© Columbia University Press
Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India
September, 2009
Cloth, 288 pages, 12 halftones, 2 maps, 3 tables
ISBN: 978-0-231-14756-9
$50.00
/ £34.50
"Bernard Bate is one of only a small number of scholars with the linguistic and language skills needed to carry out the ethnography of Tamil political speech. To the best of my knowledge, he is also the only one to have written such an ethnography. A remarkable accomplishment." — Mattison Mines, University of California, Santa Barbara
"This extraordinary book exemplifies what ethnography aspires to be. It is richly located in locality and history, it gives voice to a tradition of oratory that has barely been studied by anthropologists, it enriches the study of the difficult terrain between linguistic and literary studies, and it combines deep textual knowledge with a keen eye for living social detail. Apart from its numerous insights into ritual, education, love, speech, and devotion in Tamil cultural life, it is a pathbreaking argument about how the most proleterian and populist of political subcultures can draw on the aesthetic and literary riches of a classical tradition that spans several millenia. Bate's book is a tour de force in revealing the social life of language." — Arjun Appadurai, New York University
"Bernard Bate's historically specific, ethnographically grounded, and politically salient study of Tamil oratory and Dravidian aesthetic is a groundbreaking examination of this phenomenal outlier in a universe of languages where all is relative. It inquires into the recalcitrant sensuousness (not sensuality) of a language that is capable of goading the ultimate sacrifice of its native speakers, a language in which sound and sense flow as rival and reciprocating energies. Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic is mandatory reading for any student in the humanities interested not only in the enchanting power of a language's beauty but also in the impassioned forces of the sublime that make it 'dangerous.'" — E. Valentine Daniel, Columbia University, and author of Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence