The Indian Economic and Social History Review

Linguistically bounded literatures, such as Telugu or Kannada literature, appear today as entities that have existed as meaningful categories nearly as long as the languages themselves. However, this imagination of literary worlds as coterminus with languages has not always made sense. Using debates over pedagogy and knowledge production sparked by the advent of printing in southern India, this article argues that languages emerged as discrete foundations for the parallel reorganisation of knowledge and practice only during the nineteenth century. Literary production, educational practice, the writing of history, the imagination of genres, and eventually the assertion of socio-political identity and geographical divisions have all been reorganised in relation to vernacular languages in India during the past 150 years. The article demonstrates that the treatment of languages as parallel rather than complementary media marks a new relationship to language that differs from earlier relation-ships to language in southern India. It argues that by the end of the nineteenth-century, practices relating to literacy, pedagogy, administration and bureaucracy, religion, economic exchange, and personal interaction—practices that once moved across multiple languages—began to be governed by the logic of parallel ‘mother tongues’.

This article considers the production of the Tamil sermon in Christian and Saivite practices in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon, and the fateful entailments of oratory to far larger realms of practice. I will discuss a series of Saivite sermons delivered by Arumuga Navalar (1821–79) in the late 1840s and early 1850s in terms of their antecedents in Christian sermons. I will also consider the role of communicative practices in the production of what we understand today as ‘religion’. The discussion will begin with an orientation to the role of communicative genres within religion. I will then move to an account of Arumuga Navalar and his times, provide some rather detailed descriptions of the events in question, and close with the sig-nificance of shifts in speech genres to transformations of larger-scale socio-cultural and political-economic organization.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, ‘music’ and ‘literature’ began to emerge as two separate fields in south India, allowing a new kind of relationship between music and lan-guage to be imagined: one of analogy, rather than direct connection, contiguity, or co-mingling. This culminated in the twentieth-century canonisation of Tamil literature and Karnatic classical music as categories mutually opposed in their orientation to the ‘mother tongue’. Such shifts enabled the emergence, in the 1930s and 1940s, of new discourses on music and language in the context of the Tamil Icai [music] movement.

The article explores how a new concept of historical time entered discourses on language in nineteenth-century south India. Particularly, I look at the work of C.P. Brown, a prominent scholar of Telugu in the nineteenth century, who through his philological intervention—his Telugu grammar, dictionary and definitive editions of Telugu literary classics—worked arduously to preserve the language. I argue that because colonial philology saw language as having a progressive history, i.e., the unfolding of language in progressive stages towards constant improvement, it instigated a profound intervention in language practices and thought, foreshadowing the great debates at the turn of the twentieth century on ‘modernising’ languages.

Recent studies question the definition of a literary canon as an immutable corpus of texts sharing certain assured value and properties and distinguished by the possession of intrinsic worth; they argue that like all other human artifacts, canons are not given but are the product of a specific history, and are thus historically contingent. In the Indian context there are few studies that have taken up the question of canon formation. This article seeks to redress this lacuna and explores how the Tamil literary canon came be redefined in colonial India. The conjuncture of print, the ‘discovery’ of new texts, Orientalist scholarship and identity politics shaped the modern literary canon. While the pre-modern Tamil literary canon consisted predominantly of religious, mythological and didactic texts, the new canon was a largely secular one where the religious texts were marginalised.