Q: Hello Professor Nakassis! Congratulations on co-editing two significant publications: The Radiance of Tamil: Politics, Language, Media and For the Love of Tamil: Essays in Honor of E. Annamalai. Could you briefly summarize the main themes and contributions of these volumes to the field of Tamil Studies?

CN: These are two projects that are linked with each other, but it just so happens that they ended up coming out within a month of each other. We didn’t plan it that way! Professor Annamalai and I were, and continue to be, colleagues and collaborators at the University of Chicago from 2010 onwards. One of the first things we did together was to form a Tamil studies group, which eventually became the Chicago Tamil Forum (chicagotamilforum.uchicago.edu), an annual workshop where scholars of Tamil language, society, culture, and history come together around a theme to workshop papers. That started in 2014 and has been going on every year since. With a decade behind us, Annamalai sir, Francis Cody (a core member of the Forum and frequent participant), and I decided to bring out a book, The Radiance of Tamil, that would contain some of the many papers that were presented at the forum from 2014 to 2023; we picked 16 wonderful chapters out of the 70 plus papers that have been workshopped. It’s a kind of sampler, the idea being that the book would allow for a wider audience to participate in the discussions of the Forum than are possible with its small, intensive format. At the same time, we selected papers that took up recurrent topics of discussion and concern across our workshops, broadly, politics, language, and media. While focused on Tamil, the book will be of interest to non-Tamil scholars, however, with questions of larger significance – from political oratory and nationalism to caste and violence, literature and translation, to cinema, theater, and temple art. The second book, For the Love of Tamil is a festschrift for Professor Annamalai, put together by Margherita Trento, one of Annamalai’s cherished students, with help from myself, Sascha Ebeling, and N. Govindarajan. This book runs the gamut of all of Annamalai’s sir’s interests, from Tamil grammar to poetics to the sociolinguistics of minority languages to the politics of language. It was an honor to be able to include a chapter of my own (co-authored with Swarnavel Eswaran) and to help edit the book as a gift to recognize all that Annamalai sir has done for the study of Tamil. 

Q: Both volumes engage with Tamil across different historical periods – from classical grammatical traditions to modern media and contemporary language politics. How do the contributions in these books trace continuities and ruptures in Tamil linguistic and cultural practice over time?

I think that one of the complexities in area- or language-focused studies (where a language or a region or a “people” are taken as a basic unit of analysis) is that they can end up simplifying and treating as pregiven exactly what needs to be explained. Certainly, there is a continuous Tamil linguistic tradition across many different periods, but the idea of a hermetically sealed language or culture or people is as much a myth as it is a political fact. So, while we use “Tamil” as a handle to focus these studies, ultimately I see them as doing so as to expand outwards, to trace multilingual connections between ways of being in the world that we label with nouns like Tamil or Sanskrit or English or Telugu, but also to move beyond language per se to explore multimodal and multimedia connections, looking at cinema images or temple murals, and so on, that can’t be easily reduced to any simple notion of “Tamil.” This sensibility, which guides both volumes, is a way of approaching Tamil – as language and much more than language – as a kind of node or relation, perhaps even an invitation, rather than a coherent, self-present “thing.”

Q: What do you see as the broader implications of The Radiance of Tamil for the fields of South Asian studies, linguistic anthropology, or media studies? How do you think these collected essays contribute to refining and redefining Tamil Studies as a field?

I think one thing is simply to center Tamil more on the intellectual map. One thing that anthropologists sometimes note is that there are different theoretical traditions – different questions, approaches, and sensibilities – that come out of the study of different times, places, and linguacultures. Melanesianist anthropology, for example, has a different way of doing anthropological theory than South Asian anthropology than Africanist anthropology, and so on. The questions are often different, and so, too, the concepts. This is not to reify these “culture areas,” but more to say that the conversations that develop within and out of work in particular places and moments can lead to unique points of view on the world as a whole, illuminating something of its generality from some particular vantage. The dividuality of McKim Marriott, for example, found a resonance in the work of Marilyn Strathern in Melanesia, to just take an example. So, what I would say is that the broader implication of a book like this is to offer to all readers – whether they are interested in Tamil or not – a perspective on the whole that is uniquely afforded by the conversation that emerges from engaging Tamil materials. 

Q: Could you speak to E. Annamalai’s influence on your work and on the broader field of Tamil linguistics and studies? What makes For the Love of Tamil a fitting tribute to his intellectual legacy? Why was the decision made to publish it as open access?

Not to put him too much on a pedestal, but, personally, I look up to Annamalai sir as an exemplar of what a scholar should be. He is erudite, intelligent, accomplished; but those qualities are not the ones that I look up to the most, though I highly value them, of course! Rather, it is that he is generous, curious, and pursues ideas, arguments, and research from a sort of passion that is capacious, intimate, and yet also impersonal. We called the volume, For the Love of Tamil because, on least in my view, love is the best way to characterize his approach to the life of the mind and the community of scholarship. A love of ideas, of discussion, of knowledge, and of the intellectual relations that come with that. One incident that stands out for me, and which I mentioned at our presentation of this volume to Annamalai in early October of this year (2025), was one that captures what I am talking about. I was at the American Anthropological Association meeting one year and saw a paper by a graduate student, Hannah Carlan, that was about the colonial linguist, Grierson. When I returned, knowing Annamalai sir was interested in the topic, I told him about the paper. He was, indeed, interested, and I put Carlan and Annamalai in touch; she shared her paper. It turns out that Annamalai sir had been invited to contribute a chapter on Indian censuses or something along those lines to the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. He liked her paper so much that he arranged to have her take his place! Can you imagine a leading sociolinguist making space for a graduate student he didn’t know just because he was enthusiastic about her work? She ended up publishing an expanded version of her paper in that journal. So there is something selfless in his conduct towards knowledge and towards the larger community of inquiry. I think that is reflected in For the Love of Tamil, which spans so many topics, so many types of scholars, from different places and at different stages in their careers (from retired faculty to current graduate students). The love that he has put into the world of letters is reflected and returned in this volume, and in the work of those scholars who he has left an imprint on, myself included (even if I was never his student). We wanted the book to be open access – and we thank COSAS for making that possible – because knowledge of this kind is honored when it is shared, spread, and becomes the inspiration for further activity, conversation, inquiry, and publication. 

Q: How has your membership with COSAS helped you over the course of your career and in bringing projects like the Chicago Tamil Forum and these publications to fruition? 

Without COSAS there is not much left to Costas, you might say! But seriously, to a T, COSAS has created an important intellectual space at the University of Chicago, and beyond. COSAS’s support has been integral my scholarship, financially of course, but more than this as a community of like-minded scholars who are as diverse as they are unified in their commitment to the furtherance of the study of Southern Asia. COSAS staff and leadership have been great supporters of research on all things Southern Asian. The Chicago Tamil Forum is just one example of that that just happens to involve me. But there are countless others, as is reflected by the rich panoply of events, projects, and faculty and student research that COSAS supports. 

Q: What advice would you give to students or early-career scholars interested in studying Tamil, language politics, pedagogy, or the interplay between linguistic traditions and contemporary cultural formations?

That is a huge question and I don’t have a complete answer; but I would say, immerse yourself in the sea of Tamil: travel to Tamil-speaking lands, dig into the rich history, learn the language and learn how to speak the language. And finally, make sure that the powers that be understand that Universities have a crucial role to play in this, through the teaching of languages like Tamil (but others as well). It is through language that we enter culture and the worlds of others, and without language teaching many other critically important things, invaluable things, do not follow.