Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic
Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic

Author: Bernard Bate

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2009-09-05

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0231147562

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This is a book about the newness of old things. It concerns an oratorical revolution, a transformation of oratorical style linked to larger transformations in society at large. It explores the aesthetics of Tamil oratory and its vital relationship to one of the key institutions of modern society: democracy. Therefore this book also bears on the centrality of language to the modern human condition. Though Tamil oratory is a relatively new practice in south India, the Dravidian (or Tamil nationalist) style employs archaic forms of Tamil that suggest an ancient mode of speech. Beginning with the advent of mass democratic politics in the 1940s, a new generation of politician adopted this style, known as "fine," or "beautiful Tamil" ( centamil), for its distinct literary virtuosity, poesy, and alluring evocation of a pure Tamil past. Bernard Bate explores the centamil phenomenon, arguing that the genre's spectacular literacy and use of ceremonial procession, urban political ritual, and posters, praise poetry are critical components in the production of a singularly Tamil mode of political modernity: a Dravidian neoclassicism. From his perspective, the centamil revolution and Dravidian neoclassicism suggest that modernity is not the mere successor of tradition but the production of tradition, and that this production is a primary modality of modernity, a new newness-albeit a newness of old things.

The Pariah Problem
The Pariah Problem

Author: Rupa Viswanath

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-07-08

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0231537506

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Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.

Lines of the Nation
Lines of the Nation

Author: Laura Bear

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780231140027

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Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.

The Light of Knowledge
The Light of Knowledge

Author: Francis Cody

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-11-15

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0801469015

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Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light of Knowledge, Francis Cody’s ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The Light of Knowledge is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster. Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at an increasingly important area of social and political activism, The Light of Knowledge brings tools of linguistic anthropology to engage with critical social theories of the postcolonial state.

Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion
Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion

Author: Dirk Johannsen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-01-29

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 900442167X

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Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion studies narrativity as situated modes of engaging with reality in religious contexts across the globe, equally shaped by the immersive character of the stories told and the sensory qualities of their performances.

Essential Readings in Biosemiotics
Essential Readings in Biosemiotics

Author: Donald Favareau

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 882

ISBN-13: 140209650X

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Synthesizing the findings from a wide range of disciplines – from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics – the emerging field of Biosemiotics explores the highly complex phenomenon of sign processing in living systems. Seeking to advance a naturalistic understanding of the evolution and development of sign-dependent life processes, contemporary biosemiotic theory offers important new conceptual tools for the scientific understanding of mind and meaning, for the development of artificial intelligence, and for the ongoing research into the rich diversity of non-verbal human, animal and biological communication processes. Donald Favareau’s Essential Readings in Biosemiotics has been designed as a single-source overview of the major works informing this new interdiscipline, and provides scholarly historical and analytical commentary on each of the texts presented. The first of its kind, this book constitutes a valuable resource to both bioscientists and to semioticians interested in this emerging new discipline, and can function as a primary textbook for students in biosemiotics, as well. Moreover, because of its inherently interdisciplinary nature and its focus on the ‘big questions’ of cognition, meaning and evolutionary biology, this volume should be of interest to anyone working in the fields of cognitive science, theoretical biology, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, communication studies or the history and philosophy of science.

English as a Global Language
English as a Global Language

Author: David Crystal

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1107611806

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Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.

Tamils and the Nation
Tamils and the Nation

Author: Madurika Rasaratnam

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780190498320

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Why are relations between politically mobilised ethnic identities and the nation-state sometimes peaceful and at other times fraught and violent? Madurika Rasaratnam's book sets out a novel answer to this key puzzle in world politics through a detailed comparative study of the starkly divergent trajectories of the 'Tamil question' in India and Sri Lanka from the colonial era to the present day. Whilst Tamil and national identities have peaceably harmonised in India, in Sri Lanka these have come into escalating and violent contradiction, leading to three decades of armed conflict and simmering antagonism since the war's brutal end in 2009. Tracing these differing outcomes to distinct and contingent patterns of political contestation and mobilisation in the two states, Rasaratnam shows how, whilst emerging from comparable conditions and similar historical experiences, these have produced very different interactions between evolving Tamil and national identities, constituting in India a nation-state inclusive of the Tamils, and in Sri Lanka a hierarchical Sinhala-Buddhist national and state order hostile to Tamils' political claims. Locating these dynamics within changing international contexts, she also shows how these once largely separate patterns of national-Tamil politics, and Tamil diaspora mobilisation, are increasingly interwoven in the post-war internationalisation of Sri Lanka's ethnic crisis.

Possibilities
Possibilities

Author: David Graeber

Publisher: AK Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1904859666

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An anthropologist investigates the revolution of everyday life.

Historical Dictionary of the Tamils
Historical Dictionary of the Tamils

Author: Vijaya Ramaswamy

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-08-25

Total Pages: 519

ISBN-13: 1538106868

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The Tamils have an unbroken history of more than two thousand years. Tamil, the language they speak, is one of the oldest living languages in the world. The only people comparable to the Tamils in terms of their hoary past and vibrant present would be the Jews with one marked difference. The Tamils have always had their homeland 'Tamilaham' (alternately pronounced and spelt 'Tamizhaham') known today as Tamil Nadu which to them represents their mother and is revered by them as 'Tamizh Tai' literally ‘Tamil Mother’. This is in striking contrast to the Jews who have been through a long and arduous struggle to gain their homeland, a deeply contested site to this day with Hebrewisation of Israel being a key marker of Jewish identity in the region. Tamils, by contrast have a clear numerical majority in the region that now comprises Tamil Nadu and the language unites rather than divides adherents of different faiths. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Tamils contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Tamils.