The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880-1945

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THE MESSAGE BEARERS .Saadararaj Tlaeoclore Baakaraa, born in Dharapuram in Coimbatore District, was drawn to the study of History, his subject, as a student at Madras Christian ' College. After taking his Master's Degree, he worked for a while at Tamilnadu Archives and later entered Indian Postal Service. Baskaran has been a member of the Advisory Committee for Tamilnadu Archaeological Department and the Advisory Board of the National Film Archives, Pune. He has written widely on -archaeology, art history, cinema and also on conservation and wild life. He was a Fellow at Tamilnadu Council of Historical Rcacarch during 1974-76. Dr, Clarlatopber Bak•r who has written the Introduction, is a reputed scholar in south Indian studies. Till recently he was teaching at Queens College, Cambridge. He is the author of Tm Pounc:s o, SoUJ'H INDIA 1920-1937 and coauthor, with Dr. David Wlllhbrook, of SoUTH INDIA; PounCAL INSTrnJTIONS AND POLITICAL ClfANOB 1880-19+0.

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THE

MESSAGE ·BEARE The Nationalist Politics and the

Entertainment Media in South India 1880-1945

S Theodore Baskaran ?' with an Introduction by Dr. Christopher Baker

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First Edition March 1981 Published by Cre-A: 268 Royapetta4 High Road Madras 600 014

C .6 Theodor6 Baskaran

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Printed at Rajsri Printers Madras 600 086 Jacket printed at Supaskreen Madras 600 020 Bound at Jupiter Press Madras 600 018 Jacket designed by A Ramachandran Drawings by K M Adimoolam, K Muralidharan Price Rs. 60.00

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Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

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Popular Theatre and the Rise of Nationalism 21 Popular Songs and the Civil Disobedience Movement 45 Birth of a New Medium; Silent Cinema 67 Patriotic Cinema: an Aspect of the Freedom Struggle 97 Film Censorship and Political Control in British India 127 Appendix

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Notes and References Bibliography Glossary Index

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The period with which this study is concerned, from 1880 to 1945, was a crucial one in the history of Indian nationalism. It was at this time that many Indian., first took high office in government, and for the first time electoral institutions and legislative methods were introduced . Their emergence, together with developments in agriculture and in the rest of the economy contributed to the formation of a powerful, dominantly rural elite. Opportunities for participation in politics drew a large number of wealthy landlords into wider political arena. At the same time, mass communicatiom-the cinema, radio, gramophone and mass circulation vernacular papers-began to bring people together as never before, thus making a critical phase in the formation of the Indian nation. They also played an important role in the religious and cultural revivals of this period. These new forms of entertainment served to form social consciousness by diffusing information on political events as well as by providing entertainment and possibilities of psychic participation. The content of these media should thus be studied in terms of its interaction with the audience rather than as a thing in itself. It is in this way that the Tamil popular stage and Tamil cinema have been studied 1oshow how they were not merely giving a new shape to old cultural form,, but were instruments ofchange iv making the masses politically conscious and facilitated the emergence of nationalinn in south India.

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This book looks at various aspects of the new entertainment fonnsdrama, cinema, gramophone and popular songs--during this momentous period and attempts to delineate their role in social and political changes. The book also attempts to interweave three separate strands. The first is a study of an important but neglected part of the nationalist movement. It was an age of mass politics, and mass tnedia were undoubtedly important. Secondly, it is a study of the form'iltive years of a regional cinema. Through the exigencies of the silent era, the conventions of the early talkie and the repressions of the British, the Tamil cinema was acquiring many of the characteristics that lasted long beyond our period. Thirdly, it is a piece of social history. In order to be commercially successful, popular media were bound to adjust themselves to the demands of the audience. For this reason, very often these media depicted only such attitudes as were already universally accepted by the vast audience and they may thus be taken as peculiarly sensitive indicators of the ideas and concerns of the common people. The themes, opinions and crusades .of popular entertainment were bound to teflect the ideas and aspirations of a society in an era of historic change. Indian historiography which started developing by the tum of the century depended largely on archaeology, epigraphy and occasionally, literary sources. The history written was mostly on the rise and fall of kingdoms and the military careers of monarchs. When scholars began to realise the inadequacy of such history, theytumed their attention t'owards the growth of ideas and movements. But while tracing the growth of popular movements in the modem ~riod, they relied on archival material, which is mostly governmental records. Even when they used the press as a source of information, it was almost entirely the English press that was . used. Popular sources were completely neglected. In fact, popular cultural forms were not recognised as a possible source material for the historian and t1.ll recently this rich source of information has been left untouched. To this extent the history of popular movements has remained uni-dimensional. Many of the major: south .Indian studies . done in recent years suffer from this handicap. . Traditional historiography has been snobbish about the material used .a nd has .neglected film as .a source. Historians familiar with printed works have yet to concede that films can be aids in serious·

