Recapturing the momentous decades when the world of the Tamils was stood on its head and the age old Brahmin hegemony suffered irreparable damage, the authors present a critical analysis of the Non-Brahmin movement from its gestation at the end of the nineteenth century to E.V. Ramaswamy Periyar's Self-Respect Movement of the late twenties and thirties. The authors present forgotten texts and voices, especially of Dalit-Buddhist scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the observations of women participants who debated on a range of issues from the uses of Non-Co-operation to the politics of housework; carnivalesque denunciations of caste, Brahmin priesthood and the nation by youthful non-Brahmins. The book not only records for the first time in English what the non-Brahmins were saying about themselves, but also portrays the sensibility of the Tamil Brahmin in the early twentieth century. It privileges the Dalit contribution to the movement and ends with the anti-Hindi agitation that inaugurated a new era in Tamil politics.