Politics tamfitronics “The DMK, which split from the DK, redirected mass Dravidianism from a politics of heresy to a politics of community. Central to this change was the fuller incorporation of early Dravidianism’s essentialized ethnic categories within a popular discourse, which inspired the mobilisation of a broad coalition spanning the intermediate and lower strata.” — Narendra Subramanian in Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization, OUP, 1999.It is the element of a “broad coalition” that has been a key feature of the DMK and this, among others, has kept the party going for 75 years. In all likelihood, it will continue to be so in future. A product of social and political changes that Tamil society witnessed in the later part of the 19th Century and the early years of the 20th Century, the organisation, seen at one...
