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 Please do not cite me, read my sources instead.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.
II
O glorious Tamilian! What is the name of your nation?When I ask thus, he sheepishly says “India,” O mother!How will this child ever improve if he confuses the evergreenTamil nation with India, O mother!Will he ever change, the one who does not recognize his mother as mother, and declares the evil that destroys his motherland as mother, O mother!
-
Bharatidasan
in Kuyil, 17 June 1958.
(Trans.
from Passions of the Tongue by
Sumathi Ramaswamy)[4]
*
The first wave of anti-Hindi protests swept across Tamil
Nadu in 1938 when C. Rajagolapachari from the Congress government ordered that
Hindustani should be taught compulsorily in addition to the child’s ‘mother
tongue’ in classes 6-8 so that they have a ‘working knowledge of the most
widely spoken language in India’. The order was withdrawn in February 1940 following demonstrations which lead to
the imprisonment of more than 1,200 people and the death of two young men.
 |
| Periyar's Kudi Arasu showing the headline 'Vizhga Hindi' (Down with Hindi) Source: Wikipedia |
*
(1) The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in
Devanagri script. The form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of
the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals.
(2) Notwithstanding anything in clause (1), for a period of
fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, the English language
shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which
it was being used immediately before such commencement.
-
Constitution
of India, 1950
When the Constitution of
India came into effect, it made Hindi the official language of the country.
English was made an associate official language for fifteen years, after which
it will be gradually phased out. As the day approached to make Hindi the sole official language of the country,
agitations intensified in Tamil Nadu. In order to allay Tamil fears, Jawaharlal
Nehru proposed the Official Languages Bill.
*
21
January 1963, the Official Languages Bill was introduced in parliament. The
floor was split into two camps – the pro-Hindi group and the anti-Hindi group
lead by C Annadurai, then a member of the Rajya Sabha. Annadurai had invested almost fifteen years in grooming the DMK to be the
guardian of Tamil and had gained a reputation for being a fierce orator. This
would be his first speech on the parliament floor. Partition loomed large in
the mind of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who was struggling to hold a
unified India together without letting it disintegrate into a thousand bits. A
unified language, it was believed, would help weave together a unified India. The
States Reorganisation Act had come into force only seven years previously, and
State boundaries had been redrawn on the basis of language. Tamil, as the
official language of Madras State (as it was known then), had political
legitimacy. However, Annadurai had to tread carefully. Congress was losing
patience with the DMK’s demands for a separate Dravida Nadu which ran in tandem
with his efforts to being Tamil into the public space.[5]
 |
| C. Annadurai Source: Wikipedia |
In
his impassioned speech, Annadurai argued for the continuation of English as the
official language of the country. If we must have a link language, why not
retain English as we have been using it for these many years? Why switch to Hindi,
which though spoken by a majority of 42% of the population, was popular only in
certain areas of India while being virtually absent in the southern Dravidian
states? His argument rested on the word ‘may’ in a section which read,
"The English language may [...] continue
to be used in addition to Hindi.” Why use ‘may’ instead of ‘shall’ he argued,
when ‘may’ can be so easily understood as ‘may not’? The English language may (or may not) continue to be used in addition
to Hindi. The use of that single three-letter word demoted English from its
rule as compulsory official language to an optional one.
Four
months later, the Official Language Act was passed with no change in the
wording.
*
Riots
ripped through Tamil Nadu in January 1965, when the amendment was due to come
into force. It left the state scarred with destroyed and looted property,
several wounded, and seventy dead, including two policemen. Anger against the
enforcement of Hindi cut through differences in class and religion. Scholars of
Tamil literature, street poets, college students, Neo-Shaivites, and the
English-speaking middle class took to the streets and courted arrest. In face
of a common adversary, close ranks. Hindi words on signboards were blacked out;
hunger fasts were embarked on; anti-Hindi associations created; institutions
that taught Hindi picketed. Effigies of the ‘demoness’ Hindi were dragged
through the streets with students wailing and mourning the metaphoric slaughter
of Hindi by Tamilthay. Tens of
thousands of people joined the marches in different cities and towns. Copies of
the Indian constitution were burnt, and hundreds were arrested. Seven young men
burnt themselves alive as protest. The riots rocked Tamil Nadu for about two
months, and reached a crescendo in February 1965 when police began firing at
protesters.
The
riots marked a turning point in the political history of Tamil Nadu. The
Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (DMK) swept the polls in 1967, and since then Congress
has never managed to shake off its reputation as a front for ‘Brahmin and
Bania’ interests in Tamil Nadu. In January 1968, the DMK government effectively
legislated the study of Hindi out of the state. In 1969, the name of the state
was changed from ‘Madras State’ to ‘Tamil Nadu.’ Since then, the Tamil Nadu
government has been trying to put Tamilthay
back on her throne, one renaming at a time.
*
Arumai periyorkaley, thaymarkaley, perumaikudiya inniya Tamil makkale, enathu uyirium melana anbu udanpirappugalay, ungal annaivarukum vanakkam.
