As an infant growing up in Madras in the mid-Sixties, I was greatly affected by the film Thiruvilaiyadal. Baby Kartikeya, whom I identified with due to I was baby of family, is cheated out of the 'mango of knowledge' because elder brother, elephant headed, pot-bellied Ganesa (with whom I couldn't identify due to he was edumicated) , circles parents rather than circumambulating the Universe like his slimmer, cuter, younger sibling. Muruga throws a fit and goes off to sulk. Auvaiyyar- an incarnation of the Godhead who put aside nubile, beauty so as to serve us Tamils in the form we love most- viz Granny- tells Subhramaniyar that mango of knowledge is Tamil itself- or Kartikeya himself, breast fed by the Pleiades, or Muruga himself who coincides with all Beauty. Tamil is non-rival, its Beauty non-rival, and, if you live in Tamil country, non-excludable by any means.
What about stupid cunts like me who left Madras in '68 before we learnt to read and write and thus lost Tamil- at least of the more ornate sort? Well, we still have Rg Veda which says that baby is knower or Scripture coz it says 'Ta Ta'.
That's it. That's the whole story about Tamil or Sanskrit or any other non-rival, non-excludable, theophany of mutual, nurturing, love between Baby and the Ardhanariswara that is Mummy/Daddy between whom, in reverie, I still lie though I can't coz they are but one body and mine, like Every Woman, Every Man, is elsewhere.
I need hardly say that I am the black sheep of my community by reason of being as stupid and ignorant and useless as shit.
By contrast, there is Sumathi Ramaswamy- a TamBram who grew up in New Delhi and who did her first two degrees from there- and who published a book titled 'Passions of the tongue' back in 1997.
Its blurb reads-
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name?
The answer is that the party they supported stood to gain political power as a result. As martyrs, their families might benefit significantly. This was 'altruistic suicide' of the Durkheimian sort. The reason they mentioned language was because of the linguistic re-organization of the States and the danger that Hindi might be imposed as the language of Government in accordance with a promise made in the Constitution. By 1968, with the change in the name of Madras State to Tamil Nadu and the replacement of Congress by DMK rule, the victory of the 'martyrs' was complete.
Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism
Only three things need to be mentioned
1) The influence of Christian Missionaries- Protestants, in particular- which, as in Europe, fuelled linguistic nationalism more particularly in connection with getting jobs in the Government bureaucracy. The notion that 'Christ died for our sins' reinforced an ancient tradition of honouring the self-sacrifice of warriors or chaste women. Furthermore, the example of Ireland- where non-Catholic Nationalists identified with Gaelic as a way of asserting an Irish identity even if their genealogy was entirely of the 'Ascendancy'- influenced elites. However, the situation in Madras Presidency was different from that in Ireland because Telugu language speakers were the majority. Parts of their linguistic area were behind in Developmental terms and this spurred the demand for separate States in that region. Radhakrishnan, the philosopher President, is an example of a Telugu speaker championing the demand for the creation of a 'Rayaseelam' State. It is easy to see the influence of Protestant Higher Educational Establishments on this outcome. Consider the case of Kavi Yogi Suddhandha Bharati. He had been trained as a teacher in a Protestant Institution and then come under the influence of both the Revolutionaries and then the Gandhians before finding his home with the ex-Revolutionary, Sri Aurobindo. For him, Tamil is divine because all creation is Divine and gives praise to the Creator.
2) Stalin's philosophy of language and the Soviet approach to the 'Nationalities question'. Mention of Yulian Bromley is usual in this context. The Commies were selling some crazy Racialist philosophy such that Dravidians were good and Aryans were bad because Brahmins are Aryans- right? On the other hand, Buddhism and the Sinhalese were totes Aryan . Obviously, this created an arbitrage opportunity for the Xtians which however ended up benefitting the Pentecostals! Speaking in tongues is not so different from worshipping a particular language.
3) the origin and trajectory of anti-Brahmin ideology in Madras. Nowhere else in India was language politics about 'purifying' the mother tongue of 'Brahmin dialect'. Ironically, Kalaignar the first champion of 'Pure Tamil' was a Brahmin. As a Professor of Tamil at Madras Christian College, his motivation was to prevent the University from dropping the subject. I should mention that the Theosophical society, under Annie Besant who was based in Madras, soon started promoting a Brahmin 'Universal Messiah'. Thus, crazy mystical shite was very much in the air.
Still, like Gandhi's satyagraha, the religious trappings of the Tamil movement were purely cosmetic. This was a discourse of politics- that too of a parochial kind- having to do with which community got to monopolize clerical jobs. Love, labor and life were irrelevant because plenty of Brahmins loved and laboured and lived for the same stupid shit. Moreover some had given their lives in the Freedom struggle. So, this was a squalidly political question of zero interest to non-Tamils, nor- to speak frankly, to Tamils who- quite sensibly- wanted to get ahead by learning English and C++ etc. Indeed, it was the quest for jobs which had driven linguistic sub-nationalism in the first place.
Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion."
