Can the subaltern sing? Music, language, and the politics of voice in early twentieth-century south India

Abstract

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, ‘music’ and ‘literature’ began to emerge as two separate fields in south India, allowing a new kind of relationship between music and lan-guage to be imagined: one of analogy, rather than direct connection, contiguity, or co-mingling. This culminated in the twentieth-century canonisation of Tamil literature and Karnatic classical music as categories mutually opposed in their orientation to the ‘mother tongue’. Such shifts enabled the emergence, in the 1930s and 1940s, of new discourses on music and language in the context of the Tamil Icai [music] movement.