Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at translation as the mode of the shift of the Muslim public sphere to the Malayalam script and polity in late nineteenth century in the south Indian state of Kerala.

Paper long abstract:

The Muslim population of the south Indian state of Kerala traditionally employed a script called Arabi-Malayalam, a script which was Arabic but with inflections to denote the additional sounds in Malayalam. Thus though the spoken language was a dialectal variation of what would later become standard Malayalam, the script was starkly different. The shift of the Muslim public sphere to the Malayalam script began in the late nineteenth century, under the influence of the religious scholar Sanaullah Makthi Thangal (1847-1912) who was also a British government official. A polyglot well versed in English, Tamil, Hindi, and Malayalam, Makthi Thangal exhorted the Muslims to shift to the Malayalam script to counter the Christian missionaries whose literature was proliferating, and thereby participate in the religious debates between the various interest groups. This act of talking back in the emerging public sphere necessitated more than translating between scripts , forcing metaphorization of the language of theology, history and memory of the communities. Celebrated as the moment of Muslim Renaissance of Kerala, this moment is crucial in forming a Malayalee public sphere which established Malayalee as a regional rather than a caste identity, and in which the Muslims would claim equal representation in the coming decades. This paper will lay out the cultural actors of the period, and the process of multiple translations in the configuration of the language polity as crucial to understanding language politics in South Asia.