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historical study. As a source of material for history, films have been little used till recently and in India this continues to be, so. Films were first recognised as possible historical documents in Gotingen, Germany in 1949 and some serious work has been going on there under the aegis of such figures as Walther Hubatsch and Percy Ernest Schramm. The Referat fuer ZeitgeschichtlicheFilmforschung und Fihndokumentation founded in 1953 produced and edited fihn documents o.f contemporary German history for research purposes. In 1961 Charles Samaram included in his massive manual L'HISToIRE ET SES METHODES a section on film sources by Georges Sadoul. By 1968 the awakening had spread to England. University College, London organised a conference on 'Fihn and Historian' which set off a chain reaction expressed in the form of similar conferences in Utrecht and Gotingen. In 1970 the Historian Film Committee was founded in the United States and it now runs a journal FILM AND Hin'OllY, which is the only periodical devoted to the subject. One of the better known historical works which have used fihn as a source material is Kevin Brownlow's THE W All, THE WEn AND THE WILDERNESS which has been described by the author as 'a journey ...... in search of history on film.'

An attempt has been made in this study to tap pop.u lar sourcesTamil newspapers, magazines, popular song books, gramophone records and films-to understand the spirit of the times. A number of writers, drama and film actors, playwrights, song-writers, and film-makers have been interviewed and their testimonies have been used as an adjunct to more conventional sources of historical information such as archival material. But the limitations of such attempts are many and obvious. Drama scripts are not available. Magazines and other popular publications have not been preserved in any organised manner. Very few films of the period have survived.

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ACKNOWIEDGEMENTS

In 1964, Charles Ryerson Jr. drew my attention to the popular entertainment forms of south India as an area of study and encouraged me to write an article which was later published in REuo10N & SocmTY Vol XI. 2. In 1974, a Fellowship from Tamilnadu Council of Historical Research provided an opportunity for me to enlarge my interest, the subject of this book. There, Chaturvedi Badrinath, the then Commissioner for Historical Rese?.rch, as my supervisor, guided me to raise many questions. S. Krisl'-.naswamy introduced me to various persons in the film industry. Later, when I spent some time at the Film & TV Institute, Pune, I came to know Satish Bahadur. This book owes much of its conceptual development to the discussions I had with him. P.K . Nair, Curator of the National Film Archives, Pune, screened films from the Archives for me. I have a special word of thanks for Christopher Baker for writing the Introduction and for so painstakingly going through the typescript and forsuggesting improvements. S. Mance gave valuable editorial help and translated the popular songs in tl'-.e text. Modem Theat~es, J . Susheela Devi, K.T. Rukmani, Dr. V . Jeevanandham,Dr.N. Kalavathy, Roja Muthaiya Chettiar and P.K. Nair gave the photographs. John K. Isaac of the Photographic Department of the United Nations reproduced some of the photographs. P. Sankaralingam prepared the index. V. Sambasivam helped me with typing. To all these friends I am deeply indebted.

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INTRODUCTION

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The political movement against colonial domination in India was closely associated with a revival of artistic forms and cultural activity of many different kinds. 'Revival' is probably the wrong word and 're-creation' would be a more accurate description, for the imperial rulers imported new technologies of communication that the artists of India could not ignore: the printed books, the newspaper, the photograph, the sound recording, the broadcast, the cinematograph- and with them the cultural forms of the novel, European classical drama, journalist editorial, perspective painting and moving picture. 'New Indians' not only revived, but also innovated. Moreover, while the aim of much of this 'recreation' was to stress the autonomy and authenticity of Indian culture, Europeans played no small part in the process. Sometimes the Europeans merely provoked a response-as was the case with many of the cases of literacy and religious revivalism in northern India, but in other cases they lent active assistance-most notably through the contribution of European oriental scholars to the Bengal renaissance. But the European role was rarely creative in its own right. It merely helped to uncover old strains in the local culture and mako their echoes reverberate through the memories of the region. But while this process is widely recognised as an important part of the history of modern India, it has received little scholarly attention and such studies as do exist tend to cluster around parti-

