Passions of the Tongue Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 Sumathi Ramaswamy UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · London © 1997 The Regents of the University of California Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the assistance of several individuals and institutions. Funding for its research and writing was provided by a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship; a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship at the Institute on Culture and Consciousness in South Asia, the University of Chicago; and a Research Foundation grant by the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to all these institutions, as well as to the Departments of History and South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania, for their financial and intellectual support over the past few years. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to numerous individuals across Tamilnadu who have been gracious with their time and advice since the beginning of this project in 1990: Professors A. A. Manavalan, P. Kothandaraman, I. Maraimalai, and R. Ilavarasu; K. Sivathamby and A. Alagappan; Dr. M. S. S. Pandian; Ganapathy Stapathi; Gurusami Stapathi; Mr. T. N. Ramachandran; Mr. R. Muthukumaraswamy, managing director, the South India Shaiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society; and Mr. S. Ramakrishnan, director, Cre-A Publications. I am also indebted to Dr. Cilampoli Chellappan, Mr. P. S. Mani, Mr. P. K. Kothandapani, and Mr. L. K. Ramanujam for lending me books from their personal collections; and to Kaviaracu Mudiyarasan for so graciously sharing his unpublished memoirs. Finally, I owe special thanks to Dr. A. R. Venkatachalapathy, fellow historian, for his valuable insights on Tamil literature and politics; and to B. Krishnamoorthy and Dora, for their hospitality, for sharing their wonderful collection of Tamil books and journals, and for reminding me so much about the pleasures of doing research in Tamil. This study would not have been possible but for the painstaking assistance of librarians in three different countries: the staff of the Tamilnadu Archives, Madras, and in particular Mr. Sivakumar and Mr. Loganathan; Ms. Geeta Jayanthi at the Maraimalai Adigal Library; Ms. Shyamala at the Periyar Library; Mr. Sundararajan at Anna Arivalayam; Mr. T. Padmanabhan at the Tamil University Library; Ms. Sengamalam at the Bharatiar Memorial Library; Mr. Kanakaraj of the Bharatidasan Memorial Library; Mr. Sankaralingam at the Roja Muthiah Research Library; and the staff of the U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar Library, the International Institute of Tamil Studies Library, the Theosophical Society Library, the Madurai Tamil Sangam Library, and the Karanthai Tamil College Library; Meera Dawson at the India Office Library, London; James Nye at Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; and David Nelson at Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania. This book is based on my doctoral dissertation in history from the University of California, supervised by Eugene Irschick, Thomas Metcalf, and Robert Goldman, to all three of whom I owe enormous gratitude for their encouragement, thoughtful advice, and suggestions. George Hart and Kausalya Hart cheerfully put up with all my translation needs, as did Sam Suddhananda and Vasu Renganathan: I am immensely grateful to them. Numerous others generously offered advice on various aspects of this work: Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Valentine Daniel, Nicholas Dirks, David Gilmartin, Ruqayya Khan, Alan Kors, C. S. Lakshmi, David Ludden, Michelle Maskiell, Pamela Price, Mytheli Sreenivas, Carroll Smith- Rosenberg and Romila Thapar. I owe special thanks to Franklin Presler for sharing his field notes and experiences with me and to Paula Richman who, way back in the spring of 1991, encouraged me to pursue this study and has since then shared many insights and sources. To Sandy Freitag, I owe more than mere gratitude for being a great mentor, wonderful critic, and supportive friend. Last but not least, I would like to thank Valentine Daniel, two anonymous reviewers, and Lynn Hunt, for their valuable advice on a penultimate draft of this book; and Lynne Withey, Sheila Levine, Dore Brown, and the production staff at the University of California Press for all their assistance. My greatest personal debts are to my family: my parents, who over the years have cheerfully encouraged my preoccupation with history and Tamil literature and have always provided a loving and intellectually stimulating home for me to return to; my siblings, whose own academic achievements have set the standards for mine; my mother-in-law, who has been a source of immense joy and comfort; and, above all, my husband, whose critical advice on my scholarship has contributed in innumerable ways in shaping my vision, and whose love and friendship have given me the strength to pursue that vision. Note on Transliteration Because this is a book about the cultural politics of language, albeit one written in a tongue different from its subject matter, I have chosen to use transliterated forms of Tamil terms, phrases, and names of texts, wherever appropriate. My transliteration follows the University of Madras Tamil Lexicon scheme. For the sake of readability, however, I have not transliterated proper names of individuals, deities, castes, institutions, and places, but have instead used the most recognizable Anglicized form. