Orient Blackswan

Imprint	Orient BlackSwan
Year of Publishing	2025
Number of pages	444
ISBN	9789369730896
Format	Paperback
Language	English
Dimensions	140 x 216 mm

the Book
the Author(s)
Table of Contents

Tamil is one of the longest continuous written traditions of any language in the world. It is also very much a language of the modern world—an official language in three countries, and a recognised minority language in several others that is used across a variety of domains, from education to media to religious practice, literature, everyday talk, and beyond. To engage with Tamil and its culture, in all their dimensions is, therefore, to grapple with social, political, religious, literary, and performative traditions of remarkable depth, nuance and complexity.

The Chicago Tamil Forum, an annual workshop at the University of Chicago that brings together international scholars of Tamil language, culture, and history, began in 2014 to advance exciting new approaches to understanding Tamil and the Tamil-speaking world. This volume collects sixteen papers presented at the Forum between 2014 and 2023, which together seek to understand Tamil as a site of politics and power, to explore Tamil language and literature as a medium of social life, and to unravel the dynamics of Tamil within a changing media landscape. The chapters explore a wide range of topics, from studies of poetics, literature and lexicography to language politics, caste and political identity; from populist politics and filmic stardom to theatrical adaption and early modern temple murals.

Offering diverse perspectives on South India and disciplinary approaches to studying it, this volume refines and redefines the field of Tamil Studies. It will be of interest to scholars of South India as well as to South Asianists of all stripes.

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The Editors

Constantine V. Nakassis is Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago.

Francis Cody is Professor, Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute, and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

E. Annamalai is the former Director of Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, and Visiting Professor of Tamil at the University of Chicago.

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Editors’ Acknowledgements
List of Table and Figures

Preface
E. Annamalai

Introduction: The Radiance of Tamil
Constantine V. Nakassis and Francis Cody

I. POLITICS AND POWER: (Post)Colonialism, Caste, Modernity

Introduction to Part I: Modern Political Communities beyond Enumeration
Francis Cody

1. Swadeshi Bharati: Protestant Textuality and the Poetics of Tamil Political Modernity
Bernard Bate

2. Is this a Sudra Critique? Periyar and the Intermediate Castes
Karthick Ram Manoharan

3. Birthing a Caste: The Gendered Political Origins of the Icai Vēḷāḷar in Modern Tamil Nadu
Davesh Soneji

4. When Love Meets Death: ‘Honour’, Violence and Inter-caste Marriages in Tamil Nadu
Perundevi Srinivasan

5. Law at Large: Notes on the Public Mediation of Community in the Juridical Field
Francis Cody

II. LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE: Poesis, Translation, Ideology: Poesis, Translation, Ideology

Introduction to Part II: On the Values of Language
E. Annamalai

6. Good Tamil: What Makes It Good and Why
E. Annamalai

7. Ciṉṉattampip Pulavar’s Kalvaḷaiyantāti
David Shulman

8. Meaning as Rescuer: Colonising the Coloniser, the Tamil Way
Govindarajan Navaneethakrishnan

9. Crossing the Godāvari: Poetics, Translation, and Transformation in the Kamparāmāyaṇam
Whitney Cox

10. Rendering the Word of God
Torsten Tschacher

11. Shifting Worlds: The Obsolescence of the Nikaṇṭus in the Tamil Literary Tradition
Srilata Raman

III. MEDIA AND MEDIATION: Voice, Stage, Screen

Introduction to Part III: Sensorial Images and Sound and Murals
Swarnavel Eswaran

12. Pāṭṭukku Oru Talaivar: Making a Dravidian Voice
Amanda Weidman

13. Stars and the ‘Regional’ Blockbuster: Rajinikanth, from Baba to Enthiran
S. V. Srinivas

14. Signifying Tamil: DMK Rhetoric, Cinema and the Double Articulation of Sovereignty
Rajan Kurai Krishnan

15. The Many Shakespeares of Rao Bahadur Pammal Sambanda Mudaliyar: Shakespeare in Colonial South
India and the History of Modern Tamil Drama
Sascha Ebeling

16. Motivated Reading: Text and Image in the Expanded Temple
Anna Lise Seastrand

Afterword: From the Sangam to the Forum
Amanda Weidman

References
List of Contributors
Chicago Tamil Forum Workshops, 2014–23
Photos from the Chicago Tamil Forum Workshops
Index

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The Radiance of Tamil

Politics, Language, Media

Constantine V. Nakassis, Francis Cody and E. Annamalai (Editors)

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