serves to undermine economic rights and possibilities for mobility. It is for this reason that redistributive moves such as affirmative action in government jobs and educational institutions must be seen as necessarily economic moves, not just as social interventions (Karthik and Vasanthakumar, 2022), which have been reflected in democratic (and) economic transformation. Secondly, in a recognition that one might interpret as Lefebvrian, Dravidian ideology identified that socioeconomic relations manifested in and were co-constituted by spatial arrangements, and that social transformation necessitated and inevitably drove spatial change. Once in power, the DMK then undertook a host of socio-spatial strategies that empowered diverse actors to enter the domain of capital accumulation. These strategies included the increase of voter participation, the politicisation of the bureaucracy to create a responsive administration, the expansion of the industrial base, the creation of physical infrastructure including irrigation, electricity and transport, as well as the strengthening of social infrastructure. The resulting changes in the social relations of production, especially with the ‘democratisation of opportunity in a caste society’ (Karthik and Vasanthakumar, 2022: 116) that the Dravidian Movement and ideology enabled, had immense spatial and material impacts. Further, in the Lefebvrian reading, urbanism in particular constitutes both the ideology and rational planning of the state (Elden, 2007). In Tamil Nadu, we show that while the urban as outcome was emphasised ideologically and drove economic transformation, Dravidian political parties have not paid adequate attention to structurally addressing the disparate ex-post social outcomes driven by electoral contingencies. We elaborate on these failures in the Discussion section of the article.

What we refer to as Dravidian urbanisation is an examination of socio-spatial and economic transformation during the time of Dravidian party rule until the liberalisation of India in the 1990s. The explanations for this urbanisation trajectory are multicausal: we attempt to avoid falling into the trap of either historical determinism or an essentialist, exceptionalist reading of the Dravidian Movement. Instead, our attention is turned towards how inherited advantages, geographical and social, already set the stage for specific types of economic transitions to occur later. These legacies perhaps even created the conditions in which this social movement could emerge, which with popular and electoral success could propel urban development in particular directions. Rather than directly mapping urban outcomes to particular initiatives, political or economic, we use the term Dravidian urbanisation to mark a paradigm of ideologically motivated economic and spatial processes, centre the immense impacts of this social movement in setting Tamil Nadu on this path of urban modernity in the 20th century and explain its urban outcomes today.

To do so, this article first considers the significance of structural and spatial transformation in Tamil Nadu: the historical and geographical specificities of the region, as well as the centrality of spatial ordering to caste society are important to reckon with as we attempt to understand economic trajectories and urban growth in Tamil Nadu and in India more broadly. We then proceed to compare visions of modernity at the national level by Nehru and by the Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu to explain the divergences between the two. While both the postcolonial Indian state and Dravidian leaders in Tamil Nadu were invested in industrial development and modernity, the role of caste structures in economic transformation and the vision for the urban were starkly different across the two scales. Instead of working around caste structures to preserve popular legitimacy at the national scale, Dravidian leaders sought to reimagine who might benefit from and lead the charge in the state’s modernity, through a view of economic transformation that actively challenged caste structures. Delving deeper into the historical, ideological and implementational bases of Dravidian urbanisation until the 1980s, we then illustrate how specific dispersed regions and social groups within the state managed to successfully transition economically and to urbanise, so to speak. However, these very interventions to drive inclusive growth have not yielded the most democratic urban governance mechanisms or outcomes, which we try to grapple with in the discussion.

Socioeconomic and spatial transformation: The case of Tamil Nadu state in India

Questions of scale: The regional and the non-metropolitan

The official Census of India defines an urban settlement on the basis of density and size of population, and, importantly, the percentage of male non-agricultural workers (Kundu, 2011), keeping central, economic transformation as a consideration of urbanisation. Historians of the economy such as Washbrook (2001) have long maintained that the right way to understand economic change in India is to look at regions rather than at India as a nation state, given the historical specificities of different regions. The great federal developmental projects, including industrialisation, land reforms and the Green Revolution, unfolded in very uneven ways across the different states of India. The Indian Constitution, which treats the Indian state as ‘quasi federal’, confers primary responsibility to states for crucial sectors like agriculture, health and education, all of which have a huge bearing on economic development. Despite the overall architecture of governance, fiscal arrangements and macroeconomic policies being common to all the states in the country, regional disparities in social outcomes have widened. Since the early 1990s, the union government has also sought to rescale governance by further devolving crucial resource mobilisation tasks to subnational governments (Kennedy, 2004), contributing to growing regional disparities (Kar and Sakthivel, 2007). Given that democratic institutions have a long history in India, political regimes across the various levels, including the regional level, are likely to shape outcomes significantly. Therefore, widening differences in economic and social outcomes across the states are seen as an outcome of state-specific histories, political regimes and the developmental policies followed. India is an interesting site to understand political economy and consequently urbanisation at a subnational level.

In the period immediately following Independence, the vision for development and transformation in India was a decidedly nationalistic one. For nationalist leader and first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘modernisation’ was the national, centralising philosophy that would ideally unify a highly diverse new nation state: the (eventual) linguistic reorganisation of the various states was not an idea he was entirely receptive to (Parekh, 1991). The Dravidian Movement of the early 20th century in Tamil Nadu was ideologically quite opposed to the idea of a strong centre. The danger of uneven development across geographical, caste and linguistic/ethnic lines was one that the movement’s leaders were always conscious of, with leader CN Annadurai even drawing on Gramsci’s The Southern Question to bring attention to this issue (Kalaiyarasan, 2017). Therefore, state politics, questions of territoriality at the subnational scale and considerations of the geopolitical and the geoeconomic were all central to the Dravidian Movement, and therefore to our understanding of the historical and current differences in the economic, social and urban outcomes of Tamil Nadu vis-à-vis the nation.