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cular regions and particular types of cultural activity-Bengal's literary renaissance is the most obvious example, while the Arya Samaj, Maharashtrian religion and historiography, and the development of Hindi have also been noticed . There have been works on the literary and musicological revival in Tamilnadu (1), and so S. T . Baskaran's work cannot be said to be the first work on the relationship of politics and culture in the South. Yet even if it is not innovative in regional terms, this book certainly covers aspects of the relationship between politics and cultural revivalism that have not been studied in any part of India. It adds considerably to our knowledge of the later stages of the nationalist movement and sheds light on another fascinating, important but still obscure subject-the importance of the cinema industry in the politics of modern Tamilnadu. The book is clearly new in theme and · methodology because it chooses to concentrate on popul,ar forms of entertainment and communication. Whereas other works ofthis sort have generally stuck to literature, language, the press and classical music, Baskaran looks at popular poems and songs, local theatricals, popular recorded music and the cinema film. We can now see that there were two clear stages to the process by which political regeneration and cultural revival inspired and assisted one another, and that the two stages differed considerably. The first stage belonged largely to the elite of the cities and major towns, while the second was deliberately much more popular and populist. It was not surprising that the 'high' culture of the cities reacted against the strains of imperialism more quickly than the popular culture of the mass of people. The priests, nobles, courtiers, officials and professionals of the city were quickly and directly affected by ·the imperial contact; m~ny of their artists and entertainers deserted the cities and took refuge in the courts of indigenous princes and nobles, where ancient arts were preserved in isolation and tended to become stereotyped and dull. Later, there came attempts to regenerate the artistic and academic life of the city, with a definite political as well as aesthetic purpose. Such regeneration could help restore some of the self-confidence destroyed by the ease of colt,nial conquest, could provide evidence

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to rebut the colonial rulers' claims to a superior culture and civilisation, and could lay the foundations for a new claim to national identity. The second stage was very different, for by the time it emerged in the 1920s and 1930s the political world was utterly changed. The politics of 'reasoned debate' had been replaced by the politics of mass demand. The confidence of the intellectual was now much less important than the mobilisation of the people. This is the area of Baskaran's study. He describes in great detail how poems, songs, plays and films became vital carriers of nationalist ideas in mofussil Tamilnadu, and how they provoked the anger of the British government. But it is important to recognise that Baskaran's study has implications beyond a simple essay in the techniques of mass politics. It helps us to understand why in post-Independence India certain cultural forms so clearly dominate and certain others so clearly languish. To see this more clearly, we will have to look back at the first stage of cultural re-creation and observe its fate. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century Tamilnadu, the dominant intellectual interests were not in' literature, painting and poetry (as was often the case in other regions of India) but in history and language. The generation and then degeneration of these intellectual pursuits can provide the background to Baskaran's study of later nationalism, and a perspective on the Independence period that foUowed.

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The interest in south Indian history began with British officials. In part this arose from the British rulers' _a ttempts to legitimate aspects of their governance by aligning their methods to ancient practice. This prompted works like F. W. Ellis' PAPERS ON MIRASI RIGHT and influenced Wilks' work on Mysore (1810-17). In part it arose from the foreigners' curiosity about the country. Elther way, it was helped by the wealth of sources scattered through the region-inscribed on copper plates and temple walls, written on cadjan leaves, or locked in the folk-memory.

Four developments in the middle and late nineteenth century provided the basis fpr a thorough assessment of the region's history.

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The first was the organisation and cataloguing of the remarkable collection of manuscripts on south India collected by Colonel Colin Mackenzie. Wilks had used these manuscripts, but after Mackenzie's death in 1821, they had a difficult history. Large parts of the collection had been sent to London before Mackenzie's death, most of the remainder that did not deal with south India followed in the 1820s, and these London holdings were catalogued by H. H. Wilson. But the south Indian collection lay in the Madras College, in something of a mess, until in 183 7 the Madras Literary Society persuaded government to support William Taylor's efforts to produce a catalogue, which appeared in 1862 (.2). Mackenzie's collection contained poems, stories, historical works, epics, religious discourses, treatises on medicine and astrology, erotic manuals, plays and children's tables. It was a mammoth and quite extraordinary source, and some of its materials were used in the second important development, the writing of the district gazetteers. Some of this work was allotted to officers who had already shown their skill and interest in local history-notably J.H. Nelson, whose MADURA CouNTRY (1868) is perhaps the most outstanding of the manuals. All of the authors showed the possibility of using such of the epigraphic and manuscript sources as were already avajlable, added to the oral histories of great fa.milies and distinctive communities in the district, to write in{ormative and suggestive histories. Mackenzie's collection had included three volumes containing 8,000 inscriptions, but these were only a fraction of the total number of inscriptions in existence. The next development was t_he systematic collection of epigraphic material. The Archaeological Survey of Southern India published Robert Sewell's L1sT OF ANTIQ.UARIAN REMAINS IN THE PRESIDENCY OF MADRAS in 1882-4, and James Burgess' TAMIL AND SANSKRIT INSCRIPTIONS in 1886. But it was with the beginning of the series of ANNUAL REPORTS ON SOUTH INDIAN EPIGRAPHY a year later, followed by the EPIORAPHIA INDICA in 1892 and EPIORAPHIA CARNATICA in 1894 that the collation and study of inscriptions really began in earnest. By 1919 the work was sufficiently advanced for V. Rangacharya to

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put out his remarkable work of indexing and reference, A ToPoORAPHJCAL

UST OF INSCRIPTIONS OF MADRAS PRESIDENCY.

