Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern

Front matter

PROTESTANT TEXTUALITY AND THE TAMIL MODERN

POLITICAL ORATORY AND THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY

IN SOUTH ASIA

Contents

Editors’ Preface, by E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, and

Constantine V. Nakassis ix Editors’ Acknowledgments xiii Note on Transliteration and Citations xv Bernard Bate’s Acknowledgments xvii

Foreword: Speaking of Barney Bate, by A. R. Venkatachalapathy xxi

PART I: THE PROTESTANT MODERN 1 The Ethics of Textuality

PART II: THE TAMIL MODERN 3 Speaking Swadeshi, Madras 1907 4 Subramania Bharati and the Tamil Modern 5 Elocutionary Incandescence

Epilogue: Home Rule, the Labor Movement, and Linguistic and Political Modernity viii Contents

Afterword: Oratory and the Origins of Politics, by Sudipta Kaviraj

Notes References

153 177 203

EDITORS’ PREFACE

Bernard Bate, or Barney as his friends and colleagues called him, passed away in early March 2016 “at the height of his powers,” as one of his teachers, John Kelly, put it at a 2016 memorial at the University of Chicago. Barney was on a writing fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, working on his second book, this book. This manuscript was very much the prehistory of his masterful 2009 study, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic, a redacted version of his 2000 dissertation in the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology. Bate finished his dissertation by saying:

Some definitive statements have emerged [in this dissertation regarding “stage Tamil”]. But I am left with far more questions than firm knowledge. Many of the questions are historical: How did stage speaking begin in Tamil? ... What was the first “oratorical revolution” like when Tamil was first deployed as oratory (by Christians in Jaffna and Kanyakumari, I think)? How and why were these new models taken up outside the context of the Christian sermon (by a man named Arumuga Navalar in Jaffna, December 1847—September 1848)? ...In the world of formal political oratory, what were the conditions in which Congressmen and others decided to stop speaking in English and begin speaking in Tamil (c. 1918-1919)? ...1 will pursue these questions further. (2000, 319)

And he did, through archival work in the American Ceylon Mission and Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India from January to May 2005 and, later, through near seven hundred hours (Bate 200g9a) in the Tamil Nadu State Archives from November 2008 to May 2009, along with numerous interviews with journalists, historians, and those with first- and secondhand knowledge and memories of the times he was exploring (including Mayandi

Bharati, the late Tho. Paramasivan, Pe. Cu. Mani, A. Sivasubramanian, “Krishi”

x Editors’ Preface

Ramakrishnan, Thi. Ka. Sivasankaran, Che. Divan, Nellai Kannan, J. Rajasekaran, V. Arasu, A. R. Venkatachalapathy, and V. Geetha). This intensive research resulted in a series of publications (Bate 2005, 20094, 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2013), as well as numerous talks that he gave in the United States, Canada, India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore, all of which were to become part of the book before you.

When we, the editorial team (E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis), received the manuscript materials, we received something with a definitive shape and plan, though the various documents were both partial and sketchy—filled with bullet-point lists, elliptical placeholders for later elaboration, missing references, notes to self (in particular, in the Introduction)—and abundant and excessive—redundancies across chapters, long descriptions and quotations of primary materials, as well as a panoply of short fragments unconnected to particular chapters. While some of the chapters were almost fully done—for example, Chapters 1-2, versions of which had already been published (as Bate 2010 and Bate 2005, respectively )—others had to be put together from many different drafts (often from talks, in particular, Chapters 3-5) or supplemented with sections from fragments, other chapters, and notes (the Introduction). The final, concluding chapter—the Epilogue—was absent, though implied as to be carved out of existing publications (in particular, from Bate 2013).