As already pointed out, Tamil Nadu also demonstrates a particularly diffusive model of urbanisation that is not dependent on metropolitan centres. Recent theorisation from India on subaltern urbanisation has brought attention to the existence of urban centres outside metropolitan cities. In a summary of ideas, Mukhopadhyay et al. (2020) emphasise some key characteristics of the framework which include the potential and ability of smaller settlements to create autonomous local and translocal connections without the benefits of agglomeration, and a consideration of governance regimes, particularly the classification of the urban/rural. We propose that this article be read as a way to explain how local agency is empowered to participate in local and global urban/capitalist processes. While the attention to subaltern urban sites and actors is indeed necessary, how might we understand the enabling conditions of this agency? The role of political and ideological influence on urbanisation processes and outcomes is necessary to understand what enables subaltern urbanisation in the state.

In a recent overview of urban studies scholarship in/on India in Urban Studies, Coelho and Sood (2022) point to a decidedly statist bent, with scholarship initially responding to policy imperatives, and then since the 2010s critically examining the impacts of state-driven urban policies such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). Key themes of the scholarship have included the tracing of urban trends and spatial transformation across the country, and the ways in which politics both underwrite and resist urban transformation (Coelho and Sood, 2022). In a contribution to these strands of scholarship (while also remaining determinedly statist), this article attempts to locate the role of historical mobilisations, political and ideological, in driving particular spatial and urban outcomes in Tamil Nadu state that have yielded relatively different outcomes compared to the rest of the country. In doing so, this article is resonant with scholarship on urbanisation in China, in the attention paid to the mobilisation of the urban for intended social transformation and the fashioning of new narratives, and in being a periodised account of state-driven, frequently ideologically motivated urbanisation processes that help understand the contemporary urban (e.g. Gu et al., 2015; Oakes, 2019).

While urban scholarship in India has contended with how economic transformations in metropolitan centres have in fact sparked significant political mobilisations – such as the Shiv Sena in Mumbai (Hansen, 2001) – how have political mobilisations themselves driven particular economic transformations at scales larger than the local? In particular, how has an attentiveness to the spatialities of caste – something both scholarship and political leadership can be accused of focusing inadequately on – driven urban outcomes?

Matters of caste and associated spatialities

In addition to the danger of uneven regional development, another register in which the Dravidian Movement displayed a sharp sensitivity to spatial difference was in its attentiveness and ideological orientation to challenge caste society.

In the Lefebvrian view, space is that which is both the precondition and result of the means of production: space both determines and is determined by productive forces such as technology and physical infrastructure, the state, as well the social division of labour (Lefebvre, 1991: 85). The organisation of space is a central consideration to understand both colonial society and caste society, and the inevitable overlaps and reinforcements between the two. In Pandian’s arresting 2002 account, Indian caste elites could at once participate in colonial structures of authority by following protocols of western modernity, accessing English education, conversing in the language of law, while also upholding caste division of labour and ritual pollution and untouchability logics in the form of physical and symbolic distance in the domain of the cultural. The social hierarchy of caste was and is neatly inscribed into the geography of villages through enforced segregation. Habitations of Dalits who are considered to be at the lowest rung of caste society are located outside, some distance from the main village (Viswanath, 2014: 30). Land ownership and resource allocations are also caste-determined. Given this oppressive nature of villages, social reformer and leader BR Ambedkar called them ‘a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’ (Jaffrelot, 2005: 110).

In some ways, the postcolonial developmental Indian state was oriented towards repairing splintered development processes under colonialism and building a cohesive national community. Electricity, for instance, was seen as a key instrument to integrate diverse parts of what was now a single nation after independence from colonial rule (Kale, 2014), the distribution of which has historically taken on a moral character, making connections and communication possible (Coleman, 2017). Enabling modern development required the development of new administrative functions, professionalisation and expertise in town planning. However, while the Indian state took some cognisance of exclusivist outcomes through its planning process, it could not alter the pathways of these outcomes in practice. For instance, Broadberry and Gupta (2010) trace how the colonial bias towards the service sector and higher education over primary education in the early 20th century catered to the needs of the elite-controlled colonial administration in the British provinces of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. The postcolonial state did not alter such biases in education policy (Weiner, 1990). In addition, great efforts were taken by the elites to keep caste out of the domain of politics and the administration.

In contrast to national politics, caste was a mainstay in political conversations in Tamil Nadu. The idea of inclusive modernisation envisioned by the Dravidian Movement and its founder EV Ramasamy was born out of specific political and economic processes that unfolded in the Madras Presidency as a result of colonial interventions. We propose that the Dravidian Movement was attentive to the spatiality of caste which marked privilege, dominance and access to amenities and infrastructure. To challenge the spatial and material peripheralisation of those marginalised by the caste system, it enabled the production of an integrated, yet diffused urbanisation model with multiple urban centres, bureaucratic reform and a modern urban popular ethos as the solution. The breakdown of caste order and the empowerment of the common person was central to the Dravidian vision of inclusive modernity. In the section that follows, we compare the famed Nehruvian modernity and this regional vision to explain the differences in the eventual outcomes achieved at the national and regional scales.

