Tamil oratory and the Dravidian aesthetic: Democratic practice in South India brings to the fore alongside ongoing inquiries into language ideologies the equally critical place of the linguistic aesthetic, which informs both the emotional and material structuring of everyday experience. The text is a query into the aesthetic reflecting and informing political communicative practices and sociopolitical structures in mid-twentieth century Tamilnadu, India. Richly ethnographic and detailed simply in its complex theoretical analysis, Tamil oratory will long make significant contributions to the anthropology of democracy and current interventions into the role of publics in political process.
Bate centers the book on a major oratorical revolution in Tamilnadu in the 1940s that enabled larger social transformations informing democratic process in this post-Independent state. This revolution came about as men and women leaders took to the political stage with a new political oratorical style, what Bate refers to as the Dravidianist political paradigm, based on the highly formalized, elaborate, “proper” register of Tamil, known as centamil. Before the 1940s, this register had only ever been found in written literary and scriptural contexts. Though it was old, the fact it was being spoken was very new. For certain, speaking it from a stage in public was heard in stark contrast to the everyday Tamil (kochaitamil) of these revolutionary speakers, their audiences, and even their predecessors on the stage. Despite significant accessibility problems for those who could not learn it (to include many new politicians of the revolution!), centamil was a necessary tool to the revolution, as its very use in oratory signaled a Tamil linguistic and civilizational antiquity that projected its aesthetic quality onto these new and modern democrats. Though new to the political stage, centamil and its speakers came to embody antiquity and iconically index a unified and pure Tamil-ness vital to the aesthetic of the modern state and to its democracy.
To explore the role of the aesthetic in informing and reflecting how people experience and participate in objectified Tamil-ness, Bate closely follows political oratory, debate in meetings, forms of public praise, billboard advertisements, and newspaper poetry to engage with the ways in which the logic of these practices reflect and are productive of particular semiosocial-phenomenological worlds. Describing moments of entry and rebuff into these worlds, Bate shares his experience around issues with access and associated anxiety when inquiring into the world of the politician, particularly his rhetoric. Following the aesthetics of these forms of poetic action and the genuine emotional stakes of this material shift in register (147), Bate gives great clarification to the semiotic, embodied processes through which apperceptions of the newness of old things came to undergird modern democratic subjectivities in south India. Tracing this linguistic shift as it entailed transformations in the vision of social and political life, Bate reveals what is at stake in determining political authority and the development of a vernacular democratic “nation” and its “people.”
Descriptively and ethnographically, Bate builds the aesthetic of an ever-present oldness in Tamilnadu for his readers beginning on the first page. From India's geological antiquity to its archaeology revealing layers upon layers of human effort and history, Bate describes a setting that continually makes way for the new but always impresses it with the old. As Dravidianist orators transformed themselves from mere political representatives into avatars of Tamil itself, new spaces were carved out in the urban landscape to answer to this vision and correspond to this aesthetic of antiquity, of endurance, and, with this came additional neoclassical signs and practices to complement and reproduce the aesthetic. Bate follows many of these, namely public address at political meetings, common forms of praise poetry performed or published in newspapers, even urban billboards. Through one of his central research participants, Kavitha, we encounter the imprint of the old as it invigorates the new. In the stories of Kavitha and others in the ethnography, we see the portability of this chronotope as it enables a modern democratic subjectivity to cultivate and carry out the aesthetic of the poet-politician and the modernization of south India.
Each chapter serves quite helpfully as an exegesis of particular theoretical matters critical to broader studies in social science. The introduction instructively orients us to notions of phenomenology vis-à-vis the tension and chiasmus of ideology and aesthetic. Through a brilliantly synthesized and extremely helpful literature review, Bate outlines multiple theoretical takes on the possible distinctions and interplay between ideologies and aesthetics for how people speak in transformational ways. To show how such apperceptions undergird the sign production in any political process, Bate clarifies the tensions between aesthetic and ideology according to Peircean phenomenological categories of Firstness and Thirdness, respectively. From this point of departure, he takes us through an integrative model of phenomenology that builds from Whorfian relativism, Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, Raymond Williams' structure of feelings, Gregory Bateson's ‘ethos,’ Antonio Gramsci's framework for ideology, and the geneology of ideology as a study in linguistic anthropology. His point is a significant contribution to understanding the role of emotion and reason in political life. As his argument surmises, aesthetic and ideology are not mere subjectivist experiences for organizing the world but are interacting points of view tied to larger sociopolitical and linguistic structures. This section of the book alone synthesizes significant social theory that is accessible to both scholar and student.
Ch. 1 introduces a history of centamil as it is brought from the written word into oratory and other political communicative practices and made “proper.” Producing public language modeled on the written word created a specter of Tamil civilization itself. As Bate puts it, “the people who spoke this new genre embodied that specter. They became Tamil civilization—with all its purity and antiquity intact” (28). This was even as this elaborated code delimited access to almost anyone who was not positioned socially to learn or have learned it, and cut off the very audiences who are persuasively moved by it: the agrarian illiterate, community leaders, even Congressman who had previously cultivated the habitus of big men (36).