Back in the Thirties, every language had some Professors and crackpots who wanted to 'purify the dialect of the tribe'. Italians were replacing French words like Hotel with Albergo. 'Shuddh' Hindi was being purged of Persian or Arabic words. Even in England, as Anthony Burgess records, there were people who were trying to deploy a purely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Within the UK it is noteworthy that the SNP- despite the fact that the majority of Scots are descended from non-Gaelic speakers- is seeking to imitate the language policies of Plaid Cymru. Bibliolatry easily translates into the worship of the Language itself-more particularly if there is an economic motive for such ecumenicism.
The plain fact is that universal education- or the movement towards it- had created the need for teachers trained at Universities in their own mother tongue- an obvious waste of fucking time. This meant that some ambitious young people- who didn't want to end up as Head Masters of Middle Schools in the boondocks- took up the one subject they had some academic knowledge of and tried to make out that it mattered greatly. It didn't, but if they could give a kick in the pants to the corrupt and incompetent politicians in charge of things then, well and good.
True, the Left did embark on a 'long march through the Institutions' in the hope of indoctrinating those condemned to the pedagogue's fate in their own stupid shite. Sumathi herself went to JNU. Then she escaped to Amrika. Had she been forced to specialise in Shuddh Hindi or Centamil, she'd have been trapped in India and thus would have had to make herself useful to some political party.
She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers
spoiler alert- it was the same stupid ways other stupid peeps imagined their own lingo
and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity.
That connection arose because they had bodies and those bodies existed in colonial and post-colonial modernity.
Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden,
Which is how Sanskrit is described- it being the language of the Hindu Scriptures. But the same applies to Braj Bhasha or Tulsi Das's Awadhi etc.
Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion.
Which are the same as Hindu devotion elsewhere.
She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.
Why not metaphors of prostitution instead? That's a head-scratcher- unless peeps like Mummies and don't have a high opinion of tarts.
Sumathi's book is sheer JNU balderdash. Consider the following-
How do I, a late-twentieth-century-historian, make sense of these deaths?
The same way I do. Just because you studied stupid shite at JNU doesn't mean you have to be stupid.
Disciplined by history, I would naturally demand, What is it that led so many men and women to proclaim that they would live and die for their language?
They advanced the cause in which they believed and gained a reputational benefit. Incidentally, 14 Tamils had killed themselves when Indira Gandhi died. When the heroic leader (thalaivar) dies his heroic followers top themselves- unless they've made money or have nice jobs. But the thing can exist simply as a fad.
Why did they so passionately confess that a life without Tamil is not worth living, that they would forsake material gains and worldly pleasures, even the ambrosia of the gods, for its sake?
Their lives weren't great. At least they went from the world in what they themselves considered to be a blaze of glory. I suppose the development of Tamil as an examinable subject at school had led to indoctrination in the cult of the heroic martyr but no genuine cause was available for any truly heroic action. There was no oppressor. Brahmins weren't really devils. Nobody actually wanted to impose Hindi. Indeed, paradoxically, the no-Hindi campaign would help only English speakers, like Sumathi or my IFS officer sister, keep their dominance in the higher bureaucracy.
Trained by my discipline to always historicize, these deaths
but everybody historicizes historical deaths coz...urm... they are histo-fucking-orical. No special training is needed.
—as indeed the lives of these women and men—have nonetheless taught me to appreciate the hubris of the historical will to elucidate, as they have laid bare the inadequacies of the very language of history itself to write about matters such as these.
It is this silly woman's language which is inadequate. But then, she says, she only properly learned Tamil in America.
Yet historicize I must, if only to rescue these men and women from charges of “frenzy” and “fanaticism.”
This was Durkheimian altruistic suicide- which is why some of the martyr's names are commemorated in T.N.
And so I will return to their stories, later, but only after resorting to history.
And yet it would seem that history as a discipline has no place for acts such as Chinnasami’s
Sure it does. So does journalism and politics.
or, for that matter, for the language for which he sacrificed himself.
Tamil history is a discipline which has plenty of space for it.
While it is hardly news that languages have histories, “the odd thing about the questione della lingua [the language question] is how rarely historians ask it,” Gramsci’s attempt to theorize it notwithstanding (Steinberg 1987: 199).
The odd thing about historians is how rarely they ask sensible questions. This is because it is a low IQ occupation which is mischievous when it isn't useless. Stalin, not Gramsci, theorised language. Leftists don't know their own history of stupidity.
This is especially true for colonial and post-colonial India where the language question—that complex of issues relating to language, politics, and power—has hardly been interrogated by disciplinary history despite its obvious importance for the political cultures of the emergent nation-state.
Because historians are stupid and useless. There were American and Soviet and other analysts who needed to know whether Tamil Separatism was a real threat to the integrity of India. They did in fact consult the older type of historian but- even back then- got contradictory or wholly nonsensical results. After that they just asked the taxi driver.
The historian is a rare presence in scholarly debates on the national language crisis,
because she is as stupid as shit.
the internal partitioning of the nation into linguistic states, or the pedagogical dilemmas of multilingualism.
or fiscal policy or monetary policy or anything else which matters. That's what happens if you study stupid shit. Nobody wants to talk you. This has nothing to do with being 'Oriental' or belonging to the wrong caste or religion. Study shit and you become a shithead.
