Deepika Padmanabhan on Language, Identity, and Nation-Building in South India

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and this is the 2024 job market series where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India. 

I spoke with Deepika Padmanabhan, who's a PhD candidate in political science at Yale University. Her research focuses on nationalism, language and self-determination with a regional focus in South Asia. We discussed her job market paper, everyday imposition language promotion as a nation building strategy in Southern India. We talked about how the exposure to dominant national languages like English and Hindi impacts the identity of subnational regional speakers in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the politics of language in South Asia, the instrumental versus symbolic characteristics of regional languages and much more. 

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.

Hi, Deepika. Welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here.

DEEPIKA PADMANABHAN: Thank you so much for having me, Shruti, and for creating this space for job market candidates like me.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, this is super fun for me because I get to read awesome papers. 

Linguistic Diversity and National Identity

Your paper, I love it, because this is looking at the linguistic diversity in India, which is not perfectly symmetric. There are some languages that are more dominant. There are languages that are spoken by more people. Of course, we have English, which is this external neutral language almost, and the role that plays in India.

You're looking at how this affects local speakers, but not the typical stuff we look at. Economists typically look at how it impacts them in the wage market and job market and things like that. You're looking at something completely different, which is how they view themselves in terms of a subnational identity, which in India tends to be linguistic, like Tamilians or Kannadigas, or as a national, more Indian identity.

You find that exposure to dominant languages outside of the state, such as Hindi and English, when you look at the particular case of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, you find that the exposure to such dominant languages increases Tamilians’ and Karnatakas’ identification as Indian. 

Did I get that somewhat right? Maybe you can tell us more about the paper.

History and Politics of Multilingualism in India

PADMANABHAN: Yes, absolutely. India is an extremely multilingual country. While there are 22 officially, constitutionally recognized languages, there are so many more that are widely spoken. The dominant languages, as we can understand them, are perhaps English and Hindi. 

The promotion of Hindi as a dominant language, or as a national language by political elites, began before independence from British colonialism by nationalizing elites in the Indian National Congress. Even back then, there was widespread agitation in Tamil Nadu at various stages and from subnational elites in general who did not want to equate the idea of India with one language and one associated ethnic group. 

What happens after independence is a continued effort to promote the national language and a corresponding pushback from subnational politicians, particularly again in Tamil Nadu. 

Up until 1965, what we come to is a situation where Hindi and English will be official languages, but we don't really have any national language.We have scheduled languages, which are the widely spoken languages, and Indian states function in their own scheduled languages in addition to English. 

However, I think over the last couple of decades, especially—and a part of this is increasing internal migration within India, where a lot of Hindi-speaking migrants are moving to more employment-abundant states—there's more linguistic contestation through that source.

Then there's also linguistic contestation that's coming from a renewed push for what's perceived as Hindi imposition by the national parties in these states. It then becomes important to interrogate what exactly “imposition” is, in what ways Hindi is being imposed and what its consequences are. Whether they're material and whether they're affective, and what that does for subnational identity and national identity. 

Language as a Nation-Building Tool with Putative Effects

Nationalizing elites used a common language as a nation-building tool in early modern France and in colonized nations, as well as [in] post-colonial projects such as in the use of Urdu in Pakistan. This is not new, but in a multilingual country that professes a constitutional commitment to multilingualism, how do political elites still impose a putative national language, not an official national language, but a putative national language?

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, why? I think your paper speaks to why they might do that because there is this deeper identity question at work. 

Your result is super interesting because what you do is you expose people in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to short vignettes, which are not political or professing for a particular identity or a party, they're just exposure to a language in both English and Hindi. You find that there is almost a shift or a change in how they identify themselves.

What is the underlying mechanism at work from the individual's point of view? What's going on in the mind of my, let's say, Tamilian uncles and aunts who might have been exposed to your experiment?

PADMANABHAN: Absolutely. I think what's really important to understand in this context is how political languages are and the political associations people make with these languages. This idea of everyday imposition, I define it as the process through which nationalizing elites can elevate the status of the national language by promoting its use in routine interactions with the state. 

What this does as a process is it makes the national language more legitimate in public places through signs or boards, in everyday interaction with bureaucrats, or any platform of the state, and more legitimate, specifically, than local and subnational languages. 

