As
increasing attention is drawn to globalization, questions arise
about the fate of "the nation," a political and social unit that
for centuries has seemed the common-sense way to organize the
world. In Nation Work, Timothy Brook and Andr� Schmid draw
together eight essays that use historical examples from Asian
countries--China, India, Korea, and Japan--to enrich our
understandings of the origin and growth of nations.
Asia provides fertile ground for this inquiry, the volume
argues, because in Asia the history of the modern nation has
been inseparable from global influences in the form of Western
imperialism. Yet, while the impetus for building a modern
national identity may have come from the need to fashion a
favorable place in a world system dominated by Western nations,
those engaged in nationalist enterprises found their particular
voices more often in relation to tensions within Asia than in
relation to more generic tensions between Asia and the West.
With topics ranging from public health measures in
nineteenth-century Japan through textual scholarship of Tamil
intellectuals, the willful division of Korea's history from
China's, the development of China's cotton industry, and the
meaning of "postnational-ism" for Chinese artists, the essays
reveal the fascinating array of sites at which nation work can
take place.
This will be essential reading for historians and social
scientists interested in Asia.
Timothy Brook is Professor of History, Stanford University.
Andr� Schmid is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies,
University of Toronto.
'The mental eyes of everyone must be opened not only to
see that the present miserable condition of their life has
been due to the spell cast on them by Brahmin witchcraft,
but also to realise the great truth common to all great
religions, that is: all are children of one Heavenly
father.' -
Maraimalai Adigal, 1923
" This essay contributes to this revisionist
interrogation of the Saidian perspective by analyzing the role
that missionary orientalism played in the development of
Dravidian nationalism in South India. Through its efforts to
subvert the dominant school of orientalism in Hindu India,
missionary orientalism affords a particularly illuminating lens
through which to observe the dynamics of orientalist knowledge
production on India.
Far from being a hegemonic "colonialist
imposition" upon a passive "Orient," European orientalism was
dependent upon and responsive to the discourses of locally
dominant groups and reflected many of their visions and
interests. Similarly, far from being passive victims of
orientalism, dominant groups in the colonies actively
participated in the construction, maintenance, and propagation
of orientalist knowledge (see also Schmitthenner 1991; Trautmann
1997). "Local" power dynamics and struggles, and not only
colonial imperatives, must be taken seriously when looking at
the production of cultural knowledge, whether that knowledge be
European orientalism, "pre-British Orientalism" (Pollock 1993),
or even postcolonial scholarship.
This chapter contends that European
orientalism must be viewed as a more complex, multifaceted, and
contradictory set of discourses than the Saidian perspective has
acknowledged.
Discovering "Dravidian"
Dravidian nationalism
began gaining momentum in South India at the beginning of the
twentieth century in opposition to the dominant discourse of
Indian nationalism. Its emergence affords a significant
example not only of the complicity of missionary orientalism in
the process of identity construction and nationalism in South
India but, more importantly, of its role in empowering
subordinate groups or communities there. Ideologically,
Dravidian nationalism posited a parallel but counter discourse
to the dominant "orientalist" construction of India as Aryan and
Sanskritic.
Its ideological origins can be traced not
only to the historical tensions that existed between Sanskritic
and local vernacular cultures in South
India but to the modern reconfigured articulation of these
tensions inspired by missionary orientalism (Ravindiran 1996).
The missionaries were impelled in this project by their belief
that Brahmanism and the caste system posed the greatest
obstacles to Christian conversion in South India. They drew both
their inspiration and their justification for this project from
earlier resistance to Brahmanical culture found in ancient and
medieval Tamil literary works.
Missionary orientalism embraced and supported local
vernacular languages and cultures of South India in opposition
to those of Sanskrit, inspiring a significant body of
scholarship that proposed the existence of an ancient and once
"pure" Dravidian culture free from Brahmanism that needed to be
recovered and reclaimed. Alleging that the Aryan/Sanskriti
culture of the Brahmans had corrupted this Dravidian culture,
they called for the recovery of the latter. Many elements that
now constitute Dravidian nationalist ideology derived from this
anti-Brahman missionary orientalism.
