Abstract
Lisa Mitchell’s study of the colonial origins of Telugu nationalism examines the institutional sites within which Telugu as a language underwent radical changes in the nineteenth century, which led to clearer articulations of Telugu cultural nationalism. The outline of the argument is that nineteenth-century efforts were critical in shaping a new Telugu, which became available for identitarian struggles as a marker of culture. Mitchell positions her study to broach the question of ‘how languages came to be viewed during the twentieth century as primary and natural foundations for the reorganization of a wide range of forms of knowledge and everyday practice.’ (11) She is explicitly interested in tracing the emergence of monolingual worlds by the end of the nineteenth century from a complex pre-colonial multilingualism. All of this to provide explanation for why Telugu cultural nationalism took the extreme form that it did resulting in suicides and language martyrs. Mitchell uses the introduction to ask a series of questions regarding why the Andhra Movement that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century is important to understand new sentiments attached to language that go well-beyond middle-class aspirations for self-promotion in the colonial and postcolonial state bureaucracy. She refutes received understandings of the movement as simply middle class. And ultimately arrives at the idea that the passions surrounding language as culture are more than instrumental for middle-class desires of self-promotion. The lingering question one is left with at the end of the introduction is whether it is a specific attachment to language (newly formed during the colonial long nineteenth century) that aroused all classes of people and castes to take part in the movement without regard to any immediate reward resulting from the formation of a new regional state.
The next five chapters deal with key components of nineteenth century colonial history. The first chapter covers how language became an attribute of an individual rather than a marker of a place or region. While in pre-colonial India language was a shared medium of communication, it became of marker of identity by the end of the nineteenth century. Mitchell makes a cogent case for multilinguality as an essential part of pre-colonial society. She documents this by citing kings and poets and their ability to navigate between languages (writing or speaking). The argument is very compelling in the stark contrast between the pre-colonial world of languages and the modern one. However, it also begs the question of what evidence we have of multilinguality of the lower classes and castes or the non-literate. We may not have enough documentary evidence to speculate but it seems to me an important point to not lose sight of. The significance of this argument (which has larger implications for those studying other linguistic communities in South Asia) is that language, which becomes equated with culture in modern contexts, transcends multiple community identity markers (for instance, religion and caste) that circulated in pre-colonial India into a unified single ethnic nationalist one. In chapter two, Mitchell takes up the subject of the new genre of biography in Telugu that gets employed for narrativizing individual life stories in the nineteenth century and increasingly also used to narrate the story of Telugu as a language. In this manner, Mitchell argues that Telugu is personified and made an object of reverence.
Mitchell’s most persuasive and compelling arguments are contained in chapters three and four where her training in linguistic anthropology shines and provides much needed clarity to a number of processes that Telugu as a language underwent during the colonial period. For instance, her analysis of ‘anyadesyam’ in Chapter three deserves special mention as it traces the emergence of an idea of what is ‘foreign’ to Telugu and what is ‘accha’ or ‘pure’ Telugu. Moreover, colonial philologists were exclusively interested in the etymological origins of words due to the increasingly historical orientation in language study. The new historical approach to language study relied on this opposition between pure and foreign reifying an idea of ethno-cultural essence contained in Telugu itself. In Chapter four, Mitchell discusses radical changes that pedagogical practices underwent in the nineteenth century—specifically the replacement of pandits (as a form of embodied knowledge) to the use of primers and grammars (disembodied knowledge disseminated through textual objects). This shift was significant in that learning language as a distinct body of knowledge, as a separate object of knowledge, through primers and grammars objectified language in novel ways. The movement from pandit to primer Mitchell argues is based on a critique of the pandit’s unpredictability in disseminating appropriate knowledge of language and morals to his pupils. However, I wonder if we also brought in the critiques formulated by Telugu social reformers who felt that traditional methods of transmitting knowledge through pandits were exclusionary, how would that alter the analysis of the shift from pandit to primer. In other words, that they limited access to knowledge to certain castes and communities. In Chapter five, Mitchell discusses the impact of the expansion of modern education in the nineteenth century. This expansion did much to impact language training or the necessity of imparting language skills through modern schooling. Mitchell is persuasive that the idea of literacy changed from the early part of the nineteenth century to the latter part. She argues literacy was gained in specific contexts and in specific registers. By the end of the nineteenth century, that earlier conception of literacy was no longer adequate rather modern schooling was seen as essential. This shift to modern schooling also had further implications. The new conception of literacy did not emphasize gaining specific skills but rather universal skills. This universal orientation of modern schooling had embedded within it a critique of pre-modern social and cultural hierarchies. Again, if we were to bring in some of these concerns that were in circulation as articulated by Telugu social reformers, it would add another dimension to Mitchell’s thesis that a more unified conception of literacy emerged that relied on modern schooling at the end of the century.
Finally, Chapter six traces the changes that Telugu underwent during the nineteenth century and connects it to the political movement that led to the formation of Andhra Pradesh. It is clear that Mitchell does not want to offer a causal explanation for the emergence of passionate devotion to language—the idea that nineteenth century colonial pedagogical practices led to new political movements based on language as a marker of culture. However, the question remains as to what the relationship is between the radical changes that Telugu underwent as a language, to language becoming a basis for a political movement. The book contains five substantial historical chapters on nineteenth century transformations of Telugu, which are in themselves very enlightening, documenting the powerful thesis that language came to be seen as monolingual. Moreover, that language became the foundation for all knowledge and that languages indeed became parallel. However these chapters sit uneasily with the introduction and chapter six, where Mitchell struggles to find explanation for their relevance to the political movement. It seems what is needed to make sense of the ‘politics’ aspect of the argument is a refocusing by placing the contingencies of the political struggle at the center of her analysis. For instance, if we were to view the political struggle itself as producing new sentiments and attachments to language, we would become sensitive to how a political struggle produces its own concepts/objects. As it stands, Mitchell seems to be arguing that Telugu underwent changes in the nineteenth century that saw it shifting from a medium of communication to a marker of identity, which then made it easy to be instrumentalized by a political movement.
However, in the contemporary manifestation of the Telangana movement, there is no singular cultural object of reverence that is driving the movement. In fact to pin down one or two primary cultural motives might be too reductive to the political movement and the content of the broader struggle itself. Mitchell’s book seems very much about how culture comes together, how culture coheres— language as culture. She begins with the question of why people would die for language; to begin with such an image one is urging the reader to share the author’s initial fascination with the idea that language can become such a passionate object of reverence. More troubling though is that when we readily accept that language successfully became a marker of identity, there is an implicit assumption that there was a consensus on language as culture. This is where we hit murky waters. However, if we think of culture as something that coheres momentarily in a political struggle, we can be aware of its fissures as well. With the Telangana movement back in the news, journalists, scholars and general observers of the movement cannot help but be reminded that at the very moment of the founding of Andhra Pradesh, there was in fact no consensus on whether Telugu as a language was a stable object of culture—or indeed that it was a marker of a single community. Language as culture was undeniably mobilized in the Andhra movement. Still, we must remain attuned to the very real contestations inherent in any political movement, especially as we witness the events unfolding in Andhra Pradesh after the release of the Srikrishna Report in December 2010, calling into question any certainties we may have held about linguistic nationalisms in defining regions in India.