I argue then that this process makes subnational citizens—when they are continually exposed to the national language—it leads to important affective consequences. The nonrecognition of the local language by the state and instead the prioritization of the national language is associated with a sense of humiliation and a loss of dignity. 

Experiencing the Hierarchy of National and Subnational Identities Through Language

Downstream of this, I draw from social identity theory, which is the idea that we derive our self-esteem from our group memberships and therefore want to be members of groups that have higher status. I draw on social identity theory to argue that subnational individuals are made aware of their lower status in the state's hierarchy, and incentivize them to emphasize the higher status national identity over the lower status in the state's hierarchy subnational identity.

RAJAGOPALAN: This starts mattering, right? Now we're in the realm of politics, and now this starts mattering, whether we're talking about water sharing in rivers that are crossing state lines, whether we're talking about how we split the fiscal pie, where a particular project gets placed that is of national importance. This starts mattering for everything if the core identity of the group is going to start shifting in a particular way. Is that a good way to think about why this is so important?

PADMANABHAN: Absolutely. I think it's also important because, as you said at the beginning, why are nationalizing elites investing in this project if they anticipate pushback from subnational politicians and people? 

Clearly, locals in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka seem very angry about having to go into government offices and see Hindi signs and listen to Hindi all around them. So why do politicians continue to invest in this project? It's perhaps important then to understand that this is a nation-building project that works in some ways, which is the pernicious nature of everyday imposition.

RAJAGOPALAN: There are two ways to think about what's actually going on in your field experiment. One way is, something new is being communicated in Hindi and English. These people are picking up on some information which is outside of the context of what happens in Tamil Nadu. Even though the messaging is not political, it tells them something about the culture of UP or something about the culture of MP, and they're picking up on that context and thinking about people and Indians outside of Tamil Nadu. That's one possibility. 

A second possibility is that the exposure is just purely symbolic. There is no informational content. It's just their subnational identity is tied to Tamil Nadu or Karnataka because the states were redrawn along linguistic lines in 1964, '65. This is just invoking an identity and that identity is, “oh, people outside of Tamil Nadu speak lots of different languages and those in Tamil Nadu speak Tamil.” It's that simple and that symbolic. What do you think is going on here and how do we tease these two apart?

Observing the Discriminatory Effects of Linguistic Imposition

PADMANABHAN: There are two experiments in this paper. The first is an audit experiment with nationalized or public banks in Bangalore and Karnataka, which have become sites of language-based contestation with locals protesting not being able to use the local language, which is Kannada, to access services. 

What I do here is I randomize the language in which service is sought, and I show that institutionally and bureaucratically such banks, which are representative of national political elite, and all of these government offices prioritize Hindi over the national language.

However, I find that, materially, the work gets done. So, putatively, the service is provided. However, using the local language leads to worse affective outcomes, which is worse treatment by politicians and feelings of recognition by the state. 

What I do with this is document discrimination based on language and how it's carried out in subtle ways by the state. Then, to interrogate the consequences of such routine exposure to Hindi in the setting of a state and also outside of the setting of the state, I employ a survey experiment, which is when I expose people to completely apolitical vignettes in Hindi and Tamil or Kannada, depending on what their local language is.

The reason I use apolitical vignettes is I've established that people are thinking of Hindi or people are interacting with Hindi in political spaces and are making these political associations with Hindi. Even when people are exposed to Hindi in apolitical contexts, such as in workspaces or through media and so on, we don't have to do the work of making it political. Languages are already carrying political meaning. To answer your question, I make the case that this is an affective and not as much a material process. It is definitely a symbolic mechanism.

There's other arguments people have made about how language might affect how you think about politics. The first one is a cognitive pathway which is common in the linguistics literature which is: When you speak a different language, the structure of a language makes you think of politics differently. Then there's a social pathway which is: When you speak a different language, you are exposed to people and subcultures and media that change how you think about your identity and politics. 

Then, lastly, there's the associational pathway, where the reason people might be thinking of their identities and politics differently is because of the political associations of the language that they're exposed to. I argue that it's really this associational pathway that's doing the work of altered identity. The main reason that I make this argument is, half of my sample speaks Hindi and half of the sample doesn't speak Hindi. It's really not about what is being spoken, it's just about recognizing that this is Hindi. Just recognizing that I'm listening to Hindi, it primes your identity and primes how you think about your position in the state and therefore also how you think about politics.

