Self Respect Marriage

V. Geetha writes of Periyar and the ideas of Self-Respect Marriage.

Extract:

Periyar granted that Self-Respect marriages were constitutively indefinable, since there existed any number of variations of such unions and each claimed to be different from a conventional marriage, and announced itself to have been guided by the play of reason alone. In a sense, this reflected on the phenomenon of the rational itself which knew no boundaries, save those it set for itself. This surely ought to be clear, argued Periyar, to those who were familiar with practices of faith, which were equally resistant to simple definitions, being infinitely different. Yet, since the question of definition had come up, he needed to address it.