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Introduction: A New Emotional Commitment to Language I find only one way out. It is to lay down life with no desire, with no hate and with determination. From yesterday I felt that if I delay I should be committing a sin. I am prepared to go through the ordeal of laying down my life. —Potti Sriramulu, letter dated September 15, 1952, one month before beginning his final and fatal fast-unto-death What conditions must exist in order for someone to be willing to die, not for a nation, but for a language? How must one think and feel about language for this to be possible? Southern India has become famous during the twentieth century as a place where many have appeared to experience such heightened passion for language that they have been willing to sacrifice their lives for its sake. On December 15, 1952, the fifty-eight-day fast of the linguistic state activist Potti Sriramulu culminated dramatically in his death in the south Indian city of Madras (today known as Chennai). Sriramulu had undertaken his well-publicized fast-unto-death in order to demand the formation of a separate Telugu-speaking administrative territory within the newly independent Indian nation, with Madras city as its capital.1 His dissatisfaction with the arbitrary administrative regions established under British colonial rule and inherited by the new nation after the departure of the colonial government in 1947 (see Map 1), and his frustration with the marginalization of concerns raised by speakers of Telugu within the existing multilingual state, drew on the larger movement for a linguistically defined Telugu province launched forty years earlier.2 The movement culminated in the days immediately following Sriramulu’s  Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India death, as news of his fast’s fatal conclusion caused people in towns and cities as far as 700 kilometers to the north to flock to those sites where news arrived first—the local railway stations. Soon reports of violence, processions , destruction of railway property, stoppage of trains, and looting began to circulate. In numerous towns, scores of others met their deaths or were injured by bullets as police struggled to maintain order amidst the unruly crowds. Just four days later, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru responded to the widespread disorder, read by journalists, politicians, and historians alike as irrefutable evidence of the collective will of the people, by declaring the formation of a new Telugu linguistic state within the Indian nation. The new state was to be known as Andhra State and was to be created from the uncontested Telugu-speaking districts of the existing Madras State, though without the inclusion of the multilingual capital city of Madras (see Map 2).3 Four years later additional Telugu-speaking districts from the neighboring state of Hyderabad were added, and the name of the state was changed to Andhra Pradesh. Although pathbreaking in setting the stage for the later linguistic reorganization of the Indian nation, the historical transformations that invested new importance in the Telugu language did not affect this particular language alone. South Asia has witnessed the twentieth-century rise of widespread and unprecedented commitments to what are today claimed as “mother tongues,” a concept not attested in any Indian language prior to the second half of the nineteenth century.4 Numerous public protests, suicides, and other dramatic forms of evidence of emotional commitments to one’s mata bhasa, mat® bhasa, or taymo≠i, literally “mother tongue,” began to appear throughout the subcontinent during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Sriramulu’s fast itself followed two previous attempts at a fast-unto-death for a separate Telugu linguistic state undertaken by G. Sitaramaiah, known as Swami Sitaram.The first of Swami Sitaram’s fasts, in August and September of 1951, was given up after thirty-five days, and the second, in May and June of 1952, was aborted after three weeks in response to appeals made by a number of political leaders. On February 21, 1952, the same year as Sriramulu’s fast, in the northeastern part of the subcontinent in what is today Bangladesh, four young men sacrificed their lives to police bullets during language riots in the name of the Bengali language—martyrs whose deaths are today commemorated by an international annual “Mother Language Day.”5 In 1960–1961, Sant Fateh Singh and Master Tara Singh both undertook fasts-unto-death to demand that the Indian government [3.15.229.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11:27...

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