Homo Equalis : rationality, public sphere, and the making of nationals

The seemingly contentious insinuations on Nation-Nationalism often rely on certain ‘objective’ criteria to define this conceptual duo. This paper tries to demonstrate that more than the objective categories, the tumultuous upheavals in the socio-cultural-political realm augur the metamorphosis of the value structure in a society that paves the way for the emergence of a plausible new social order. That upended social order wherein homogenization of power within culture emerges as the nucleus, and that remains the axiomatic proposition for a community to imagine itself as Nationals. By invoking Ernest Gellner's framework, this study seeks to decode the contributions of an iconoclast E V Ramasamy in the Tamil-speaking region of India, whose attempts were not merely to ‘reform’ the caste structure but to reconstitute the society into national consciousness.