TY - BOOK AU - Krishnan,Rajan Kurai AU - Sriramachandran,Ravindran AU - Subagunarajan,V.M.S. TI - Rule of the commoner: DMK and the formations of the political in Tamil Nadu, 1949-1967 T2 - Metamorphoses of the political: multidisciplinary approaches SN - 9781009197168 (ebook) AV - JQ298.D7 K75 2022 U1 - 324.254 23 PY - 2022/// CY - Cambridge PB - Cambridge University Press KW - Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam KW - Populism KW - India KW - Tamil Nadu KW - History KW - 20th century KW - Political parties KW - Tamil Nadu (India) KW - Politics and government N1 - Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 15 Jun 2022); Introduction: Two scenes of departure -- Ideation -- Construction of 'Dravidian-Tamil' people -- The uses of language -- Human immanence -- Left populism -- Imagination -- The play is the thing -- Critical hermeneutics -- Counter-narratives -- Power of fiction -- Mobilization -- The grassroots -- The waves -- The eruption -- The climb 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009197168 ER -