Dearest elders, mothers, praiseworthy sweet Tamil people, my loving siblings who are more important to me than my life, to all of you, I say welcome.
(A generic opening to many Tamil political speeches, this one was cooked up through many popularly heard phrases.)
Karunanidhi’s
nasal voice emanates through the public announcement system and wild cheering
breaks out as he calls his fellow DMK members as his ‘udapirappugalay,’ his beloved siblings. He holds up his hand to
silence the audience, and continues, praising every group in the audience, his
fellow DMK members, the party leaders, the organisers, the opposition parties,
the police, each beautifully-turned phrase punctuated by bursts of applause.
Clothed in his words, the party leaders are re-imagined as ancient kings of the
Tamil world, destined to save the Tamil race which has fallen into ruin. The Kalaignar himself would be praised in
similar terms by his party spokespeople. He would be called the auspicious hero
(latchiya veeranae), the master poet
(vithaga kavignar), leader of the
Tamil race (thamilina thalaivar), who
with diamond words and sentences of gems (vayra
vaarthaikalum vaiduuriya vaakiyangalum), with unbending principles (valaiyaatha kolgaikalum), will return
justice and affordable commodity prices to Tamil Nadu. [6]
The speeches of the Dravidian movement post-60s is proof that language can be
used to create an alternate reality between speaker and audience.
 |
| Karunanidhi (right) in conversation with MG Ramachandran (left) Source: Wiki Commons |
The
rise of English education and the consolidation of the Tamil literary canon in
the early 20th century bred a new kind of politician in the 1950s
and 60s. It was a politician who was a scriptwriter, poet, theatre man and
journalist. He speaks in a literary language that is not easily understood, but
more importantly, captured the Tamil imagination. Within his words lurks a new
kind of oratory that marries rationality and poetry. The shadow of unlikely
predecessors: Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, stands in a similar forum addressing
citizens, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen!” or a lawyer addresses a packed
courtroom, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury...” And yet, there is a different
strain in the language, in the alliterative endings, the hyperbolic praise. It
is the language of the court poet, the lilt of praise poetry that formed the
bedrock of Tamil literature right up till the end of the nineteenth century.[7]
E.V.
Ramasamy, founder of the Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu, spoke in anything
but a literary tongue. He spoke to be understood by the illiterate masses in a
language that they will understand: rationality. Thanthai Periyar (Farther Learned One) had little patience for
elite literary discourse. Often, he sounded like an elder community member
fierily giving a piece of his mind to the youngsters, his waterfall white beard
twitching in annoyance. But the new age of the Dravidian speakers were achieving something
groundbreaking. Their language placed them above the masses, as men of
learning, direct descent from the kings of old. By using an archaic classical
language instead of a dialect, they transcended differences of caste and class
and established a direct connection with an ancient Tamil civilisation. The
medium became the message. When they spoke, who was it the crowd cheered for?
The poet or the politician? For the poetry or the rational argument? The
ancient Tamil civilisation or the modern State?
It
was new kind of Tamil that married the rationality of Periyar and the poetry of
the court poets that was heard through Tamil Nadu from the 60s. There was a
clear statement being made: Tamil had come to stay as an important part of the
Dravidian political vision. By the 90s, every political party in Tamil Nadu
spoke in this literary hyperbolic language. It would become the language of
education and textbooks. Ridiculing the opposition’s language was an acceptable
way of questioning their political power. When the competition for political
power was so closely tied with the competition for the more beautiful Tamil,
speaking Hindi in a public space would have been political suicide.
*
Christmas
Eve, 1987, Chennai. The crowd lining the ten kilometre stretch from Rajaji Hall
to Marina Beach is restless. Hundreds of thousands of mourners were packed
shoulder-to-shoulder to mourn the death of a man they believed to be a
demi-god. The cry of MGR Vazhga! (Long
Live MGR!) resounds through the mob as women beat their breast and weep. Young
men have scrambled onto the top of billboards and lampposts to catch sight to
the convoy snaking past. M.G. Ramachandran’s mortal remains are carried on top
of a truck, an endless shower of flower petals raining down on his face, which
still wore with his iconic white fur cap and dark glasses. Tamil Nadu’s
favourite son, after more than a decade in office, was finally being laid to
rest.
