Language and Devotion

How then do I write differently the (hi)stories of Chinnasami and his fellow speakers 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, 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).^[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. 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, 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)

That the cunning of Europe ensures that Herder & Co. speak in such clear Tamil tones only reminds us of the regimes of repetition and mimicry that colonialism sparked among subject populations. Yet, as Homi Bhabha observes, colonial mimicry is marked by a profound ambivalence, for “in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.” 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). 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? 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)? For inevitably in such a narrative, “Tamil” nationalism is a (distorted) variant of something that has already happened elsewhere, but reenacted with local content.

This is not the only problem with the analytic of nationalism for writing a different history. Even as the nation-state has become so ubiquitous in this century 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. Indeed, that single term, “nationalism,” has become theoretically overburdened, rendering it incapable of capturing the many incommensurable differences that separate the story of one nation from another. 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). This is especially true when it comes to the complex nexus between linguistic identity and nationalism. 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). But nationalism is not everywhere predicated on linguistic passions, nor does language loyalty necessarily or always induce a singular nation-state, if we recall the Swiss in the very heart of Europe, modern Latin America as it emerged from the former Spanish and Portuguese empires, or even Arabic in parts of its diaspora, 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. As Prasenjit Duara has recently suggested in his Rescuing History from the Nation, “although nationalism and its theory seek a privileged position within the representational network as the master identity that subsumes or organizes other identifications, it exists only as one among others and is changeable, interchangeable, conflicted, or harmonious with them” (1995: 8, emphasis mine). In this book, I hope to “rescue history from the nation” by displacing the latter as the locus of this particular history I write, 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.” 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.

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. 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. So, its speakers are told to cultivate tamiḻppaṟṟu, to demonstrate tamiḻppaṟṟu, and to not sacrifice tamiḻppaṟṟu for worldly gains. Those who practice tamiḻppaṟṟu are tamiḻar, “Tamilians” by the same token, anybody who does not show tamiḻppaṟṟu is not a Tamilian. 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.

This then is a book about the poetics and politics of tamiḻppaṟṟu, “Tamil devotion”—those networks of praise, passion, and practice centered on Tamil. 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. I explore the consequences of this for the ontology of Tamil, 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”—an entity whose subjectivity merges into the imagined self of Tamil. enḳum tamiḻ, etilum tamiḻ, “Tamil everywhere, everything in Tamil”: 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).

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.

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. 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, 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 as in illustrating how, and in what manner, tamiḻppaṟṟu is able to generate and sustain it in the first place. 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? What are the institutional practices through which such a certitude is disseminated among Tamil speakers so as to appear self-evident and commonsensical? What are the ways in which its logic is used to mount resistance against putative foes, and to garner power? 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?

My use of tamiḻppaṟṟu to interrogate the language question thus is not a nativist gesture, for I make the concept do theoretical work for me in ways which exceed the many tasks that speakers of Tamil have themselves assigned to it in their prolific discourses. Neither is it meant to alienate non-Tamil-speaking readers, 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. 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, as I wish to draw attention to the inevitable hybridity that accompanies academic exercises like this one, which are conducted between cultures, between languages. But above all, following the cue of many who have written on the politics of translation, tamiḻppaṟṟu allows me to “inscribe heterogeneity” in these pages, even as its assertions betray, as we will see, the colonial and post-colonial space which it inhabits (Niranjana 1992).

So, what kind of theoretical work does the analytic of devotion perform in this study? Most obviously, by hijacking it from the domain of religion to which it has been conventionally confined in South Asian studies, I wish of course to suggest that devotion is not solely directed towards deities and religious personages in India. Instead, piety, adoration, and reverence have routinely centered on sovereigns and parents; more recently, on politicians, movie stars, and other figures of popular culture; and most distinctively in our time, on the nation. Remarkably, through the intervention of its supporters, Tamil, too, joins their ranks, and even subversively displaces them—so much so that, as tamiḻppaṟṟu gathers strength as the century wears on, it is increasingly asserted that Tamil alone ought to be the sole and legitimate focus of the unconditional devotion of its speakers. This indeed is the dream, and demand, of the most fervent of its adherents. The analytic of devotion allows me to demonstrate how sentiments that accumulate about Tamil among its speakers resonate with attitudes expressed towards deities, sovereigns, and parents. In fact, central to the work of tamiḻppaṟṟu is the wholesale annexation of genres of praise, vocabularies of reverence, and habits of adulation which have been conventionally reserved for such notables.

