No Brahmin candidates: Tamil Nadu party lists lay bare a century-old power shift

In Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, M S S Pandian begins with the 1916 Non-Brahmin Manifesto which warned that self-rule, if granted too soon, would become Brahmin rule over others. Pandian wrote that Brahmins formed only about 3% of the population, yet were “preponderant and highly visible” in the colonial bureaucracy, the professions, and the Congress leadership. Demographically small but institutionally immense.

S Narayan’s The Dravidian Years gives this imbalance statistical flesh. Brahmins, he writes, formed “less than 3 per cent of the population”, but had an outsized hold over education and government jobs. Between 1892 and 1904, 15 of the 16 Indians selected to the Indian Civil Service from the Madras Presidency were Brahmins, as were 21 of the 27 engineers selected in that period. “Their mastery over English was considered a passport to power, influence, and a means to profit,” Narayan writes. In colonial Madras, English was not just a language, it was an escalator.

This did not merely provoke resentment but produced an opposing political identity. Pandian shows how “non-Brahmin” was not a naturally unified social bloc but a category that had to be imagined, asserted, and made politically real. Over time, it became the settled grammar of power in Tamil Nadu. By the 1950s, he notes, the Congress leadership in the state had passed from Brahmin to non-Brahmin hands; in 1954, Madras became the first state without a Brahmin in its ministry under K Kamaraj; and by the 1970s, both ruling and Opposition spaces were occupied by parties claiming allegiance to non-Brahmin interests. This was not just a shift in who won elections. It was a shift in who could claim legitimacy.

Robert L Hardgrave’s The Dravidian Movement, later echoed in Narayan’s account, understood this transformation as more than electoral arithmetic. Dravidian politics turned long-standing social grievances, linguistic pride, and anti-hierarchical sentiment into durable mass politics. Pandian puts the ideological thrust sharply: the Self-Respect Movement “invented the Brahmin as a trope for a wide range of inequalities and forms of oppression”. In Tamil Nadu, anti-Brahminism did not survive merely as rhetoric. It hardened into common sense.

What explains BJP’s decision?

Seen in that light, the candidate lists almost like a political footnote to a century-long argument. The AIADMK, which once under MGR and Jayalalithaa accommodated Brahmin faces, has for the first time in 35 years drawn a blank. By contrast, Vijay’s TVK has fielded two Brahmin candidates, while Seeman’s Naam Tamilar Katchi has fielded six, choosing seats such as Mylapore and Srirangam where Brahmin voters remain both numerically and symbolically relevant. The smaller or insurgent players, in other words, are willing to experiment where the established parties have grown cautious.

That raises a harder question, especially for the BJP. Former University of Madras political science professor Ramu Manivannan puts it bluntly. “Why even the BJP doesn’t have a Brahmin candidate is very important. The BJP should answer more than any other party.” The Brahmin leadership in the BJP too “wants to dominate, play a role in decision making, but doesn’t want to contest”, he says.

From RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy to BJP spokesman Narayanan Thirupathy, the ecosystem has visible Brahmin faces, yet not one of them is contesting. “The BJP is perceived as a Brahmin party. They don’t want to contest, but only control the party. But why didn’t they contest?” Prof Manivannan’s theory is that the Brahmin leaders are shaping the political apparatus, leaving others to fight the electoral battle.

Jayalalithaa, of course, was the grand exception who proves the rule. Katherine Young, in Turbulent Transformations, identifies her as a Tamil Śrīvaiṣṇava Vaṭakalai Brahmin. But Jayalalithaa did not return Brahmin politics to the centre of Tamil Nadu’s ideological universe. She never flaunted her identity even though she was a faithful. She succeeded as a mass populist leader with a welfare-driven, cross-caste base in a political order already reorganised by backward-class assertion, social justice language, and Dravidian legitimacy.

Narayan’s account helps explain why she did not work to restore the political centrality of Brahmins. The Dravidian movement did not stop with rhetoric against upper-caste dominance; it translated that social ideology into governance, welfare, and a reordering of public opportunity. Tamil Nadu, he argues, became an example of empowering backward classes, with administration and politics working together to move away from “the dominance of the forward communities”. Over time, the contest shifted from Brahmin versus non-Brahmin to competition among increasingly powerful OBC and dominant-caste blocs.

New power centres

In Dravidian parties, new groups hold the levers of power due to their proximity to power. In the AIADMK, the Jayalalithaa years saw an unmistakable concentration of influence among Thevars, owing in no small measure to the clout of her close aide V K Sasikala. After Jayalalithaa, that balance shifted sharply toward Gounders, another politically and economically formidable backward community. Caste arithmetic was not incidental to the party’s 2016 victory; it was part of the engine. The OBC-heavy Kongu belt dominated by Gounders and the Thevar strongholds of the south mattered greatly, and the Cabinet reflected that social ledger: at least eight ministers from the Gounder community and seven from the Thevars.

In the DMK too, power is hardly casteless. If the Brahmin once stood as shorthand for institutional advantage, today other socially entrenched groups, such as Muthaliyar, are often seen as occupying that influential, functional space in Dravidian politics. Power in Tamil Nadu has not abolished caste, it has merely changed caste clothes.

That is why the present moment is more interesting than a simple zero in the candidate table. What has faded is not their influence so much as the incentive of contesting openly under a Brahmin sign in a state where the vocabulary of legitimacy remains stubbornly non-Brahmin.

After a century of Dravidian politics, the old minority that once exercised disproportionate power may still hover near the levers of influence. But on nomination day, hovering is not the same as standing. And Tamil Nadu’s parties, with their usual earthy realism, appear to know that perfectly well: why risk a symbolic battle you do not need, when power, after all, is often more comfortable in the second row than on the stage?