The
Puratchi Thalaivar’s body is lowered
into his grave at Marina Beach. A wail goes up around the mob, and the police
cordon buckles under the strain. Men and women were not mourning the death of a
political leader, but a man they believed was their son, husband, brother. A
man that they believed was the embodiment of justice who was no different from
his screen avatar: a noble man who would fight off villainy and always protect
his women. The mourning reaches a hysterical pitch. Fearing for the security of
the dignitaries present, tear gas shells are fired. The crowd shows no signs of
dispersing. Rifles are levelled. In the rioting that followed, more than twelve
were killed and several others committed suicide in grief.
 |
| MGR waving at a public rally Source: Wiki Commons |
Why was there such hysteria surrounding MGR’s
death? A part of it was because MGR had put into place several social welfare
schemes, gaining him the reputation of being pro-poor. This fitted in perfectly
with his larger-than-life public persona, an avatar cemented by his movies,
where he always played the dashing hero, his arm protectively wrapped around
the waist of the leading lady. With the fur cap to cover his balding head and
dark glasses to hide the crow’s feet by his eyes, one could almost believe he
was an immortal deity descended to provide relief to the poor and desperate of
Tamil Nadu. His fans were his devotees who undertook barefoot pilgrimages,
piercings, prostrations and austerities in his name. The ‘literary’ Tamil that
Karunanidhi had created turned ‘scriptural’ in MGR’s hands. Worship that was directed to him was directed to Tamil as well. Speaking centamil or literary Tamil, was now a
devotional act, and not merely a political one.
MGR’s
love for language may not have been as literary as that of his immediate rival
M. Karunanidhi, but it took a unique form. MGR extended his political and
financial support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant
organisation for Tamil rights in Sri Lanka. He had the LTTE supplied with
explosives and arms, while several of the top leaders sheltered in safe houses
in Chennai. MGR’s support of the LTTE fit nicely into an existing matrix of
thought in the collective Tamil imagination – Tamil, and the Tamil people, will
always be the underdog, fighting oppression of class, caste and wealth. MGR, by making himself the champion of the
underdog Sri Lankan Tamils, was making himself the champion of all Tamils
around the world. His position reinforced the belief that had been developed
through decades of Dravidian rhetoric – Tamil has been enslaved by Hindi,
English, and now Sinhalese, and would vanish completely without her brave
champions. And how else can the Tamil people serve these brave champions except
by handing over their votes and keep them in office?
*
What
was the cause behind the tidal wave of resentment against Hindi?
On
the surface, the anti-Hindi agitation was in response to the fear that Hindi
will become the official language of the country, hence depriving Tamilians of
opportunities in government employment. The speakers of Hindi were as great a
threat as the language itself. Not being able to speak the ‘official language’
of the Union, it was feared that the people of the Dravidian states will be cut
off from political and economic power, by rendering them speechless in the new
nation. But more than the immediate implications of the language change, there
was a greater fear in the collective Tamilian consciousness. It was the anger
at what Hindi represents. Hindi was
derived from Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmins, the oppressors. It was the
language of the North Indian Bania, the money lender, the land owner, the
banker, the merchant. In the State which witnessed one of the first anti-caste
movements in the country, it was preferable to use the language of the
coloniser than that of the Brahmin.
The
Congress, in the Tamil political imagination, was seen as a monstrous puppet
master that controlled the country through its Brahmin power. Their queen was Bharat Mata, mother of the nation, enemy
of Tamilthay. This caricature, though
perhaps true during the nationalist struggle, had changed quite dramatically
post-independence. After all, Madras was the first State to have an entirely
non-Brahmin Congress ministry under K. Kamaraj in 1954. If not at the Centre,
within Madras State, both the ruling party and the opposition party were
professing their allegiance to the non-Brahmin castes by the 60s.[8]
However, the threat of the Brahmin was as real as it was un-real. Hindi did not
become the national language by chance, it rode into power on the back of Hindu
revivalism in the 1920s and 30s. The Hindu Right, which was gaining traction
under the leadership of VD Sarvarkar and friends, placed Hindi in the bang
centre of its slogan: ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan.’ A unified language, religion
and nation, taking its roots in a mythic Aryan past.
From
the late 1800s onwards, Hindi found itself constantly defining itself against
Urdu, the language of the Mughal court. With increasing pressure to find one language for education and
communication, rivalry broke out between the Urdu and Hindi elites, but Hindi
won out in the end through sheer majority. In order to differentiate itself
from its rival, Hindi retreated back to its Sanskrit roots, adopting an
increasingly Sanskrit vocabulary and grammar.
Hindi’s reputation was carefully tailored through several re-writings of
literary history which placed Hindi as the ‘original’ language of Hindustan
before the ‘alien’ Muslim rulers enslaved it.[9]
Such a re-writing of history was necessary – if not by seeking a common past,
how else would you hold together a handful of princely states and presidencies?
The mythic timeless past would create a basis for a unified India from which
all differences could branch out.
However, the Dravidian movement wanted no part of the myth of the ancient
Aryan civilisation – the ritualistic fires, the scriptures, the caste system –
all stood exactly opposite what it believed in. To accept Hindi would be to
accept Aryan supremacy, it would be a death blow to the Dravidian people. If
Hindi was going to be the descendent of Sanskrit, the child of an Aryan
Hinduism, then it too must be exorcised from Tamilthay’s kingdom, with blood and fire, if necessary.[10]
If
Hindi had an Aryan past, then Tamil will have a Sangam past. If Hindi had a
glorious age, then Tamil too will have its golden time, even before that of
Hindi. As a literary history was created for Hindi in the North, a parallel one
was crafted for Tamil in the South.
