Three separate things happened here, and they are not one story. The first was the palayakkarar resistance of 1801–1805 in the Erode country, which was about tenure and revenue and ended at Sankagiri. The second was a mill-town nationalism from the 1920s, produced by an industrial workforce rather than by a landed one, to which the Tiruppur flag procession of January 1932 belongs. The third was the Self-Respect movement, founded at Erode in 1925 by a man who had been president of the provincial Congress three years earlier and who left it; before 1947 its work was social reform — marriages conducted without priest or caste, widow remarriage, women's property and the removal of caste disability — and it ran alongside, and often against, the Congress in the same towns.
The Kongu palayakkarar resistance1801–1805
After the annexation of 1799 the Company moved to collect directly and to disarm the palayams. Dheeran Chinnamalai, holding Odanilai near Erode, refused and fought a series of small engagements in the western uplands over four years.
परिणाम: He was taken and hanged at Sankagiri fort in 1805; the palayam tenure in the Kongu country was wound up and re-issued as revenue-paying estates.
The mill-town campaigns1920–1932
Non-cooperation and then Civil Disobedience took hold in Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Erode and Salem among mill hands, weavers and traders rather than among cultivators. Picketing of foreign cloth, hartals and processions in defiance of the ban on the nationalist flag were the standard forms.
परिणाम: On 11 January 1932 a flag procession at Tiruppur was broken up on the banks of the Noyyal and Kumaran, who was carrying the flag, died of his injuries; he is remembered locally as Kodi Kaatha Kumaran.
The Self-Respect movementfrom 1925
Founded at Erode by E. V. Ramasamy after he left the Congress in 1925, with the journal Kudi Arasu as its platform and the first provincial conference at Chengalpattu in February 1929. Its pre-independence programme was social: marriages performed without priest or caste ceremony, widow remarriage, inter-caste marriage, opposition to child marriage, and campaigns against caste disability in temples, wells and schools.
परिणाम: Self-respect marriages spread through the western districts from the late 1920s and the movement built a press and a network of conferences that operated independently of the Congress.