Differing visions: Nehruvian modernity and the Dravidian urban

Even as ‘modernisation’ was a central goal to both leaders at the level of the nation and Tamil Nadu state, there were critical ideological and implementational differences between the ways in which industrial development and urbanisation were imagined. In an influential essay, Chatterjee (2000) lays out how the planning bureaucracy began to occupy a central place in the imagination of the new modern nation state which was to pursue the rational goal of development. This project needed to be constantly legitimated through political means, leaning on representative politics and catering to the economic and social interests of all the various interest groups (based on caste, religion and various economic classes) so that consensus around ‘the modern’ could be maintained and the passive revolution of capital could get underway (see also Kaviraj, 1988; Menon, 2022). However, the new regime under Congress leadership mostly retained the administrative bureaucracy, judicial and law and order systems just as they operated under colonial rule. Even where it did not, it remained an effort of decentralisation that came from the top down (Sherman, 2022); economic decision making was never quite democratised.

The goal of Nehruvian socialism was, Sherman (2022: 88) forwards, not to abolish social hierarchies but to mobilise them for developmental ends. Hierarchies were sought to be co-opted and mobilised for development, the responsibility for which was to be located in the nation’s elite, who then only consolidated their positions in the hierarchy and reaped the benefits (Sherman, 2022: 210). The consensus of the already powerful was sought at every turn, rather than a re-conception of who is to be given power, unlike in the Dravidian Movement. (The Dravidian Movement was in fact responding to the frustrations wrought by the mainstream nationalist movement driven by caste elites in the Congress party.)

Instead of producing a more egalitarian society, the Nehruvian brand of socialism aggravated inherited caste hierarchies and deepened inequalities. Its industrialisation strategies benefited educated elites who were largely male, Hindu upper caste, relegating others to precarious positions. Even its agrarian strategies that culminated in the Green Revolution largely benefited intermediate castes at the expense of landless labourers. The status of Dalits was hardly addressed. Even as Ambedkar managed to build out protections in the Constitution, caste hierarchies in everyday life remained unaddressed (Sherman, 2022).

Significant to our thinking here is the question of whether the city, or urbanisation, was in fact central to Nehru’s imaginations of the modern. In Sundaram’s (1999) account, the chosen grounds for spectacle in independent India was the ‘architecture of energy’, not urban space, as was the case in the Mughal and British empires. Chandigarh was but one planned model of the utopian modern rather than a demonstration of any urban vision for the country. Singular and isolated master-planned townships such as Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar, Gandhinagar and Jamshedpur were illustrations of the use of urban planning to illustrate the new nation’s modernity and development, much along the lines of other cities across the world such as Brasilia (Datta, 2015). It was only from the 1980s, as consumption cultures transformed through globalisation, that the traditional city (and the suspicions associated with it) shifted. Urban historian Gyan Prakash (2002: 3) explains that ‘the city’ occupied at most an ‘ambivalent’ place in the Indian nationalist imagination. For MK Gandhi, the village was idealised as the ‘real India’, in contrast to which the city was evil and corrupt. For a modernist like Nehru, the village was backward and ignorant and the city a critical aspect of planned development (Prakash, 2002). But in the early years of independent India, the Plans reflected no comprehensive vision for urbanisation (Batra, 2009). Beyond Chandigarh, the 1st Five Year Plan had little ‘urban’ emphasis apart from the housing and rehabilitation of refugees (Batra, 2009). Only from the third plan onwards (1961–1966) did urban planning and development authorities begin to feature, and from the late 1960s onwards the focus began to shift towards the management and decongestion of existing cities through the development of small and medium-sized towns. By this time, radical high modernist ideals were forgotten, save for occasional populist measures of urban redistribution (Batra, 2009).

While ‘modernity’ was the goal for both the leaders of the newly independent nation as well as the social reformers in Tamil Nadu, the ideological and implementational approaches to achieving this goal were starkly different at these two levels. Nehru assumed that, with modernity, caste order would automatically be broken down. In contrast, leaders associated with the Dravidian social movement perhaps recognised that caste would be an impediment to truly inclusive economic transformation (or even true independence from colonialism, as Ramasamy argued). An ideological orientation to bridge spatial and social differences in the pursuit of modernity in Tamil Nadu was central to the Dravidian imagination in contrast to the state-led approach at the national level in independent India.

Well before independence, Ramasamy was articulating visions of an egalitarian citizenship model that did not toe the mainstream nationalist line. From the 1920s onwards, Ramasamy had been fighting caste-based discrimination in schools and making a case for ‘communal representation’, a predecessor to what are today known as caste-based reservations in public service (Pandian, 1993).

A 1944 speech reveals Ramasamy’s keen understanding of the spatiality of the village and its relationship to the caste system. He emphasised that villages can never hope to enjoy the rights and liberties enjoyed by those in cities, because the ‘necessity and organisation’ of cities and villages were different. For Ramasamy, the city–village relationship was also hierarchical, imitating caste order: he claimed that so long as Panchamas (Dalits) occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder, villages and their tillers would be subordinated to (residents of) cities and towns. He therefore believed that the Gandhian call for renewal of traditional occupations was a political strategy to arrest the masses within traditional, caste-bound occupations and geographical spaces (Aloysius, 2013).