III
Tamil as an Anti-Brahminical Language
Tamil as an Anti-Brahminical Language
It is out firm conviction that in India, for some time to come at any rate, any community has primarily to put its own house in order, so that, when it has to cooperate with other communities, possible with higher social pretensions, it may do so not as a dependent and helpless unit to be made a figurehead of cat’s paw of, but as a self-respecting and highly developed organisation, offering its willing co-operation for the promotion of common objects on terms of perfect equality.
On
20 November 1916, thirty leaders from the non-Brahmin castes met in Victoria
Hall, Madras, to discuss the representation of the non-Brahmin castes in the
legislature of India. They were mostly well-educated middle class men from the
upper non-Brahmin castes, several were college graduates. A few of them
appeared in full suits. For the most part, they believed in rationality and
science, and they laid the bedrock of their argument through the irrefutable
language of numbers. Over forty-one and a half million people lived in Madras
Presidency, of which only one and a half million were Brahmin, but why did they
control an inordinate amount of power in the legislature, judiciary and
education?
The
closing lines of the Non-Brahmin
Manifesto brought into focus the foundational arguments that would back the
Self-Respect movement for the next four decades. It was necessary to address
inequalities between communities before attempting Home Rule. It would go
further to imply that the order and efficiency of colonial British rule was
preferable to an oppressive government lead by Brahmins where Dravidians would
be denied basic self-respect. The Manifesto was thrashed by several nationalist
newspapers including The Hindu (which
the Justice Party was quick to point out was run by a Brahmin). Was this
anti-Brahmin sentiment being spurred by the British in a new manifestation of
its divide and rule policy which had already carved up Bengal? The timing was
uncanny. The Manifesto had been published within months of the launch of Annie
Besant’s Home Rule League about half an hour down the road. Annie Besant had
articulated her justification of Home Rule by undercutting the British
civilising mission by sketching out a rich Indian culture which traces its
lineage back to the Vedas, Puranas, and Manusmriti. More importantly, the
League had lent its support to Brahmin candidates in the local council
elections, who had won, at the expensive of their non-Brahmin
counterparts.
Instead
of taking to the streets, they take to the pen. The first move that the South
Indian Liberal Federation (SILF) makes to represent non-Brahmin interests is to
start three newspapers, in Tamil, Telugu and English. The name of the English
paper, Justice, becomes synonymous
with the political party that started it. The name of its Tamil paper, Dravidian, lends its name to the
political philosophy. The choice of the three languages was not accidental; it
was made out of an educated choice based on Orientalist discourse where the
word ‘Dravidian’ could refer both to a race of people or a group of languages.
To be from an oppressed caste, is to be from an oppressed race, is to speak an
oppressed language. To fight for one, is to fight for all three.
 |
| Justice Party in the 1930s Source: Wiki Commons |
*
30 March, 1924, a hot sun blazes over Vaikom, Kerala. Three
young men wearing kadhi and Gandhi
caps walk toward the Eastern road around Vaikom temple. They stop in front of
the notice board that reads “Ezhavas and other low castes are prohibited
through this road." As they attempt to pass the board, they are stopped by
police who ask them what their caste is. The men calmly reply that they are
lower caste. The police tell them that they will not be permitted on the road,
according to the orders of the Maharaja of Travancore. The young men reply that
it is a public road, and anyone should be allowed to pass. The police refuse.
The young men refuse to budge. A little before noon, they are arrested. The
Congress flag flutters high in the sky. The crowd, standing fifty feet away
begins to shout, “Satyagraha ki jai,
Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”
Two
weeks later, the Vaikom Satyagraha had grown to massive proportions. It has
featured on the front page of every national newspaper and money is flowing in
from all parts of the world. A desperate Gandhi was trying to keep the focus on
the Hindus of Kerala – temple entry is a religious experience and should not be
interfered in by outsiders. A few heads turn as a new group on foot approach
the crowd of volunteers. Periyar E.V. Ramasamy had heard of the movement while
he had been travelling in the Madurai districts half a day away and was here to
offer his support to the non-Brahmins of Kerala. Shortly afterward, he is
sentenced to a month in prison.[12]
 |
| Periyar Source: Modern Rationalist |
The day when Gandhi said God alone guides him, that Varnashramadharma is superior system fit to govern the affairs of the world and that everything happening according to God's will, we came to the conclusion that there is no difference between Gandhism and Brahminism. We also concluded unless the Congress party that subscribes to such philosophy and principle is abolished it will not be good to the country.
Periyar
may not have been a great supporter of Tamil literature, but he believed in
rationality and education. He believed that the Dravidian race was entitled to
its own nation because of its rich cultural past. Only in such a nation could
the non-Brahmins be truly equal and free of the Aryan Brahmin menace. This
utopic Dravida Nadu, according to Periyar’s vision, would be multilingual,
populated by the speakers of the four Dravidian languages.
