Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate

Abstract

Reviewed by: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate Sharika Thiranagama Bernard Bate. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia. E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 264 pp. In 2016, when Bernard Bate passed away, he left behind a collection of texts, some chapters in finished form, some in draft, and a series of notes and fragments. Assembling these pieces, this pathbreaking book is a labor of love. It represents Barney's labor over decades of love for his work and for the Tamil language. It is also a labor of love by E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, who have painstakingly put together this manuscript in such seamless and brilliant fashion that it has the edge of a single author. Barney was a friend as well as an exemplary anthropologist full of life. This work is a testament to the best of what community, friendship, and love can look like. Bate's previous book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic (2009), examined oratory within new forms of democratic praxis in South India. In Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern, Bate explores the formative pre-history of this oratory. The South Indian state of Tamil Nadu (renamed from Madras State in 1969) was formed out of political mobilizations centered around linguistic nationalism and Tamilness. For anyone who knows Tamil Nadu, the place of oration within political movements is, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy explains in his foreword to the book, undeniable. How did this communicative praxis of Tamil democracy arise? How did 20th century Tamil politics and identity become so invested in a naturalistic relationship between a vernacular Tamil and a Tamil "soul" and spirit, in what had been a profoundly heteroglossic pre-colonial South India? How did these changes relate to the Protestant homiletic sermon, a style of speech [End Page 725] propagated by Tamil missionaries? Barney's answers to these questions in this new book go to the historical heart of contemporary Tamil politics by emphasizing oration and speech as a fundamental political infrastructure of contemporary nationalism and politics. While some of the arguments in this book, such as the fashioned Tamil neo-classicism of contemporary Tamil politics (the "newness of the old" [Bate 2009:xv]), were central to Bate's first book, this second work introduces the Protestant homiletic sermon as a foundational rhetorical form—exploding many assumptions of contemporary Tamil scholarship. The role of print media—and Anderson's (1983) associated notion of print capitalism—in creating new kinds of national imaginaries, politics, and publics has, as Barney points out, been well explored. However, unlike print, the Platform—political speech—is, by virtue of its embodied sensuous form, difficult to capture in an archive, even as we know intuitively that the emotions and sentiments mobilized around speech are central to modern politics and nationalism. This book represents an effort to recover and locate political speech in specific modern forms of language that were simultaneously new and Tamil. Bate centers new forms of public speech and political practice through which politicians and orators mobilized new constituencies across class and caste into new populist and nationalist formations. There are multiple ancient Tamil genres and practices of speech, writing, performance, and theater across nearly 2,000-year-old written records. Bate argues, however, that no prior genre resembled the homiletic sermon, addressing an "undifferentiated mass of lower-status" (5), and that this uniquely new 19th century Protestant missionary form would become the heart of modern Tamil democratic praxis. To tell this story, Bate, unlike many scholars of South India, looks to both South India and northern Jaffna in Sri Lanka, understanding text, language, and tradition across the borders that contemporary scholarship still so faithfully follows. Tamil Souls "The Christians who wanted to capture souls for Jesus knew that their own texts must first have Tamil souls." (29) [End Page 726] Christian missionaries entered a South Indian and Sri Lankan (then Ceylon) world profoundly marked by multiple languages and heteroglossia that would only later be distinguished as 20th...