This is partly because of a (Orientalist) preoccupation with caste and religion,
Indians, not Orientalists, are preoccupied with caste and religion because, in a democracy, that's what decides the outcome of elections and court cases and PWD tendering processes.
those two gatekeeping concerns of South Asian studies on identity politics (Ramaswamy 1993: 684-85).
Linguistic sub-nationalism hopes to paper over caste divides. It is not clear that it has successfully done so in TN.
But just as clearly, it seems that because our historical conceptions come to us in and through language, historians have tended to treat it, the linguistic turn notwithstanding, as a transparent medium of communication of information rather than as an ideological formation that itself has a politics which has to be historicized.
This is nonsense. Tamil doesn't have an 'ideological formation'. It is similar to Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. But anti-Brahminism has been big in TN since the time of the Justice Party. Thus TN is different from its neighbours. On the other hand, it had a Brahmin CM, Jayalalitha, for the longest time. Only male Tambrams- that too only those who prided themselves on standing first in worthless Exams- provoked and deserved the derision and ire of all Tamils- including Iyers.
Yet, even as I try to make a case in this study for (Indian) historians to take the language question seriously,
The Brits took the language question seriously. So did Congress. There was linguistic reorganisation of the States. If Indian historians weren't taking language seriously, they were ignoring Stalin. But then nobody actually reads Indian historians because they are stupid and ignorant and write like shit- unless they don't, in which case nobody remembers their names.
I do so with the troubled knowledge that disciplinary history has been complicit in the Europeanization of alternate life-worlds and imaginations.
Yet there has been no fucking Europeanization. Americanization- sure. People eat McDonalds and watch Disney movies. They don't wear berets and eat smelly cheese and hit each other over the head with baguettes. Incidentally, this 'life world' nonsense only originated in the Thirties and died immediately. Husserl was shit. So was Witlesstein. Turing wasn't ,once he realised Brouwer wasn't. Tarski wasn't till Kripke he was only on condition that everything wasn't. But Auvaiyyar had already, most melodiously, put this matter to me in T-Nagar before I'd learnt to read and write.
For the knowledge procedures and institutional practices of history have universalized the European historical experience as the desirable norm,
Fuck off. America- maybe. Europe- no. It shat the bed.
against which all other histories, Indian included, appear inadequate and incomplete (Chakrabarty 1992).
Chucks was inadequate. On the other hand, he has been accused of sexual harassment so maybe he isn't anatomically incomplete.
Nevertheless, as Dipesh Chakrabarty insists, we cannot give up on history,
if we are paid to teach that shite
for it is one of the fundamental modalities of our times,
whereas other people's times feature no hysteresis effects- right? +
“in the establishment of meaning, in the creation of truth regimes, in deciding, as it were, whose and which ‘universal’ wins.”
America's universals won. Europe still has a lot of Kings and Dukes and such like. Nobody else thinks that a good idea. But America's time may have passed. Next, it may be China's turn.
What we can—and must—do instead, as Meaghan Morris
Meghan Markle maybe
recommends, is to resist the writing of histories of places like India “as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content” (quoted by Chakrabarty 1992: 17-20).
The woman is Australian. She doesn't want to admit that the Brits got incorporated into Indian history. The aborigines prevailed.
Histories which seek to corrode the universalizing imperative of Europe’s knowledge practices
displaced those 'knowledge practices'. The German Historical school fucked up and died. The Annales school bored itself to death. Mathematical methods prevailed. Ergodicity matters more than the 'Residues and Derivations' which drive hysteresis.
ought to heed all those “scandalous” moments of “difference” which “shock” and “disrupt” the homogenizing flow of history-as-usual:
Very true. Chucks should drop his trousers and display his asshole during lectures.
Subaltern histories,
enable subalterns to escape to Western campuses. Ranajit Guha is considered a great man in Vienna. Meanwhile a former school teacher from a Scheduled Tribe has become President of the Republic.
thus conceived in relationship to the question of difference, will have a split running through them.
They have shit running through them.
On the one hand, they are “histories” in that they are constructed within the master code of secular History and use the academic codes of history-writing (and thereby perforce subordinate to themselves all other forms of memory).
Or knowledge. These guys know they are writing useless shite. Still, they have to go through the loose motions.
On the other hand, they cannot ever afford to grant this master-code its claim of being a mode of thought that comes to all human beings naturally, or even to be treated as something that exists out there in nature itself.
Because their job is to pretend to understand some stupid Continental shite. Also, these guys are bucking for affirmative action by pretending their ancestors plucked cotton under the lash on Ind's coral strand.
Subaltern histories are therefore constructed within a particular kind of historicized memory, one that remembers History itself as a violation, an imperious code that accompanied the civilizing process that the European Enlightenment inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world-historical task.
But, as Disraeli said, India wasn't conquered. It paid the Brits to administer more and more of its territory so as to make some Indians richer and more secure than they had ever been before. Sadly, this also meant that some minorities did well. The Independence struggle was about fucking over those minorities or just chasing them away.
The “unassimilable,” the “untranslatable,” the “different”—these then are the stuff of histories written in a post-colonial moment.
No. They are the stuff of horror fiction of the Lovecraft type.
The goal is not the illusory quest for the authentic, but a narrative refusal to seek recognition through collapsing the “difference” of India’s histories into the “sameness” of Europe’s.