Finally, there were attempts to unearth and publish the region's ancient literary texts, particularly those bearing on religion and history. This had gone on in a haphazard fashion throughout the century, and had received some help from scholars like G.U. Pope who translated several works into English. But this work gained proper momentum only when U. Swaminatha Aiyar, encouraged by Minakshisundaram Pillai and later commissioned by the Madurai Tamil Sangham, began to unearth and publish not only Hindu texts but also many of the Jain, Buddhist and secular works that had been suppressed in the intervening centuries. By 1900, Swaminatha Aiyar had found the two great Sangham anthologies, and this single discovery revolutionised the possibilities of writing the early history of south India (3). By the turn of the century, the sources were well enough laid out for historians to use them to political effect. In particular they could be used to find in the past a Golden Age which could · be contrasted with the poor state of Tamilnadu under imperial rule. Such works could also equip Tamil civilisation with a depth and lineage which would enable Tamilians to regain self-confidence and to rebut any accusations of their lack of history and culture. The most remarkable of these books was V. Kanakasabhai Pillai's THE TAMILS 1800 YEARS Aoo, published in 1904. Kanakasabhai's book, and others that soon followed, drew heavily on the evidence of the Sangham poets, supplemented by some inscriptional evidence and some extracts from the Mackenzie collection, to paint a picture of a pristine and sophisticated Tamilian society. But while this interpretation of Tamil history might swell the Tamilian's pride in his own people' and culture, it also suggested consequent problem.'! of historical exegesis that led to bitter disputes. The first, and less important, of these sets of disputes ranged over the dating, chronology and authenticity of the Sangham works. The second, and more important, considered the question of how such a utopia was lost. Some scapegoat had to be found who could be blamed for the fall from grace, the evident

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decline of Tamil civilization from the heights it had apparently attained in the new histories. Three obvious culprits wereavailablethe Aryans, the Muslims and the British. It was politically most apt to blame the British, and they bore the brunt in no small measure, but few of the writers could ignore the evidence for some considerable decline before the coming of the European. The culpability of the northern Muslims, and more especially the Aryan Brahmin, became the central problem of works written in the first quarter of the twentieth century (notably by J . M. Nallaswami Pillai, Maraimalai Adigal, M. Srinivasa Iyengar, S. K. Krishnaswami Iyengar and P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar). It led to fierce controversies over the use of sources and over the promotion of racial hatred between Hindu and Muslim, Brahmin and nonBrahmin. By the second decade of the twentieth century, these academic disputes-and particularly the controversy over the historical role of the immigrant Brahmin-crept into the arena of political debate. It was soon clear that the study of history, which had begun as a way to inspire the Tamilian, now. threatened to divide him from his neighbour. The works of the academics had been based on scanty and imperfect evidence. These imperfections had led to scholastic differences, and these differences had lent themselves to political debasement. From now on it was clear that the intellectual study of the region's history could not safely contribute to political resurgence. Rather it must isolate itself from the dangers ~ · political distortion. At this point, the discipline of history divided. 'Coarse' history remained an intrinsic part of political myth-making, steadily declining in credibility and intellectual stature. 'Fine' history disappeared into the universities and research rooms and did not emerge until devotees like K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, T.V. Mahalingam, N. Venkataramanayya, K. K . Pillai and C. M . Ramachandra Chettiar had laid down new standards for the deployment of the source material available in the region. In the case of history, there was no love-match between politics and intellectual activity. After the foreplay, they had turned their backs on one another, and from now on they would not even hold hands in the dark.

