Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan

Abstract

the revision of entries and maps (103). Offering a summary of the reception of the encyclopaedia by the Tamil public, we are told that by the time the final supplementary volume appeared in 1968, ‘much had changed in the Tamil cultural world’, epitomised most of all by the rise to political power of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) (108). The snapshot of reviews provided in Chapter 6 seeks to explain how its reception in the regional press remained largely lukewarm, critical or even hostile at the hands of DMK ideologues. The Kalaikalanjiyam came willy-nilly to be identified with the Congress and the Indian nationalist position on the language question and judged harshly by the latter for what they considered its ‘mixed manipravala style’ and failure to use tanittamil or pure Tamil. As the book reiterates, the shaping of a discourse of Tamil regional identity and cultural production were inflected partly by the legacy of the Madras school of Orientalism, partly by the imperatives of nationalism and its cultural project as conceived by its early ideologues, and partly by Dravidian ideology that produced another compelling set of counter-perspectives. Not the least of its contributions is that the present study opens up the field to further research on the complex bearing that these skeins had upon debates around shifting definitions of ‘traditional’ and modern socio-political, cultural and knowledge repertoires, as well as upon specific issues of content, style, patronage and audienceformation for the Tamil sphere, particularly in the decades just before and after 1947.