Even as he was deeply inspired by Soviet society, Ramasamy did not believe that communism was possible without a dismantling of the caste system which accorded social, and consequently economic, power to Brahmins (Karthik and Vasanthakumar, 2022). For Ramasamy, there was a distinction between the wage labourer and the caste labourer in India, where labourers are historically frozen into different castes that are all invested with a ritually low and inferior status (Vidiyal, 2017: 743–744). The denial of economic rights on account of the social undermines prospects for economic mobility. Labourers are denied access to the returns of their labour because of the caste system, not merely because of exploitation as in class analysis. Class and caste identities were deeply entwined for Dravidian leaders, and therefore democratising access to modern education and employment that did not reproduce the colonial and caste order was the route to freeing and modernising the masses (Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021).

Measures such as land redistribution were unlikely to produce egalitarian outcomes unless caste privilege itself was dismantled. A caste-free society was thus tied to upending the caste division of labour in the agrarian sector through inclusive modernisation and structural transformation. This view was not averse to capital accumulation (Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021): it was oriented towards making accumulation and entrepreneurial opportunities available to regional, lower-caste ‘productive’ people rather than to ‘unproductive’, dominating (of land and capital) North Indian, brahmin-bania elites as was the case then. In sharp parallels to Lefebvre’s (2003) theorisation of the urban revolution, Ramasamy recognised that the urban was the site of the realisation of surplus value, that those with access to the urban could partake of surplus value and exercise some control over its distribution. For this, the ‘abolition’ of the village, especially as a site or target of political action, was necessary. Increased industrialisation, infrastructure development, even the linking of erstwhile rural areas to deliver them from the status of a ‘village’ were priorities, a line of thinking perhaps setting the stage for the emergence of multiple industrial clusters in a diffused urban model later in the state.

The division of labour – and labourers (Ambedkar, 2014) – ordained by the caste system inevitably has spatial dimensions and consequences that entail the hierarchical ordering of particular people and their place (Ranganathan, 2022; see also Massey, 2004). In postcolonial India for Dravidian thinkers, this was noted along the North/South and the village/city axes. Ramasamy’s thought, therefore, emphasised that inclusive economic transformation over spatial axes needed to centre a critique of caste precisely because caste is central to uneven development. It was through widespread Tamil communication – speeches, plays and literature – that this productivist ethos and the ideals of Dravidian social justice were spread (Hardgrave, 1965).

While the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), the social movement started by EV Ramasamy, led the ideological campaign against the village as the site of oppression and foregrounded a vision for societal reform by critiquing gender and caste norms, the early DMK political party invested in state-led initiatives to build out industrial, social and physical infrastructure aimed at broad-based development, poverty alleviation and eventual urbanisation. This was in contrast to a reliance on particular utopian cities for demonstrating urban modernity without a concern for poverty or justice in these cities in particular. This is a key reason why urbanisation in Tamil Nadu is diffuse and broad, rather than city- or metropolitan-centred, and why our own analysis centres state-level outcomes rather than city-level outcomes or particular case studies. We now illustrate the ways in which inherited historical advantages and interventions by the DMK together set Tamil Nadu up for inclusive urbanisation.

Urban development in Tamil Nadu and the Dravidian political parties

Path dependence on colonial legacies

Extractive intentions notwithstanding, two colonial legacies in the state have had the effect of facilitating and shaping the trajectory of urbanisation: industrial development and the land tenurial system in the Madras Presidency, large parts of which constitute modern-day Tamil Nadu.

As an important colonial city, Madras was seen as fit for modern industrial investment, its growth owing in good measure to what Bharadwaj (1982) has termed the port-enclave model of development. While the Madras Presidency did not develop enough industries in comparison to Bombay or the Bengal Presidency, some colonial officials like Alfred Chatterton pioneered a set of initiatives in this regard (Swaminathan, 1992). His work with chrome leather tanning, for instance, played a critical role in the growth of the leather and leather-goods cluster in the state. Though colonial intervention did lead to deindustrialisation in pockets, especially in the case of weaving, the state also inherited a productive base for industrialisation and transport infrastructure. For instance, Basel Mission activities pioneered the hosiery industry, contributing to the eventual rise of Tiruppur as a major hub of cotton hosiery production in the world and the ‘Manchesterisation’ of western Tamil Nadu. In the southern parts of the presidency, the expansion of cotton cultivation through the introduction of ‘Cambodia cotton’ created a symbiotic linkage between agriculture and industry, setting off distinct accumulation processes in post-colonial Tamil Nadu (Mahadevan and Vijayabaskar, 2014).

Similarly, the particular colonial tenurial system in the region proved to be significant in what followed. and taxation was a key concern and source of revenue for the British in the Indian subcontinent. Revenues were extracted from one of three systems: through landlords in the zamindari system, directly from cultivators in the ryotwari system and from village bodies in the mahalwari system (Banerjee and Iyer, 2005). Banerjee and Iyer (2005) demonstrate that the ryotwari tenurial system tended to generate incentives for improvements in both productivity and infrastructure because individual cultivators could appropriate greater returns from such improvements. ² Another important consideration is that in ryotwari regions, as Gupta (2013) argues, social movements that emerged during the colonial period were engaged more with the productive domain and sought to link social emancipation and a sub-national identity while supporting modern production modes (even as they displaced several thousand Dalit labourers into indentured labour). These factors together set the stage for the future economic trajectory witnessed in the region. It is notable that in the longue durée, regions that fell outside the zamindari system have also demonstrated higher levels of human capital infrastructure and outcomes, as seen in the number of schools and health centres and in the literacy and infant mortality rates, at least until the 1980s (Banerjee and Iyer, 2005).