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The question of language is a little more complex. It is not difficult to see why it has excited the Tamilian with a fervour that in other countries is usually reserved for questions of territory, race or religion. The Tamils are not a well-defined group in racial terms. There is little to separate them from the Dravidian-speaking neighbours, and there is too much evidence in their early history (and their anthropology) of the admixture of a number ofdifferent peoples. Further, their more recent history has scattered a number of different and still distinct peoples throughout their country-particularly Telugus and K.annadas, but also Gujaratis, Arabic Muslims and a number of other north Indians-and has distributed many of the Tamil-speakers in a diaspora that stretches from the Caribbean, through South Africa and Ceylon, to southeast Asia. Finally, the Tamils have probably never in their history at all owed allegiance to the same, Tamil ruler. The Pallava, Pandya and Chola dominions of early history were little more than sub-imperialisms of a single region, and the Tamil country since the fourteenth century has suffered from internal fragmentation and a constant stream of external invaders. Against this background it is not surprising that the Tamilian defines himself so much by his language and the cultural inheritance that conveysthe Sangham poems, the bhakti hymns, the Kural and Kamban's • epic story. But it was developments in the nineteenth century that helped to shape the modern concern for the Tamil language. The subject arose because, as it stood, Tamil was not really suitable for the function it now had to perform. In the later nineteenth, Tamil was rapidly put to use in administration, Western-style education, journalism and other forms of creative prose-writing. And yet, before this period, there was no strong tradition of 'administrative Tamil', and no settled and accepted manner of writing Tamil prose. Since Tamilnadu had been prey to foreign rulers in its recent history, the language of bureaucracy had been Telugu, Marathi, Persian and then English. Of course there were Tamil terms and practices used by village officials and zamindari clerks, but these were often deliberately arcane, always very localised, and provided no foundation for a wider use. Meanwhile, literary Tamil had

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been developed towards the richness of poetic effect. It was marvellously equipped with figures of speech, a vocabulary to express all shades of emotional experience, and a grammar flexible enough to accommodate these flourishes. Almost everything written in Tamil was in poetry, composed according to strict (and often awkward) conventions. Almost the only form of prose-writing was the urai, the commentary on poetic works, which followed many of the styles and conventions of its subject matter (4). But there was no punctuation and no compunction to separate individual words or affix diacritical marks in order to avoid ambiguity. It was a language for scholars only and there was an enormous gap between this literary masterpiece and the spoken tongue. It would clearly require considerable transformation to suit the new demands of administration, education and mass communication. The story of the creation of modern prose Tamil has received little attention, which is surprising because it is a fascinating subject and there have been many studies of other aspects of the Tamil language. The subject would require much greater expertise in language and linguistics than I possess, so here I can only record some extremely inexpert impressions. Two trends in the development of modern Tamil prose, however, seem clear. The first was an inclination to retain as many of the rules of poetical composition as possible, rather than to adjust the new, written form towards the conventions of ordinary speech. The second was a tendency to modify and supplement these poetical rules wherever necessary, with regulations and conventions adopted from the study of the European classical languages. These trends helped create a written language that was some way removed from the spoken tongue and this in turn gave birth to controversies over the nature and usage of language. Once again Europeans were prominent in the early stages. The -missionaries of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries :were the first Europeans who took the trouble to learn Tamil well. They were motivated by a desire to understand the local culture and religion, ·so that they might be better equipped to ridicule and refute it, and to be able themselves to write proselytising works in Tamil. Proenca, Ziegenbalg, de Nobili and Bcschi

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were the most important figures. They had to learn Tamil by ear, without literary aids, and only when they had mastered the spoken language did they progress to a study of the script and then to the literature. When they themselves came to write Tamil, they found that there was no tradition of converting the spoken language into writing and so they were bound to use many of the conventions of the poetical language. Yet their early acquaintance with the language through sound rather than script, and their desire to cultivate an audience, meant that they did try to 'demoticise' their prose to some extent. They attempted to write down 'Tamil as she was spoke' using some of the conventions of literary Tamil (5). But after this beginning, the tendency of m;ssionary writing was to adopt more of the canons of poetical writing, and less of the conventions of common speech, rather than vice versa. The reasons for this tendency are clear. The missionaries felt that greater sophistication of style, even though it might make their works rather more arcane, would lend greater status to their message. Beschi noted: 'Among the Natives themselves, very few can now be found who are masters of the higher dialect. He among them who is acquainted even with its rudiments, is regarded with respect; but should he quote their abstruse w:orks, he is listened to with fixed admiration' (6). Thus Beschi became a student of Tamil. He unearthed some of the classical treatises on poetical grammar, and also compiled two of his own-one on Kodum-Tamil, the 'common' language, and the other on Sen-Tamil, the 'pure' or 'literary' version (7). In the introduction to the latter he justified the use of a missionary's time on such an apparently obscure task on the grounds that it would enable his colleagues to understand the religious literature of the Tamilian Hindu, and to reply with equivalent literary effect. At roughly the same time, Ziegenbalg was also engaged in studying literary Tamil - he pioneered the printing of Tamil in Europe with his GRAMMATICA DAMULICA in 1716 - and when he began his tran.,lation of the Bible he endeavoured to use a poetical style that would, to his mind, match the sublimity of the content.

