Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? 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.
Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment,
- 343 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Information
Publisher
University of California PressYear
2023Print ISBN
9780520208056
Edition
1eBook ISBN
9780520918795
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents 1
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliteration
- Preface
- CHAPTER ONE Introduction Language in History and Modernity
- CHAPTER TWO One Language, Many Imaginings
- CHAPTER THREE Feminizing Language Tamil as Goddess, Mother, Maiden
- CHAPTER FOUR Laboring for Language The State of Tamil Devotion
- CHAPTER FIVE To Die For Living for Language
- Conclusion Tamil Subjects
- Notes
- References
- Index
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Yes, you can access Passions of the Tongue by Sumathi Ramaswamy in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Asian History. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.