Post-colonial industrial growth, electoral expansion and bureaucratic diversification: 1950s–1980s

Post independence, Tamil Nadu benefited from the Indian government’s efforts to develop infrastructure and industry during the implementation of the second Five Year Plan (1956–1960) (Subramanian, 1999), even as the DMK complained that the plans favoured the development of the North over the South. In addition to the already existing concentration of industries in some regions, the Congress regime set up infrastructure such as financing institutions and industrial parks for small-scale industries, which in turn further encouraged the Government of India to invest in large public sector undertakings such as Bharat Heavy Electricals and the Neyveli Lignite Corporation in the state (Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021). The bureaucracy kept up with these developments, incorporating new rules and manuals to aid industrial development. However, the chain of command remained top-down and rule-driven (Narayan, 2018), as was considered typical in Congress regimes. The Congress worked with the colonial bureaucratic structures and procedures they had inherited: some of those serving in the upper echelons of the Tamil Nadu Civil Service at this time belonged to the Indian Civil Service from the British era and maintained the caste order in the bureaucracy prevalent at this time.

Subramanian (1999) points out that the Dravidian parties emerged from some of the most industrialised and urbanised parts of Tamil Nadu, which were also experiencing relatively high levels of poverty and inequality and low levels of political participation. In Hardgrave’s (1965) account, CN Annadurai, leader of the DMK that split from Ramasamy’s Dravidar Kazhagam in 1949, focused his attention particularly on the urban lower classes, the lower middle classes, the proletariat and the oppressed caste groups. In the face of rural disruption wrought by the market economy, the party’s campaigns attracted the youth of oppressed castes into cities with the promise of industrial jobs and freedom from caste oppression. In addition to mobilising around Dravidian and Tamil identities, the party also mobilised along the axes of class status and social marginality in opposition to privileged elites within the state (Subramanian, 1999).

In his 1949 book Panathottam (The Garden of Money), Annadurai declared that what was necessary for the economy of Tamil Nadu was a democratisation of opportunities for accumulation. In practice, this meant interventions to restrict rentier activities such as moneylending by bania caste North Indians and encouraging local ‘Dravidian’ entrepreneurs (Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021). Uneven spatial development within the nation needed to be addressed through social, political and economic intervention for industrial development in the South of India. Asserting that manufacturing is the lifeline (uyirnadi) of any country (Annadurai, 2017 [1949]: 44), he contends that the reason for the state’s backwardness was essentially the absence of state support for modern industrialisation and the breakdown of the social hierarchy of caste. The party’s 1957 manifesto promised a ‘socialist’ economy that included industrialisation with minimal involvement by private interests, with the ultimate goal of social ownership of all means of production and distribution, ceilings on land holdings and fair wages for industrial labour, among other things (Hardgrave, 1965). It was a rather eclectic imagination of socialism that promoted the democratisation of access to the modern sectors including through access to capital and the means of production. This vision, accompanied by a distinct language- and culture-based mobilisation through mass communication, politicised the ‘transitional individual’ as they moved to urban centres from villages in pursuit of social mobility (Hardgrave, 1965).

Among the most significant early initiatives of the DMK’s political mobilisation was to increase voter participation in the electoral processes. The party’s efforts ahead of the 1962 elections resulted in the largest increases in voter turnout in the state and across gender and rural/urban divides (Subramanian, 1999: 171–172). Subramanian argues that this, alongside the commercialisation of class relations, also helped break traditional patron–client bonds with local elites in many rural areas.

Once the DMK came to power in 1967, it actively politicised the bureaucracy. Policy agendas began emerging from the bottom up, driven by what were thought to be the needs and demands of the people, and not without some initial resistance by the bureaucracy that was used to working differently. The administration began to receive representations from the people led by local party functionaries on various issues. Over the next few decades, the demographic composition of those in government services changed, with increased recruitment from backward and Dalit castes, including from small towns and rural areas and those sympathetic to the Dravidian cause, compared to the Brahmin and Madras city over-representation that existed earlier in the Congress regime (Sabanayagam, 2019). The bureaucracy was embedded in the local socio-cultural and political milieu while also enjoying a great deal of autonomy: this vastly increased the responsiveness of the administration to the needs and aspirations of marginalised groups (e.g. see Niesz and Krishnamurthy, 2012 on state school education). The conservative financial management of the state was overhauled to accommodate welfare initiatives, setting the stage for populist welfare distribution by the state through the administration (Narayan, 2018). Sen and Dreze (2013) claim that the various welfare initiatives such as the universal midday meals in primary schools, and investment in a vast array of social infrastructure through the 1970s and 1980s, went against the grain of economic common sense as an outcome of democratic political culture in the state at the time. These ended up pulling the state out of higher poverty rates compared to the all-India level. These initiatives, and the close, ideologically aligned association between political leaders and the administration, have gone on to characterise the very nature of Tamil Nadu bureaucracy and policy agendas, as well as the quality of public services up to now (see also Sen and Dreze, 2013).