But English history hasn't collapsed the Welsh and the Scots and the Cornish into 'sameness'. As for those who live north of the Watford Gap- don't get me started. Gramsci coined the term 'subaltern'. But Mussolini was plenty subaltern.
And so, when I raise the questione della lingua, and demand that Indian historians heed it, I
am displaying great ignorance. Back in 1915, Nilakantha Sastri had argued for writing history in English rather than, as Jadunath Sarkar demanded, in vernacular languages. Bharati attacked him with might and main. Vernacular histories changed Indian politics. In the Soviet Union, an Indian historian actually wrote in Hindi. Sadly, Hindi-wallahs couldn't understand it. I need hardly say that Sastri's scholarship was calamitous for Tambrams. But then the guy was a Telugu speaker.
do so with the full realization of its European origins.
Protestant origins. Then America declared independence and Europe was on its way to provincialization.
And yet, the work of colonialism and modernity has ensured that this is no longer a question that just belongs to Europe but is also a dilemma for the worlds that it colonized.
A completely unimportant dilemma. How do we make more money? That's the only fucking dilemma. On the other hand, the language question is important in Wales and may become so in Scotland. Orban has also raised it in connection with Ukraine. By contrast, the language question seems to have little salience for South Asia or Indonesia- which deliberately introduced a national language not based on the biggest dialect.
To ask the language question, but to answer it and write it differently for a colonial and post-colonial context—these then are the burdens of this book.
Was there a language question in Tamil Nadu at that time? No. Sri Lanka- maybe. But this lady wasn't foolish enough to stray into Tiger territory.
who claimed a willingness to die for Tamil? Although Chinnasami’s immolation by itself is a spectacularly singular act, defying easy translation into universal categories,
'altruistic suicide' a la Durkheim. That's easy enough surely?
the attitudes that produced it could be conveniently assimilated into the metanarrative of nationalism, as yet another instance of “linguistic nationalism.” Indeed, this is typically how the few scholarly works that deal with the question of Tamil, if only tangentially, gloss it—as “Tamil nationalism,” or its variant, “Tamil revivalism,” and as such, an entity that is forged in the shadows of metropolitan Indian nationalism, itself declared a “derived” version of the normative European form (Chatterjee 1986).
American, Wilsonian, form- sure. Europe had transnational Empires and one multi-linguistic, multi-faith, Republic. Portugal became a Republic in 1911 but retained the older Imperial view of subject-hood. France gave up Algeria very reluctantly and retains the notion that distant colonies are part of the same polity.
[2] It would be hard to deny the importance of ideologies of nationalism, derived or not, for much that happens in late colonial and post-colonial India.
Ideologies didn't matter anymore than Michel Aflaq's ideology mattered for Iraq and Syria. India formed a Union because Hindus felt they had to hang together or else succumb once again to Muslim salami tactics. But Pan Arabism failed because some countries had petroleum and others didn't.
We hear repeatedly in the words of many a speaker of Tamil, from at least the later decades of the nineteenth century, the logic of Herder, Fichte,
wholly unknown to Indians save one or two- like Radhakrishnan- who studied at Lutheran Colleges
and other prophets of (European) linguistic nationalism:
Language is breath;
Language is consciousness;
Language is life;
......
Language is the world;
Without language, who are we?
(Bharatidasan 1978: 132)
This is the Vakyapadya philosophy. It also coincides with the extreme nominalism of the Bhakti poets whereby the name of God is higher than God. One may speak of onomatodoxy of the Russian orthodox sort but even the Protestants mention Philippians 2:9–11 in this context. One wonders whether Sumathi ever spent any time listening to sermons in Tamil Churches or hearing religious discourses given by Hindu preceptors.
That the cunning of Europe ensures that Herder & Co. speak in such clear Tamil tones
is baloney. Herder wanted to be the Philosophical Commissar of the Prussian Army. South India had no Prussia- not even a Piedmont. Tamils used their knowledge of English to gain Government employment or lucrative legal practices in neighboring states. Similarly, Bengalis were spreading into Orissa and Assam which caused a reaction.
only reminds us of the regimes of repetition and mimicry that colonialism sparked among subject populations.
There were no such regimes. Indians who went in for mimicry didn't get jobs. They were laughed at. Even to become a Vakil you had to pass exams in vernacular languages and were obliged to learn 'shikast' script etc. Gandhi, fool that he was, became a British barrister to evade this requirement. But he failed immediately at the bar and so his brother got him a job in South Africa where it was his knowledge of Gujerati which was salient.
Yet, as Homi Bhabha observes, colonial mimicry is marked by a profound ambivalence,
It didn't exist. What did exist within every profession was Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitating your boss. If the guy is into cricket, you mug up on that game. If he listens to Ravi Shankar on the car stereo you do the same. I am speaking from personal experience. But the manager who listened to Ravi Shankar was named Nigel Smith. I stopped listening to Ravi Shankar when he didn't make partner in the London office and was exiled to Southampton or some such place.
for “in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”
That may be true of mimicry- which is what comedians indulge in. But mimetics means becoming as good or better than the mimetic target. That's what you aim at when you join a profession. If that profession is Chartered Accountancy, you have to be very very good at arithmetic. If it being a Professor of a shite subject, you have to be very very shitty indeed.
