Linguistic Movements and Political Heterogeneity: Rethinking Unification Movement across British and ‘Princely’ Karnataka

Subsequent to the Partition of Bengal in 1905, the consolidation of linguistic identities and movements emerged as an important assertion of core democratic values, positing that governance must be in a language intelligible to the majority. Like other linguistic movements in late-colonial India, the Karnataka Ekikarana (Karnataka unification) movement did not proceed with a spatially uniform logic nor followed a uniform temporality in realising its objectives of uniting Kannada speakers from disparate sub-regions. Attempting to reconcile elite literary ambitions, popular aspirations and political differences, the movement shifted gears through several phases as it worked across multiple territorial jurisdictions and political systems, including the demarcations of British India and princely India. Focussing on the period between 1860 and 1938, the present article examines the heterogeneous nature of the unification movement across British-Karnataka and two Kannada-speaking princely states, namely, Mysore in the south and Jamakhandi in the north. It explores the ways in which the ruling family of ‘model’ Mysore sought legitimacy in embracing their Kannada heritage; in contrast, the Jamakhandi rulers resisted any concession to Kannada linguistic sentiments. The article shows how, in arriving at monolingually indexed territorial entities, the bridging of ‘internal’ frontiers across these divergent political and linguistic contours proved just as crucial as the claiming of dominance over other language groups within an intensely polyglot world.

Tamil Nadu Politics and Tamil Cinema: A Symbiotic Relationship?

From the second-half of the twentieth century, a nascent Tamil cinema became increasingly influential in Tamil society and more prominent in political life. The Dravidar Kazhagam, founded by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in 1944, morphed into the DMK and AIADMK, two dominant state political parties in Tamil Nadu. Through the medium of film, some of its leading lights, C. N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalitha, cultivated cinema audiences and the voting public in the political ideologies of the Dravidian movement and subsequently became Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The symbiotic relationship between politics and Tamil cinema has meant that political and social commentaries and the assertion of Tamil nationalistic ideas was commonplace in Tamil films. In recent years, Tamil cinema has become the vehicle for raising a wide range of concerns ranging from caste, class and gender and state/nation politics, marking a shift that focusses on everyday politics in the state. In this article, we present a critical survey of the role of Tamil cinema in disseminating particular realities and politics of identity that speak to an essentialised notion of Tamil cultural and linguistic identity, the concomitant disavowal of broader conceptions of Indian-ness or belonging to the Indian nation, as well as the use of cinema to address everyday politics in the State.

Bringing Back the ‘Classroom’: Feminist Pedagogy in a Sociology Classroom

The article interlinks sociology and classrooms through the lens of teaching gender studies. It argues that to address the challenges of teaching gender studies to students of sociology at a university department, of a state university, it has to be placed within the complex terrain of classrooms. It states that while there is a discussion on the challenges of framing feminist pedagogy and teaching gender studies in India, there is inadequate engagement with the issue of; one, the changing nature of the classroom and its relevance and impact in the structuring of the disciplinary theories, methodologies and pedagogy and two, the challenges of operationalising feminist pedagogy within classrooms.

Who Is a Migrant? Understanding Migrant’s Identity in a North Indian Industrial Setting

The question of ‘identity’ is being questioned and debated in modern social theory. One way of life is giving one identity and another way of life is giving another identity, which leads to the identity crisis. The formation and transformation of identity is really a matter of concern and introspection in today’s world. As Mercer (1990, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, 43–71, London: Lawrence & Wishart), observes ‘Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty’. The identities of a migrant and to identify who is a migrant are to be answered and analysed in different contexts. Also, it extends the idea of life world of migrants hinting at the complex identity in a new space like Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the migrant employees’ perception and construction of multiple identities for each other in their everyday life. Their everyday negotiation and confrontation with respect to identity constructions have been focused on and discussed.

Waqf and Authority Dynamics: Reconfigurations of a Pious Institution in Colonial Malabar, South India

The formative years of Darul Uloom, Vazhakkad, a well-known Muslim waqf institution in northern Kerala in India established in the late nineteenth century for imparting religious education, is examined in this article. Darul Uloom is probably the first registered waqf in Kerala and by analysing the registered waqf deeds of this institution, we seek to understand the operation of authority and management in the initial years of this institution, especially in the background of contestations between emergent Islamic reformists and traditionalists. We trace the significant reformulation of the foundational intent evident in the subsequent deeds by later custodians and the intervention of various social groups, particularly the local community, in refashioning the trajectory of the waqf. A shift in authority—a complex product of theological, political and economic contestations emerged in the context of transformations brought by British Colonialism in Malabar—is evident in this process. Through our analysis, we suggest that waqf institutions and its legal foundations were highly dynamic and adaptive to their changing social contexts as against the portrayal of these Islamic institutions as stagnant and inflexible.

