Invented traditions and regional identities---A study of the cultural formations of South India---1856--1990s.

摘要

This dissertation explores the cultural formations of South India in colonial and postcolonial Indian history. It argues that the constructions of a regional South reveal a decentered nationalist history in India. However, the idea of a "Dravidian South" is contested along the axes of nation, religion, caste, and gender. In situating South India as a site of understanding of the regional formations in India, this interdisciplinary study moves across plural discourses such as the colonial Orientalist writings on India (1856-1900), socio-political writings of the Dravidian movements in South India (1925-1960's), and post-colonial Indian literature in English alongside translations of works in South Indian languages.;The second chapter discusses the nineteenth-century Orientalist constructions of India. Inflecting Eric Hobsbawm's formulations of the invented traditions, it demonstrates that the quests for antiquity in India were mediated by colonial knowledges. The nineteenth-century nationalists were influenced by European Orientalists like Monier Monier-Williams, and Friedrich Max Muller. The colonial ethnographer, Robert Caldwell's, work inspired the formation of a lower caste Dravidian identity in the twentieth century.;The second chapter focuses on the writings of the Self-respect movement in twentieth-century Tamilnadu. These writings interrupt the nationalist formulations of religion, caste, and gender by constructing Dravidianism in anti-Aryan and anti-Brahminical terms. This chapter also recovers the Self-respect history in the writings of the women Self-respecters.;The fourth chapter argues that the idea of a Dravidian South is contested in post-colonial Indian literature. While Indo-Anglian writers like Jawaharlal Nehru, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and even Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan, cast South India in a relationship of supplementarity, or subsume it within the idea of a pervasive Indianness, women writers like Arundhati Roy, Geetha Hariharan, or vernacular writers of South India like U. R. Ananthamurthy, Chandrashekhar Kambar, Jeyakantan, and Lalithambika Antarjanam construct a local and divided Southern space.;The Conclusion highlights the tensions between the nationalist and regional politics in India. My study demonstrates that the regional formations of South India intervene in the narratives of a uniform Hindu Indian tradition.