The
impossibility of this dream would become clear in 1938 when Periyar led the
struggle against the compulsory study of Hindi in schools. He would set the
battle cry for the Dravidian movement for the next half century or so: “Tamil
for Tamil Nadu!” For Periyar, there were no four Dravidian languages, there was
only one language with four names, and that was Tamil. This same battle cry
would backfire two decades later, when Potti Sreeramulu would undertake a fast
unto death in October 1952 for a separate Andhra State for Telugu speakers.
Several of the arguments used by the Telugu linguistic movement would use the
same rhetoric that Tamil had used against Hindi. Linguistic identities must equate to regional identities it
would seem. By the time C. Annadurai appeared on the scene, Madras State was no
longer Dravidian State, but a Tamil one.
Within
those two tumultuous decades, from 1925 to 1945, Periyar had forged an
indelible connection in the Tamil imagination: Aryan, Brahmin, Congress, and
Hindi all fit together into one giant oppressive structure. As the geographical
boundaries of the State were increasingly defined by linguistics, and there was
an increased pressure from the Central Government to adopt Hindi, a new label
was added to the enemy that the Tamils of Tamil Nadu had to defend themselves
against: Aryan, Brahmin[13],
Congress, Hindi, and now, North Indian. Just as all the North Indian languages
were flattened into one national identity, all the dialects of Tamil were
frozen into one Tamil identity.
*
I gained consciousness of belonging to a community called Tamilian when I first read the Purananuru. I knew I was a Tamilian. But it was only on reading the Purananuru that I realised that the Tamil-speaking people had their own unique history, their own unique customs, their own distinctive political traditions, and their own nationality. Tamilians have had their own unique motherland and its name is Tamilnadu, I realised. Tamilnadu had been ruled for thousands of years by Tamilians. It struck me that no empire from the North had ever subjugated Tamilnadu or Tamilians during the Cankam period.
-
Sivagnanam,
1974
On
February 16, 1880, a twenty-five year old U.V. Swaminatha Iyer was appointed as
the head of the Tamil Department of the Government Arts College in the temple
town of Kumbakonam. The young man had already gained a reputation for being the
devoted pupil of Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, a Tamil scholar of great erudition.
Eight months later, Swaminatha Iyer would have a casual encounter that would
change his life, and the history of Tamil literature.
On
21st October, 1880, the young scholar met a civil judge, Ramasami
Mudaliyar, who would ask him a question that would leave him flummoxed. The munsif asked him if he had studied any
of the old texts, and named a few, none of which the dedicated Tamil teacher had
ever heard of. The English-educated judge had run across a section of a text in
a textbook by Rev Henry Bower. He handed over to Swaminatha Iyer a palm leaf
manuscript and told him to take it home. It would turn out to be the manuscript
of the Jain epic Civaga Cintamani. In
addition to his day job in the college, Swaminatha Iyer would go on to seek
twenty-three copies of the manuscript, compare them, adapt them to the print
book format, and finally print and publish them with commentary.[14]
Within his lifetime, he collected thousands of manuscripts and printed and
published more than 90 books. Between 1880 and 1930, the entire Tamil literary
canon will be converted from palm leaf to the print book format through the
effort of Swaminatha Iyer, Damodram Pillai and others.
 |
| U.V. Swaminatha Iyer Source: Wiki Commons |
In
Tamil history, the four decades would become the ‘Tamil Renaissance,’ the years
when the Tamil people rediscovered their literary and cultural heritage. Though
the historicity of the Sangam is
dubious, the profound effect it had on the Tamil imagination cannot be
understated[15].
For the first time, printing unlocked these ancient manuscripts from the closed
circuit of religious learning and opened it up to the public sphere. The texts,
which were more than half a millennium old, would become a banner to rally
under. The Self-Respect movement would use the texts to lay claim on a pristine
Tamil past where they was no caste system and men and women were treated
equally. The Neo-Shaivites would use the texts as the basis of a new ‘Tamil
religion’ with Tamil scriptures and Tamil rituals. The reformists would use
them as foundation principles for an ideal society. The Dravidian movement
would use it to legitimize Tamil devotion. By the time Swaminatha Iyer passed
away in 1942, the texts would become that other space, outside the realm of the
colonizer and the Aryan, to root Tamil identity.
*
‘This [Dravidian] was a race black in skin, low is 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.’
(Government
of India, 1891 census)
Robert
Caldwell in A Comparative Grammar of the
Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages published in 1856 was the
first to coin the word ‘Dravidian’ to refer to a group of languages in South
India. In the preface to the book, he would take the theory a step further to
argue that the people who spoke the Dravidian languages were also from a
difference race, compared to the Aryan Brahmins who ‘colonised’ the south. Of
the Dravidian languages, Caldwell identified Tamil as being the language that
used the least Sanskrit, perhaps because the literature of the language was
preserved ‘jealously’ by the ‘native Tamilians’ and not the Aryan Brahmins.