Alongside, the DMK also continued to work to expand the industrial base of the state, by attracting industrial investment and setting up corporations such as the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO) and the State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu (SIPCOT) to develop and finance large industries and infrastructure projects (Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021).

Dravidian interventions and illustrations of economic transitions

By 1981, the state ranked first among the major states in the country in a composite index of urbanisation which considers the degree of urbanisation, the rural population served by a town and the average distance to a town from the village (Rukmani, 1994). It was noted in the 1991 Census that Tamil Nadu has a high density of towns. Each town served a relatively small rural population, and conversely rural populations could also access a town easily (Rukmani, 1994). Urbanisation in Tamil Nadu is thus a geographically as well as relatively socially inclusive, dispersed phenomenon that does not hinge on metropolitan growth alone.

A host of existing historical advantages created favourable conditions for urbanisation in the state. In addition to the already named advantages – the ryotwari land tenurial system in which cultivators had control of the land, and the geographical advantage of Madras city being a port enclave for the colonial regime – the absence of a dominant trading community was another. The absence of a set of Vaishya trading castes in this part of the country has allowed for entrepreneurs from lower castes to take advantage of opportunities in particular geographies, making it somewhat easier to undermine the economic basis of caste and associated division of labour, and to bring about a process of ‘democratisation of capital’ (Damodaran, 2008) visible in entrepreneurship.

Rukmani (1994) attributed the eventual high dispersal of urbanisation in the state first to a high level and spatial spread of agricultural modernisation in the post-Independence period. Agricultural modernisation is enabled, among other things, by access to irrigation, including through motorised electrical technology. Since the majority of cultivators depend on well and tubewell irrigation, the expansion of the electricity grid across the state and the institutionalisation of subsidised power in the 1970s enabled accumulation within agriculture. This in turn has led to diversified cropping patterns, with distinct crop specialisations emerging in different regions. Public investments in irrigation facilitated the formation of agro-industrial capital (Harriss, 1996). Eventually, a host of ‘agro-towns’ linked to the processing, marketing and selling of the crop emerged. In the 1980s, the Green Revolution was accompanied by the emergence of an agrarian capitalist class, who managed to enter the circuit of accumulation through manufacturing that has been made possible in many pockets of the state (Mahadevan and Vijayabaskar, 2014). Many entrepreneurs in the state are from ordinary, peasant and provincial mercantile castes, as opposed to pan-Indian Bania–Marwari or big multinational capital in other regions (Chari, 2004). For instance, Tiruppur has emerged as the biggest cotton market in South India. Kongu Vellala Gounders, the numerically largest agrarian caste in the region, have successfully transitioned into the modern urban economy through their entry into knitwear production. Damodaran (2008) notes that a third of the cotton brought into the market since the early 20th century was by the farmers themselves, allowing them to gain a higher share of the sale price. Some of the better endowed and more successful among them went on to become commission agents, sourcing cotton from other farmers as well. Subsequently, they also set up gins, presses and spinning mills. Similarly, some traditional artisanal production has upgraded to modern production technologies while successfully withstanding, even avoiding, dispossession to an extent (e.g. Tastevin (2017) on the transformation of carpenters and blacksmiths into self-made engineers, eventually integrating themselves into global value chains).

The development of connectivity-enhancing physical infrastructure was key to inclusive development. The DMK in its initial phase in power invested in expanding road networks, both major district roads and ‘minor’ roads connecting interior villages to every major district in the state, increasing rural–urban linkages (Nagaraj, 2006). This ensured the mobility of people, expanded the scope for non-farm livelihood options among rural households and thus drove urbanisation itself (Rukmani, 1994). Alongside this, low-cost transport made mobility affordable. Many could not afford public transport until it was nationalised (Narayan, 2018: 49), now with the lowest bus fares in the country. These moves were articulated through a Dravidian vision of the urban in which people were lifted out of repressive landlordism in the rural areas to come together as the ‘Tamil-speaking world’ (Tamil koorum nallulagu) (Narayan, 2018).

Inspired by the Soviet experience, DMK ideologues believed that electrifying villages was key to modernisation. By 1976, Tamil Nadu state declared that 98% of its villages and 98% of its Dalit settlements were connected to the grid. The state also has a considerably long history of subsidising electricity for poor households and farmers. In that sense, rural electricity access and the use of electricity in agrarian production was much higher in Tamil Nadu than anywhere else in India (Kale, 2014: 161). This swift and steady electrification indeed facilitated agrarian production and built agro-industrial linkages across the state.

A successful agrarian transition into high productive modern sectors requires not just productivity of land in agriculture or physical infrastructure alone but investments in human development, particularly in education. In that sense, the state was a pioneer in enacting a series of interventions, building a network of schools, starting a noon meal scheme that keeps children from economically marginalised backgrounds in school and finally expanding higher education (Kalaiyarasan and Vijayabaskar, 2021). This led to an inversion of the prevailing elite bias in education at the national level by emphasising primary education and creative affirmative action policies. As a result, today the state has one of the highest literacy rates, particularly among marginalised caste groups, and also hosts the largest share of youth in higher education. Entry into tertiary education too has been relatively inclusive in terms of both gender and caste, compared to all-India levels. ³

Discussion: The successes and limits of Dravidian urbanisation today

India’s tryst with industrialisation and urbanisation is seen as truncated vis-á-vis the East Asian countries, which could generate a pattern of growth that produces jobs and inclusive development (Kalaiyarasan, 2022). Some of the critical preconditions that Centeno et al. (2017) identify as necessary for inclusive industrialisation include egalitarian land reform, public investment and pro-poor welfare. Today, India’s urbanisation rate is one of the lowest in the world. As per the 2020 World Urbanisation Prospects database of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 34.9% of India’s population is urban, compared to 61% in China and 87.1% in Brazil.

