Parallel Languages,Parallel Cultures

Abstract

Linguistically bounded literatures, such as Telugu or Kannada literature, appear today as entities that have existed as meaningful categories nearly as long as the languages themselves. However, this imagination of literary worlds as coterminus with languages has not always made sense. Using debates over pedagogy and knowledge production sparked by the advent of printing in southern India, this article argues that languages emerged as discrete foundations for the parallel reorganisation of knowledge and practice only during the nineteenth century. Literary production, educational practice, the writing of history, the imagination of genres, and eventually the assertion of socio-political identity and geographical divisions have all been reorganised in relation to vernacular languages in India during the past 150 years. The article demonstrates that the treatment of languages as parallel rather than complementary media marks a new relationship to language that differs from earlier relation-ships to language in southern India. It argues that by the end of the nineteenth-century, practices relating to literacy, pedagogy, administration and bureaucracy, religion, economic exchange, and personal interaction—practices that once moved across multiple languages—began to be governed by the logic of parallel ‘mother tongues’.