Review of Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (review)

Lisa Mitchell’s Language, Emotion and Politics in South India makes a brilliant intervention in the study of language and modernity by critically interrogating the concept of the “mother tongue” as it arose in the context of Telugu linguistic nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the heart of Mitchell’s book is the argument that the mother tongue concept is neither natural nor primordial, but contingent upon shifts in understandings of language that emerged in particular historical and socio-cultural contexts. Mitchell shows how the notion of mother tongues as the bases for ethno-linguistic identification in present-day India required a polyglossic, multilingual situation to give way to (or at least be discursively overpowered by) a monolingual sensibility in which languages, now seen as attributes of persons, become objects of affective attachment. Such a shift in the experience of language is encapsulated, as Mitchell argues, in the difference between rasa, the term generally used in premodern India for pleasure or aesthetic taste in language, and abhimanam, the term most commonly used at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century to indicate affection, pride, devotion towards a specific language recognized as one’s “mother tongue.”

The book consists of a series of superbly reasoned chapters that draw on the close reading of a range of sources, including precolonial grammatical treatises, maps, literary works, lexicons, and primers, as well as ethnography. Each chapter presents a crucial way in which language ideology and linguistic practice changed in order to enable the structure of feeling embodied in devotion to one’s mother tongue, an emotion which would subsequently be channeled for political purposes to create the linguistically defined state of Andhra Pradesh in 1952. In the first chapter, Mitchell contrasts the idea of desa bhasa—language of the land, or language as one of the many features of a landscape, a tool one might use when in that place, prevalent in the early 19th century and before—with the term matr bhasha, literally “mother tongue,” which began to be used at the end of the 19th century. Embodying the notion of language as an inalienable aspect of each individual, the term matr bhasa makes Telugu into “the language of the people.”

This shift in conceptualizing the relationship between language and speakers required making language into a definable, bounded object that could be contrasted with other similarly defined and bounded languages. The second chapter shows how this process of objectification actually entailed personifying language: portraying language as having a life of its own, including a birth, kinship with other languages, stages of development, and eventual death. Mitchell shows how such modes of representing human lives in self-contained narratives of individual and autonomous subjectivity arose in South India in the 1870s and 1880s with the first novels and modern autobiographies and were extended to inanimate categories such as language. The third chapter, one of the most tightly and impressively reasoned in the book, examines shifts in categories used to represent languages introduced by colonial etymologists. Contrasting the Sanskrit vyakarana grammatical tradition, which classified language on the basis of intelligibility and appropriateness for use in literary composition, with colonial etymology, which classified languages on the basis of notions of history and common origin, Mitchell argues that colonial etymology introduced the notion of the “foreign” and the idea of “pure ” languages into a system which had previously not included such concepts. Devotion to one’s mother tongue, and the fear of loss or defilement of one’s language by another, are ideas that depend on the notion of linguistic purity.

The fourth and fifth chapters demonstrate how the objectification of language entailed a shift from language as learned in use and for particular kinds of content and contexts to language studied as a content-less medium, equivalent to any other language. By the end of the nineteenth...