Mimicry in the colony, “on the margins of metropolitan desire,” is always “a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 1994: 85-92).
Homo Baba thought that Black people in the Colonies were all prancing around in top hats and frock coats. But his own Parsi ancestors did no such thing even if created Baronets. On the other hand Armenians and Baghadi Jews did 'assimilate'. But they were birds of passage. The Parsis stuck with Gujerati even if they had been educated at Eton.
But how do we narrate the lives of those who lived in the colony so as to keep alive this ambivalence of mimicry, this tension between the “almost the same” but the “not quite,” which dismembers European norms and forms, as Bhabha reminds us?
The phenomenon was non existent in India. True, a couple of England returned babus might live in Western style for a few years. They they understood that everybody was laughing at them. Also, wifey started to beat them.
Sumathi grew up in New Delhi where all the nice bungalows Lutyen's built were occupied by guys wearing dhotis while the Prime Minister wore a saree and had a nice 'Brahmacharee' to teach her Yoga with his dick. But the khaddar fad started a hundred years ago!
Equally crucial, how may we write their stories so as to displace the universal narrative of nationalism, a narrative whose normative “silent referent” is always (western) Europe, that paradigmatic site of the modern nation-state (Chakrabarty 1992)?
This silly lady knows nothing about Europe because she hasn't lived there. Pretending to have read Foucault or Derrida doesn't make you an 'Europeanist' as is amply demonstrated by the case of Gayatri Spivak (who thinks there is something called the Straits of Rhodes which some European Hanuman jumped across).
Western Europe's 'silent referent' is America. Sadly, this is also why Racism increased at a certain point. Europe welcomed Obama's election because they could back to their earlier lack of color prejudice.
For inevitably in such a narrative, “Tamil” nationalism is a (distorted) variant of something that has already happened elsewhere, but reenacted with local content.
Bullshit! There has been no linguistic re-organization of States in Europe or America. True, Reagan became Governor of California before MGR became CM of Tamil Nadu. But Reagan was 'B-list'. It was as head of the Actors guild, when he strategically supported McCarthyism, and then as a spokesman for Corporate America that he rose. MGR and Jayalalitha were A list actors who were deeply committed to the rationalist philosophy of Annadurai. Still, if Kamraj Nadar hadn't come up with a deeply stupid plan to increase Nehru's power, Congress might have been able to stay in power in T.N. Incidentally, Indira was the one member of Sastri's Cabinet who supported the anti-Hindi protests. It is important to remember that Indira was actually less shite than her colleagues.
This is not the only problem with the analytic of nationalism for writing a different history.
The only problem being to get a grant to write nonsense.
Even as the nation-state has become so ubiquitous in this century
because Empires collapsed.
that, as Benedict Anderson (1983: 14) observes, “everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender,” there has been a tremendous surge in scholarly works on nationalism.
But nationality existed even under trans-national Empires or when the Papacy was the highest source of legitimacy. What changed during the twentieth century was exclusive citizenship of a polity which might tell you that your actual mother tongue wasn't the one which your Mummy spoke.
Indeed, that single term, “nationalism,” has become theoretically overburdened,
if by 'theory' you mean paranoid shite- sure.
rendering it incapable of capturing the many incommensurable differences that separate the story of one nation from another.
Yet, for any given purpose, this can always be done in fine grained enough manner.
And yet, nationalisms “do not work everywhere the same way: in a sense they must work everywhere in a different way, this is part of the national ‘identity’ ” (Balibar 1989: 19).
Meaningless shite! National identity works the same way everywhere, ceteris paribus. Otherwise there is no identity class or uniqueness relationship.
This is especially true when it comes to the complex nexus between linguistic identity and nationalism.
There is no complex nexus. Nation comes from 'natio'- birth. People of common descent are likely to have the same mother tongue and live more or less contiguously.
Herder, Fichte, and others may have declared that “those who speak the same language…belong together and are by nature one and inseparable whole” (Kedourie 1961: 69).
Herder said this in the context of Napoleonic 'universal monarchy'- which involved the French fucking over everybody else. But Germans themselves claimed French and Danish speaking territory while having subject populations who spoke Polish etc. Herder himself came from the East. He held, reasonably enough, that the Germans needed to unite or else remain doomed to being he battleground for rival powers. This was the lesson that History had taught. Hindus too decided to have a strong Union because they didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the previous thousand years. Tamil separatism died when the Chinese invaded. Though Madras was far from the Himalayas, it was vulnerable to maritime invasion.
But nationalism is not everywhere predicated on linguistic passions,
because brothers may speak different languages. There are parts of the world where everybody is polyglot.
nor does language loyalty necessarily or always induce a singular nation-state, if we recall the Swiss in the very heart of Europe,
But French speakers generally supported Napoleon's invasion to support the Helvetic revolution. Previously, there was no Swiss nation. There was an ancien regime Confederacy of sovereign cantons and oppressive feudal rights and obligations.
modern Latin America as it emerged from the former Spanish and Portuguese empires,
The Portuguese bits stuck together. The wars against the Spanish Royalists were localized revolts by the creoles against the 'peninsulares'. Naturally, the successor states were disparate and subject to their own civil wars.
or even Arabic in parts of its diaspora,
There is no Arab diaspora save such as exists in the West. The Arabs colonized the MENA and entrenched their own language and religion and political institutions.
to cite a few random examples (Seton Watson 1977). In other words, passions of the tongue do not readily map onto the passions of the nation.
