The Rise and Rise of Tamil

Professor Bernard (Barney) Bate is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. Bate completed his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2000, and is trained in linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology. Fluent in Tamil, his primary area of study is the history and politics of Tamil oratory and the Tamil public sphere. Indeed much of his work deals with interactions between the colonists and the colonized in Southern India and modern day Sri Lanka, and the impact these interactions had on social imaginaries and language use at the turn of the 19th century. His first book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic (Columbia University Press, 2009) focuses on the intersection between political theory and ethnography, between discourses on modernity and on tradition, to explain the phenomenon that is contemporary Tamil oratory. Bate, who is extremely interested in oratory and teaches a class on it at Yale is currently working on another book on the subject, tentatively titled Speaking the Public Sphere: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern.

Bate will deliver a lecture titled Bharati and the Tamil Modern on Wednesday, 10th November at 4 pm in room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue. The lecture deals with nationalist poet Subramanya Bharati and his impact on the Tamil language. In particular it explores the manner in which the language, like other vernaculars across India, quickly became an axis around which extremely successful political mobilization could take place. Despite being fluent in many languages, Bharati, who was known as Mahakavi (great poet), chose to write primarily in Tamil, describing it as his mother tongue. Indeed he used to language in all his avatars�in journalism, poetry and on the national stage in political mobilization. In many ways he is seen as an early patriarch of modern Tamil, and it is this relationship between the intellectual and his language that Bate brings alive through his painstaking research.