We also had to contend with alternative outlines and titles of the book. Ina truncated version of a draft of the Introduction, Barney writes in a parenthetical statement that indicates the ambitious Weberian and Durkheimian scope of the project, followed by his instantly recognizable, intimate, oral voice:

(I'm tempted to call it [the book] Protestant Textuality and the Spirit of Political Modernity, but that might be a step just a little too far. Sort of like people entitling their books with something like “Elementary Forms of the...”). Let me give you a sense of the overview of this thing, then:...

We have attempted to maintain that intimate voice (indeed, oratorical style) of Barney’s, as it moves from the near and familiar to the grand sweep of his sense of history and culture, one well worth, in our opinion, the appellations

Weberian and Durkheimian.

Editors’ Preface XI

A further point to note is that in his many talks on this project, Barney always began with a slightly different, and ever-developing, overview of the project as a whole (Bate 2013 offering a published snapshot of this vision ca. 2012—13). This was a project that was changing over a decade, even if it had its sights set on the questions he identified at the close of his dissertation, defended a decade or so before. We do not pretend that what we put together here is what Barney would have eventually published. It surely would have kept developing and filled out in ways we could not have anticipated or completed ourselves. Instead, we have attempted to provide something true to his vision of the project as it was developing up to and at the time of his premature death. In short, while it is from many chapter drafts, publications, talks, fragments, notes, and outlines that we have put together the book before you—a task that sometimes required filling out prose in what was indicated only fragmentarily and other times redacting or rephrasing redundancies (though we have let many remain as well), as well as inserting transitions, callouts, and the like (these different sources and emendations are indicated through editorial notes in the various chapters; see References for a list of such documents)—it is, irrevocably, Barney’s voice and arguments. We hope to have done them justice.

A word on the time line and the editorial process. After receiving the materials in May 2017, the editorial team met to discuss how to tackle the process of editing the book. First, Malarvizhi Jayanth went through the notes, fragments, chapter drafts, talks, outlines, and archival materials, cataloguing them, putting together their time line, and indicating the most definitive or complete versions to work from and supplement. From there, E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, and Constantine Nakassis went over the chapters one by one, editing them in rounds—Frank or Costas taking the first round of a chapter, then followed by the others. We proceeded chapter by chapter from July 2018 to May 2019, followed by a second round of reading, editing, and discussing in May and June 2019. This produced a (relatively) clean near-final copy, which we sent to A. R. Venkatachalapathy and Sudipta Kaviraj to read and write a foreword and afterword, respectively, as well as to two anonymous reviewers at Stanford University Press. All provided helpful feedback and suggested emendations to the text, which

XII Editors’ Preface we integrated insofar as they explicated and clarified Bate’s arguments and points. Reviewer comments that differed from Bate’s arguments are mentioned and delineated in editorial notes. With these additions, we present you with Bernard Bate’s Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia.

EDITORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the help and support of the Bate family, in particular, Noah Bate and Key Jo Lee in helping us access Barney’s files and materials for the book; Blake Wentworth for getting the materials to Noah; Whitney Cox for help in the initial stages of discussing how to approach the manuscript; Magda Nakassis for editorial help and advice; Stephen Hughes and Gigi Bate for providing photographs; Era. Chiththaanai, N. Govindarajan, and Indira Peterson for help with bibliographic references; A. R. Venkatachalapathy for corrections on the manuscript and for his foreword; Sudipta Kaviraj for his afterword; Srilata Raman for consultation on aspects of premodern discourse practices; as well as Thomas Blom Hansen and Marcela Cristina Maxfield at Stanford University Press for help with the publication process. The Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago generously helped financially support the editorial process and provided funds for open-access publication.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND CITATIONS

In the manuscript materials, Bate uses a number of different transliteration schemes and citation styles. Regarding the first: in order to standardize the presentation of Tamil materials, we have opted to use a modified version of the Madras lexicon’s transliteration style for Tamil original materials, indicating voiced variants of particular graphemes (e.g., £ / d corresponding to unvoiced and voiced L, respectively; p / b for Ù; s / c for voiceless alveolar sibilant and alveolo-palatal affricative &, etc.). Tamil materials are italicized. We use, however, conventionalized English spellings and normal font for certain Tamil proper names (e.g., Madurai instead of Maturai, Annadurai instead of Annaturai, etc.). Regarding the second: we have opted to use in-text reference citations for journal and book publications (mostly, secondary literature) and notes for archival materials. See the Abbreviations listed in the References section for how archival sources are noted.