Bilingualism or Diglossia

RAJAGOPALAN: Your paper is one in the area of political science and what's happening in India in that space, but there's this whole other super interesting literature on bilingualism. Bilingualism versus diglossia, which are basically completely different things. 

I love Peggy Mohan's book, I don't know if you've come across it, and her point is that bilingualism is about two languages having essentially the same functional use in an individual's life and bilingual people are simultaneously translating. They can use either language, or even trilingual people, they can simultaneously translate, and they can use any of those languages for any purpose. 

Whereas most Indians I think tend to be diglossic, which is they learn a language which is native to them, something that's spoken at home or school or in their state, and then they translate to other languages which they use in other contexts. 

Now you have multiple things going on in your paper because even the bilinguals—it's not clear if they're truly bilingual or if they're diglossic because it's hard to test for that because everyone says they're bilingual. Maybe it's the diglossia which is making them have this association with something other than what they would have an association with if they heard Kannada or Tamil. 

There's a second question, which is, you say that past the point, the effect neither matters for bilingualism nor diglossics. Just hearing something even if it sounds completely foreign and you don't understand a word of it, it changes something in a person's mind and how they think about their identity. 

There are these multiple layers going on which I find totally fascinating about how that interacts with the politics of what's going on.

PADMANABHAN: Absolutely. I think it's important to note that South Indians recognize Hindi. They recognize the script. They recognize when it's being spoken because we see it in state forms. They see it on road signs or metro stations or in speeches, and so on. Even if they are not understanding what is being said, you're still understanding that this is Hindi, and it is a political symbol, therefore reminding me of my place in the nation.

Differences in the Political and Economic Valences of Hindi and English

RAJAGOPALAN: A couple of follow-up questions here. Is there a difference between Hindi and English? Both are dominant languages. English has got a different association, maybe some of it is political, but a lot of it is economic, right? People who speak English, especially at the native level fluency, they have this huge wage premium. This has been documented well by economists. There's the idea of hearing English when someone's not fluent or doesn't know English at all. There's an elite structure at play. They're made to feel inferior or as if they're not at the same level.

That is a little bit different from what's going on with Hindi because with Hindi it's more about demographics. There are more Hindi speakers. There are more Hindi-speaking migrants who come to the southern states. The national party typically tends to be Hindi first before it speaks regional languages. Even in a coalition government, the speeches will be largely given in Hindi and so on. 

Is there a difference that you see between the two dominant languages and how people may perceive them?

PADMANABHAN: Yes, and you absolutely hit the nail because while English is higher status, and also a dominant language like Hindi, it, as you said, is also politically neutral. Crucially, it's also not associated with any local ethnic group. 

Something I heard a lot in my interviews with Tamil politicians, they would say things like learning English doesn't make you an Englishman and learning Hindi will not make you a Hindiwala. The difference here is Hindi is actually associated with an ethnic group in India, or with ethnic groups in India, whereas English is not. 

The other dimension is, English is more aspirational. One of the survey questions I ask people is, why it's important for them to learn languages such as Hindi, or English, or their local language. People respond with the economic incentives of learning English, but with Hindi, it's a lot of national integration or to understand the political narratives of the country and so on. The effects that we see then are also driven by different forms of different relationships of these two languages vis-à-vis the local language.

RAJAGOPALAN: If I take the results from your experiment and generalize them much beyond what you're writing in the paper, then do you think what we'll see is, the people who are exposed to English and speak English or are just passively exposed to English think of themselves more as global citizens versus those who are exposed to their local language or Hindi [who] are thinking along more nationalist lines. Do you think it's just way too complicated, and that's a little too simple, even though English is the lingua franca globally. Especially, it's the language of the internet; it's the language of integrating in the global supply chain or service sector; and so on.

Migration and Language Politics

PADMANABHAN: I definitely think those are the political associations that people might make. However, when we compare them to the local language or the local languages—Tamil and Kannada or whatever they might be in the other states—I guess it's also important to consider the employment market and migrants here in this setting who speak Hindi as well as English. Then the local languages become much more critically associated with the subnational identity. In my open-ended survey responses, I was finding that people were also associating English with the migrant and with the threat. Perhaps not to the extent that they're associating Hindi with migrants or with the hegemonic state.