With one sweep of his hand, Caldwell had dismissed nearly a millennium of a
multilingual history. Instead, he had created three categories that would haunt
Tamil politics for the next century: Aryan, Brahmin and Dravidian.
This
view would so seep into Orientalist thought, that by the time the report of the
1891 census was published two years later, the Dravidians would be portrayed as
a subservient race to the ‘superior’ Aryans, with no culture of their own. It
fit in perfectly with the existing race theory that the colonisers had created
on the basis of observations in Africa, the Americas and other parts of the
world. It only made sense that there were some races which were superior, and
some inferior. The ‘natives’ would be seen as innocent, lacking the capacity
and the skill to undertake an objective study of language, or a comparative
study of languages. Perhaps they may have had a glorious past, but that past
has fallen into ruin, and that knowledge has been lost. However, one cannot
study a tradition without changing it.
The
early twentieth century would see a vigorous movement by Tamilians to reclaim
this ancient knowledge. Manuscripts would be published, commentaries written,
research undertaken. The textbooks written by the early Orientalists were
studied, and used as a springboard for further and more in-depth research.
Perhaps by saying that the natives had no critical awareness of their
tradition, the colonisers created it. By saying the Dravidians are a separate
race, they had give them a distinct identity.
Less
than one lifetime later, the Self-Respect Movement would use exactly the same
idea, that the Dravidians are a separate race with their own language and
culture, and use it against the nationalist. The Dravidian movement would use
the same narrative, that Tamil was an ancient language that has fallen into
ruin, and must be saved through political action. The nationalist would use the
Tamil ancient past as proof of a heterogeneous culture which does not need a
coloniser to civilise it. The first historian, by attempting to study the
history of an ancient language, will change its history. A circle
of dominoes that neatly topple onto each other.
IV
Jayalalithaa
wants Tamil as official language in HC (April 8, 2013)
“If we are to take the administration of justice genuinely
closer to people, then it is absolutely imperative that the local language is
used in the high court, as is already being done by the state government and
legislature.” – Jayalalithaa
Tamil
Nadu MPs demand Tamil as official language (May 13, 2012)
Three Tamil Nadu MPs from different parties on Sunday made a
strong pitch for making Tamil one of the official languages in addition to Malayalam,
Odiya, Bengali and other languages and opposed any move to impose Hindi on the
country.
‘Implement
Tamil Official Language Act fully’ (March 27, 2005)
The Tamil Protection Movement (TPM) tonight urged the State
Government to implement the Tamil Official Language Act 1956 in letter and in
spirit. This resolution was adopted at the `Third Language Struggle
Proclamation Conference' organised by the Movement here.
In
December 1956, Tamil was made the official language of the state legislature
amidst much celebration. After decades of political agitation, Tamilthay was finally restored to her
throne. Now, all that awaited the Tamil people was progress and prosperity now
that their queen reigned supreme again. Once the initial exhilaration faded,
the State was left to confront with the very real business of the
infrastructure overhaul that would be needed to switch languages. All
government offices would have to get Tamil typewriters, the keyboard would have
to be standardised, typists would have to trained, and a vast quantity of
existing legislative, legal and judicial matter would have to be translated.
More importantly, an entirely new register of language had to be invented for
communication in government offices.
More
than fifty years later, the complaints don’t seem to have gone away. The State
still leans heavily English to conduct its business, and central government
institutions continue to use Hindi, making it impossible to exorcise the rival
from the land. Irrespective of the tomes of glossaries for new administrative
and scientific terms that language purists come up with, English always creeps
in as science outpaces translators. Despite the number of Tamil textbooks that
are printed to educate children about their great heritage, the Tamil spoken on
the street remains adulterated with English, Hindi and vulgar slang.
Language
is plagued with a paradox. The more we try to construct it as timeless,
extending unchanging into the past and the future, the more we are forced to
admit that it is slipping out of our control, mutating with every uttered and
written word. And if you cannot define it, then how do you defend it? Perhaps
the greatest disillusionment about the Tamil language movement came during its
crowning glory – it was revealed as a language with all its flaws, useful in
some ways, underdeveloped in others, crafted by institutions, changing with
usage. It was neither an omnipotent goddess nor an all-redeeming mother, it was
a tool that needed sharpening. Tamilpattru
continues in live in the heart and mind of Tamil Nadu, but what ‘Tamil’
signifies has shifted. It no longer signifies a worship of language, but a
cultural identity. Tamilthay has
quietly faded into the shadows, as a new generation of young people are waking
up to the opportunities that learning the link language of the nation can bring.
The Hindi Prachar Sabha is reporting enrolment rates that are increasing 20%
year on year, which could be equally driven by speakers of other languages
settling in the State, and Tamilians seeking to learn a new language of
opportunity.
Identity
is plagued with a paradox. The more you try to circumscribe a certain identity
and defend it against an oppressive power, the more you become an oppressive
force that marginalises minorities within the identity you have defined. To
defend something you must first define it, but all definitions are essentially
reductionist. By attempting to defend Tamil, a new standardised form was born,
that whitewashed all dialectical differences.[16] While the chunk of the politics of the last century has been constructed around
telling you that your linguistic identity defines you, then what do you do when
the dialect you speak has no space in the public sphere, and when the
standardised form becomes a dialect no one can speak?