BERNARD BATE’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to A. R. Venkatachalapathy (to whom this book is dedicated), Mike McGovern, Doug Rogers, Haun Saussy, Pericles Lewis, and Joseph Errington for reading parts of this manuscript.

Chapter 1 appeared as “The Ethics of Textuality: The Protestant Sermon and the Tamil Public Sphere,” in Ethical Life in South Asia, ed. Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, 101-15 © 2010 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press. Research for this chapter was made possible by a research grant from the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies (2005) and by generous support from the Department of Anthropology and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University. Earlier drafts were presented at “Vernacular Public Spheres/South Asia,” Yale University (6 April 2007); “Vernacular Social Imaginaries: Public Spheres, Modernities, Nations,” CASCA/AES, Toronto, Canada (8-12 May 2007); and “Genealogies of Virtue,” University of Vancouver (6-8 September 2007). Thanks to all the members of those presentations for constructive interventions. For very helpful comments on earlier drafts and general encouragement, I thank Anand Pandian and Daud Ali. Thanks also to Rebecca Tolen of Indiana University Press and one outside reader for their helpful suggestions. Very special thanks to M. S. S. Pandian, who originally brought the Bazaar Book to my attention in 2003.

Chapter 2 appeared in “Language, Genre, and the Historical Imagination in South India,” special issue of the Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 4 (2005): 467-82 (used here with permission), translated into Tamil by Cho. Patmanaban, as “Arumukanaavalar: c. 1850 Alavil Caivap Piracanka Marapum, Camaya Nirnayamum,” Panuval (Jaffna) 3 (2005): 166-87; and into Sinhala by Anuruddhika Kularatne and Harindra Dassanayake, as “Arumuga Navalar, Shaivagamika Anushasana saha Agamehi Seema Nirnaya, 1850

XVIII Bernard Bate’s Acknowledgments

Ashrithawa,’ in Shri Lankeya Samajaya saha Sanskrutiuya Patanaya Kireema: Thoragath Nibandha, 2000-2006, ed. Sasanka Perera and Harindra Dassanayake (Colombo: Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture, 2007). Versions of this chapter were previously presented as “Arumuga Navalar and the Advent of a Prose Orality in Tamil Public Discourse” at the annual conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison (16 October 1999); “‘Arumuga Navalar, Protestant Textual Practice, and the Objectification of Saivism,” the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC (29 November 2001); as an invited lecture, “Arumuga Navalar and the Materiality of Speech,” to the Department of Anthropology, Yale University (19 March 2001); as a paper, “Protestant Textual Practice and the Objectification of Saivism,’ at the annual conference of the Asian Studies Conference, New York (27-30 March 2003); and as a paper, “Appropriating Rhetoric: Christian and Saivite Sermons in Tamil, c. 1850,” delivered at the conference “Language, Genre, and the Historical Imagination in South India,” Yale University (20 February 2004).

Chapter 3 was delivered as a paper, “Speaking Swadeshi, Madras 1907,’ at “City Talk: Language and the Urban Sensorium,” Department of Anthropology, Stanford University (28 October 2011). Versions of this chapter or portions of it were also delivered as papers at Matruveli Uraiyadal (Alternative Conversations), Bookpoint Auditorium, Chennai (9 February 2009), and as an invited lecture at the French Institute in Pondicherry (25 March 2009). Thanks to V. Arasu, Kannan M., and Rajesh for helpful comments.

