Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) by Sumathi Ramaswamy

Author:Sumathi Ramaswamy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-07-31T12:55:00+00:00

This incident is cited as the originary moment of what comes to be called tanittamil iyakkam, the "pure Tamil" movement, and is dated by most scholars to 1916, though the roots of Maraimalai Adigal's own personal predilections in this regard may be traced back to the late 189os. The movement has invited considerable criticism and resistance, even within the devotional community. Nonetheless, it still continues to have its share of enthusiasts who publish books and journals advocating its virtues, and who seek, with varying degrees of success, to make tanittamil into an everyday habit in contemporary Tamilnadu. For the ardent purist, there is no difference between "Tamil" and tanittamil good Tamil is always already tanittamil the only language in the world that is capable of flourishing without the aid of other languages (Nilambikai 1960: 40-51). This has meant that for purists, even their fellow devotees who do not follow the ideals of tanittamil are, by definition, enemies of Tamil; they are not the true "sons" of their language/mother (Ilankumaran 1991: 130-36, 168-69). "Those who oppose tanittamil are murderers of Tamil," the purists declare unequivocally (quoted in M. Tirunavukarasu 1959: 520).

Soon after the incident in the garden, Vedachalam Tamilized his name (and those of his children), and from then on referred to himself, at least in his Tamil publications, as Maraimalai Adigal. Vedachalam was not the first to do this.23 A few years earlier, in 1899, another Tamil enthusiast, V. G. Suryanarayana Sastri, had published a collection of sonnets in which his name appeared in its Tamil form as "Paritimal Kalainar." Although this was the only occasion in which Suryanarayana Sastri used his tanittamil name, his act is much cited in purist circles, not just because of his fame as a Tamil scholar but also because he was Brahman (Tirumaran 199z: 118-23). Since that time, many of Tamil's adherents have Tamilized their given Sanskritic names and have bestowed tanittamil names on their children (Kailasapathy 1986: 30). The pure Tamil movement, however, advocates more than just symbolic acts such as the Tamilizing of personal names and, by extension, the names of towns, streets, deities, temples, and so on. It is equally concerned with transformations in written and spoken Tamil, with the conscious refusal, in both public and domestic contexts, to rely on words that are deemed non-Tamil.24 As early as 19o6, the Tamil scholar and Murugan devotee Pamban Swami (1851-19z9) published a book of verses called Centan Centamil in which care was taken not to allow even one Sanskrit word to appear (Tirumaran 199 z: Iz3-z6). And with the more concerted efforts of Maraimalai Adigal and his followers, this trend picked up momentum from the 19zos-with varying degrees of success, of course (Maraimalai Adigal 193oa: xxv-xxvi, 1934: ii-iz). It has been estimated that even at the height of Maraimalai Adigal's enthusiasm for tanittamil in the 193os, at least 5 percent of the words in his texts continued to be Sanskritic (Nambi Arooran 1976: 345-46). Nevertheless, even impressionistically speaking, the marked decline in

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