queen (araci), to be honored and worshipped very much in the manner that
divinities and sovereigns are in this culture.
From the 1930s, under the growing influence of what has been charac-
terized as “the Dravidian movement,” the Tamil-speaking community also came
to be imagined as an autonomous, sovereign nation (Dravida Nadu or Tamil
Nadu) in clear opposition to the emergent idea of “India.” Through the writings
of the poets and publicists of the Dravidian movement, Tamil
̄
tta ̄y moved out of
the elite confines of learned religious and literary treatises and academies which
had hitherto been her habitat, and was more widely disseminated through news-
papers, street songs, political speeches, and even cinema. In this process, the
figure of Tamil
̄
tta ̄y, as indeed the language she embodied, underwent a funda-
mental transformation, from autonomous deity and sovereign queen, to a frail
and endangered mother totally dependent on her “children,” the loyal speakers
of Tamil. As the figure of the mother emerged as a sign of the authentic, pure
community, and as a metonym for “the people,” and as their language –
imagined as “mother tongue” – was configured as the bearer of the true soul,
spirit, and genius of its speakers, the motherhood of Tamil was fashioned into
an instrument with which to contest both British colonialism andIndian nation-
alism. So, Tamil speakers were told:
There is no distinction at all between our mother who bore us for ten months, gave
birth to us, watched over us, sang lullabies to us, and fed us milk and guarded us,
and our Tamil language which taught us about good conduct and tradition, and
granted us good values and knowledge, and which is the very reason that we live
well and in prosperity. We have the same attachment to our language as we have
for our mother; we have the same devotion to our language as we have for our
mother; we have the same love for our language as we have for our mother. He who
disregards his language... is like he who disregards his mother and forsakes
her... (quoted in Ramaswamy 1997: 72)This assertion that disregarding their language was like disregarding their
mothers, even matricide, was frequently used to arouse a “sleeping” populace to
come to the rescue of their endangered mother language. This was especially so
in the middle decades of the past century when the Indian National Congress
party vigorously promoted Hindi as the future national language of India, a
cause that was taken up as well with even greater enthusiasm by the indepen-
dent Indian state after 1947. In the writings of numerous devotees of Tamil,
Hindi (caricatured as a bloodsucking demoness, a sultry temptress, an upstart
maid, and a false mother) as well as its chief patron, the Indian state, were tar-
geted as the principal enemies of Tamil and Tamil
̄
tta ̄y, and hence of the incipi-
ent Tamil nation (Ramaswamy 1999). Between the late 1930s and mid-1960s,
a series of vigorous, sometimes violent, anti-Hindi protests provided the context
for the widespread deployment of Tamil
̄
tta ̄y’s body in various stages of distress
and disarray. Anti-Hindi poetry as well as populist speeches from these decades
554 sumathi ramaswamy