Chapter 4 was presented as a paper, “Swadeshi Bharati: Protestant Textuality and the Poetics of Tamil Political Modernity,” circulated for “Economy, Reason, Affect: Anti-colonial Sensibility, 1860-1950,” Nehru Museum and Library (7-9 January 2014), the Chicago Tamil Forum at the University of Chicago (21 May 2015; thanks to Amanda Weidman for discussant commentary); and the “Workshop on Meaning: Language and Sociocultural Processes,” Institute of Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University (23 April 2012). It was also delivered as an invited lecture to the University of California, Berkeley (1 March 2016); the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University (9 October 2012); CLIC Symposium, “Political Language and the Crises of Democracy,’ UCLA (8 February 2013); and at the Faculty Seminar, South

Bernard Bate’s Acknowledgments XIX

Asian Studies Program, National University of Singapore (23 October 2013). Portions of it were presented at the Language, Culture, and History Conference, University of Wyoming, Laramie (2 July 2010); the annual conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison (16 October 2010); the South Asia Colloquium, Yale University (10 November 2010); the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans (17 November 2010); and the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Montreal (16 November 201, as “The Poetic Structure of the World—an Introductory Fragment to Speaking the Public Sphere: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern”). Thanks to participants at these various events for feedback.

Chapter 5 was presented at the annual Tamil conference, University of California, Berkeley (4 May 2013); the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago (22 November 2013); Singapore Anthropology Exchange, National University of Singapore (29 November 2013); Tamil Studies Conference, University of Toronto (17 May 2014); and as an invited lecture for the keynote of the inaugural meeting of the Chicago Tamil Forum at the University of Chicago (29 May 2014). Thanks to Prof. A. Sivasubramanian, who accompanied me on a tour of the port and mill areas of Thoothukudi in January 2009, where we thought about where these events may have taken place. I am very grateful to him for his hospitality, generosity, and guidance.

Parts of the Epilogue appeared in “To Persuade Them into Speech and Action’: Oratory and the Tamil Political, Madras, 1905-1919,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 55, no. 1 (2013): 142-66 (used here with permission). The research was made possible by senior fellowships from the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (2005) and the American Institute of Indian Studies/ NEH (2008-9). Time, further financial resources, and support were provided by the Department of Anthropology and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University. Versions or portions of the Epilogue were presented at American Institute of Indian Studies/Indian International Center, Delhi (18 May 2009); Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai (18 June 2009); South Asia Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania (8 October 2009); South Asia Seminar, Harvard University (30 October 2009); South Asia Institute, Columbia University (7 December 2009); and the Departments of

Anthropology at Vassar College (30 May 2011), University of North Carolina,

XX Bernard Bate’s Acknowledgments

Chapel Hill (2 March 2012), and Bennington College (12 March 2012). Thanks to organizers and participants for their invitations, provocation, and encouragement. Special thanks to Doug Rogers, Mike McGovern, A. R. Venkatachalapathy, and five anonymous reviewers and the editors of Comparative Studies of Society and History for their close readings and helpful comments.

Foreword

SPEAKING OF BARNEY BATE

A. R. Venkatachalapathy

Barney, as all his friends will emphatically agree, was an animated conversationalist. But our first meeting was rather quiet. We met at a cinema hall in Madurai, toward the end of 1992, to watch Kamal Haasan’s Thevar Magan (dir. Bharathan). Barney had apparently been told that I did not like to be distracted when watching a movie, and I had in turn taken him for a serious Chicago academic who did not entertain idle talk. When we soon became thick friends spending long hours chatting—in his adopted hometown of Madurai, in Tirunelveli, in Chicago, and at Yale University—we laughed heartily at this misunderstanding. These memories well up in me as I struggle to write this foreword, made poignant by the knowledge that, of all his friends and interlocutors—and Barney had many—he chose to dedicate this book to me.