Rethinking South Asian Media Historiography: Excavating Princely India’s Media Cultures with Reference to Jammu and Kashmir State

This article, while attempting to rethink the media historiography of South Asia, traces the early origins of press systems in princely India. Focusing on Jammu and Kashmir state, it offers an assessment of socio-political and historical factors which contributed to the trajectory of growth of the press in the state while tracing its relationship with the princely politics, indigenous politico-religious movements, and the British colonial state vis-a-vis an emerging colonial public. The larger aim of the article is to shift focus to media cultures of princely India and bring them onto the centre stage of postcolonial historiography. We argue that such a study of the press systems—which existed in princely states but have hitherto remained a neglected subject—will not only complement the current understanding of postcolonial media studies but substantially offer an alternative reading of the dominant discourse within postcolonial studies. The article maps the webs of patronages, loyalities, struggles and resistance that marked the coming of the periodical press in the state and how they differently shaped its practices, aspirations and outcomes.

Corrigendum

Ranjan, Amit. 2021. ‘Language as an Identity: Hindi–Non-Hindi Debates in India.’ Society and Culture in South Asia 7(2): 314–337. DOI: 10.1177/23938617211014660 In the above article, the corrections listed below have been made. The online and print versions have been updated to reflect the correct information. On p. 314, the article subtitle has been corrected to: Hindi–Non-Hindi Debates in India The abstract has been updated. The text under section ‘Introduction’ has been changed. The main heading on p. 317 has been corrected to ‘Hindi and Provincial Languages in Colonial India’. On p. 320, page number for reference ‘Ramaswamy 1997’ has been corrected to 27. On the same page, references ‘Ramaswamy 1997; Geetha and Rajadurai 2011’ have been added to the end of the first paragraph. On p. 323, reference ‘Constitution of India, 2015 edition’ has been added to the display quotes. Wording for footnote 3 on p. 329 has been corrected. On p. 330, footnote 4 has been updated. On p. 336, the publisher has been corrected to ‘University of California Press’ in reference Ramaswamy 1997.

Language as an Identity: Hindi and Provincial Languages in Colonial India

Language is an inherent part of an individual’s identity. Any attempt to subjugate that identity is vehemently resisted by the people. In India, Hindi is not only seen as a language per se but also linked with North Indian Hindus. In the past, the introduction and imposition of Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking states, mainly Tamil Nadu, had faced strong opposition. Since the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Hindu Nationalist Party—Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)—elected to power in May 2014, the union government has taken measures to what it calls promoting the use of the Hindi language in India. These measures have been strongly resisted in the non-Hindi-speaking states of the country. This article looks at the debates between Hindi and non-Hindi speakers since the years of the anti-colonial movement in India. It examines the character of the movement to promote Hindi and the resistance against the Hindi movements in India. This article also discusses the demands for language-based states in India. In this paper, the author argues that in the non-Hindi-speaking states, Hindi is mainly looked at as a means to subsume and suppress the native’s identity. To protect their linguistic identity, which is inextricably intertwined with other identities, people in non-Hindi-speaking areas have protested in past and also resist such attempts in present.

Book review: Aakash Singh Rathore, Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India

Aakash Singh Rathore, Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India. Haryana: Vintage, Penguin Random House, 2020. xlviii + 236 pp., ₹599. ISBN 978–0–670–09324–3.

Myths, Similes and Memory Traces: Images of Abduction in the Ramayana Universe

In this essay, the Ramayana is conceptualised not merely as a text but as a narrative universe constituted by the multiplicity of its telling. Each telling is unique and involves combining fragments or narrative elements in particular ways. This universe occupies not merely a geographical but also a kind of virtual topological space made up of the relation between narrative elements. The argument is exemplified at two levels, first through an abstraction of one theme—abduction—from the text of the Valmiki Ramayana, which is then mined for significant poetic elements. Second, the article takes up the Ramayani gathas (ballads) of the Pardhan Gonds of Madhya Pradesh and describes some stories also based on the theme of abduction. A comparison of the fragments from the two types of texts reveals comparable elements such that poetic elements, like similes and metaphors, used to describe Sita’s abduction and Rama’s grief undergo structural transformation and are expanded into metonymic configurations, that is, plot elements in the Pardhan Gond gathas. Thus, the Valmiki Ramayana and the Gondi Ramayani seem to have a metonymic connection with each other. The second part of the article then shows how transformations occur within the narrative universe of the Gondi Ramayani itself as the storyable themes move from the aural medium to that of painting, as contemporary Pardhan Gond artists use themes and poetic imagery inspired by the gathas for their compositions.