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chapter 5 From the Art of Memory to the Practice of Translation: Making Languages Parallel When Vennelakanty Subba Rao made his recommendations to the Madras School Book Society in 1820, he was not just interested in the improvement of students’ use of unbounded, undifferentiated language in general. Nor was he exclusively interested in the improvement of one particular language over all others. Instead, his proposal specifically addressed “the better improvement, therefore, of the knowledge of the several languages.” Indeed, “the several languages” appeared in the early decades of the nineteenth century as the most important target for improving education within the districts subject to the administration of the Madras Presidency.1 Central to the attention and educational intervention addressed toward this newfound focus was the plural nature of the objects of knowledge in question. Reformers increasingly began to see the accumulation of linguistic skills, registers, and mediums acquired in context or through everyday usage as inadequate, believing it essential to mark them as explicit objects of instruction. But rather than grouping these objectives together by specific task—the deciphering of handwriting, the reading of scripts, the writing of official correspondence, the singing of the Ramayana, or the recitation of lexical knowledge—the objectives of education began to be defined along linguistic lines. Increasingly, students were expected not simply to add each of these accomplishments to their repertoire in whatever language or languages each could be done, but rather to acquire a more general basic knowledge of Telugu, Tamil, English, Sanskrit, Kannada, or Persian. As chapter 4 has argued, this reorientation of educational objectives increasingly meant studying the grammar of any one of these languages as a prerequisite for doing other things with the language. Although the vyakarana tradition had made grammatical knowledge of languages available for centuries in southern India, existing evidence suggests that gram- From the Art of Memory to the Practice of Translation  matical texts were never studied at the primary level as a prerequisite for later use of linguistic mediums. Instead, they tended to be taken up for advanced study by already established scholars and poets. Texts such as Mulaghatika Ketana’s thirteenth-century Andhra Bhasa Bhusanamu, the classic Andhra ≈abda Chintamani, popularly attributed to Nannaya Bhatt, and Kakunuri Appakavi’s seventeenth-century commentary upon it (see chapter 3), were not considered relevant to the basic education of schoolchildren . Educational reformers of the early decades of the nineteenth century correctly observed that these texts were seldom to be found in schools.2 What has been less remarked upon, however, is the fact that this new attention to educational objectives caused languages to begin to be thought of as separate, distinct, and, most of all, parallel mediums. With the advent of such a perspective, languages increasingly came to be viewed not as registers—their uses specific to particular tasks and contexts—but as complete in and of themselves, sufficient for any and all tasks and contexts within a newly geographically and linguistically defined community. Indeed by the end of the nineteenth century the idea of the existence of linguistic communities increasing replaced task or context as the primary factor in determining and defining language use. This had dramatic effects in numerous realms, but particularly upon notions of what it meant to be literate. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century someone in southern India might find it perfectly natural to compose an official letter in Persian, record a land transaction in Marathi, send a personal note to a relative in Telugu, perform religious ablutions in Sanskrit, and barter with the vegetable vendor in Tamil, all in the course of a single day. If one wasn’t comfortable with the language required for the specific task, then one engaged a specialist to perform the function—be it religious, administrative , or even the writing of a personal letter. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, such contextual and task-specific language use was increasingly converted into different registers of the same language. More and more, people came to expect that—if not all of these functions— then at least most of them could be performed within a single language. And what’s more, people increasingly began to feel that all of these things could be performed in any language equally well, though not necessarily by the same person. The shift to a recognition of “the several languages” that Subba Rao’s report marks paved the way for languages to be experienced as separate but equally acceptable mediums, eventually...

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