RAJAGOPALAN: With Hindi, the worry is the numbers are going to be very large, whereas in English, the numbers tend to be small, but the economic impact is large and positive. Right?

PADMANABHAN: Exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: Even with Hindi-speaking migrants, the economic impact is positive but the numbers being large frightens everyone that they're losing their culture and all the other things. Like all the protests that are literally going on this week in Bangalore.

PADMANABHAN: Exactly.

Linguistic Pluralism in Relation to National Identity and Growing Nativism

RAJAGOPALAN: A couple of questions again, which are a little bit outside of your paper, but I just want to pick your brain on this. Given that a lot of it is symbolic and not actually what is materially being communicated in the language, do you think the results will be similar or different or how different when they're exposed to non-dominant Indian languages? For instance, Karnataka is interesting because there are Tulu speakers, there are Marathi speakers, and so on. 

I'll stick with Tamil Nadu for the moment. You don't have, traditionally, within those regions, say Marathi speakers—that would be more Telugu speakers. But if they were exposed to Marathi or Odia, which are not nationally dominant languages but are spoken by millions of people, do you think there will be a similar feeling of national identity because they associate India's national identity with this kind of linguistic pluralism? 

It's not a nation-building exercise identity which is imposed by a particular kind of politics, but it's just a nod to: Everyone in India knows there's linguistic pluralism. That's what makes India India. 

PADMANABHAN: That's a great question because while these states are Tamil dominant and Kannada dominant, there are various other language groups that also have a large presence in these states. The first point I'll make here is, in my survey experiment results, the first thing we see is exposure to Hindi makes people identify at greater rates with the Indian identity over their local identities.

However, this is complicated because this is a fractured nationalism. One might expect the implication of this is reduced nativism against core national internal migrants, which are the Hindi migrants who are also part of this nation that you are professing increased identification with. However, what I find instead is, alongside increased nationalism, we see increased nativism as well against Hindi-speaking internal migrants. There is something very specific to Hindi going on here. 

Through my qualitative fieldwork, a lot of people in Bangalore specifically and language activists and language groups consistently spoke about how Bangalore has been multilingual since really its inception but especially since the '60s when there was language contestation along a very different dimension, which is against Tamil speakers at that time. They pointed to how Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and other language groups have had a large presence in Bangalore for many decades without this kind of escalation as we've seen in the past five to ten years. 

Hindi as the Site of Political and Economic Tensions

I think it's important to understand this kind of Hindi-speaking migrant as a special subset of internal migrants which have the political patronage of the center of the state. As a journalist in Tamil Nadu told me, "Earlier the migrant was not hegemonic. Now the migrant has the imagination of national power and access to it."

When locals perceive that in their own state or in their own home city, when the state is catering to the migrant through language more than it is to the local, I think we see this complicated dynamic of a defensive claim to the Indian identity to try to decouple it from Hindi. Simultaneously, there's this backlash or nativism against the Hindi-speaking internal migrant.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think something there is also intertwined with the demographic anxieties because like you said, once upon a time, Telugu was a really dominant language. Tamil was very dominant because more people spoke it. Language, at the end of the day, is a network good. The more people who speak a language, the more useful it is to know it. As those numbers settle into equilibrium, and the fertility rates of these states drop because these states are also richer, now we are literally talking about more people in a room who can speak Hindi. That is also becoming the network good language in a lot of these states. 

Plus, there's the question in democracy, even though we have a lot of malapportionment, you are one person, one vote for all practical purposes. There's this demographic anxiety along multiple lines. One is that our language will become less useful and effective, and the other [is], those people vote for someone different, and they will vote for this non-subnational power if you let them in and actually give them space and residence and domicile. 

It's fascinating how all of this is happening simultaneously, but there's also this weird side nation-building thing attached to it. Right?

PADMANABHAN: Absolutely. I think the nation-building alongside this increasing dynamic of internal migration and nativism and really high tensions right now in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, especially in the capital cities, is important to understand as a symbolic and identity-based process. Demographics are absolutely a large part of it. I often heard language activists in Karnataka say things like, "We are the highest state taxpayers in the country and so on, but we won't decide what's going on in the country. It's those people in UP who are more numerous than us who will decide."

