Chennai: When the famous Vienna-born logician and philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) first “made his name in English-speaking countries” with his work ‘Open Society and its Enemies’ (1945), “it created something of a sensation,” writes John Passmore in ‘A Hundred Years of Philosophy’.
Popper’s path-breaking book was a virulent attack on any form of totalitarian social order. It saw the light of day, just about when the world was emerging from horrors of fascism.
In that painstakingly argued book, he saw the ‘Open Society’ as “an association of free individuals, respecting each other’s rights, within the framework of mutual protection supplied by the State, and achieving through the means of responsible, rational decisions, a growing measure of humane and enlightened life.”
For a reporter covering this State for over 25 years now, Thursday’s ‘Ganesh Chathurthi’ day this year came as a temptation to transpose Karl Popper’s idea to the Tamil Nadu context, as ‘Open Society and its Tolerances’.
The reason was simple. By sheer coincidence, the surfeit and variety of celebrations marking ‘Ganesh Chathurti’, the multiplicity of forms that the Elephant God came in – DC had reported how a girl-devotee in Ooty has already collected over 8000 forms of Lord Ganesh and wants to break the Guinness record in this —, coincided with the 137th birth anniversary (Sept 17) of the atheist and rationalist, Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy, popularly known as ‘Periyar’, credited with giving the Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu a new socio-political thrust that later spawned the DMK and its successors.
This unwitting coincidence of date heightened Ganesh Chathurthi’s uniqueness this year. While the entire range of the political class from the leaders of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), ruling AIADMK, DMK and MDMK to the other parties, individually paid floral tributes to the statues and portraits of Periyar the sworn atheist and social reformer who fought idolatry, virtually in the same breath several political party leaders also extended their ‘Vinayaka Chathurthi’ greetings to the people at large.
In embracing the rationalist way of life, Periyar’s ardent devotees had reportedly broken idols of the elephant God on Buddha Poornima Day in 1953, only for Periyar himself to be deified decades later. The DMK’s founder-leader C.N. Annadurai, sensing how religion played a key role in the people’s cultural space, effected a course-correction so to say, moving away from DK’s uncompromising atheism to secular deism with his pithy one-liner, ‘Ondre Kulam, Oruvane Devan (One Humanity, One God).
Annadurai’s famous one-line quip, “I neither break coconuts for Pillaiyar, nor do I break his idols,” was also seen as a symbolic retort to Periyar’s radicalism. Now, theism is no longer a bad word among Dravidian parties.
Significantly, despite certain pockets in Tamil Nadu where Dalits are still not allowed entry into Temples, this bandwidth of tolerance appears to have only widened in the State. This is despite the fact that some Hindu outfits have since early 1990s’ sought to give political hue to ‘Ganesh Chathurthi’.
Interestingly, on Thursday, The DK general secretary, K. Veeramani unveiled a new 20-feet tall statue of Periyar at his party headquarters, even as ‘Anna Dhana (free dining)’ was going on in street corners and Temples across the state as part of the ‘Ganesh Chathurthi’ festivities.
And with the day also coinciding with the 65th birthday of the BJP leader and Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, there was more than political courtesy as Dravidian party leaders including the DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi greeted Mr. Modi. So much was in evidence, all in a day, on an ‘Open Society and its Tolerances’.
