instruments that are in use in today’s Tamil lifeworld, her devotees have
preferred to show their goddess playing the archaic “ya ̄l.,” a lute-like instrument
whose great antiquity they laud. The items of jewelry that abundantly adorn her
body are declared to be the great works of ancient (but never modern) Tamil lit-
erature: so the Cilapatika ̄ram [the Lay of the Anklet] jingles on her feet as anklets,
theMan.ime ̄kalai[the Jeweled Belt] encircles her waist, and so on. As with Bha ̄rat
Ma ̄ta ̄, her jewelry and her clothing confer upon her an iconographic persona
that consciously remove her in most cases from the everyday Tamil modern
(again see figure 26.1).
The Cunning of Modernity
Yet, I insist that in spite of the best efforts of their devotees to pass Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄
or Tamil
̄
tta ̄y off as timeless ancient goddesses, signs of their novelty and moder-
nity are quite apparent to the discerning eye. I do so insist not just because my
historicist training allows me to trace their emergence to texts and practices
datable to the latter half of the nineteenth century – and not any earlier. My
insistence also does not just follow from the conclusions of feminist scholarship
that such female figures emerge as iconic in the context of a late colonial world
in which motherhood came to be newly privileged, both as the sine qua non of
women’s identity, and also as the foundational site on which pure and true sub-
jectivities and communities could be imagined and reproduced. And lastly, my
argument does not just rest on the new ways of visually presenting these god-
desses to their devout public (through media such as calendar art, “god posters,”
cinema, and video) in poses and appearances that can be persuasively described
as “modern.”
Persuasive enough as these reasons might all be, I rest my case for the moder-
nity of these goddesses on the entirely novel manner in which the entities that
they embody – be it the territory of “India” or the Tamil language – come to be
reconfigured in late colonial India. In the case of Tamil
̄
tta ̄y, I have argued else-
where that it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that Tamil
emerged as an object of praise in and of itself, deserving adulation for its ability
to ensure communication between its speakers, their schooling, and their gov-
ernance, rather than for commanding the attention of the gods or being the lan-
guage that they favor. We get a glimpse of this new people-centered ideology that
emerges around Tamil in the following declaration from 1879:
Tamil gave birth to us; Tamil raised us; Tamil sang lullabies to us and put us to
sleep; Tamil taught us our first words with which we brought joy to our mothers
and fathers; Tamil is the first language we spoke when we were infants; Tamil is
the language which our mothers and fathers fed us along with milk; Tamil is the
language that our mother, father, and preceptor taught us... [T]he language of
our home is Tamil; the language of our land is Tamil. (quoted in Ramaswamy
1997: 11)the goddess and the nation 563