are but natural expressions of the devotion to the mother-figure that has been
deemed a timeless and universal ingredient of Hindu culture and society.
Instead, I propose that the imagination of these goddesses has been possible
because of a new, even “secular,” ideology of motherhood that has accom-
panied the consolidation of modernity everywhere, India included. All the same,
the passions that these goddesses have managed to arouse in the subcontinent,
and the structures of sentiments in which they have come to be embedded, are
distinctive enough that Tamil
̄
tta ̄y and Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ are not mere rehearsals of
similar symbolic fictions elsewhere, nor indeed are the nationalisms whose fertile
imaginations have generated them.
Introducing Tamil
̄
tta ̄y: Language Devotion in Tamil IndiaI begin my reflections on such matters with the figure of Tamil
̄
tta ̄y (figure 26.1),
who is the lesser-known and more local of the two, confined as she has been to
the Tamil-speaking parts of India, in contrast to the pan-Indic Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄.^1 As
the apotheosis of the Tamil language, and the founding mother and guardian
deity of the Tamil-speaking community, the moment of her birth can be traced
to an 1891 hymn in Tamil by the litterateur P. Sundaram Pillai (1855–97). In
this hymn (which since June 1970 has served as the state of Tamil Nadu’s
official “prayer song”), the earth is imagined as a woman whose beautiful face
isparatak kan.t.am(“ Bha ̄rat,” “India”) and whose radiant brow is the southern
peninsula. The southern tira ̄vit.a na ̄t.u(“Dravidian land”) adorns that brow as an
auspicioustilakam(sacred mark). The hymn then declares:
O great goddess Tamil!
Like the fragrance of that tilakam, your fame spreads in all directions,
and delights the whole world.
Spellbound in admiration of your splendid youth and power, we offer
you our homage.
(quoted in Ramaswamy 1997: 17)Although there are occasional examples from before the 1890s of the glori-
fication and feminization of the language (Ramaswamy 1998a), I have argued
at length elsewhere that it is from the closing years of the nineteenth century
that Tamil
̄
tta ̄y emerges systematically as a figure of speech, worship, and iden-
tity in the context of the development of what I have characterized as “Tamil
devotion” (tamil
̄
ppar
̄r
̄u) (Ramaswamy 1997). A loosely-connected network of
praise, passion, and practices centered on the adoration of Tamil, Tamil devo-
tion has underwritten many different projects over the course of the twentieth
century, beginning with a religious revitalization movement which aimed to
identify the authentic Tamil speaker as a follower of the lord Shiva whose
worship was most efficacious when conducted through the medium of “divine”
552 sumathi ramaswamy