The epilogue discusses new and old challenges for history as an academic discipline that overemphasizes the written archive and fails to deliver on its promise to be transparent about the motivations behind and process of source selection. It highlights the shortcomings of the document-based and state-, male-, and literate-centric history-writing as a violent technology of European and Japanese imperialisms.

The Cambridge Companion to Periyar has been jointly edited by two researchers belonging to two different generations. When the first editor began his writing career in the mid-1980s, Periyar's was not a name that could be taken in genteel, academic circles. By the time the second editor began his doctoral work at a British university in 2011, the topic was a study in political theory, comparing Periyar with a major international thinker (Frantz Fanon). In the intervening generation, much had changed in the fortunes of academic writing on Periyar. After decades of being ignored or consigned to the margins by Indian sociologists and historians, we can say that Periyar has arrived in global scholarship. This volume exemplifies this turn.

Paralleling Periyar's rising influence during these intervening decades, there has been vigorous academic interest in studying the Dravidian movement. Newer and newer editions of Periyar's writings—covering the spectrum from multivolume sets to popular paperbacks—are being published every year. Any visitor to the annual Chennai Book Fair would be amazed by the piles of books by and on Periyar. The transformation of the Periyar Library and Research Centre housed in the Chennai headquarters of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) from a sweltering hall roofed by an asbestos sheet in 1981, when the first editor first consulted it, to a comfortable air-conditioned hall with expanded print resources indexes the growing academic interest in Periyar. Social media is also abuzz with young readers discussing animatedly the ideas of Periyar.

A little over a hundred years after the non-Brahmin manifesto put forth by the South Indian Liberal Federation, better known as the Justice Party, in 1916 that advocated for adequate representation for non-Brahmin groups, Tamil Nadu's legislative assembly is India's most diverse in terms of caste representation (Verniers et al., 2021).

This legislative assembly's diverseness has been often attributed to the capacious Dravidian– Tamil1 identity and its ethos, which continue to inform the politics of the Dravidian parties that have governed the state since 1967. The capaciousness of the ethos that defines the Dravidian– Tamil identity, which has allowed for horizontal solidarities across caste groups that otherwise share a hierarchical relationship, stems from the socio-economic and cultural aspirations of these groups. These horizontal solidarities and aspirations continue to derive both their legitimacy and sustainability from the ever incremental and yet radical, anti-caste episteme and activism of Periyar. This chapter is an attempt to engage with him and the way his ideas may be located or traversed both within and outside the literature of other academics, intellectuals, and scholars not just of the subcontinent but across the world. His anti-caste episteme and the vocabulary of his activism are informed by a demand for adequate representation of non-Brahmins—grounded either in their demographic weight or in a historically embedded sense of tension with Brahminical hegemony.

This chapter portrays the multifaceted connections that shaped narratives of early modern Japanese–European encounters and colonial expansion in Southeast Asia. It achieves this by applying an entangled biography approach to Murakami’s knowledge networks, which integrated contemporary Japanese academia, foreign archives, and historical actors. An in-depth study of two ‘great men’ of the seventeenth century, Yamada Nagamasa and Sebastián Vizcaíno, illustrates the material and historiographical dimensions of myth-making and cultural diplomacy in the early twentieth century. The chapter finally evaluates the extent to which Murakami’s scholarship and his exposure to colonial sources contributed to the meta-narrative of early modern Japanese superiority.

Ideologue, reformer, feminist, firebrand secessionist: these are some of the many things E. V. Ramasamy Periyar has been called. If there is one strand of Periyar's thought that runs through all these titles and the politics that informed them, it would be his clarion call for self-respect. Not one to stop at dismantling the hegemonic power structures that he saw around him in India, Periyar was committed to the cause of reform in and for the Tamil diaspora as well. His views on nationhood thus ‘constantly violated the certitude about boundaries, identities, agents of change, and went beyond the territoriality of the nation’ (Pandian, 1993, p. 2282). Periyar emphasized that foreign settlement could enable the regeneration of Tamil society abroad, unfettered by India's oppressive traditions. Moreover, he saw the diaspora as an important source of financial support for the Dravidian movement. To this end, Self-Respect literature often asserted that Tamil people everywhere were bound by obligations of mutual assistance and reciprocity (Alagirisamy, 2016). Periyar visited British Malaya and Singapore twice in his lifetime: once in 1929–1930 and again in 1954–1955. Both visits were pivotal in aiding the development of a settled Tamil political consciousness in Singapore.

Scholars of the Indian Ocean world continue to trace the comings and goings of sojourners and settlers, privileging the ocean itself as a key agent of change (Moorthy and Jamal, 2010; Amrith, 2013; Menon et al., 2022). Yet, settlement also brought with it a sea-change in the lived presents and anticipated futures of migrant communities that aspired to citizenship.

The popular focus on Periyar and Dravidian—as a person leading his loyal people—may invite placing nationalism's assertion, rather than critique, at the heart of political thought in twentieth-century Tamil-speaking South India. ‘Nationalism’ names the intuition that ‘France [is] for the French, England for the English … and so forth’ (Shaw, 2013) or, more generally, ‘nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy … requir[ing] that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’, insisting on ‘congruence of state and nation’, and refusing ‘ethnic divergence between rulers and ruled’ (Gellner, 1983, pp. 1, 134). Much turns on ‘ethnic’. Considerations include whether ‘ethnic’ is ‘racial’ or ‘historically constituted’ (Lenin and Stalin, 1970, pp. 66–68) and nationalism's ‘inherent contradictoriness’, both because its ‘rational and progressive’ promises of modernity are often premised on ‘traditional and conservative’ gestures to the past and because its anti-colonial articulation usually adopts the very imperial ‘representational structure … nationalist thought seeks to repudiate’ (Chatterjee, 1986, pp. 22, 38). So, when the August 1944 creation of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) was heralded with ‘Long live Periyar, Dravida Nadu for the Dravidian, let the Dravidar Kazhagam flourish’1—entrenching an ‘ethnic’ idiom for Tamil-speaking South India's politics—an invitation for ‘a chapter on Periyar and nationalism’ encourages the interrogation of a twinned presumption of coherence: not simply of ‘Dravidian’ as a people loyal, but of ‘Periyar’ as a person leading.