Resumen de The demoness, the maid, the whore, and the good mother: contesting the national language in India

Sumathi Ramaswamy

• This essay considers the gendering ofthe Tamil and Hindi languages in the course of the anti-Hindi movement in southern India during the middle decades ofthis Century. The movement, which was principally sponsoredby Dravidian and Tamil nationalists, presented the Hindi language to the Tamil public äs a bloody demoness, a scheming maid, a tempting whore, and a false mother out to destroy the Tamil language. The paper argues for the significance of the gendering of languages in nationalist mobilizations and activities.