Book Review: An Update on AIT (Part 1)

[Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan]

I fully agree with Dr. Thorp. In the following postings, I shall discuss the 
reasons for my criticism of Sumathi Ramaswamy's work. 

In her book, Ramaswamy says that in the analysis of social science 
scholarship preceding hers, 
<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?> p. 8

One would hope that she would provide a history of such a loyalty towards 
Tamil. But she also says, 

<For like the nation, that other entity produced in modernity, tamizppaRRu, 
too is driven by the imperative to clothe itself in timeless antiquity, so 
that devotion to Tamil appears to be as ancient as the language itself. Yet 
Tamil devotion--in the sense in which I have identified it as networks of 
praise, passion, and practice through which the language is transformed into 
the primary site of attachment, love, and loyalty of its speakers--is a more 
recent phenomenon whose foundations were laid in the nineteenth century with 
the consolidation of colonial rule in what was then the multilingual Madras 
Presidency. Writing the Tamil question differently also therefore means a 
resistance to assimilation into a nativist antiquity
> p. 10

Having defined Tamil devotion as having Tamil as the "primary site of 
attachment", among the groups of people with "primary" attachment to Tamil, 
she includes those whom she calls neo-Shaivites. The problem is she also says,

<Neo-Shaivism declared that Shaivism and divine Tamil are the two "eyes" with 
which modern Tamil speakers would regain their lost vision and be redeemed. 
Divine Shiva and his divine Tamil go together, hand in hand, and cannot be 
separated: each lends power and authority to the other.> p.33

Given that Tamil was not the "primary" site of attachment for the 
neo-Shaivites, what type of language attachment is she studying?

In her desire to write the Tamil question differently, she has failed to 
study objectively the history of attachment to Tamil before colonialism, as 
we shall see.

Regards
S. Palaniappan