Ramaswamy, Sumathi

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Ramaswamy, Sumathi

PERSONAL:

Education: University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1992.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Box 90719, Department of History, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708-0719. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, historian, and educator. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, assistant professor; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, began as associate professor, became professor, served as director of the Center for South Asian Studies; Ford Foundation, New Delhi, India, program officer, 2002-05; Duke University, Durham, NC, professor of history, 2007—. Cofounder of Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture.

AWARDS, HONORS:

J.B. Harley Research Fellow for postgraduate study in the history of cartography, 1997-98; Han Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 1999, for Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970; Frederick Burkhardt Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies, 2001-02; Guggenheim Fellow, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1997.

(Editor) Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, Sage Publications (Thousand Oaks, CA), 2003.

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sumathi Ramaswamy, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, is a historian and educator, having taught undergraduate and graduate courses in history at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Duke University. Ramaswamy's research lies in the fields of colonial and postcolonial India, British colonialism and empire, Tamil culture, cartographic history, and South Asian aesthetics. She is a cofounder of Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture, loosely translated as "house of pictures," a transnational digital archive initiative that seeks to collect popular South Asian cultural images for academic and artistic study. The Tasveer Ghar initiative takes an interdisciplinary approach to its examination of South Asian visual media and the history, technique, and exhibition that accompany these images. Ramaswamy's essay "When a Language Becomes a Mother/Goddess: An Image Essay on Tamil," featured on the project's Web site, discusses the visual history of the Tamil language and its goddess metaphors. She has also written several books and articles on linguistic, visual, and spatial histories related to India.

Her first text, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970, published by the University of California Press in 1997, draws upon her doctoral research on the subject of the interconnectedness between language and identity in colonial Tamil society. She explores the complex network of praise, passion, and practice centered around the gendered adoration of goddess, queen, maiden, and most importantly, mother in the Tamil language. According to Ramaswamy, the maternal figure, or Tamil Tay, is central to this network of devotion and involves a complicated relationship between follower and deity in which one is both protector and supplicant of the "mother" archetype. Italian scholar, G. Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, in a review for Asian Folklore Studies, acknowledged, "Ramaswamy points out the great sacrifices devotees made for their language and the partial success their labor obtained, such as eliminating Hindi from the list of compulsory subjects in Tamil government schools and increasing the use of pure Tamil words in place of Sanskrit derivatives." Ferro-Luzzi also stated, "Passions of the Tongue is an excellent study of a little known facet of Tamil culture, adorned by photographs of posters and statues of Tamilttay and cartoons showing her suffering at the hands of Hindi." Ramaswamy draws a significant connection between nationalistic ideals and language with her detailing of Tamilian devotion and inclusion of literary examples and instances of Tamil martyrdom. Vying cultural and political forces, to which Tamil culture reacts, is also part of this narrative, and Historian contributor James Heitzman noted, "The author carefully traces the origins of all these approaches within the context of colonial power and colonial forms of knowledge."

An edited collection of several scholarly essays, Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, a 2003 Sage Publications release, brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the historical study of Indian aesthetics. Based on a conference Ramaswamy organized in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2000, this volume examines the production and circulation of mass-media images and their role in society. As in Passions of the Tongue, this work links the manifest element, in this case the visual, with the culture in which it appears and details the significance of that relationship. Beyond Appearances? includes a review of multimedia materials, such as print media, photographs, fine art, and advertisements, and demonstrates their connection with Indian ethnicity. Moreover, Ramaswamy's 2004 publication The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, "ventures boldly into the world of the "fabulous and the "incredible" to explore the world of imagination and place making with great passion, precision, erudition, analysis, and scholarly concern," according to reviewer Surojit M. Gupta in the Historian. Although, the text departs from the study of the tangible and transitions to an examination of the mythological, Ramaswamy makes clear the significance of this place and the timelessness that surrounds it. In The Lost Land of Lemuria, "Lemuria, which figured so prominently in the Tamil and colonial imagination, occupies a crucial place in even contemporary constructions of tradition, history, and literary canon in the southern Indian state," commented Pramod K. Nayar in an essay for the Canadian Journal of History. Nayar further stated, "A mythic place that becomes effectively realized through polemics and erudite tracts, Lemuria, Ramaswamy demonstrates, is integral to the process of Tamil modernity." The subject of loss serves as the unifying principle, and, as Mary Hancock explained in a Journal of Interdisciplinary History review, Ramaswamy looks at the myth's function "as a cultural symbol among occultists and South Indian nationalists, among both of whom Lemuria continues to anchor discourses of memory, identity, and futurity."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December 1, 1999, Parama Roy, review of Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970, p. 1653; February 1, 2006, Kumkum Chatterjee, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, p. 137.

Asian Folklore Studies, June 1, 1999, G. Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, review of Passions of the Tongue, p. 395.

Canadian Journal of History, March 22, 2006, Pramod K. Nayar, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 185.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, March 1, 1998, review of Passions of the Tongue, p. 1232; November 1, 2005, R. Fritze, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 549.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, July 1, 1999, Douglas E. Haynes, review of Passions of the Tongue, p. 598.

Historian, June 22, 1999, James Heitzman, review of Passions of the Tongue, p. 938; March 22, 2006, Surojit M. Gupta, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 200.

Isis, December 1, 2006, Michael F. Robinson, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 775.

Journal of Asian Studies, November 1, 1999, Srilata Raman Muller, review of Passions of the Tongue, p. 1179; August 1, 2005, Kristin Blommer, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 787.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, January 1, 2007, Mary Elizabeth Hancock, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 495.

Parabola, December 22, 2006, Richard Smoley, review of The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 115.

Reference & Research Book News, November 1, 2003, review of Beyond Appearances?, p. 218.