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The anti-Hindi agitations of the late 1930s marked an important transformative moment in the politics of the Dravidian movement and its various strands in late colonial Madras Presidency. The decision of the Congress government to make the study of Hindi compulsory in secondary schools in the Presidency in April 1938 sparked widespread protests that served to crystallize identity based on ethno-linguistic nationalism. The mobilization of identity around language posited an oppositional relationship between Tamil and Hindi as they came to encompass a range of categories including caste, region, race, and even religion. Hindi was constructed as Aryan, North, and Sanskritic, and therefore derivative and of recent origin as opposed to Tamil which was Dravidian, South, and non-Sanskritic, and therefore original and ancient. The various interests, goals, and ideologies within the Dravidian movement as reflected in the Justice Party, the Pure Tamil movement, and the Self-Respect movement coalesced around the issue of language. This paper argues that the Congress government’s attempt at linguistic rationalization not only contended with the reality of India’s linguistic diversity but also profoundly affected the construction of Tamil identity in the late 1930s. Furthermore, the construction of a nationalist imaginary out of a Tamil past borrowed heavily from British orientalist discourse that posited for the languages of southern India a separate, distinctive, and ancient identity called “Dravidian’. This discourse found its apotheosis in the anti-Hindi agitations as the Congress government’s language policy came to be seen as representing the hegemonic aspirations of the Aryan, Sanskritic North.
Uma Ganesan
Manchester University, Indiana