Barney’s reputation preceded him—as a white man who spoke Tamil like a native and as a scholar fascinated with platform speaking, He was one of the earliest anthropologists whom I knew and from whom learned much about how anthropologists work in the field. His home—on Munichalai Road, a lower-class neighborhood that he chose over posher localities such as Visalakshipuram or Tapal Tanthi Nagar—easily conformed to an anthropologist’s home in the field.

I was a fundamentalist Rankean historian then, besotted with sources. Barney was theoretically oriented and prone to discursive analysis. We were, one could say, following Bernard Cohn, inhabiting Historyland and Anthropologyland. Our conversations continued over the years—a committed correspondent, he would pen long letters and, after the advent of email, his

XXII Foreword

FIGURE 2. Barney Bate and his gurunatar, Professor Tho. Paramasivan. This photograph was posted by Barney on his Facebook page on 27 June 2009 with the caption “Me writing down things that Tho.Pa. says.”

responses were unfailingly swift—and gained a new edge when I spent the fall term of 1999 at the University of Chicago. Shortly before he turned in his PhD dissertation, I read its final draft and learned an enormous lot from it. In my comments and conversations, I pushed him into thinking historically. (Another deep influence on Barney’s thinking about Tamil culture historically from the ground up was the late, great Tamil scholar Tho. Paramasivan whom he referred to respectfully as gurunatar, meaning “mentor” or “preceptor.”) I plied him with historical material—excerpts from documents, collections of speeches, Tamil writings on oratory and orators—but Barney was diffident about taking the historical turn.

In March 2003, Barney, along with Rama Sundari Mantena and Lisa Mitchell, put together a panel on “Language, Genre, and Identity in Colonial South India” at the Association of Asian Studies Conference, New York, and the conversations continued next year at Yale as an international roundtable, “Language, Genre, and the Historical Imagination in South India,” resulting

Foreword XXIII in a special issue, of the same name, of the Indian Economic and Social History Review. It was here that Barney first rehearsed and published his work on Arumuga Navalar.’ In the first half of 2005 he spent some months in the missionary archives in Jaffna working on Navalar; he was, however, reticent about his time there, and I can only speculate why.

By this time, Barney was deeply taken in by the Swadeshi movement and, on discovering Sumit Sarkar’s classic monograph on the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, could never stop speaking about it. However, his archival diffidence continued even when he arrived in Chennai to spend the academic year of 2008-9 to work at the Tamil Nadu Archives, but he soon took to the archives like fish to water. The editors of this book state that he clocked about seven hundred hours there. Like a born-again historian, he spent long days at the archives, often working over weekends. Enjoying the minutiae of archival research, his detailed notes, written in black ink, filled many moleskin notebooks. As historians are wont to do, he even wrote a vignette on a Vellala woman’s Swadeshi lecture in Madurai—a piece that Economic and Political Weekly unfortunately turned down (but was eventually published, in Tamil).* I write this to show how quickly he grasped and mastered the historian’s craft.

Like many of us, Barney suffered from writer’s block. It was during his work on his second book, I believe, that he fully overcame it, the publication of his first monograph, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India, providing the spur. For many years from the middle of the first decade of this century Barney experienced professional anxieties, material worries, and personal travails. But he breathed Swadeshi during these days, and it probably helped him overcome much of them. In the years before his shockingly untimely death he was writing at a furious pace and presenting various versions at seminars and conferences. Barney obsessed over details and could never stop refining his text; he would toss endlessly in bed the night before a presentation. For whatever reason, he conceived this book to a manageable size, stopping at the time of the Non-cooperation movement rather than logically extend it to the rise of Dravidian oratory in the 1940s. But even in its present form Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia is a patently pathbreaking work.

I am not aware of another monograph that treats oratory in any of the South

XXIV Foreword

Asian languages. The editors of this book, apart from paying their tribute to a dear friend, have put the scholarly world in debt by patiently and diligently piecing together this text.

The purpose of this foreword is to fill in some of the gaps and complement this splendid monograph, based on the material I remember sharing with Barney and other sources. Hopefully, younger scholars will pick up the threads and extend the history.

