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En/gendering Language: The Poetics of Tamil Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Sumathi Ramaswamy
Sumathi Ramaswamy
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

Since the publication of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities almost a decade ago, historians and anthropologists have become accustomed to think of the nation—that bedrock of our existence as moderns—as an imagined entity.1 Yet it is problematic, at least to this author, that while the spotlight is (once again) on the nation, the other key actor in Anderson's formulation, the language through which a specific nation is subjectively conceived and imagined, appears to have been relegated to the sidelines. By proposing that languages, too, be considered cultural and symbolic entities that are themselves enrolled into projects of imagination, this essay assumes its beginnings in questions provoked by Anderson's analysis. Because languages themselves are subjected to multiple imaginations, how indeed can they enable the harmonious and contention-free imagination of communities? How indeed do they acquire the capacity to generate feelings of “contemporaneity,” “solidarity,” and “belonging,” as Anderson proposes? Do they not just as well have the power to scatter and disaggregate such sentiments? These are questions occasioned by more than just theoretical curiosity. In many parts of the world, the diverse imaginations that cling to languages have frequently sparked off contestation, divisiveness, and even violence, especially in multi-lingual pluralities like India, the focus of this article.

Type
The Identity of Language
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 1993 , pp. 683 - 725
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

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