Bate - Tamil oratory and the Dravidian aesthetic: democratic practice in south India

TAMIL ORATORY AND THE DRAVIDIAN AESTHETIC

CULTURES OF HISTORY

CULTURES OF HISTORY

NICHOLAS DIRKS, SERIES EDITOR

The death of history, reported at the end of the twentieth century, was clearly premature. It has become a hotly contested battleground in struggles over identity, citizenship, and claims of recognition and rights. Each new national history proclaims itself as ancient and universal, while the contingent character of its focus raises questions about the universality and objectivity of any historical tradition. Globalization and the American hegemony have created cultural, social, local, and national backlashes. Cultures of History is a new series of books that investigates the forms, understandings, genres, and histories of history, taking history as the primary text of modern life and the foundational basis for state, society, and nation.

Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics

Ahmad H. Sadi and Lila Abu-Lughod, editors, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory

Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 17001960

Todd Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains

Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories

TAMIL ORATORY

and the

DRAVIDIAN AESTHETIC

DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE IN SOUTH INDIA

Bernard Bate

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

cup.columbia.edu

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright 2009 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51940-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bate, Bernard.

Tamil oratory and the Dravidian aesthetic : democratic
practice in south India / Bernard Bate.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14756-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-51940-3 (ebook)

1. Folk literature, TamilIndiaMadurai. 2. Epic poetry,
TamilIndiaMadurai. 3. Speeches, addresses, etc., Tamil
IndiaMadurai. 4. Tamil languageIndiaMaduraiRhetoric.
5. Politics and cultureIndiaMadurai. 6. Language and culture
IndiaMadurai. 7. Madurai (India)Politics and government.

1. Title.

PL4758.85.M29B38 2009

398.2'0494811dc22 2009020689

A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

In memory of N. G. M. Kavitha, navalar

CONTENTS

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

KARL MARX, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE, 1852

THE NEWNESS OF MADURAI

India is very old. Geologists tell us that the entire Indian subcontinent was a part of southern Africa some one hundred fifty million years ago. It crossed what is now the Indian Ocean and smashed into Asia twenty to forty million years ago raising up the Himalayan Mountains in the process. They are still rising today.

Ordinary people in Tamilnadu have different senses of this antiquity. For instance, surrounding the ancient city of Madurai in the southernmost part of the peninsula are granite hills whose stone first formed in Africa. People say they are the petrified remains of great demonselephant, snake, cowwhom the Lord Siva defeated in the time of the puranas, the old stories. On some of those hills are caves, stone beds, ancient writings, and beautiful images of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, carved twelve hundred years ago by ascetics waiting to die. (There are no Jains there now.) Construction sites for Madurais new big buildings with their deep foundations regularly reveal heartbreaking layers of human effort, suggesting that there were many others here long before. Everywhere one looks, it seems, are traces of people long gone, erased by people gone almost as long.

It is that sense of layers, of depths, of history laminated over history melded with stories, riddles, proverbs, and stone that permeate ones sense of the place. Reading an ancient Tamil text has this same quality: an anthology of poems will date perhaps to the firstthird century C.E., the period of the Tamil , or academies. A commentators exegesis composed six centuries later will appear just below the original verse. Another commentary written in the fourteenth century will illuminate the first commentary for his contemporaries. And nineteenth-or twentieth-century Tamil prose frames this archaeology, all of it bound into that most modern of objects, a printed book. History laminated over history, readings of readings of readings all culminating in an ancient text bound in a modern form whose very presence indicates to us just how old Tamil is, just how long people have been writing and speaking in Tamil.

India, Tamilnadu, and major metropolitan cities

At the same time, a great deal of what we seeor hearas old in Tamilnadu, and India more generally, is really very new. To put it even more pointedly, a great deal of the very new things in India have that feel of very old things layered with history. As it turns out, these very new things appear to make claims regarding the essences of the Tamil people. For instance, perhaps the very first thing a student will read of Madurai, or what a visitor or pilgrim will learn in a tourist map and guide, is that the city is centered upon the great temple of the Goddess Meenakshi, Lord Sivas consort, almost universally said to be Madurais queen. Everything about the city confirms this basic fact: streets appear to radiate out from the temple in concentric circles. And the high point of any year is the annual festival in the Tamil month of Chittirai (April/May), in which the goddess reenacts her Conquering the Lords of the Eight Directions (