Tamil
had been hijacked from the literary sphere and brought into politics,
transforming both eternally. A scholar who has spent her entire life in
research of the language is considered as great a devotee of a language as a
man who set himself on fire in battle against Hindi. Who is to say whose
conviction was greater, or who served the language better? On the surface, it
may seem that the scholar played the great role, but if not for the foot
soldier, would the Dravidian languages have survived against the double
onslaught of Hindi and English? Or having lost ground in the legislature and
liturgy, would Tamil have been able to defend its bastion in literature, or
would it have slipped into become just another language of the bazaar?
Tamil
is yet to address several questions, not the least is the existence of several
dialects. With the entrance of Tamil into politics, it split into two – a
formal written form, and a dialect-filled spoken form. Though the written form
has been standardised, the spoken form remains split across different
communities. Do we preserve difference or do we create a standard language for
smooth communication? Which Tamil
should the standard language be based on? How do we get Tamil community to adopt
the standard language and drop their own dialects? Should we?
From
where we are standing now, it is impossible to say what the next fifty years
will bring for Tamil. But it is telling that Tamil is the only Indian language
in addition to Hindi which is seeing increased sales of books. The Tamil media
industry is booming. The Tamil Nadu government holds several cultural
festivals, of which one is the annual cultural bonanza, ‘Chennai Sangamam,’ to
showcase folk forms of art, music, dance and drama. This literary and cultural
awareness has come at a cost however, Tamil Nadu as a state is known for not
being language-friendly to visitors from other states, and Tamilians are left floundering
when they visit other parts of the country.
In
face of an increasingly coercive globalised culture, a new generation goes back
in search of roots. Perhaps there is another revivalist movement coming for
Tamil, one that will create yet another avatar for Tamilthay. And yet, the irony of this paper having been written in
English has not been missed. Perhaps we may never see ourselves outside of the
categories that the coloniser created for us, far too much water has passed
under that bridge to go back, but the study of history reminds us that what these
categories mean is neither stable nor constant. We forget that behind a
standardised language or a homogenised community there are a million other
possibilities, history is populated by an ever expanding network of ‘could have
beens.’ Perhaps it is in one of these possibilities that the future of Tamil
lies. Perhaps we will slip back into the pre-modern understanding of language[44],
where language is not linked to identity, but is merely an instrument, a tool
to express thought and emotion. To be multilingual would not be to use every
language for every purpose exclusively, but to use each language for a specific
purpose. Like the poets of Krishnadevaraya’s court, perhaps we will all speak
multiple languages, and craft sentences which use words for different languages
interchangeably, until the boundaries between them will cease to exist.
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Classical Tamil Literature in Colonial India. New Delhi: Cambridge
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[1] Ramaswamy, Sumathi. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India,
1891-1970. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1998.
Sumathi Ramaswamy,
in Passions of the
Tongue is the first to use the word ‘Tamilpattru’
in an academic setting to capture the particular tenor of worship that language
excites. She explains how passions of nationhood do not always map onto
passions of language, and so Tamilpattru
cannot be understood as asserting a regional identity, but it is a devotional
response to language. The relationship between the language and devotee is seen
as natural, sacral and eternal, a connection which was not always the case. She
goes on to study the personification of language as a female goddess / mother /
lover figure is conjured up through speeches, literature and iconography and
its role in enabling this high degree of attachment between devotee and
language.
[2] Ramaswamy, in the chapter ‘Labouring for Language: The
State of Tamil Devotion’ identifies the different fields in which Tamil devotes
labour for the language. Though all the devotees agreed that labour was
necessary, there was no consensus amongst the various factions (classists, dravidianists,
Tamil nationalists, Neo-Shaivaites) what this labour should be. This
relationship between language and devotee, where the devotee is seen as being
in debt to the language and so must work for it is also particular to tamilpattru.
[3] Mitchell, Lisa. Language, Emotion & Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother
Tongue. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010.
Tamil is not alone in its brewing of a unique cocktail of language
devotion, anti-Brahmanism and nationalism. Lisa Mitchell in ‘Language, Emotion
and Politics in South India’ explores how several of the Indian languages went
through similar processes in the twentieth century. Telugu, Kannada and
Malyalam all went through similar, yet unique, patterns of linguistic
consciousness in the 1950s, when borders were redrawn on the basis of
linguistic boundaries through the States Reorganisation Act, 1956. However,
there is one strand that is unique to Tamil Nadu and muted in other language
movements in India: The strong resistance to Hindi.
It grates to have to use an English translation of a poet who was so
strongly against English. However, these particular lines are from a Tamil
journal that is hard to locate at the moment. Perhaps, at some future date, the
English translation will be accompanied by the original Tamil lines.