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from Tamil Preface • • • “Between Homes, Between Languages” It is only appropriate that a book about passions of the tongue ought to have a confession about my own passion for languages, or, more truthfully, a confession about an embarrassing lack of attachment to any particular one. I grew up in a home in New Delhi surrounded by numerous languages and multiple cadences. It was, linguistically at least, a mongrel household—a hybrid formation, in today’s fashionable parlance. I heard Tamil spoken by my mother and, after a fashion, by my father as well, although he appeared to be more comfortable in Kannada, which I heard him use in conversations with his siblings, and for formal transactions with many colleagues of his Bangalore-based firm. To this day, my father, a child of Tamil-speaking parents who grew up in Bangalore, counts in Kannada and insists he even dreams in it. As happens in many a Brahman household, I also heard a lot of Sanskrit in the context of prayers I was made to learn from the time I was six. And as is true of the life trajectory of so many young girls who grow up in post-independence India in bourgeois families burdened with the task of preserving “Indian tradition” even while aspiring to be “modern” and “Westernized,” I was started on classical Indian music lessons—in my case, Carnatic music—when I was seven. This exposed me to the sounds of Telugu which I learned without comprehending, and it is even today a language I continue to passively hear when I listen to my tapes. There were two other languages which found a prominent place in my life-world: (Indian) English, the principal language of all my formal schooling, of my private pleasures of reading, and of public discourses with family and friends alike; and Hindi, a language I used in the marketplace, and for the consumption of movies and songs, a passion I hold on to, albeit in a truncated fashion, to this day. Unbeknownst to me then, but something I recognize now, these very “Hindi” movies, as well as everyday life in Delhi, familiarized me with the sounds of Urdu, a language with which Hindi speakers of today share an intimate and recent past. So, what was the place of Tamil, this putative “mother tongue” of mine, in this constellation of languages in which I moved? I had no formal schooling in it, nor could I read it. I did not speak it, or hear it spoken, in public. We used it liberally at home, but freely interrupted by English and Hindi; and I can tell from having a specialist’s knowledge of it today that it was heavily Sanskritized. While I may appear as some kind of exotic polyglot creature to those who have grown up in environments that are predominantly monolingual, my (multi) linguistic experience, I would insist, is something that many who live in the subcontinent, especially in urban bourgeois India, would readily recognize as their own, even if the specifics may vary with each personal story. In turn, my polyglot habits echo a deeper history of multilingualism on the subcontinent produced by the displacement and resettlement of populations in areas where their languages were confined to the home and the family; and they are a consequence of a national education policy which, however haphazardly implemented, ideally expects every Indian citizen to formally study at least three languages: her “mother tongue” (or “regional language”), Hindi, and English. Yet, as my example illustrates expediently, this official linguistic hope has more often than not foundered on issues of how to define the “mother tongue” and encourage its active use in an environment where English and Hindi rule as languages of prestige, profit, and power; of how to promote the study of English against the forces of nationalism that identify it as the language of the (colonial) West; and of how to ward off protests that Hindi, the putative “official” language of India, is but the tongue of one region masquerading as the language of the nation. These linguistic battles are very much part of my personal history that have fostered my interest in the cultural politics of languages in modern India. While my multilinguality is quite the norm for a person of my class, caste, and educational background in India, what is perhaps less usual is the intellectual turn I made towards studying Tamil, a language which, its official status as my “mother tongue” notwithstanding, was after all on the margins of the linguistic economy in which I functioned.