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This tencten"y :.., ...aopt 1nore of the poetical language into the new Tamil prose continued in the next period of rapid change in the mid-nineteenth century. Again missionaries and proselytising works were important in the story but there were other important influences besides. First, there was the need to produce grammar, dictionaries and primers to serve in the education of.British officials in India. Secondly, there was the need to translate textbooks into Tamil for use in the growing number of primary and secondary schools. Thirdly, there was the influence of the study of comparative grammar, which had formed such an important part of the intellectual life of Europe in the eighteenth century. The need to educate official recruits was perhaps the most important, and curious, influence. The nineteenth century grammarians noted that the classical Tamil grammars- principally the Tolkappiyam and the Nannul-were written for native Tamilspeakers and thus of little use for enlightening the foreigners, and that the works of Zeigenbalg and Beschi had stuck fairly close to these sources and were thus almost as obscure. It is hardly surprising that when the new grammarians started to write works more useful for Europeans, they should draw on their own education in. Greek and Latin classics. The influence of the · study of European classics on the form that the new Tamil prose would take was not entirely new in this period. Beschi wrote his grammar of Sen-Tamil in Latin, and Ziegenbalg wrote several of his works in Latin. But now it was more intense. Dr. B. G . Babington, who translated Beschi into English, was quite happy to use the techniques of classical study to help the exposititon of Tamil grammar (8) . The result was a strange mixture. On the one hand, there was a tendency to revere the traditional, poetic grammars and to move very strongly towards the more elevated style of literary Tamil. Beschi's manuscript on Tamil, which had never actually been published, was dug out by F . W. Ellis, published in translation by Babington in 1822, and then published in the original Latin by A. C. Burnell in 1876(9) . The first of the principal nineteenth-century Tamil grammarians, C. T. E. Rhenius, took as his assistant the latest exponent of a well-established school of literary grammarians from theMadurai district, and wrote his grammar in the ancientTamilian

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form of stanzas, rather in the more westernised form with exercises ( 10). On the other hand, the infi_u ence of the European classics led to a far greater concern with strict rules of declension and conjugation, with correct syntax, with standardised spelling and with correct rules for creating compound words. Both of these influences tended to draw the new Tamil prose farther away from common speech, and the extent to which this had occurred is evident from the criticisms that the nineteenthcentury grammarians heaped upon their predecessors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The nineteenth-century gl'.animarians consistently talked of the 'errors' and 'vulgarisms' in the earlier works. They pointed out that the only Tamil prose works which Beschi and his contemporaries had been able to use were translations from Sanskrit, generally done by Brahmins, and overloaded with Sanskrit words and heavy, pedantic constructions. They contrasted their own efforts with the low, impure, hybrid works of their predecessors ( 11). Rhenius was the most explicit in this respect. He thought Beschi's efforts were creditable, but full of 'vulgarisms', and was so keen to make his own work approximate to the canons of literary Tamil composition that he eliminated 'errors' at each reissue. On the eighteenth-century works, he noted: 'They did in their days what they could do in Tamil literature, and we are greatly indebted to them for the degree' of knowledge they had given us of the Tamil language. But they all have failed in giving us pure Tamil; they have mixed vulgarisms with grammatical niceties and left us in want of a regularly digested syntax.' He also made it clear how he felt the new prose should be ·shaped. He insisted that his was not a grammar of high Tamil. 'But it is a grammar of the vernacular, as it is spoken by well-bred Tamili_ans, yet so as to avoid the errors against grammar which are found amongst them. It steers between the high and vulgar Tamil, avoids the intricacies of the former and the barbarism of the latter' (12).

