Language is breath;
Language is consciousness;
Language is life;
………………….
Language is the world;
Without language; who are we? (– Bharatidasan)
In the South Indian city of Tiruchirappalli, there once lived a man named Chinnasami. A man of modest means, he lived with his mother, wife and child in a mud house with a tiled roof. One day, on a chilly winter morning in January 1964, he took a can filled with Kerosene and walked over to the city’s railway station. There, he doused kerosene and set himself on fire, shouting:
Inti olika! Tamil vālka!” – Death to Hindi! May Tamil flourish!
It was an act of rebellion, an expression of anguish and frustration, rejecting the imposition of Hindi on Tamil speaking people. With this, Chinnasami, who was considered an “ordinary man,” turned into a martyr at “the altar of Tamil.”
Within months, inspired by Chinnasami, five other men doused themselves with Kerosene and set themselves on fire. As the American newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek reported, “these men had turned themselves into human funeral pyres.” Over the next year, three other men committed suicide by consuming insecticide – “for the sake of Tamil.”
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