A preface to spoken Tamil

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to an anthropology of aurality in Tamil Nadu. Using a sociolinguistic approach to performance, I shall argue that contemporary low caste performers in Tamil Nadu are part of a discursive tradition that dates back to Sangam times in order to show how this tradition, the dialogue between the art of writing and the practice of speech, is actually a feeling in Tamil that affects the concept of locality in Tamil. This feeling, or spoken Tamil, is a kind of aural competence. In performance, it is a way of speaking with writing in mind. In writing, it is that sentiment which demonstrates a kind of ethnographic authority. Sangam literature, bhakti devotion, Tamil nationalism--indeed, the practice of spoken Tamil has been, and continues to be, a mode of organizing people in light of the state. Then and now, spoken Tamil has never been about how people really speak. Rather, it has always been a way of producing citizens by manufacturing aural competence.