In this book, Sumathi Ramaswamy explores how the Tamil language became the focus of intense commitments in twentieth-century South India. Following recent calls among South Asian scholars to find alternatives to narratives derived from western experience, she rejects language nationalism as an appropriate conceptual tool for her study, both because the term implies a universal European standard by which language feeling is to be measured and because it is incapable of encompassing the full range of ideas and sentiments that became attached to Tamil. Instead she employs a concept grounded in the discourse of the politicians and writers she has studied: that of tamilpparru or devotion to Tamil.