In Tamil Nadu, there's a different kind of anxiety as non-Tamilians come in—how that changes how people vote since there's not a significant national party presence. I guess the other dimension here is of the class of the migrant because we see two kinds of migrants coming into the South. We see the more labor class migrant, and then we see those who come in to work in the IT offices, in the multinational companies, and so on. I think there are different kinds of anxieties associated with both migrants.

RAJAGOPALAN: With one, it's economic hegemony, which is the network good value of the local language, and with the other, it is the demographic hegemony, which is, they're just going to flood the state with their numbers and therefore they're going to change the voting patterns or whatever it is we care about.

PADMANABHAN: Exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: Is that a good way to think about the difference?

PADMANABHAN: Exactly. Sometimes I heard also in interviews with politicians, things like, "Well, land costs much more here, so we don't have to worry about it yet because these are circular migrants who will go back, and they'll buy land in Bihar or Rajasthan, and therefore, economically, we can guard against this demographic change." I suppose that day will come soon enough when we have to recognize the migrant and provide constitutional and fair-minded inclusion means.

RAJAGOPALAN: The funny thing is they want the migrants because these states have become too rich to be able to attract workers at a particular wage level to do their bidding. Bangalore will come to a standstill without migrants. I don't think we'll be served idlis on time at Saravana Bhavan if we didn't have migrants working in the back in the kitchen, and so on. I guess what I would say is anxiety is not always economically rational. That's where we can lead that.

Dialects of Local Languages Provoking a Subnational Identity

I also found the best kind of big papers always make me think about how would I design an experiment to tease out all these multiple parts. I thought a really fun—I say fun because I'm not the one who would have to do this experiment; someone like you would have to do it—would be looking just at Tamil Nadu and then exposing them to vignettes in different dialects of Tamil.

Tamil is also spoken in Sri Lanka, which is a completely different dialect because I've heard Sri Lankan Tamil, and I can't understand anything, versus Tamil in Tamil Nadu. Does that similarly invoke someone's feeling of Indianness because it's so clearly like a different language? You don't see that so much with Bengali. There's a slight difference, but it still very much sounds like the same language with the same emotion or symbolism it might evoke. But with Sri Lankan Tamil and Indian Tamil, I think there might be quite a difference.

Do you think you will find that exposure to a dialect which is so clearly from another country—this is a country that's literally geographically separated; it's been geographically separated through mythology for millennia at this point because of Lanka and everything that's happening in the Ramayan. What do you think we will find if we did design an experiment like that, which is not about a dominant language? Just thinking about it, does this evoke national and subnational identity or only subnational identity?

PADMANABHAN: Sure. I think that's a great question because not only are there varieties of Tamil in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, but there's also varieties of Tamil within Tamil Nadu that signal caste and subregion and so on. Which actually came up a lot in my interviews where people would try to figure out where I'm from as like, "Are you from Coimbatore?"

RAJAGOPALAN: They know where you’re from, right?

PADMANABHAN: Yes, exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: It's like My Fair Lady. I have a great linguistic origin story I'll tell you after we finish talking about the paper, but yes they know where you're from.

PADMANABHAN: Exactly. They're trying to place you in the caste hierarchy as well.

RAJAGOPALAN: I'm sure they call you Iyer-Ponnu or something like that, right?

PADMANABHAN: There was a bunch of confusion about that because in some interviews, it did come up. Your surname, but it's not matching up with the kind of Tamil you're speaking, and so on. The typical Brahmin Tamil is perhaps different from the Madras Tamil, and so on.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, exactly, which is more colloquial.

PADMANABHAN: Exactly. I think each kind of Tamil would then prime a different kind of politics, because if you hear, I think Palakkad Tamil for instance…

RAJAGOPALAN: It's completely different.

PADMANABHAN: I'm fairly certain that wouldn't prime the Dravidian social justice politics when people hear it. 

Coming to your question about Sri Lankan or Eelam Tamil versus the Tamil that maybe you and I would speak, I think, given the high degree of solidarity with the Eelam course in Tamil Nadu and also a parallel rise in Tamil nationalism in Tamil Nadu right now with the NTK and so on, it would still prime a subnational rather than a national identity. That is me speculating without having done the experiment.