Unless that nation has a passion for imposing the language of the majority. Sri Lanka is the obvious example.
As Prasenjit Duara has recently suggested in his Rescuing History from the Nation, “although nationalism and its theory seek a privileged position
which it achieves when a nation-state is formed or pre-exists. Nationality is a unique, 'buck stopped', juristic identity. Being sweet and pretty- which is what I am- not so much.
within the representational network as the master identity that subsumes or organizes other identifications,
Which is unfair. I want to be known as a sweet and pretty Chinese person.
it exists only as one among others and is changeable, interchangeable, conflicted, or harmonious with them” (1995: 8, emphasis mine).
Every theory seeks a 'privileged position'. Why should nationalism be different from any other 'ism'?
In this book, I hope to “rescue history from the nation” by displacing the latter as the locus of this particular history I write,
so as to babble nonsense
and by refusing to subordinate, all too quickly, the sentiments and notions of all those who lived and died for Tamil under the rubric of “nationalism.”
Though there was a strong Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism at the time. But writing about it would be risky. So Sumathi will just write nonsense about Tamil Nadu where there was no language question whatsoever.
Which is why I propose a new analytic to theorize the discourses of love, labor, and life that have coalesced around Tamil in this century, discourses which can only be partially contained within a metanarrative of nationalism, or even a singular conception of the nation, as we will see.
What is this new analytic? What 'elements' or 'principles' is Sumathi introducing? None at all. Why? There was nothing to be explained. People want to be governed in their own tongue. Under elected legislatures, and thanks to linguistic reorganization of the States. that was the outcome the Tamils and their neighbors secured. That's it. That's the whole story here. Nothing to see folks. Move along now.
My access to this analytic—and hence to a different take on the language question—is through a Tamil word, paṟṟu, which speakers of Tamil routinely use in their talk about the language.
The notion was that Brahmins lacked this because they were from the North. But there is Teluguparru which they exemplified. The fact is, Telugu was the preferred language for theistic poetry.
Typically, the term appears with the word tamiḻ in the compound tamiḻppaṟṟu, the hinge on which hangs the structure of affect and sentiment that develops around Tamil.
Actually, Periyar had condemned this infantile histrionics about Tamil being mother's milk. Just suck on a pacifier and shut the fuck up.
I have a vague idea that 'parru'- which means adherence or affection- has a special meaning for Vaishnavites which is linked to their denial that there can be a 'jivanmukta'. The notion here is that Dualism prevails. The devotee must be wholly subordinate to the Lord. There is no spiritual technique whereby you can rise up to yourself achieve Liberation.
So, its speakers are told to cultivate tamiḻppaṟṟu, to demonstrate tamiḻppaṟṟu, and to not sacrifice tamiḻppaṟṟu for worldly gains.
Unless you can emigrate.
Those who practice tamiḻppaṟṟu are tamiḻar, “Tamilians” by the same token, anybody who does not show tamiḻppaṟṟu is not a Tamilian.
Which is emigration is such an attractive prospect for Tamilians.
The lexical meanings of paṟṟu include adherence, attachment, affection, support, love, and devotion. Out of these, I have chosen “devotion” to gloss paṟṟu, and the term “Tamil devotion” to denote tamiḻppaṟṟu, as well as other similar sentiments that Tamil speakers express for the language: aṉpu, “affection” pācam, “attachment” kātal, “love” ārvam, “passion” and the like.
So, the Tamils speak of their language in the same way that the French do. But they still learn English to advance their careers. Which linguistic group says 'don't be devoted to your mother tongue. Speak Esperanto instead?'
This then is a book about the poetics and politics of tamiḻppaṟṟu, “Tamil devotion”—
no it isn't. It would be written in Tamil if that were true. But Sumathi might be of the wrong caste. Her book might be burnt by fanatics.
those networks of praise, passion, and practice centered on Tamil.
centered on a particular political party some of whose members have become very very rich
And it is about the lives of those women and men who declare themselves to be tamiḻppaṟṟāḷar or tamiḻaṉpar, “devotees of Tamil.” I analyze how the language has been transformed into an object of devotion in the course of the social mobilization and political empowerment of its speakers.
Will Sumathi also mention Sri Lankan Tamils who did have a genuine grievance? Nope. I wonder whether the fact that the JVP was Trotskyite caused Moscow to promote Tamil secessionism in view of the strategic importance of Sri Lanka. The most fanatical anti-Brahmin I've ever met was a Sri Lankan guy working in a petrol station in West London who had been educated at Patrice Lumumba. The poor fellow had never met a Brahmin in his life. Also he had been rendered incapable of learning English properly though, I suppose, he spoke Russian well enough.
