Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue

2. Making a Subject of Language

chapter 2 Making a Subject of Language To our mother Telugu, a garland of jasmine flowers Camphor flames to the mother who gave birth to us Our mother, who showers us freely with gold in her heart, Compassion in her gaze, riches and good fortune in her smile When the rippling Godavari River flows When the rapid Krishna River runs Golden crops ripen And milky white pearls appear The rare arts of Amaravati city The notes which spring from the throat of Tyagayya The sweet beautiful sounds from the pen of Tikkayya She is present and endures in all of these. With the strength of Rudramma, the faithfulness of Mallamma, The intellect and cleverness of Timmarusu, the power of Krishnarayalu We’ll keep singing your songs and dancing your dances Until our ears resound with your echoes. Hail Mother Telugu, hail Mother Telugu! —Shankarambadi Sundarachari, Ma Telugu Talliki Mallepu Danda [A Garland of Jasmine Flowers for Our Mother Telugu] Making a Subject of Language  By the twentieth century, in addition to the shift from language as a feature of the landscape to language as a defining characteristic of individuals, a second transformation was under way in the representation of language in southern India. The Telugu language, like many other languages used in India, increasingly came to be personified more elaborately than had ever previously been the case. It also, for the first time, began to be imagined and described as having a life of its own independent of the speakers and writers who used it. Although sometimes metaphorically portrayed as an eroticized maiden in which a poet might take pleasure, the Telugu language was experienced up to the nineteenth century primarily as a medium for written and oral communication; for linguistic play, artistic and musical pleasure, and the demonstration of technical virtuosity ; for religious and literary education; and for inscriptions, record keeping , and accounting. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Telugu language also began to be experienced as a new personified object of adoration, pride, and devotion, as a specific subject of study, pedagogy, and attention in its own right, and as a marker of identity. During the nineteenth century, the Telugu language acquired a number of new attributes , including a birth and, as Rama Mantena has argued in her work on language and historical time, stages of development and a progressive life narrative.1 It also gained a family tree, kinship relations with other languages, and the possibility of its own death. All of these acquisitions led eventually to a new full-fledged personification of the Telugu language by the early decades of the twentieth century. From this point onward, the Telugu language began to appear in a new personified and gendered form as Telugu Talli, “Mother Telugu,” represented in human-like form—often as a goddess—in descriptive narratives, poems, songs, and artistic renderings (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2).2 When Gurujada Sriramamurti published his Lives of Poets, not only was his use of the term abhimanulu to define a community of readers in relation toTelugu a new innovation, but the context in which it appeared— a text consisting entirely of biographical narratives of the lives of Telugu poets—was itself a new phenomenon when he published his first edition in 1878. The bringing together within a single printed collection of biographies of poets from a wide range of historical time periods, geographic locations, and sectarian backgrounds solely on the basis of their shared use of Telugu was unprecedented. As we have already seen in the case of Kavali Venkata Ramaswami’s publications, there were by the nineteenth cen-  Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India tury already contexts in which multiple poets and their work would have been brought together in a single manuscript, composition, or occasion. Before the nineteenth century, poets were sometimes anthologized and grouped together in association with a particular intellectual lineage, literary school, genre, or sectarian affiliation (e.g., Vira∆aivite, Vaisnavite, Jain), or by virtue of their common association with a particular dynasty, king, or other patron. Popular legend, for example, has retroactively associated eight great poets, the asta-dig-gajas, with the sixteenth-century court of Krishnadevaraya.3 However, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that these eight poets—and indeed, Krishnadevaraya himself—came to be celebrated as specificallyTelugu poets rather than as representatives of the rich multilingual literary culture...