RAJAGOPALAN: It would be super interesting to see that because that is the one dialect of Tamil I find very hard to understand. I don't claim to understand it at all. 

A Linguistic Origin Story

My linguistic story is actually interesting. This was during the tsunami, so it's already 20 years ago. I had gone there to do some tsunami relief work. I'm born and raised in Delhi, so I never grew up in Tamil Nadu. I've only visited Chennai, now erstwhile Madras, for short vacations and weddings or something like that.

I was taught Tamil by my grandparents, so I still speak Tamil, not like Madras Bashai, which is much more colloquial and much more mixed ethnically, caste, regional, and all of that stuff. I speak Tamil like they spoke Tamil in Thanjavur and Mayavaram 100 years ago because that's when my grandparents spoke it. 

I show up in these villages, and they needed one Tamil-speaking person heading the field support in each of those places, and I was one of those. They just called me Iyer-Ponnu the whole time. I didn't quite understand, and I'm like, "What are they talking about?" Then they kept telling me that I am from there.

I'm trying to tell them that I am not from here. I am from Delhi, and I was born there, and I was raised there, and it's the first time I'm coming to your village. I was mostly talking to women, and these were all fisherwomen. They all were so insistent that I'm from there.

PADMANABHAN: You're one of us.

RAJAGOPALAN: They start naming villages. I got tired of this, and cell phones were around, but I had to go to an STD booth, and I called my parents and my grandparents and I'm like, "Where are we from?" My parents were born in Bombay and Bangalore. Really, no one is from the village except my grandparents. Then my grandparents tell me where they're from, and both my maternal and paternal grandfather were within five kilometers of where I was standing.

PADMANABHAN: Oh, wow, so they're right.

RAJAGOPALAN: One, they were right, and they can tell how I sound. I sound exactly like my grandparents because it's very uncontaminated. I speak Hindi like a local Delhi, colloquial Hindi person, but I speak Tamil like you speak at home because there's no external influence. 

It was really freaky. Also, [for] the first time I understood that it doesn't matter that I've not been to a particular place, but that's my identity. It's been baked into my caste, my language, and intergenerationally, and there's no way out of it. That's when I was also asking my parents, "Are we Iyers? What is going on here? Why do they keep calling me that?"

My grandfather was like, "Yes, but it is also a shorthand for you're a Brahmin girl, is how they would say Iyer-Ponnu and things like that." It's just a personal story, which has suddenly made me realize my own Tamilness, if that's a word.

PADMANABHAN: This stuff really makes a difference say for anybody doing interviews or qualitative work and so on.

RAJAGOPALAN: They respond differently depending on who they think you are.

PADMANABHAN: Completely. For me, it became important because my surname indicates that I'm from Tamil Nadu, and my parents are from Tamil Nadu, but we're actually from a Telugu-speaking family, to explain that origin story. But also not to signal that too much was challenging.

RAJAGOPALAN: Did they constantly ask you if your family is named after the temple? They were constantly asking me if my family named anyone in my parentage after a particular temple, and incidentally, my dad was named after that temple. They got so many things right about my family. I honestly thought, “I'm in that opening sequence of My Fair Lady where Henry Higgins is telling everyone how to catch a horse buggy or a taxi cab to get to where they need to get to because of their dialect.”

Do you have time to chat a little bit more about your other research in Tamil Nadu because you are writing about food and film and politics, and propaganda, and all of these things are super fascinating to me. What can you tell us about these papers?

Politics in Tamil Film

PADMANABHAN: I think anybody interested in Tamil politics generally also tends to be interested in how political Tamil film is. For myself, the Tamil I know is mostly from Tamil film, and therefore, a lot of the politics that I personally own are from Tamil film. 

This paper is advancing this theory that political film really serves as a heuristic tool to understand an actor-politician more than a propaganda tool to change people's politics. While I also have a survey experiment that's currently in progress, a bulk of the evidence of this project comes from these in-depth interviews I conduct with Tamil film fans.

In 2021, I conducted around 20 interviews with Rajinikanth fans as well as Kamal Haasan fans.

RAJAGOPALAN: That is beyond politics. That's religion now. 

