For the Brahmins, by the Brahmins: Hotel with upper caste tag raises hackles in Jaya's constituency

What's there in a name? But hell has broken over the name of a hotel with a 'Brahmin' tag in the famed pilgrim town Sri Rangam, incidentally the constituency of Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa.

Puritanical Dravidian political outfits and fringe groups still wedded to the anti-brahmin ideology of rationalist leader 'Periyar' E.V. Ramasamy are up in arms over the nomenclature. For them it proved to be a convenient handle to orchestrate the spectre of 'brahminical hegemony'. That it remains in the constituency of the Chief Minister, who takes pride in her Brahmin ancestry, has added a twist to the issue.

The protest to deface the name board on Tuesday turned violent, with the police arresting 120 activists of the militant Periyar Dravida Kazhagam (PDK) and other outfits. All of them have been remanded to custody.

It is no posh hotel and sports a conventional look. 'Sri Krishna Iyyer Bramanal Cafe,' close to the sprawling Sri Ranganathar temple, has been functioning for the last seven months. "I have christened it after my grandfather who was also into the hotel business," says Sri Krishnan, the proprietor, who had no inkling of this naming fuelling a controversy. Now, police protection has been provided to the hotel.

"My clientele includes aged parents of those working abroad. They cannot take the pains to cook on special occasions and we supply food prepared in conformity with traditional Brahmin methods. The Brahmin tag was to serve this purpose and was helpful as an identity," he reasons.

Countering it, PDK General Secretary K Ramakrishnan says, "The politics behind such christening has to be unmasked. In the past, Periyar had launched a campaign to tar and deface name boards of hotels and Cafs bearing the 'Brahmin' tag." In his opinion, this smacks of caste superiority and a revival of Brahminical hegemony.

But, he has no answer to hotels and business establishments with the caste tag in Trichy and elsewhere in the state. "Let them have Iyyer or Iyyengar hotel. We have no objection to it. But, the use of the word Brahmin cannot be tolerated as it reinforces Varnashrama Dharma," was his lame duck explanation.

Sangh affiliates and the Brahmin community in Sri Rangam, separated from Trichy by the river Cauvery, and the puritanical Dravidian outfits and ultra-left groups have been at loggerheads ever since a statue of Periyar was installed at a junction facing the temple. Attempts to remove the statue have been resisted.

Asked why he was refusing to change the nomenclature, Sri Krishnan asks whether it violated any provision of the law.

However, he is ready to remove the 'brahmin' tag if the Periyar statue was removed and there was a ban on the use of caste names in public.

This has again enraged the Periyarists, who are threatening to open a meat stall in the vicinity of the hotel. "The demand for removing the statue of a social reformer betrays a mindset opposed to social justice. If the Brahmin tag is not removed we would proceed with our plan of launching sale of beef, pork, fish and all non-vegetarian items in that area," fumes J Kennedy, an advocate engaged with the protest.