I explore the consequences of this for the ontology of Tamil,
Tamil is a living language. That's all the ontology it has.
as well as for the formulation of cultural policies around it. And I consider how language devotion produces the modern Tamil subject—tamiḻaṉ, the “Tamilian”—
who is in the queue for an H-1B Visa unless he has his own start-up in which case she will get an EB5 visa for creating at least ten well paid full time jobs in the States.
an entity whose subjectivity merges into the imagined self of Tamil. enḳum tamiḻ, etilum tamiḻ, “Tamil everywhere, everything in Tamil”:
Fuck. That's what peeps say about my Inglis. Anthony Burgess- who believed he and his wife had been placed under a curse by some Malaysian Tamil witchdoctor- would often rant about how Tamils turned any language they spoke into Tamil. Yet, the language itself was nothing by God's fart bubbling through his bath water.
this is the leitmotif of tamiḻppaṟṟu at its climactic moment. “If we live, we live for Tamil; if we die, we die for it,” declared one of its devotees (Puthumai Vanan 1968: 7). Another insisted, “[Our] mind is Tamil; [our] entire body is Tamil; [our] life is Tamil; [our] pulse is Tamil; [our] veins are Tamil; [our] flesh, muscle, everything is Tamil; everything in [our] body is Tamil, Tamil, Tamil” (S. Subramanian 1939: 15-16).
By contrast, my declaration that I live only for pepperoni pizza has not won me any admirers.
Body, life, self: all these dissolve into Tamil. Devotion to Tamil, service to Tamil, the sacrifice of wealth and spirit to Tamil: these are the demands of tamiḻppaṟṟu at its radical best.
But smart Tamils prefer to learn C++. Mind it kindly.
As we will see, there are considerable differences among Tamil’s devotees over the meaning of their language, and over how best to practice tamiḻppaṟṟu.
Emigrate. Seriously, folk, there is little point in praising your own language while starving to death in your natal shithole. Once you are doing well abroad, gas on about the wonders of your mother tongue by all means.
Nonetheless, I consider them as members of one singular community because they all agree upon one foundational certainty: the natural and inevitable attachment between Tamil and its speakers,
Nonsense! These guys fucking hate Brahmins though they many ended up voting for a fair skinned Iyengar lady. Incidentally, Chief Minister Stalin calls RaGa 'Sir' and supports his candidacy for PM. It seems the Dravidianist is slavish enough to a North Indian Brahmin. It is only Tamil speaking Brahmins that he despises.
an attachment that is repeatedly presented in devotional talk as inviolable, eternal, sacral. The goal of this study lies not so much in exposing the illusory nature of this certitude
doing so in Chennai might get your head kicked in
as in illustrating how, and in what manner, tamiḻppaṟṟu is able to generate and sustain it in the first place.
The quest for money and power. That's what sustains stuff. During the Cold War there was some foreign money on the table. By the Nineties, the Diaspora was more important. Now, the thing looks silly. Hindus in TN are waking up to the fact that Christians worship Christ, Muslims worship Allah. They are only pretending to like Tamil but don't really think it is particularly Divine.
What ideological devices and strategies of persuasion are deployed by Tamil’s devotees to convince their fellow speakers of the natural and unshakable bond(s) between themselves and their language?
Blaming everything on Tamil Brahmins. That's the strategy. The problem is that Congress may become unelectable in Kanyakumari. The BJP is making inroads there. Religion suddenly gains salience when Christians or Muslims become the majority in a District. The bigger problem is seat redistribution in 2026 which will adversely affect the South. So far the DMK has bet on Rahul reviving his party. But Rahul is shit. Wayanad's Muslims may not re-elect him in 2024. Will Stalin accommodate the moon-calf he respectfully calls 'Sir'?
What are the institutional practices
those of Cinema and print
through which such a certitude is disseminated among Tamil speakers so as to appear self-evident and commonsensical?
We speak Tamil. Praise Tamil and feel good about yourself. That's common sense 'oikeiosis'.
What are the ways in which its logic is used to mount resistance against putative foes, and to garner power?
Keep blaming Tamil Brahmins for everything. They are very evil.
And finally, how is this certitude deployed to produce the modern Tamilian, whose subjectivity is anchored by Tamil and has no existence independent of it?
Nonsense! Lots of Tamils don't know Tamil but because of their caste or family connections support the DMK ideology. Also, maybe Tambrams really are evil. I mean they speak Tamil- right?
My use of tamiḻppaṟṟu to interrogate the language question thus is not a nativist gesture,
it is an American Professor's gesture- which is what makes it funny.
for I make the concept do theoretical work for me
sadly theoretical work does not encompass doing the washing up for me
in ways which exceed the many tasks that speakers of Tamil have themselves assigned to it in their prolific discourses.
Cool. Apart from Tambrams, Jews too are very evil.
Neither is it meant to alienate non-Tamil-speaking readers,
whose impseity is that of having shit in their brains because they study or teach a shitty subject
despite its alterity (heightened no doubt by the diacritical marks that grace its English transliteration!). Nevertheless, its frequent presence in these pages marks the difference accompanying the ideologies of Tamil that cannot be readily assimilated into preexisting categories such as nationalism.
But sub-nationalism assimilates it completely. TN is vulnerable to invasion by sea. Also it is majority Hindu. Sooner or later, it will have to hang together with the rest of India or else become a place where kids are forcibly converted to Christianity at School while Islamist terrorists run amok. K. Annamalai seems to be doing well. But Stalin is no fool. If he delivers rapid growth, he consolidates his dynasty's hold on TN. But he may break with Congress and help found a 'Janata parivar' alliance in '24. This is because bowing down to a Brahmin moon-calf is bad for Tamil pride. The other problem is seat redistribution which is scheduled to occur in 2026. The Southern States need to get behind a credible rival to Modi.