Further, the analytic of devotion enables me to track the myriad micronetworks of statements and practices through which Tamil has been transformed, over time, in specific historical, political, and social circumstances, into an object of passionate attachment. Despite what its devotees might claim, Tamil (or for that matter, any language) does not have an inherent, natural, even God-given capacity to generate loyalty, love, longing; it is made to do so, and to serve specific ends. Such structures of sentiment that tie a language to its adherents are crucial to the politics of its empowerment. Yet they are too hastily passed over by a social science scholarship that has its sights set on demonstrating how languages have been used as agents of social and political mobilization, or as catalysts for nationalist activity. In such analyses, we learn little about how specific languages are transformed into sites of such loyalty, reverence, and love. How indeed do they acquire the capacity which enable them to act as symbols or catalysts, or, just as crucially, disable them from doing so? To remember Chinnasami, once again, how does Tamil acquire the power to move him to burn himself alive in its name?

The politics of language empowerment, however, are never independent of its poetics, those rhetorical norms and strategies of persuasion through which its adherents attempt to convince their fellow speakers about the glories of their language, the urgency of its cause, and the need to surrender their wealth, bodies, and souls for it. Such networks of talk are especially crucial for tamiḻppaṟṟu, for the hold that Tamil appears to exercise over its devout follows not least from the deployment of the persuasive power(s) of the language itself. Its devotees repeatedly confess to the joys of hearing the very sound of Tamil, and comment on its meṉmai (softness), iṉimai (sweetness), nuṇmai (fineness), and so on. The potency of Tamil devotional talk lies not just in the scholarly breadth it displays or in the logic of its arguments, but just as crucially in its strategic use of alliterative phrases, affective figures of speech, catchy idioms, rhetorical flourishes, and the like. My analysis of Tamil devotion therefore follows the suggestion that “linguistic practice, rather than simply reflecting social reality, [is] actively…an instrument of…power.…Words [do] not just reflect social and political reality; they [are] instruments for transforming reality” (Hunt 1989: 17).

Attention to linguistic practices is particularly necessary in colonial situations where new language hierarchies emerge to displace older ones, as European languages, linguistic forms, and literary genres capture prestige, profit, and power (Cohn 1985; Fabian 1986; Rafael 1988). As elsewhere in the British empire, Tamil devotion, too, paradoxically relies on English to stimulate tamiḻppaṟṟu, a reliance that noticeably diminishes by the 1920s and can rightfully be seen as one of its more visible successes. The attitudes of Tamil’s devotees towards English, the language of their colonial masters, are quite equivocal and contradictory. While many of them—as is typical of bilinguals spawned by colonial systems—are clearly at ease in going back and forth between the two languages, there are many differences in the structure and logic of arguments, the representational devices, and the strategies of persuasion they deploy in doing so. Rather than reflecting some essential qualities inherent to either language, such differences are themselves traces of the different ideological work performed by the two languages, Tamil and English, within tamiḻppaṟṟu. All this of course only reminds us that linguistic practices such as these are never just about languages. Instead, our choice of languages and the myriad ways in which we use them are intimately reflective of our sense of selves and the worlds in which we live, the economies of prestige and power within which we function, and the politics of our beings.

Finally, I turn the lens of devotion on tamiḻppaṟṟu itself, to reveal how despite the claims of Tamil’s devotees, there is no singular, homogeneous language that consolidates itself as the focus of their love and adulation; there is no singular, homogeneous community that emerges in their imaginings; and there is no singular path to practicing what they praise and preach. Its apparent singularity as a sentiment notwithstanding, tamiḻppaṟṟu itself is multiple, heterogeneous, and shot through with difference.