Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern
Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia
Author(s)
Bate, Bernard
Contributor(s)
Annamalai, E. (editor)
Cody, Francis (editor)
Jayanth, Malarvizhi (editor)
Nakassis, Constantine V. (editor)
Language
EnglishAbstract
Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era.
Keywords
Social and cultural anthropology; Asian history; Social and cultural historyDOI
10.21627/9781503628663ISBN
9781503628663, 9781503628656, 9781503628663, 9781503628663Publisher
Stanford University PressPublisher website
https://www.sup.org/Publication date and place
2021Series
South Asia in Motion,Classification
Social and cultural anthropology
Asian history
Social and cultural history