[6] Bate, Bernard. Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
These phrases
are taken from a sample speech included in Appendix V of Tamil
Oratory and Dravidian Aesthetic. However, they are fairly common phrases that are
circulated today in political speech. For a detailed analysis of the nature of oratory in
the Dravidian movement, refer the chapter ‘The King’s Red Tongue” in Bernard
Bate’s Tamil Oratory and Dravidian
Aesthetic. Bate breaks down oratory in the basis of rhythm, influence and
register.
[7] Venkatachalapathy, A.R. The Province of the
Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu. Ranikhet:
Permanent Black, 2012.
The genre of praise poetry was a fairly common genre right up till the
early 1900s when it died out with the shift from the patronage model to the
capitalist market of publishing. For an historic account refer A.R.
Venkatachalapathy’s The Province of the
Book.
M.S.S.
Pandian in Brahmin and
Non-Brahmin provides a stellar historical account of how ’Brahmin’ and ‘non-Brahmin’ are tropes in the Tamil
political imagination, with large overlaps between the real and the imagined.
However, these categories have become naturalized and are experienced today as
fairly everyday occurrences. For a brief account, refer the Introduction
chapter.
[9] An
excellent account of the shaping of Hindi as the national language can be found
in Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi Public
Sphere and Ulrike Stark’s An Empire
of Books. Both books address the artificial construction of Hindi as a
Hindu language as opposed to Urdu, a Muslim language. A large part of the
dynamics of the two languages was also defined by class as much as it was by
religion, and as much by Orientalist discourse of the previous century as by
the politics of that time.
Lisa Mitchell in Language, Emotion
and Politics in South India makes a case for linguistic identities being
defined against each other – only if there are two or more languages present in
a culture, would it be possible to pick one as a ‘mother tongue.’ Language
holds the key to economic and political power and the struggle between the
dominant language of an institution and a subservient ‘mother tongue’ is
replicated on several levels – English-Hindi, Hindi-Tamil, Tamil-Telugu. Each
of these linguistic movements made its claim to autonomous power on the basis
of being the ‘mother tongue’ of the people, but by doing so, marginalized a
smaller minority within the same population it claimed to represent.
M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and
Non-Brahmin has an excellent history of the Self-Respect Movement and the
Justice Party and how these two movements shaped the category of the
‘non-Brahmin.’ Refer chapters ‘From Culture to Politics: The Justice Party’ and
‘The Brahmin as a Trope: The Self-Respect Movement.’
[12] The facts are a bit fudgy at this point. The history
of Periyar has been written and re-written many times, largely by the Dravidian
movement which has dubbed Periyar the ‘Vaikom
Veerrar’ (Vaikom hero). It is hard to determine whether Periyar played a
large role in the Vaikom Satyagraha, or whether the Congress-led event has been
hijacked by the Dravidian movement. Also, Periyar was part of the Congress at
that moment, which further complicates the relationship – did he go to Vaikom
representing Congress or his own Self-Respect Movement? While DK members claim
Congress suppressed information about Periyar’s involvement, Congress claims
that Periyar played a relatively minor role in the struggle.
[13] Though the rhetoric was constructed this way and
gained force through the decades, this did not mean that there weren’t any
Tamil devotees within the Brahmin community.
After all, one of the men credited with finding and publishing a large
chunk of the Tamil literary cannon was a Brahmin: UV Swaminatha Aiyer. However,
as the anti-Brahmin/anti-Hindi sentiments gained momentum, a Brahmin who
professed an interest in Tamil was regarded with distrust. Could he accept Tamilthay as his true mother or would he
reject her for the Aryan Sanskrit enemy? Additionally, as radical Neo-Shaivism
rose to popularity in the State, the Brahmin’s ‘stigma of foreignness’ was even
harder to erase.
[14] Ramanujan, A.K. "Classics Lost and
Found." In The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, by A.K. Ramanujan,
edited by Vinay Dharwadker, 184-190. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
A more detailed account of the encounter (an entire chapter) can be found it Swaminatha Iyer’s
autobiography En Carritiram.
[15] Rajesh, V. Manuscripts, Memory and History:
Classical Tamil Literature in Colonial India. New Delhi: Cambridge University
Press, 2013.
The
predominant argument is that the Sangam texts fell out of the Tamil literary
canon because they were not the religious texts of the dominant Shaivite and
Vaishnavite faiths, and so were not taught in the oral tradition. For a detailed
discussion on Sangam literature was ever ‘lost’ to be ‘re-discovered’ refer V.
Rajesh’s Manuscripts, Memory and History.
[16] A similar accusation would be leveled against the Dravidian movement.
The Dravidian movement was controlled by the upper-caste non-Brahmins who in
turn marginalized the voice of the Dalit. For an opinionated essay on the
relationship Periyar and the Dalit community, read above. Bernard Bate would
argue that the ‘literary language’ used in politics was modeled on the written
form of the language – a very effective way of making sure that only the
literate would have a political voice.
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