Dissolving in the Wind

Sundara Ramaswamy’s evocative obituary of the Communist leader P. Jeevanandam—which not incidentally focuses on his legendary oratorical skills— is titled Kattril Kalantha Perosai (The thundering voice that dissolved in the wind).* It could not be more apt. Speech vanishes into thin air. Unlike printed material to which historians take first recourse, speech poses an extraordinary challenge to access and reconstruct its history.

For the colonial period, historians need to rely on police reports, contemporary newspaper reports, the speaker’s personal files, and testimonies of contemporaries—rare indeed is an autobiography of those times that does not speak of attending public meetings and auditing the speeches. Apart from the fact that much of the intelligence archive remains closed and personal papers of the actors sparse, each source comes with its own problems. As Barney shows in this book, until shorthand for vernacular was invented, there could be no reliable transcripts.5 What we do have in the colonial archive are English translations and redactions of Tamil speeches. Rarely do we find—at least until much after the time of the Civil Disobedience movement—the original Tamil versions. These translations are surprisingly rather faithful (but awkward), though the original vernacular transcripts, presented in the courts of law, remain to be unearthed by historians. When some of them came up for discussion in the government for prosecution, we get more analysis. When speeches actually went to court, they were discussed threadbare. In the decade after independence, elaborate transcripts of Tamil speeches came to be bound together in government files. Colonial Police Abstracts of Intelligence provide detailed translations purporting to be verbatim.

Early Tamil newspapers—which, until the beginning of the First World

Foreword XXV

War, virtually meant only Swadesamitran—offer some recourse to Tamil originals, But newspaper reports are even more unreliable. Vernacular newspapers did not have trained reporters but only nirubars (literally, correspondents)— who were amateurs if not actually the speakers or organizers of the meeting themselves—to send a report to the newspaper. In this situation, the quality of the reported speech can well be imagined. Here is Thiru. Vi. Kalyanasundaram Mudaliar (Thiru. Vi. Ka.) writing in 1928 (my translation):

Correspondents of the Tamil press do not take the trouble to learn shorthand. Shorthand is now largely the preserve of the police. I do know of one or two non-policemen who have acquired shorthand skills. As they do not have adequate knowledge of the Tamil language, I see them struggle. If there are indeed persons who both know shorthand and possess Tamil language skills, I am not aware of them....

Tamil speeches are never reproduced faithfully in newspapers. There is no limit to the violence they commit on the speeches. One can only throw up one’s hands, exclaiming, “Alas, alas.”

Thiru. Vi. Ka. continues his observations under the rubric “The Mischief of

Newspapers”:

The correspondent renders the speech in his own words. The views of the speaker thus lose their [original] garb. Sometimes meanings get distorted. Occasionally distortion is deliberate. IfI elaborate on the mischief of party newspapers, it will run into pages. In short, one may say that it is rare indeed for talks delivered in the vernacular to be reproduced faithfully in newspapers.

... Today I would say something on the platform. In tomorrow’s newspapers it would appear in an entirely different version.’

Thiru. Vi. Ka. would know. For he was not only Tamil’s pioneering orator but also a distinguished political journalist, the hero of Barney’s last chapter of this book.

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy provides an excellent example of one such mischief. Referring to a report in Swadesamitran, on a meeting regarding birth control, he pointed out that the Tamil newspaper had reported the English speeches

XXVI Foreword in full while adding a plain statement that P. Varadarajulu Naidu had spoken in Tamil. Pointing to such prejudicial reporting, Periyar wondered if this occurred because Tamil was a lowly language or because Varadarajulu Naidu was a non-Brahmin.®

However, by and large, Barney did not use newspaper sources. But the future historian, who will need to stand on Barney’s shoulders, will need to exploit this source.