By leaving it untranslated in many instances, and by glossing it in English in others, I seek to remind the reader (and me) of the ironies of writing about Tamil devotion in English,
because Sumathi only learnt Tamil in Amrika
as I wish to draw attention to the inevitable hybridity that accompanies academic exercises like this one, which are conducted between cultures, between languages.
Stupidity is not hybridity. There is a hybrid Tamil English. Indeed, my abiding fear is that it is the language I will revert to once senile.
But above all, following the cue of many who have written on the politics of translation,
the lady is going to write stupid shite
tamiḻppaṟṟu allows me to “inscribe heterogeneity” in these pages,
This is not possible. Why? English has no rule forbidding the incorporation of foreign words or phrases. French- sure. Tamil- maybe. But English? Nope.
even as its assertions betray, as we will see, the colonial and post-colonial space which it inhabits (Niranjana 1992).
'bewray' with stupid shit- not betray.
To be fair, this silly lady does make an attempt to show evil Orientalists being mean to Tamil and dismissing it as a 'corruption of Sanskrit'. The subaltern Tamil then discovers Sangham literature and fights back.
The truth is quite different. Missionaries- first Jesuits and then Protestants- praised Tamil. They believed that loosening its connection to Sanskrit would promote conversion. The British too saw the advantage of teaching and administering the Presidency in Tamil, Telugu etc.. This reduced corruption. At a later point, since Brahmins tended to be Nationalists, it made sense to pander to the Justice Party and promote a separate Tamil identity. Keir Hardie, visiting Madras in 1907, had noticed that the 'big men' of the Province got on well with the Brits. Co-operation was yielding substantial benefits. By 1922, Willingdon- as Governor of Madras- felt the Province was ready for self-rule. Dyarchy would be a headache. It was only the Great Depression which displaced the 'big men' of the Justice Party and which opened the door to populist politics. But, by then, Ceylon had universal suffrage.
Sumathi does not mention the European contribution to Tamil. Instead, she cherry picks evidence for her 'Orientalist' thesis
Consider the following unflattering portrayal of the “Turanians,”We may say generally that a large number of them…belong to the lowest Paleozoic strata of humanity[,]…peoples whom no nation acknowledges as its kinsmen, whose languages, rich in words for all that can be eaten or handled, seem absolutely incapable of expressing the reflex conceptions of the intellect or the higher forms of consciousness, whose life seems confined to the glorification of animal wants, with no hope in the future and no pride in the past. They are for the most part peoples without a literature and without a history[,]…peoples whose tongues in some instances have twenty names for murder, but no name for love, no name for gratitude, no name for God.
Did we not all read in our school-days that the Tamilians were aborigines and savages, that they belonged to a dark race, a Turanian one, whom the mighty civilising Aryans conquered and called Dasyus, and that all their religion, language and arts were copied from the noble Aryan. Even a few years ago, a great man from our sister Presidency held forth to a learned Madras audience how every evil in our society, whether moral, social or religious, was all due to the admixture of the civilized Aryan with the barbarous Tamilian.
So, Pillai was attacking some Indian guy from the North (Bombay and Calcutta were Madras's sister Presidencies) who, however, never called the Tamils 'barbarian'. It must be said, that Northerners don't get that all non-Brahmins are classed as 'Shudra' in the South though they are Princes and Pundits and leaders of Religious sects- e.g. Lingayats- of the highest spiritual scholarship and social prestige. On the other hand, women too enjoyed a higher social position. Islam had much less influence in the South and thus its path diverged from the North's.
Classicism, like neo-Shaivism, thus set out to contest all such claims—Orientalist as well as metropolitan Indian—that denigrated Tamil speakers as “barbaric” and “primitive,” and that unilaterally declared that the “civilized” Aryan was inevitably superior to the “aboriginal” Dravidian.
What has been less noted is the resistance to such formulations that arose almost from the beginning of colonial rule among British administrators and missionaries based in South India. Skeptical about the clubbing together of the languages spoken in “their” part of the subcontinent with the northern tongues, these men were especially critical of the characterizations of Tamil or Telugu as “vulgar derivatives” of Sanskrit.
This was a race black in skin, low in stature, and with matted locks; in war treacherous and cunning; in choice of food, disgusting, and in ceremonial, absolutely deficient. The superior civilisation of the foreigner [the Aryan] soon asserted itself, and the lower race had to give way.…The newcomers had to deal with opponents far inferior to themselves in civilisation, and with only a very rudimentary political organisation, so that the opposition to be overcome before the Arya could take possession of the soil was of the feeblest.
In such statements, which were also picked up by many a metropolitan nationalist narrative to pursue the agenda of salvaging Indian pride by taking refuge in Aryanism, the white, virile, civilized, energetic, and superior Aryan is starkly contrasted with the dark, feminine, menial, and aboriginal Dravidian.
All the same, slowly but cautiously from the 1920s on, the colonial state began to concede the antiquity and “copiousness” of Tamil, and its status as a “cultivated” language.
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