Multilingual Dramas at the Tanjavur Maratha Court and Literary Cultures in Early Modern South India

Abstract

This article examines literary multilingualism at the South Indian Maratha court of Tanjavur (aka Thanjavur) (1675–1855), where the Telugu yakṫagāna dance–drama, a Nayaka legacy, developed into a polyglot form and the premier literary and performance genre. Composed in Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Sanskrit and Bhā ṫā (Hindi), and in combinations of these languages, Tanjavur yaksagānas were performed at court and temple. This article argues that these dramas both embodied and self-consciously represented the encounter of languages and literary cultures. The privileging of performance and the application of Tamil–Telugu formal conventions to Marathi, Sanskrit and Bhā ṫā resulted in the evolution of a hybrid, polyglot ‘vernacular’ literary culture, one which was simultaneously local and cosmopolitan, and in which differences were muted. At the same time, the dialogic texts and tropes of the polyglot dramas served as playful, imaginative representations of interlingual and inter-cultural encounter, often emphasizing the irreducible plurality of language and culture. Both aspects of the Maratha court’s performative multilingual-ism entailed the aestheticization of language in ways that contrast with other models posited for relations between languages and literary cultures in pre- and early modern South Asia, characterized by the linkage of lan-guage and region, and by hierarchy (cosmopolitan/vernacular) and con-testations for power.