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Are There Religious Grounds for Tamil Nationalist Aspirations?

Authors: Kaushik Arvind Swaminath

Year: 2021

Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	Are There Religious Grounds for Tamil Nationalist Aspirations?	Methods: This paper will analyze how both European and Tamil thinkers linked the concept of nation with religion and language. In Europe, since the time of the early Church fathers, nations have been connected to language and religion in a very specific way. In the course of British colonialism, many Indian nationalists adopted this conceptual framework, including the Tamil nationalists. The central inquiry of this paper focuses on how the Tamil nationalists’ distorted the concepts of nation and religion and their connection with language when adopting this conceptual triad from the Europeans. Results: This paper shows that the framework of ideas which facilitates the nation-religion-language connection was structured by Christian theology including a Biblical view of human history. In the course of European colonialism, many Indians also picked up the nation-religion-language paradigm and started their own nationalist movements. One such nationalist movement arose in nineteenth century Tamil Nadu. The ideologues behind this movement claimed that Tamil speaking people were not part of India; rather, they were a distinct nation with its own unique Tamil religion, Shaiva Siddhanta. Using the Tamil nationalists own writings on the subject, I demonstrate how the Tamil nationalists did distort the nation-religion-language paradigm given that they lacked the Christian theological framework needed to understand and coherently talk about these concepts.	nationalism; religion; Tamil movement; language; colonialism