Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia (South Asia in Motion)

This book explains how modern political oratory in Tamil emerged out of Protestant missionary forms of speech. Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era. Cover 1 Contents 8 Editors’ Preface 10 Editors’ Acknowledgments 14 Note on Transliteration and Citations 16 Bernard Bate’s Acknowledgments 18 Foreword: Speaking of Barney Bate 22 Introduction: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern 38 PART I: THE PROTESTANT MODERN 62 1 The Ethics of Textuality 64 2 Arumuga Navalar and the Protestant Modern 79 PART II: THE TAMIL MODERN 96 3 Speaking Swadeshi, Madras 1907 98 4 Subramania Bharati and the Tamil Modern 122 5 Elocutionary Incandescence 147 Epilogue: Home Rule, the Labor Movement, and Linguistic and Political Modernity 178 Afterword: Oratory and the Origins of Politics 190 Notes 214 References 240 Index 254 A 254 B 254 C 255 D 256 E 256 G 256 H 256 I 256 J 257 K 257 L 257 M 258 N 258 O 258 P 259 Q 260 R 260 S 260 T 263 V 264 W 265 "By tracing the genealogy of Tamil political oratory alongside the development of political modernity in South Asia, the author argues that speech and rhetoric shape how history unfolds and how a social order is structured."-- Provided by publisher