In the face of this disconnect, Bate suggests that the common bifurcation of centamil and kochaitamil as the diglossic opposition between written (therefore, pure and High) and spoken (therefore, bent and Low) overlooks the ways in which diglossia in Tamilnadu is likely to be: it should be considered more “a function and modern forms of political and national subjectivity in which elements of the language are mapped onto social and situational contexts and also onto new histories” (14). This intervention into current theories of diglossia comes as Bate subjects Bakhtinian diglossic frameworks to productive and motile notions of heteroglossia, everyday forces that both unify and divide: those drawing inward toward heterodoxic unification and naturalization of centamil practice as timeless and unmarked and those exposing and resisting how centamil practice forecloses on the access to political linguistic resources for others.
Ch. 2 traces the two models of political interaction that made way for the Dravidian aestheticization of power: (i) the rhetorical model of late nineteenth-century colonialism, and (ii) the longstanding devotional model deployed through centamil as a form of political patronage. One of Bate's most important contributions to the anthropology of democracy comes as he explores how political power is mediated through this devotional model. Devotion to leaders by his subordinates was “the mode of political verbal interaction throughout Tamil history” (43). Unlike Western models, however, rhetorical address in Tamilnadu is best understood more as an act of desire on the part of the politician to make coherent a local cosmology that is both material and endures as the antiquity of the Dravidian aesthetic. The speaker's desire to recognize and praise a community in which to participate then ratifies him as the iconic index of its membership. Along with his ability to speak, the speaker's political subjectivity and agency—or at least benefit—then comes through an audience's desire for devotional proximity to superiors, with audiences or co-speakers signifying through subordination their own participation in the power of the praised.
Ch. 3 works from this phenomenological aspect of rhetoric to explore the fusion of religious chronotopes of charismatic patronage with that of political meetings and processions. Here Bate considers how from the logic of worship to the design and decoration of temple festivals, all embodied practices of antiquity are also spatialized and controlled as such in their aestheticizations of power. In fact, throughout the text, Bate fully explores imaginings of power in political practice and the techniques through which the Dravidian aesthetic is activated through the reorganization of urban space integral to the multisensory reception of oratory in Tamil electoral rallies. He applies these same queries of urban space as sensory motivation to the ways in which gendered practices bring particular aesthetic energies to the public sphere. For example, Ch. 6 is the story of Kavitha's great impression on Tamil oratory, in which through centamil she guided the signs of feminine energy into a predominantly male public sphere.
With certain phenomenologies of oratory and other political communicative practices at play, Bate then turns in Ch. 4 to the role of tropes in the aestheticization of Tamil antiquity and authenticity as iconical indices of political power. The aesthetics of poetic action in shaping contemporary political behavior, according to Bate, are likely to go unnoticed if one applies Western notions of tropes as analog to the Tamil tropological schema. Relying on Burke (Reference Burke1945), Jakobson (Reference Jakobson1960/1987) and Friedrich (Reference Friedrich1989), Bate situates his ethnography within an extremely useful exegesis into the interplay of metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche as they reflect potential modes of thought and categorization informing primary modalities mediating power relations shaping a democratic Tamilnadu. In true Friedrich fashion, Bate problematizes Western conventions for reading synecdochic encounters by detailing the vernacular relevance of tropes as emotional catalysts.
Bate further grounds his central argument in the remainder of the text by looking at the hierarchical intimacies constituents and their leaders cultivate in order to link with antiquity and authenticate their power through association. Such intimacies, as Bate shows in Ch. 5, defy separations of politics and religion while also instigating ideologies of their separation when religious groups grow angry over praise practices connecting the political with the divine. Such intimacies, even as they pluck the aesthetic nerve tightly wound to ideological positions, contain contradictions and limits that point to their continual emergence as signs of the nation. Bate uses this moment to show how organizing practices as bounded by political, religious, or as otherwise distinct matrices of communicative practice is problematic; rather, phenomenologies of one experience encounter and inform others. He argues that any such lines between politics and religion, for example, require a meta-awareness that enables their discursive placement as separate often when their distinctions were not present and informative of different logics of practice in the first place.
Closing in Ch. 7, Bate traces the semiotic assault on the aesthetic of centamil as actually democratic. He follows those who ridicule the conventional, subvert the standards, while also embodying a language and behavior common to their audience. What we gather here, quite significantly, is that the authority undergirding political process in south India is relational, maximally dialogic, and based on joint understandings of what language is and does. Political power in this case is had democratically because it is only generated between leader and led based on one's praise of that leader. Desire and testimony of that desire through praise instantiates a power both parties are privy: This important contribution to scholarship on vernacular democracy goes understated but is central to reading the democratic aspects inherent in the aestheticization of power invigorated through this register of Tamil.
Tamil oratory and the Dravidian aesthetic is an elegant and rich ethnography that contributes to the scholarship on Tamil anthropology, the anthropology of democracy, semiotics, poetics, and language ideologies. Bate develops and ethnographically grounds a theory of power and authority in political process that privileges social relations as the primary modality in democracy. His synthesis of theories of phenomenologies of experience give them place in reckoning with workaday political processes. To understand democracy is to reckon with phenomenologies at play that deeply shape what public language is, does, and how it is engaged in the production of political power—spun toward a center by articulable, ideological understandings of what democracy looks like but also how that aesthetic is spun out and apart in resistance to continually reshape the transformational qualities of our language.
