Passions of the tongue

Language devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970

Bibliographic Data

ID20435715
AuthorsSumathi Ramaswamy
Year1997
Pages303
Publication date1997-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenuePassions of the tongue (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/california/9780520208049.001.0001
ISBN9780520208049
Open LibraryOL1011827M
LanguageEN
Citations received81

Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions in 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

1765-1947 · british occupation · British occupation, 1765-1947 · Critical pedagogy · Dravidian languages · Étude et enseignement · Foreign Language Study · Historiographie · Historiography · History · Hungarian · India · Knowledge · Knowledge and learning · Langage et culture · Langage et langues · Language and culture · Language and languages · Languages · Langues · Langues dravidiennes · Nationalism · Pédagogie critique · Philosophy · Political aspects · Psycholinguistics · Ramaswamy, Sumathi · Study and teaching · Sumathi Ramaswamy · Tamil language · united states