There were at least two key "moments" in the evolution of
Dravidian nationalist ideology.
The first consisted of the efforts to present Tamil and other
South Indian languages and speakers as having a genealogy
distinct from those of the Indo-Aryan linguistic family and its
speakers in India. It is exemplified in the pioneering
philological work of Rev.
Robert Caldwell (1814-91),
Comparative Grammar of Dravidian or South Indian
Family of Languages ( [1856] 1974).
Caldwell not only coined the word Dravidian to describe the
languages and peoples of South India, but he also constructed,
with the aid of the modern disciplines of philology,
archaeology, and history, a genealogy for Dravidian languages,
culture, and people marked by their opposition to their
Aryan/Brahman counterparts.
His work provided a significant "scientific" bulwark against
the privileging of a Brahmanical vision of India prevalent in
his time. It also provided the rising classes of non-Brahmans in
South India with a significant ideological weapon against
Brahman sociocultural and intellectual hegemony. His use of the
term Dravidian came to have an enormous appeal for these people
by providing a single category under which all the
linguistically disparate non-Brahman caste groups in South India
could unite (Sivathamby 1993, 28).
Caldwell's work had a phenomenal impact, for aside from
laying the ideological foundation for Dravidian nationalism it
opened up a whole field of scholarly inquiry into things
"Dravidian." After Caldwell's achievement, others launched a
search for a distinctly "Dravidian" religion and culture. This
was the beginning of the second key moment in the evolution of
Dravidian ideology. European scholar-administrators and
missionaries were again in the forefront in raising the issue of
a distinctly Dravidian religion in the orientalist scholarship
of the time.
Although Caldwell had dismissed the religion of the
Dravidians as "demonolatry" overlain with a thin veneer of
Brahmanism, other European Christian missionaries and
scholar-administrators searched for and found in the ancient
Tamil and other vernacular religious and literary works evidence
of an ethical and religious system that was in their eyes more
compatible with the Christian tradition (Gover [1871] 1959).
The major impulse in much of the missionary support for a
distinctly Dravidian religion, again, was their antipathy toward
Brahmanism and what was considered to be its latest
manifestation, neo-Vedantism. Neo-Vedantism by the late
nineteenth century in South India had come to be considered by
many Christian missionaries and Dravidian ideologues as the new
liberal face of a resurgent Brahmanism in India. Working against
the ascendancy of neo Vedantism among English-educated Hindus
that had been in part promoted by orientalist scholarship, some
Christian missionary scholars working in South India sought to
promote what they considered to be a distinctly Dravidian
religious tradition.
This second key moment involved the identification and
resurrection of a Dravidian religion, which came to be
identified as
Saiva Siddhanta. It is best exemplified in the
writings of pioneer revivalists who forged an "inviolable" link
between Saivite and Dravidian identity. In the writings of
advocates such as the Protestant missionary
George Pope, pioneer
Tamil ideologues such as
P. Sundaram Pillai,
J. M. Nallaswami
Pillai, and
Maraimalai Adigal, Saiva Siddhanta became the original and
"true" religion of the Dravidians. In fact, the Dravidian
ideology derived much of its indigenous impetus and resonance
from its association with a Saivite identity. As most of the
early indigenous intellectuals in South India who embraced the
Dravidian ideology were Tamil Saivites, the Dravidian movement
began largely as an integral part of the Saiva Siddhanta revival
movement. These ideologues utilized the Christian missionary
vision of a unique Dravidian language, culture, and religion to
present Saiva Siddhanta as a distinctly Dravidian religion. In
so doing, they clearly disrupted an earlier vision of a less
racially defined or caste-bound Saiva Siddhanta tradition."
