The intensity of cultural investment that South Asian societies have channeled into their languages and literatures, whether gauged in a globally comparative perspective or in absolute terms, is truly remarkable. The intellectual energies poured into linguistic and aesthetic expositions, the assiduous maintenance and temporal depth of written and oral traditions, or the complexity and consequence of sociolinguistic relations, both locally and in interactions of regional diversity, would each suffice on its own to underscore South Asia's marked preoccupation with language. Their combined effect, however, has at times produced a civilizational sphere whose very self-definition rested with foundational claims to achievement in language. Yet despite the richness of this linguistic and literary history (or, perhaps, because of it), relatively few studies combine substantive textual analyses with theoretical agenda adequate to a treatment of the multiplex roles and articulations of specific languages and their interactions in the constitution of particular South Asian societies.

Throughout southern asia at different times Starting around 1000, but in most places by 1500, writers turned to the use of local languages for literary expression in preference to the translocal language that had dominated literary expression for the previous thousand years. This development constitutes at the level of culture the single most significant transformation in the region between the creation of one cosmopolitan order at the beginning of the first millennium and another and far different one—through colonialism and globalization—at the end of the second.

This paper addresses the problematic birth of the Malayalam language of Kerala in medieval South India. I say “problematic” because, of course, languages are never really born. Indeed, the dominant tradition of language genesis in India long asserted that all languages there only gradually arose by degenerate mutation out of the primordially beginningless Sanskrit. If there is a general truth to be found here, it is that since there are no human communities without speech, novel forms of language must always be emergent from earlier forms. Language genesis is thus always a matter of linguistic differentiation, away from some standard and towards another. But the sustained contrivance of these particular claims for Sanskrit also reflects another linguistic truth: that languages and their constituent elements are routinely shaped, conditioned, and ideologically figured by being themselves made into objects of discourse. In terms of language differentiation, this means the continuum of transformations that may at some point coalesce into a claim for linguistic separateness is always modeled and monitored in and through language itself. The reflexive or metalinguistic nature of this process, however, is always contextually oriented to the social fields in which it operates, so that the ideological positions and interests in those fields tend to carry over into the discursive products of a language and its literature. This study will attempt to highlight the web of relations among language varieties, ideologies, social contexts, and identities, as documented in a treatise on the language of medieval Kerala when that region first raised its claims for a distinctive linguistic identity.

Once upon a time, long before the rise of the modern nation, a language named Tamil wandered about in a world inhabited by divinities and extraordinary beings. This was an enchanted world of miraculous events and wondrous deeds, where the dead were brought back to life, and deserts transformed into fragrant groves; and where verses in Tamil cured fevers, stopped floods, and impaled enemies. It was a world in which poets, because of their mastery of Tamil, lorded over the gods themselves, and in which celestials vied with each other to win the affections of the language. There were even those who insisted that devotees of Tamil could look forward to a life amongst the gods, while its enemies were destined to languish in hell.

Why did you kill? From the first day I arrived in Cambodia to conduct ethnographic research, I had wanted to pose this question to a Khmer Rouge who had executed people during the genocidal Democratic Kampuchea regime (April 1975 to January 1979)- When the Khmer Rouge—a radical group of Maoist-inspired Communist rebels—came to power after a bloody civil war in which 600,000 people died, they transformed Cambodian society into what some survivors now call “the prison without walls” (kuk et chonhcheang). The cities were evacuated; economic production and consumption were collectivized; books were confiscated and sometimes burned; Buddhism and other forms of religious worship were banned; freedom of speech, travel, residence, and occupational choice were dramatically curtailed; formal education largely disappeared; money, markets, and courts were abolished; and the family was subordinated to the Party Organization, Ângkar. Over one and a half million of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants perished from disease, over-work, starvation, and outright execution under this genocidal regime (Kiernan 1996).

In her recent presidential address, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” Professor Evelyn Sakakida Rawski attacks the “sinicization” theme originally presented as one of the five major aspects of my 1967 article, “The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in Chinese History” (Ho 1967). In her essay—frankly admitted to have been based exclusively on “recent secondary literature”—she states that “a notable outcome of the new scholarship is the rejection of the sinicization thesis and its Han-centered orientation in favor of an empire-building model that emphasizes the importance of the Chinese empire's cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia” (Rawski 1996, 827). It ought to be pointed out at the outset that my 1967 paper was not delivered, as she mistakenly presumed, from the podium of the president of the Association for Asian Studies; for I did not receive this honor until 1975–76, when, after having shifted my research interest so far away from the Ming-Ch'ing period, I addressed the Association with a paper entitled “The Chinese Civilization: A Search for the Roots of its Longevity.” The 1967 paper was an AAS panel presentation, not a presidential address.