PADMANABHAN: Exactly. How even people's religious identities—and what signals are they looking for in these actors' movies? An average moviegoer in Tamil Nadu, at least, is very politically savvy and they're able to understand political signals.

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

PADMANABHAN: An average fan is able to talk in detail about why did Rajinikanth do a certain movie, such as Kaala for instance, and therefore, what does that signal about his politics on caste. Therefore, how can I then educate myself on Ambedkar and Periyar, and so on? 

Right now, I'm in the process of interviewing Vijay fans, which has also been hugely illustrative because a lot of non-fans think about Vijay as very apolitical, and we don't know yet. His party platform has not been revealed and so on.

RAJAGOPALAN: That's the other thing, right? In Tamil Nadu, a lot of the actors turn into politicians or at least have political platforms which will support the existing party structure and have coalitions with them. 

By the way, I am curious to read this paper because my own family has a political and religious divide between Kamal fans and Rajini fans, so it would be super fun to read this.

PADMANABHAN: Absolutely. I will say I had the best time working on this project, and people are so excited to talk about politics and film.

RAJAGOPALAN: One is the kind of films they choose, which is, “now we're going one layer under,” then it's this dynamic game between what the star thinks the fan wants, and therefore, the stars will start choosing those particular themes. There are also these very significant tones on linguistic nationalism and politics in the films themselves, the kind of Tamil they speak, the kind of remarks they make about those who are not Tamil-speaking or those who are outsiders and those who are English-speaking, which is typically like the dainty lovely girl who enters whatever context is going on in the movie. This is fascinating. I can't wait to read that paper.

PADMANABHAN: Thank you. As you said, linguistic cultures are also politicized in these films, and the idea of a Hindi speaker or even the Sethu-ponnu and so on is baked in.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I forgot “Sethu-ponnu” [good girl]. That's such a lovely word there. We're going to have a fun time translating that in the transcript.

PADMANABHAN: Apologies.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, no, no, I keep using all these other words and then, when we're doing the transcript, I’ve got to do this. 

I'm going to also send this to my uncles. My uncle once told me something quite lovely, very ardent Tamil speaker. He said, "The only Hindi imposition I'm willing to live with is one imposed by Mohammed Rafi," which is both dating him and also how a lot of Tamilians got exposed to Hindi to start with, by these beautiful songs that were sung by Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar and so on. I think even Ram Guha has a passage in his book on how Indian cinema and Indian songs were this nation-building exercise.

PADMANABHAN: Yes. And films as a modern creation of an imagined community, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

PADMANABHAN: That's how communities are created in some ways. As you said, I think that's not uncommon in southern India. A lot of people talk about how we watch Bollywood. We enjoy Bollywood. We just do not want you to force us to speak Hindi, whether in state settings or by migrants and so on. I can choose to learn it if I want and engage with it on my own terms.

The Future of Linguistic Diversity with Advancements in Technology

RAJAGOPALAN: Last question, do you think all this is just going to disappear with AI and simultaneous translations and things like that? People are literally working on technologies where, in real time, if you're speaking in Tamil, I can hear it in Hindi. There are devices being made like that. Do you think all this will just disappear in 20 years, and we'll wonder what the fuss was about?

PADMANABHAN: Yes, it's interesting you bring that up. A lot of the language activists in Bangalore city, some of the leadership also had long careers in engineering and IT and so on, so these are people familiar with technology and advancements in AI. I think one thing that's important to think about here is the will to actually do this. Even right now, if you go to most of the government of India websites, very few of them go beyond English and Hindi, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

PADMANABHAN: That's already very easy for people to do. I remember during COVID, there was a gap before which services for the health apps became available in the local languages. I remember this activist in Bangalore telling me "Google settings in California can understand what I need, but these people can't understand that they can leverage technology." 

There's also then a simultaneous effort which we've seen in the past to modernize Tamil vocabulary, but right now, we're also seeing this effort to modernize or to adapt Kannada vocabulary to technology and so on.

I think technology will definitely change how we engage with language and language politics, but I think political will and the political dynamics is a crucial variable here.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is fascinating. Looking forward to reading all of this. Thank you so much for taking time to talk about your research with us.

PADMANABHAN: Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. It was so nice to be here.