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Twentieth-century gr;1.mmarians and commentators have continued this trend. In his work on THE CONTRIBUTION OP EUROPEAN SoHoLARS TO TAMIL, Dr. K. Meenakshisundaram found (p. 279) that de Nobili's writings were 'disadvantageously filled with Sanskrit words and entangled with outdated words and phrases.' In his preface to the facsimile publication of Proenca's dictionary of 1679 X. S. Thani Nayagam noted disapprovingly that 'the compiler and the sources whic:h he used seem to have been dependent to a large extent on reproducing sounds as heard in the speech of rural and littoral districts' ( 13). A. H. Arden, whose grammar appeared in 1891 and quickly became a standard work, made it quite clear how much correct Tamil prose should diverge from common speech. 'The object of this book', he noted in the preface, 'is to present the reader with a _grammar of common Tamil only, as it is correctly spoken and written. In ordinary conversation and writing several vulgarisms and colloquialisms are used. These can easily be mastered by observation and by intercourse with the people of the country, and therefore they are only briefly noted in these pages' (14). Thus one of the main influences on the creation of a Tamil prose style was the European, and particularly the mission, interest in the language. Their version of prose style dominated the first tran.,lations from European languages into Tamil, gained a wide and impressionable audience through textbooks composed or tran.,lated in the nineteenth century (the prolific grammarian G. U. Pope was very active in this respect), (15) and laid some of the groundwork for Tamil journalism; most of the Tamil printing presses that appeared in the nineteenth century were missionowned and the first Tamil journals were mostly Christian publications. Moreover, many of the non-Christian works in prose Tamil that appeared soon after were counterblasts to the mission works (Arumuga Navalar, for instance, wrote diatribes against the missionaries) and tended to adopt many of the stylistic conventions and pretensions of their opponents. The other main influence on the shape of prose Tamil was a direct inheritance from the tradition of the ruai commentary. This sort of writing, which had never completely died out since

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its heyday in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, also received a fillip from the advent of printing and from the renewed academic interest in history (and in language itself). While this form of prose differed from that influenced by the European missionaries and grammarians, it was if anything even more removed from the spoken tongue, even more deliberately a scholastic product. In the second half of the nineteenth century, while Tamil prose was in this emergent form, there came the great expansion and proliferation of its use. When Miron Winslow published his famous dictionary in 1862, he noted in the preface (p. vii) that while no one doubted the poetical elegance of the Tamil language, 'its prose style is yet in a forming state and will well repay the labour of accurate scholars in moulding it properly. Many Natives, who write poetry already, cannot write a page of correct prose.' By 1900, Tamil publication was in full swing in textbooks, religious booklets and journals. The first Tamil newspaper, "the SwADESAMITRAN appeared in 1880 (and became a daily in 1898), sixty new Tamil periodicals appeared in the last twenty years of the century, and the first attempt at a novel in Tamil was published in 1879. This curious background to the development of the prose language, and then the speed with which it was put to a variety of uses, provided the setting for academic and then political concern about the nature of the Tamil language. This concern concentrated on two main points. The first was the historical significance of language; the second was its modern form. In both cases, the pattern followed closely along the lines of the concern for history; what began as an intellectual and academic interest developed into a political controversy, after which the intellectual and political interests divided. The interest in the history of Tamil can be traced back through the work of Robert Caldwell. Among his many contributions to the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Tamilnadu was his attempt to use ideas derived from the European study of comparative grammar to illuminate the history of southern India. The grammatical rules that were the conclusion ofothers' works were no more than the starting point for Caldwell's discussion of the

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relation of Tamil to the other Dravidian languages of the south of India, and of the relation of the south as a whole to the Aryan north. The conclusions that he set forth in his monumental A COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF THE DRAVIDIAN OR SOUTH INDIAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES (16) virtually created 'the Dravidian problem' in its modernform, and Professor E. F. lrschick has lucidly explained the legacy of Caldwell to later writers ( 17). By the turn of the century, the question of the exact historical relation of the south of India to the north had become politically important, and would become more so as the prospect of an independent India ruled from the north grew steadily nearer. The second discussion took up where Pope and Arden had left off. The Madurai Tamil Sangham found a new lease of life, and began a journal in 1903. Another Sangham was founded in Madras in 1907 intended to 'encourage the study of Tamil classics and to bring the Tamil language so as to fit it to modern times' (18). It was significant that the Madurai Sangham's journal was called SEN-TAMIL, the title usually applied to the classical and poetic form of language, even though the Sangham was as much concerned with the nature of modern prose as with research into the classics. In this journal and in a number of learned works - M. Srinivasa Iyengar's TAMIL STUDIES (1914), S.S. Bharati's TAMIL CLASSICS AND TAMILAKAM (1912), S. K. Devasik.hamani's THE TAMILS AND THEIR LANGUAGE ( 1919)-there was a clear continuity with the nineteenth-century grammarians' tendency to favour strict linguistic rules and more elements of the classical, poetic language. There then followed a battle. Some authors argued that the use of the new "pure" prose was an explicit political act, an assertion of Tamilian civilisation in the face of the European rulers and in the face of the immigrants from the north. There were some linkages with those who wished to use history in the same light and indeed Maraimalai Adigal wrote his historical tracts in this language ( 19). Others like the great journalist Tiru Vi Ka argued for a more tempered language, one that was still exclusively and aggressively Tamil, but was more accessible. He stuck to the grammatical rules, but he used constructions that were simpler and clearer than the poetical fancies of Maraimalai Adigal, and he was

