Note: This article has been written for entertainment, and not as scholastic research. It is intended as an introduction, and not an authoritative account. Please do not cite me, read my sources instead.
***
Udal mannukku uyir thamizhukku
Ithai urakka solvoam ulagukku!
Inam ondraga mozhi vendraga
Puthu velai eduppom vidivukku!
Nam vetri paathayil narigal vanthaal
virunthu vaippom vinnukku!
My body I will give to soil, my life to
Tamil,
This we will proclaim loudly to the world!
United as one, with the language of victory
We will pick up new spears for freedom!
If wolves stray into our victory path,
We will make a feast of them for the gods!
(My translation)
(My translation)
I
The
year is 1997, the release of Mani Rathnam’s Iruvar.
 |
| Manthiri Kumari Source: Wikipedia |
*
January
26, 1965. Twenty-one year old Sivalingam, a young worker of the Madras
Corporation, walks into the railway station near Kodambakkam, Chennai. He
douses himself with kerosene and lights himself on fire. A letter was later
found in which he had written ‘Udal
mannukku uyir thamizhukku!’ Body to soil, life to Tamil. A monument stands
in Guindy, Chennai, now to memorialise him, and six others, who sacrificed
their bodies to fire in protest against Hindi. He would become one of the
martyrs of the Dravidian movement and will be resurrected every time the
anti-Hindi standard is raised in Tamil Nadu.
*
The year is 1953. A young M. Karunanidhi lay across the railway tracks at the Dalmiapuram railway station refusing to move until the demands of the Tamil people are met. The twenty-nine year old protestor was fighting to change the name of the town from Dalmiapuram back to Kallakudi, claimed to be its original name. The town had adopted the name Dalmiapuram after a North Indian cement magnate who had built a factory in the town. As he rests his head on the tracks, he cries out ‘Udal mannukku uyir thamizhukku!’ a slogan that catches the attention of other Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (DMK) comrades. Four years later, he gets elected to the Tamil Nadu assembly.
 |
| Kallakudi protest scene from Iruvar |
*
The
year is now.
The
phrase ‘Udal mannukku, uyir thamizhukku!’
has haunted speeches in the Dravidian movement for the last half century, and
by the time Vairamuthu uses it for Iruvar
in 1997, it has become a sign post for a particular sentiment. This sentiment
has been carefully taught to generations of Tamil children through textbooks,
movies, speeches, mass media and visual iconography. Though the tenor of this
devotion has been diluted in the last three decades or so, the rhetoric is
unmistakable. Tamilthay (Tamil
Mother) has fallen on evil times we are told, and it is up to her devotees to
re-install her on her throne in Tamil Nadu.[1] It
is in belief of her that a young M. Karunanidhi laid his head on a railway
track to rename a railway station, and a young Sivalingam set fire to himself
in the middle of a busy railway station. Without them, the speakers of the
language, to protect and defend her honour, what would become of the classical
Tamil language and culture? After all, it is their kadamai (obligation) to do so.[2]
For
Sivalingam and the thousands others who have taken to the streets for Tamil, tamilpattru (Tamil devotion) is
experienced on a visceral emotional level. Nothing is permitted to stand
between the devotee and the language, not even the devotee’s life. Language is
not a tool, an instrument or a vehicle of thought, it is a person, Tamilthay, mother and goddess, loved and
honoured, queen of Tamil Nadu. Her
devotees have also become her ministers, and adopt titles like Kalaignar (Artist) Karunanidhi, Arignar (Scholar) Anna, Navalar (Learned) Nedunchezhiyan to
express their devotion. They use their political power to safeguard and protect
her throne.
The
Tamil we have today is the result of more than a century of tamilppani (work for Tamil) of devotees
who have found and published manuscripts, institutionalised Tamil in public
spaces, re-created Shaivism as a ‘Tamil religion,’ eliminated ‘foreign’ words
from Tamil, created institutions to spread the world of Tamil, and standardised
the script, grammar, spelling and vocabulary of the language through
innumerable glossaries, commentaries and textbooks. Like all languages, Tamil
too has changed, shaped by the institutions that claim to protect it, and the
people who speak it. Though tamilpattru
may be experienced as a bodily affect, the language it is directed to has been
crafted painstakingly over the last century.[3]
Today,
though we may no longer have devotees sacrificing themselves ‘at the altar of
Tamil,’ language remains a core part of the Tamil identity. Speaking English
amongst friends and family can gain you much teasing and the derogatory title
of ‘Peter,’ speaking Hindi would label you as an outsider, speaking
non-standard colloquial Tamil dialects can brand you as ‘village’ or ‘uncouth,’
and speaking an Anglicised stilted Tamil would get your accusatory glances of
not being Tamilian enough. In short, speaking Tamil makes you Tamilian, not
being from Tamil Nadu. Speaking a certain kind
of Tamil will make you a certain kind
of Tamilian, from a certain kind of place and a certain kind of family. With increased mobility, migration, education, and an overwhelmingly globalised
culture, language identities are being re-formulated, and the Tamil identity
reinvented. In the words of Hip Hop Tamizha, ‘English pesinalum Tamizhan da.’ Even if you speak English, you are
still Tamilian. Or rather, despite
speaking English, you are Tamilian.
From
where we stand, about five decades after the formation of Tamil Nadu as we know
it today, and perhaps one generation removed from it, it seems like a fairly
common sense thing to say: A person who speaks Tamil is Tamilian. Tamil culture
is seen as independent, with its own history, literature, politics and
identity. However, we forget that this notion of language defining our regional
identity has had a relatively short history in India. From a pre-modern world
up till the 1950s, Indians were largely multilingual. The poets of the
Krishnadevaraya’s 16th century court were believed to be able to
compose poetry in Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit and Tamil. C.P. Brown, a colonial administrator, reports that in the period between 1820
and 1854 in Madras Presidency, various languages were used to conduct
government business, including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi,
Hindustani, Persian, Arabic and English. More
recently, E.V. Ramasamy, the face of the Dravidian movement in the 1930s, could
speak in Kannada, Tamil and Telugu and was Kannadiga by birth. M.G.
Ramachandran, who served as Chief Minister for three successive terms from 1977
to 1987 in Tamil Nadu came from a Malyali family. Words from different
languages were often mixed up together in documents, performances and
conversations. Languages were fuzzy and based on usage. Boundaries were fluid.
Your identity was shaped by where you came from, not by the language you spoke.
So
from a world where everyone spoke every other language, how did we get to this
point, where speaking a particular language would define your identity? We
assume that identity and language go hand-in-hand, however, this is a recently
new trend in India. We assume that the differences between ‘formal’ and
‘informal’ ways of reading and speaking have existed for centuries. Though this
may be true, what is considered formal and what is considered informal has been
constantly shifting and has been shaped by political and cultural movements.
Literary histories can and have been re-written by political and social
movements and have shaped how we think about language and literature today.
Neither languages nor identities are stable – they are constantly shaped by
institutions and usage – however, we like the convenience of thinking of them
as stable categories to define ourselves against.
