Organizer and Chair: Bhavani Raman,

University of Michigan

Spanning two centuries of modern Tamil history, this panel will examine both how regional knowledge and dialogues are textualized, formalized and circulated, as well as elucidate the tensions and struggles involved in the production of authority in textmaking. Departing from civilizational models that have long ruled areas studies, the panelists will attempt to deepen our understanding of cultural flows from early colonial encounters to contemporary political movements by focusing on text and the power of textualized knowledge in social change. The papers will focus on the changes in pedagogical practices in Tamil elementary schools in the early nineteenth century; the reformulation of mathematical education in colonial South India; the writings of the Tamil Christian poet, Vedanayakam Sastri who wrote on language, caste and Christianity; and a contemporary literacy movement in Tamil Nadu. The panelists will all point to modes of objectification which have shaped the very nature of social knowledge in South India. Neither literary in the conventional sense, nor easily encompassed by the categories of traditional religion, these practices of knowledge production represent struggles in the political economies of text often overlooked in the conventional division of academic labor on the region.

Bhavani Raman, University of Michigan

This paper is an invitation to re-conceptualize the modes of learning reading and writing in tinnai pallikutams or elementary schools in Madras under East India Company rule. It will analyze Tamil tinnai curriculums in the first half of the nineteenth century that have been conventionally seen by Company administrators, missionaries and modern educationists as fostering repetitive rote learning. The paper will emphasize the importance of the silent R -recollection, in the teaching of elementary reading, writing and arithmetic in this schooling system. Mnemonic skills were inculcated through habit forming, repeated ways of learning to do things, i.e. through repetition /recitation and apprenticeship within small, tightly contained communities of learners. These skills were deployed selectively and variously to comprehend texts even as the texts themselves were used as manuals to build specific memory skills. Modes and meanings of mnemonic learning were occluded by a script and grammar centered pedagogy introduced by a new bureaucratic state and the protestant ethic of the new mission school. The paper will thus direct our analytical gaze to the Madras tinnai school curriculum in order to historicize and interrogate the dominance of such script centered interpretative frames and to analyze the nature and meanings of pedagogic practices that escape this lens.

Senthil Babu, French Insititute of Pondicherry, India

Tamil mathematical texts, such as numeracy primers and calculation manuals are an important source for a sociological understanding of the place of written texts in mathematical pedagogy in modern Tamilnadu. This paper will examine a set of such Tamil mathematical palm leaf manuals and nineteenth century printed textbooks to investigate the relationship between text making and computational practice, and the conflict over the nature and texture of mathematical knowledge in colonial Madras. How were these texts rooted in, and organized around localized material practices of counting, measuring and weighing? How did they become the eye of an ideological storm in the nineteenth century?

The practice oriented Tamil palm leaf corpus represents the standardization of quotidian arithmetical skills that was distinct from Sanskritic mathematical manuals that were based on observation and abstraction. However, with the circulation of liberal universalistic modes of mathematical knowledge preached by missionaries and a utilitarian colonial state, a new set of concerns emerged. As some of these texts were printed and `re- formed' into mathematics textbooks for the modern school system they became the site of a struggle between two pedagogies; one practiced in the Tamil village school and the other in schools run by the colonial government and missionaries. By analyzing mathematical practice against this canvas, this paper offers a deeper understanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and colonized societies.

Bhavani Raman, University of Michigan

This paper will focus on the writings of the Tamil Christian poet, Vedanayakam Sastri, a renaissances figure in modern Tamil history. Although largely known for his religious poetic work, it will analyze a selection of his essays, in English and Tamil, on the institution of caste to examine his orientation towards written texts and language. It will argue that Sastri's sensibility both as a Christian and commentator on Tamil society reflects a tension between two strands of Christian philosophy and thought: his own Lutheran pietism with its emphasis on textual authority and education and Protestant Anglicanism, which stressed the functionality of written language and itineration. The Tanjavur court, with which Sastri was long associated, was an important part of an emerging Tamil public culture that was deeply influenced both by the growing presence of Protestant Christianity and the East India Company's government that was seeking legitimacy and coherence in the region. It is in this context that the paper will attempt to analyze Sastri's self understanding of his position as a `literary' figure, even as his prose writings were shaped by the assumptions and language of the colonial bureaucracy, print and the mission. By shifting Sastri from the realm of the purely `literary', it hopes to re -think our understanding of the history of regional languages and cultures.

Francis Cody, University of Michigan

The entanglement of elite and subaltern life-worlds in encounters like a literacy movement provides a key ethnographic window into the politics of everyday struggles over textual authority in contemporary rural India. One such movement is the Arivoli Iyakkam (Light of Knowledge) mass-literacy movement which has mobilized millions of women in the state of Tamilnadu in South India. This paper takes an ethnographic lens to the political economy of knowledge production in contemporary village Tamilnadu by looking at literacy primers, pedagogical dialogues and the dialectical philosophies of social change which inform Arivoli movement activity. It will investigate how Tamil language is objectified and re-presented to learners as a means of consciousness raising. In particular, I focus on how an implicit orientation towards text and knowledge runs into complications when applied in village literacy lessons. In their turn, the subjects of pedagogy, village women, have too often been represented as either empty receivers of modern values or noble resisters upholding "authentic" cultural tradition. What do Dalit village women make of their encounter with such a movement informed, as it is, by state developmentalism and globalized leftist thought? This paper will examine the positive terms in which the struggles over the means and meanings of enlightenment take place in this context.