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not quite so strict about vocabulary. He was not scared of the old Sanskrit word, and while he might use archaisms for rhetorical or humorous effect, he generally stuck to the vocabulary of common speech. His form of the language could be used for the short, snappy sentences of journalism and it set the style for the Tamil press (20) . There was also a third faction that wanted a much simpler demotic language. They were equally proud of Tamil, they were reluctant to use Sanskrit words but not dogmatic about it, but most of all they were afraid that the language would become an aesthete's and intellectual's plaything, rather than a medium of political communication and a forerunner of social change. They were concerned that written Tamil should be accessible to the barely literate, that it should reflect the sounds that made up common speech rather than the rules of the medieval and modern grammarians (21). C. Subramania Bharathi was prominent among such writers, though the argument is implicit in his poetical and prose writings, rather than explicit in any manifesto. He is of course remembered chiefly for the quality of his poetry, but it should also be noted that this was as much a linguistic as an artistic achievement. He managed to convey everyday thoughts, political messages, children's rhymes and romantic sentiments in language that was accessible to the man of ordinary education, yet also pleased the literati. Few others were so unquestionably 1successful, but then few are blessed with Bharathi's talents. This search for a demotic style increased in the 1930s, with an upsurge in Tamil journalism and the appearance of journals, most notably ANANDA VtKATAN, publishing short stories, serials and humorous pieces (22) . These differences in style- inevitable in the light of the recent history of the language- soon developed into fierce arguments over the nature of 'correct Tamil' and these arguments soon took on a political colouring. Some of these arguments concerned the nature of grammar and the rules of syntax, but the most fiery argument centred around the use of loan-words-Sanskrit, Urdu, English- in the ' correct' form of the tongue. Ardent nationalists strove to exclude all English words, while others criticised such writers as for making the language unnecessarily clumsy and

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parochial. Those who claimed that it was possible to identify a Tamil civilisation that pre-dated any northern influence were careful to avoid any Sanskrit words, and this became a fetish of some of those who identified the non-Brahmins with the original inhabitants of the region and the Brahmins with later invaders. Opponents of this school considered this not only a bad and maliciously d_ivisive reading of history, but also a pedantic attitude to a language which clearly employed many Sanskrit words in common speech. By the l 920s, the interests in Tamil on the part of the academics and intellectuals on one side, and the politicians on the other, had begun to diverge. The academics settled down to a close study of the early history of the language ·and a minute, painstaking study of its linguistic rules. The politicians turned the grandeur and purity of the Tamil language into a slogan. But unlike the case of the study of history, language retained and even increased its importance in politics in the years to come. But the politicians were interested in Tamil not as a creative medium, nor even to any great extent as developing means of communication, but rather as an artefact, a symbol, a way of defining the harassed people at the tip of the subcontinent. Any chance that the political energy of the late nationalist and early independence periods might inspire an equally creative, critical and energetic literature was virtually lost.

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Thus in the end revivalism in history and language had not sustained revival in politics; rather the divisions among the intell!!ctuals and the divisions among the politicians had fostered each other. Moreover, this style of cultural regeneration, because it was so deliberately a minority interest, had always been vulnerable to the imperial rulers' antagonism. The leaders were so few and so visible that it was easy to monitor their activities and put them in jail if really necessary. It was also easy for the British to evade the intellectuals' attack by shifting their own ideological ground. In the nineteenth century the British had tended to justify their raj on the grounds that India was too backward to rule itself. The revival

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of In(jian intellectual life, in forms that the British could recognise and appreciate, emptied that argument of all its force, but in its place the British now argued that the intellectuals and politicians of 'New India' were a microscopic elite, lacking the popular support that could legitimate their leadership. Political conviction in the twentieth century would have to be measured in terms of mass support. This was also the logieal corollary of the ideas of liberaldemocratic nationalism, already adopted by Indian politicians, and it was the basic requirement of the new governmental institutions (elective legislatures and local boards) that the British~:were imposing on India. The character of politics had changed and the character of nationalist activity changed with it. Thus even as the studies of history and language subsided into scholastic quarrel and political sloganeering, some of the participants moved away from these areas and towards an interest in popular culture and mass communication. Some wriiers and ·poefs, 1riterested in tne" aeveTopm:emor 1"alnfl•but bored by the pedantry of the scholasts, began to experiment with forms of Tamil prose that could reflect common speech and everyday emotions more closely than the architectonic language of the Tamil purist. Others moved into the fields of activity that Baskaran describes -writin.g songs and pli\¥3 designed for a wide audience, and later modifying these activities to suit and to exploit the new techn9!01ies .Q.f th.~ .~JI!!