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xiii Note on Transliteration I have used the Tamil Lexicon as the basis for transliterating Tamil words into English orthography with appropriate diacritical marks. There is a strong demarcation between spoken and written Tamil, or “low” and “high” Tamil. There are also marked political and practical distinctions between the more Sanskritized “Brahman”Tamil that my family speaks and other forms ofTamil. The language politics of the twentieth century has tried to make language a basis on which to invoke a homogeneous “non-Brahman” cultural tradition. There are, however, radical differences between the Tamil spoken by coastal villagers in Kanyakumari and that spoken by agricultural Dalit communities in Chengalpattu District—the two areas of fieldwork I draw on in this book. I have therefore found it important to retain the local flavor of speech and, on occasion, have rendered words and whole sentences in the vernacular, with diacritics. Similarly, the names of places and deities that may be little known outside the region are rendered with diacritics, whereas those that are easily recognized in their English written form as used in India have been left in that form. This applies also to names of castes and pan-Indian deities, for example, and to Sanskrit terms such as “dharma” that are familiar in English. ...

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