Tamil Nadu’s development trajectory thus provides an interesting case in which both convergences and divergences with India’s economic story are visible. While initiatives at the level of the national and the rule of the Congress have enabled growth and human development in the state, it is the intended divergences at the level of the state that have had a huge influence on Tamil Nadu’s industrial and urban story.

Following a somewhat deterministic economic vision, Nehruvian modernity assumed that with economic interventions towards development, caste would become irrelevant. In contrast, Dravidian ideologues recognised the economic and spatial basis of caste, and premised the social as a necessary site of intervention for inclusive economic development in caste society. A breakdown of caste order necessitated a spatial imagination. If a critique of caste norms and diffusion of productivist ethos led by Ramasamy’s Dravidar Kazhagam weakened the social basis of caste, administrative transformation and infrastructural interventions in the realms of transport and connectivity, human development and urbanisation by Dravidian parties enabled ordinary people to become agents of urban transformation. This is the second key difference between national interventions and those in Tamil Nadu in the postcolonial phase: the state was the agent and driver of change at the national level. In contrast, and especially pushing back against nationalistic rhetoric in which caste was not reckoned with and later, elite rule which did not adequately reform colonial bureaucratic structures, the Dravidian imagination emerged from a social movement, found electoral success and transformed the state machinery itself. A focus on development and industrialisation processes coupled with an anti-caste ethos has enabled the region to develop a somewhat distinct subnational identity.

While the scope of this article is limited to tracing developments until the 1980s, we observe urbanisation picking up further in the state since liberalisation in 1991. Beside new industries that came up with increased private investment, Tamil Nadu also saw the movement of industries from urban to rural or semi-urban cities (Ghani et al., 2012). Some of these new, semi-urban cities became growth centres, shifting growth poles from metropolitan centres to small towns. Liberalisation also provided a shot in the arm to existing manufacturing industries such as textile, leather and automotives, while also spurring service industries like information technology and financial services, all of which inevitably led to further urbanisation. The gains that had been made over decades in the growth of technical education, reservations for middle and lower castes in higher education, public health, diversification of the workforce in administration and privatisation of education, including in rural areas, paved the way for a relatively equitable distribution of the benefits of liberalisation in economic, social and geographical terms. Tamil Nadu today has a large number of factories, a higher share of workforce and output in manufacturing and a broad-based urbanisation model with multiple nodes and clusters. While western (Tiruppur and Coimbatore) and northern (Chennai and Kancheepuram) regions are the most industrialised regions in the state, manufacturing is still spatially diverse. Each region hosts specific industrial clusters. For instance, Sivakasi in southern Tamil Nadu specialises in safety matches, firecrackers and printing, Karur, Erode and Salem in power looms and home textiles, Tiruppur in knitted garments, Ambur, Vaniyambadi and Ranipet in leather goods, Coimbatore in textiles and engineering and Chennai has acquired the label the ‘Detroit of India’ thanks to its being home to a number of car and car component firms, both foreign and domestic (Damodaran, 2016).

Despite this relatively inclusive economic transformation, there are several notable failures of the Dravidian model of urbanisation. Caste, as a socio-spatial structure, continues to impede both economic and urban transformation. Several scholars have observed that despite relative caste anonymity in cities, cities do remain caste-splintered (Ranganathan, 2022). This can be witnessed in the failure to equitably redistribute land morphing into cumulative inherited asset inequality, entrenched urban segregation and unchanged division of labour, with Dalits continuing to be associated with low-value labour while living in undesirable locations with precarious infrastructure access (Ranganathan, 2022). The majority of those living in so-called slum settlements in Tamil Nadu are Dalits and others from marginalised castes (see also Roberts, 2016). Thousands of these residents are being forcefully removed from the public lands they occupy in cities, in the name of development, beautification, eco-restoration and river rejuvenation, and relocated in low-quality tenement housing in the peripheries, where they suffer a loss of education, of livelihood opportunities, of social networks and of social amenities. This is a practice that many activists term a form of ‘neo-untouchability’. Even as Chennai city expanded its metropolitan administrative boundaries vastly in 2011, including within its limits these large-scale resettlement colonies housing the urban poor, there remains an ambiguity of jurisdiction and gross inadequacy in terms of the provision of urban infrastructure and basic services (Narayan, 2015). Urban administrative status has not guaranteed a more ‘urban’ life for its residents.

Alongside this, caste remains central to contemporary capitalist accumulation. For all of their radical ideological origins, Dravidian parties today are accused of pandering to various intermediate and backward caste groups such as Vanniyars, Thevars, Goundars, Naickars and Nadars in various parts of the state for votes, power and capital, thus consolidating the interests of these castes over those of Dalits (Karthikeyan et al., 2012). Caste-based networks often reinforce socio-economic hierarchies and generate new forms of exclusion. Besides unevenness in higher education outcomes among different communities, elites have been guilty of opportunity hoarding through their caste networks that sustain caste inequality.

