Continuing the review of Passions of the Tongue

[Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan]

I have presented philological evidence showing the passion of the Tamils
towards Tamil that has been personified as mother, woman, and maiden from
pre-fifth century cilappatikAram onwards.

"Passions of the Tongue" is the epitome of what will result when one with a
low regard for philology tries to map the history of attitudes towards a
language with a literary tradition spanning more than two millennia. (Even
the sub-title of the book "Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970" is
misleading because she mentions Sri Lankan scholars many times whose views
are not different from those across the Palk Straits.) To show how one could
go wrong by believing what Ramaswamy says,  I detailed some - not all -  of
the problems in the book.

In the final analysis, this work is similar to that of a geographer who sets
out from the Mediterranean to find the source of the Nile and map its course.
He stops at Cairo and seeing many European 747s landing at Cairo airport
decides that all the water in the river is being flown in from Europe. The
geographer's report is highly acclaimed and he is rewarded with a university
professorship and a fellowship in mapmaking!

The following processes relating to Ramaswamy�s work should be of concern to
Indologists in the way academia functions:

1. Given the nature of the topic, the doctoral committee at UC Berkeley
(Eugene Irschick, Thomas Metcalf, and Robert Goldman) did not include a
single scholar in Tamil literary tradition.

2. The favorable evaluation of the book for publication by the university
press. What does this say about the review process or reviewers?

3. The hiring by the universities of Pennsylvania  and Michigan possibly
based on a favorable review of Ramaswamy�s work discussed here.

Should Indologists wonder about the relevance of Indology in South Asian
studies?

As for Tamil nationalism, unfortunately, Hindu nationalists on the right and
the neo-South Asianists on the left share a common distorted view of it being
caused by colonialism. This is to be attributed to the very nature of
nationalism which, according to James Anderson,  "seeks to play down internal
divisions and conflicts, partly by externalising the supposed source of
problems" and because, as Mitchell Cohen said,  Marxism "was particularly -
though not singularly - remiss in understanding nations and nationalism".


Regards
S. Palaniappan