Figure 20	Figure 21

The triumph of Tamiḻttāy —as signaled by pictures such as these—was particularly sweet to its most ardent of devotees because they believed that it had followed upon years ofstruggling against other languages such as Sanskrit and Hindi (and to a more limited extent, English). Hindi in particular came to be caricatured by anti-Hindi Tamil nationalists and others as a demonic figure out to destroy Tamil in its own “home.”  Caricatured often as “Inti arakki,” “the demoness Hindi” (for example, Figure 22), Hindi was also presented to the Tamil speaker from the 1930s as a lascivious strumpet who would destroy the fine Tamil speaker with her loose morals, or as the lowly maid who sauntered in and usurped the fine Tamil home from its rightful owner, Tamiḻttāy. Not least, she paraded about as an imposter mother who, backed by used the power of the Indian state, sought to lure Tamil speakers away from attachment to their genuine mother, Tamiḻttāy.

In the course of the anti-Hindi struggles which convulsed the Tamil public sphere from the 1930s into the mid-1960s, escalating in particular from the late 1950s, Tamiḻttāy came increasingly to be visually presented to her “children” as a suffering mother appearing as the flesh-and-blood women who had given birth to them and nurtured them into adults. She is an all-too human fragile figure, wearing a sari in the style of everyday Tamil woman, but denuded of jewels, weeping over the bodies of her children who had been killed in anti-Hindi riots, or had poisoned themselves, or most consequentially, burnt themselves alive to show their devotion to her.

Yet this sari-clad, all-too-human, Tamiḻttāy is the exception rather than the rule, for as I have noted, the dominant look she generally wears is that of a glorious four-armed goddess, adorned in jewels, looking full frontal at her viewer. In this regard, despite assertions about her singularity and uniqueness by her devoted votaries, she very much resembles the numerous “poster” goddesses who had become visible from the closing years of the nineteenth century in the burgeoning commercial and devotional visual art complexes of India as a mixture of all manner of new and traditional forms.  So, her visual presence is one that essentially follows the newly formulated canons of the “god-poster” industry for representing the divine female as sensuous but un-touchable, blandly generic and anonymous.  Ironically, despite the fact that she is deemed a “Tamil” goddess, she does not particularly resemble the women of the region in her features or demeanor or even the style of the sari she wears, and indeed, she is generally presented with an (un-natural) pale complexion! In fact, as I have argued, unless she is specifically named as such, Tamiḻttāy runs the risk of being confused with Saraswati, the more well established and widely known Sanskritic goddess of knowledge and learning. 

But this is not the only risk that pictures of Tamiḻttāy have to negotiate. Although Tamil and Dravidian nationalisms, which under-wrote a large part of the Tamil movement from the 1920s, claimed to be secular, even anti-Hindu, in their ideology, Tamiḻttāy herself looks very much like a Hindu goddess in her dominant visual appearance: she wears the crown that many Hindu divinities typically wear; she holds her right hand in the typical gesture of offering grace to her devotees; she sits on a large lotus or her feet rest on it; and her face often carries the same look of her remoteness and transcendence that marks the countenance of many a deity.  Her visual votaries have found it difficult to shrug off the influence of Hindu iconography to which they turn, again and again, in their efforts to picture Tamiḻttāy.

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