A showcase of deep anthropological research and prodigious Tamil literary skills, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic is a momentous achievement. After five years spent researching public meetings in Madurai, Tamilnadu, Bernard Bate has produced a volume that focuses particularly on the distinct style of language favored by Dravidianist politicians. In the 1950s, there was a marked shift in the language of Tamil political oratory, from the common register that emphasized solidarity between leaders and the common people, to this more ancient, literary style of language. Bate exposes several ironies inherent in that move—the use of an elite language to express populism and an ancient language to express a modern democratic polity—and makes sense of them within a vernacular, and particularly Tamil, worldview.
In the Dravidianist paradigm that is at the heart of Bate's book, an authentic and original Tamil-speaking civilization is valorized over a more recent Sanskrit-speaking, Indo-Aryan, North Indian, and Brahmin-dominated civilization. Marked as non-Brahmin, centamil (literary Tamil) enabled Dravidian political parties to exclude the predominantly Brahmin National Congress Party from capitalizing on its narrative. Through this language, Dravidianist orators and politicians project their leaders as embodiments and “avatars” of gods and ancient kings, an association that is reinforced in other media such as images, processions, ceremonial arches, music, pilgrimages, lighting displays, darshans, prasadam (in the form of shawls gifted to leaders being redistributed to the crowd), and praise poems. Similar strategies are employed with regard to film stars, who are also honored through cutouts, billboards, and advertisements in newspapers. As many Dravidianist political leaders come from the film world, they benefit from all of this. Devotional practices toward cinema stars and gods slip seamlessly into the political field because, as Bate mentions, the division between the political and religious realms is a relatively recent Western construct.
Dravidianist leaders are figured as gods, as kings, as film stars, and also as avatars of the Tamil language—with all its trappings of purity, virginity, and antiquity. While centamil was being used in mass politics earlier, it was npt until the 1990s, under the leadership of J. Jayalalitha, when Bate was doing his research, that the language was routinely used to express devotion to charismatic leaders. The antiquity, authenticity, and beauty of the Tamil language is transferred onto these leaders, whose adept use of their prodigious poetical and rhetorical skills attracts followers and voters.
It seems contradictory that this ancient language would be used to expression a modern democracy, but Bate productively complicates the standard narrative of modernity following tradition. He pushes to a new level the idea that modernity can incorporate aspects of tradition to argue that some traditional practices are themselves “elements” of modernization. He argues that although the language and tropes may seem ancient, “they are quintessentially modern precisely because they are deployed as traditional” (p. 185). These virtuosic orators create a new political discourse by drawing on and reemploying ancient rhetorical and devotional models of language. The archaic language gives the illusion of cultural and literary continuity, when in reality these are invented. Relying on Hobsbawm's 1983 idea of “invented tradition,” Bate suggests that Dravidianists produce tradition as “a primary modality of modernity” (p. xvii), a pattern that may be widely applicable in a number of different contexts.
In addition to shedding light on varying patterns of modernity and Tamil political practices and speeches, this book also makes an important contribution to the field of Tamil poetics. Bate provides an in-depth analysis of the different uses of the English term “rhetoric,” concluding that there is no good equivalent in Tamil, a language that does not divide speaking from action. The poetic praise language found in Tamil political speeches valorizing present or past leaders serves the important function of creating relationships between the speaker and those leaders. This section moves into a complex discussion of Tamil tropology.
In addition to the important theoretical implications and technical discussions of poetics and rhetoric, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic also contains ethnographic interviews and research, though they are presented sparingly. The focus is on history, linguistics, and the massive archive of recorded speeches from which Bate is able to detect and analyze overarching themes and tropes. The excitement and color of political life are often overshadowed by dry theory and technical linguistic analysis, surprising in a book from an anthropologist.
This book is primarily directed at Tamil literature specialists, but also would be useful for historians, political scientists, religious studies scholars, and anthropologists. Though it is thorough and enlightening, and even includes a helpful glossary, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic remains a specialized and demanding read.
