Budalur, a non-descript village on the Thanjavur-Tiruchi Road, is known outside the Cauvery delta districts as the birthplace of Krishnamurthy Sastri, a renowned Gottuvadyam player, Vaidhyanatha Iyer, the founder of Ananda Vikatan, and Naveenan, Tamil writer. It also has a unique place in the history of social reforms. It was in the agraharam (village inhabited by Brahmins) of Budalur that the Tamil Nadu government ran a hostel for the Adi Dravida students in the 1970s, before shifting it to a new building.
“The government must have paid the rent for occupying the house. But what is important is the circumstances that favoured the transition in the 1970s. It should be viewed from the fact that houses for rent are denied to particular communities and non-vegetarians even in cities like Chennai,” said S. Armstrong, Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Madras.
Today, in Budalur, only three or four families of Brahmins live in the agraharam. Other houses are occupied by families of various communities. The old house where the Dalit hostel was located once remains in a dilapidated condition. “[Back then] Dalits were never allowed to enter the agraharam. If they rode a bullock-cart carrying paddy or other goods, they would stop it at the entrance, and it would be driven into the agraharam by the workers of intermediate communities. It was a great change that Dalit students could live and study from a Brahmin settlement,” said K. Kesavan, Head of the Department of Physics, Periyar Maniammai Institute of Science and Technology, Vallam, Thanjavur.