In some cases, speakers had a written text. By the 1920s it was common for presidential addresses of major conferences at least to be written up and printed copies distributed at the time of their delivery. For instance, Thiru. Vi. Ka. collected these written texts and published them in book form, and he was by no means exceptional.’

When, in 1945, two years after the death of S. Satyamurthy, Chinna Annamalai, the Congress activist and publisher, decided to publish his speeches, Chinna Annamalai sought the help of Satyamurthy’s family. On visiting Satyamurthy’s home along with his friend S. A. Rahim, Chinna Annamalai was pleasantly surprised when Satyamurthy’s widow, Balasundarammal, handed over to him “a cartload of files” containing transcripts of his speeches.” Evidently, even a speaker celebrated for his spontaneity prepared notes and texts, if not transcripts, after the speech.

Though the platform was the preeminent forum for public talks, it was by no means the only one. By the mid-1930s All India Radio had come into existence and was a regular forum for talks; some of these have now been retrieved from its archives and are being broadcast occasionally. During the Quit India movement there were clandestine broadcasts, and the Indian National Army aired Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s inspiring talks. Gramophone records of speeches were not uncommon, but such speeches could only be brief. Radio broadcasts and gramophone records are a different cup of tea altogether and will require separate treatment.

Textual versions of speeches—whether recorded by the police or reported by journalists or written out by the speakers themselves—are but words. But as Barney shows, “vernacular oratory became the central communicative frame within which mass politics cohered as a genre of action within . . . democratic politics.” Words mobilized people and impelled them to act, and therefore, even

Foreword XXVII if the words themselves dissolved in the wind, the listeners, many of whom went on to become political and cultural actors, recalled and recorded their memories. Barney, for instance, appropriately cites Thiru. Vi. Ka.’s evocative recall of Bipin Chandra Pal’s speeches and the British journalist Henry Nevinson's report of a Swadeshi meeting, both delivered in 1907 on Madras Beach.

This draws us to another aspect of what these sources tell us: the context, the numbers, and the effect speeches had on the audience.

Police reports invariably provide specific figures, for the colonial masters were understandably keen to know how many turned up for political speeches. The numbers are likely to have been underestimates—though it is curious, as Barney notes, how tens of hundreds, even as per police underestimates, could hear anything on the beach, even accounting for the lack of noise pollution. The police also applied crude sociological categories identifying the crowd as students, merchants, petty shopkeepers, et cetera, and often on caste lines as well. Crowds were often characterized as mobs, who tended to get irrationally excited. Terms such as “riffraff,” “rowdy,” and the Anglo-Indianism of badmash (scoundrel) were frequently employed. This language has all the elements of “the prose of counter insurgency.” The effects on the crowd were also recorded. In contrast to police reports, newspapers tended to be less precise, using terms such as “hundreds” and “thousands” to refer to the crowds, and are better taken as orders of magnitude rather than literally. In the last part of A. Madhaviah’s well-known novel Padmavathi Charithiram, the protagonist observes: “Newspapers often write outrageous lies. ... Even in this city of Chennai, after attending a meeting, if we read a report of its proceedings in the papers one begins to wonder if it is a report of the same meeting or it’s a dream. Even if only thirty turn up the newspaper exaggerates the numbers as three hundred and three thousand.” By the 1930s, we have some photographs, and the occasional, if jumpy, newsreel clips that give us a sense of the crowd.

The public-address system had made its tentative entry by the time of the Civil Disobedience movement. For all its novelty and assumed revolutionary significance, references to its use are limited, and one has to tease them out from the sources. For instance, Kalki states, in 1931, that one Coimbatore Mahalingaiyer, nicknamed Kodai-idi (Summer thunderclap), “would not require ‘a loud speaker’ even when addressing a crowd of a lakh people.” Interestingly,

XXVIII Foreword

Kalki uses the term “loud speaker” in English and parenthetically describes it in Tamil as oli perukkum karuvi (literally, a sound-amplifying device), an indication both of its newness and imminent entrenchment.