"From Medium to Marker: The Making of a Mother Tongue in Modern South India" by Lisa Ann Mitchell

Lisa Ann Mitchell

Deposited 2004

Abstract
This dissertation argues that the relationship to language that emerged in southern India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries differs dramatically from earlier relationships to language. Each chapter demonstrates ways in which language experienced primarily as a medium of communication has given way to language experienced as a marker of cultural identity. In tracing these shifts in local experiences of language (in general) and the Telugu language (in particular), the dissertation details the emergence of language as the foundation for the reorganization of a wide range of forms of knowledge and practice, including literary production, the writing of history, geographic imagination, grammatical and lexical categorizations, pedagogy, and relationships between languages. These reorganized practices and forms of knowledge—newly organized around languages—enabled new language-based expressions of community and identity to appear completely natural by the early decades of the twentieth century.

Chapter One uses literary histories to argue that a new affective attachment to language appeared in southern India in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It further establishes that this affective attachment was linked to the new positioning of the Telugu language as a personified subject of historical and biographical ‘life’ narratives. Chapters Two through Five use geographic narratives and maps, grammatical texts, pedagogical practices, and lexicons to trace a major shift from Telugu characterized primarily as a feature of local territory (dēśa bhāşa or “language of the land”) to its new acceptance as an inalienable characteristic of individuals (mātŗ bhāşa or “mother tongue”). Tracing the impact of colonial scholarship, printing, and changes in educational practices on ideas about language, these chapters also demonstrate that the relationships between languages, and the very categories through which language itself is understood did not remain constant. Finally, Chapter Six, influenced by recent work in subaltern studies, illustrates ways in which the changes explored in earlier chapters have manifest themselves within southern India more recently, revealing diverse individual experiences that have been subsumed within dominant public narratives of linguistic community and statehood.