Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue [Paperback]

What makes someone willing to die, not for a nation, but for a language? In the mid-20th century, southern India saw a wave of dramatic suicides in the name of language. Lisa Mitchell traces the colonial-era changes in knowledge and practice linked to the Telugu language that lay behind some of these events. As identities based on language came to appear natural, the road was paved for the political reorganization of the Indian state along linguistic lines after independence.

The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India

Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr., Prize in the Indian Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies

Lisa Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

[O]riginal and persuasive . . . This lucid and engaging work will appeal to South Asianists as well as to other scholars interested in the history of language and literacy.Dec. 2009

[M]akes a brilliant intervention in the study of language and modernity by critically interrogating the concept of the 'mother tongue' . . . brims with interesting and provocative ideas that extend beyond its immediate focus. . . .a fascinating and ambitious project.Vol. 82, No. 4, 2009

Mitchell's study successfully demonstrates that 'The story of colonial encounters with language in Southern India includes the story of efforts to bring very different sensibilities regarding language into a single frame of discourse'. While colonial restructuring of language contributed significantly to the making of the mother tongues, the fact remains that the resurgence of regional languages and the demand for linguistic states in South India served a powerful impulsecultural unification and political empowerment of people scattered among arbitrary administrative divisions.Nov 2011

The study subtly identies links that all too often appear lost in the haze of un-critical activism. For th