In response to mainstream and scholarly debate on whether the Dravidian Movement and parties have in fact done enough for the upward mobility of Dalits, we offer some provocations. There is clear evidence of success in the structural breakdown of elite caste capture in postcolonial Tamil Nadu. Accounts such as Rao Cavale’s (2020) point to significant infrastructural development leading to substantive change in the quality of rural life in villages. Increased connectivity and mobility overall allow for opportunity and ability to participate in cosmopolitan life beyond the geographical constraints ordered by caste society. Even so, it is also important to take cognisance of the continued exclusion of and violence against Dalits in the state (see Rajangam and Rajasekaran, 2023). Contestations over the spatiality and sociality of caste emerge mainly from Dalit settlements, frequently inviting violent backlash from dominant groups (Gorringe, 2016). Despite the patchy attempts to provide housing for marginalised castes through the Periyar-inspired samathuvapuram sites, the ghettoisation of Dalits continues in the state (e.g. Shanmughasundaram, 2021).

We suggest that to understand both types of outcomes alongside each other is not simply to claim that caste endures, in a flat static sense, unchanged by Dravidian intervention. Instead, attention needs to be directed to how caste, while retaining certain enduring features – such as continued systematic denial of property ownership and tenure security, relegation to particular labour roles, dispossession and segregation – also rears its head through newer cycles of structural breakdown and rising and changing opportunities. Caste violence today is premised on challenges posed to the old order, the fact that those who were not economically and socially mobile before are now perceived as threats. Dravidian parties have not adequately anticipated this transmutation of caste, especially the oppression of Dalits even through the structural transformation it successfully spearheaded, including within urbanised spaces. This calls for a more dynamic view of caste that is able to acknowledge structural transformation, capital, social infrastructure and changing ideological grounds as new bases for the transmutation of caste hierarchies, rather than an outright denial of structural change in Tamil Nadu.

To return to the point on the denial of an urban life for residents of urban spaces, ironically, this is true even of some seemingly thriving industrial towns such as Ambur which are simultaneously hubs of production (of leather goods, in this instance) but also unserviced, underdeveloped urban spaces (Coelho and Vijayabaskar, 2014). Even in geographical terms, development within the state remains decidedly uneven. Failed efforts to develop industries in industrially backward districts in the state such as Tirunelveli or Perambalur signify the limits to the extent to which regional differences and uneven development can be addressed through diffusive urbanisation.

Further, in an ironic turn for electoral parties which emerged from social movements centring ordinary people as agents of change, structures of dependence have been created in which the benevolence of politicians and bureaucrats is routinely sought, through patronage relations or corruption. A movement that recognised the importance of urban centrality in the partaking of surplus value and the controlling of its distribution managed to accomplish diffused urbanisation, but not necessarily a decentralised governance of and in the urban. Rather than being meaningfully part of governance structures, poor urban residents remain greatly dependent on local political leaders and bureaucrats in determining their outcomes. While it was important to have a politicised and socially diversified bureaucracy to effectively design and implement welfare architecture, the absence of participatory channels has entrenched dependence on the bureaucracy. Even as Dravidian parties focused explicitly on recruiting support from the urban grassroots, both city governance and decision making within political parties remain centralised in practice, despite a seemingly decentralised structure within parties. One sees that residents remain party loyalists, leaving little room for potential transformation independent of these tightly knit and omnipresent party networks, and very few autonomous spaces for movements from which to pressurise the state. Political capital as well as acquiescence to slum evictions is regularly gained from measures such as cash-for-votes and the distribution of consumer goods such as television sets and food grinders. Our contention is that Dravidian urbanisation has perhaps overemphasised urbanisation as an ideal outcome, while not yet paying sufficient attention to the radicalisation of urban processes and management.

A related disquieting outcome of dependence on political actors and bureaucrats is the extraordinary level of corruption and rent seeking in the state. Dravidian political parties have effectively institutionalised corruption through rent seeking, for instance in natural resources, in an exemplary case of what Walton and Crabtree (2018) call ‘crony populism’. A centralised mechanism for the extraction of rents from sand mining has been created, through which cartels are built to corner contracts to mine and transport sand: this mechanism is a form of socially embedded and politically institutionalised pork-barrel politics (Rajshekhar, 2016). The state has one of the highest election expenditures per candidate in the country, and the reputation of being the third most corrupt state in the country (see e.g. Sivakumar, 2018). This unfortunate outcome is at least partly a consequence of the nature of the Dravidian mobilisation, as it eventually started to rely too heavily on political actors and bureaucrats rather than on mobilisation from below as in the early days of the movement.

‘Radicalism in Madras state is a markedly urban phenomenon’, Rudolph (1961: 297) wrote when the DMK first broke significant electoral ground in cities. Populist radicalism in Madras politics, for Rudolph, was one in which the central figure was the ‘small man’ who desired ‘levelling’ and ‘economic and social equality’ while also being interested in property, profit and upward mobility, in response to democratic ideas and a modern economy. Many decades later, this remains a rather accurate description of the Dravidian model in Tamil Nadu state in India. Several of these ‘small men’ have succeeded, but the model could do a lot better for those who continue to remain at its margins.