What makes someone willing to die, not for a nation, but for a language? In the 1950s and 1960s a wave of suicides in the name of language swept through South India. This book asks why such emotional attachments to language appeared. It answers by tracing shifts in local perceptions and experiences of language in general and Telugu in particular, during the preceding century. Winner of the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr., Prize in the Indian humanities, American institute of Indian studies. Mitchell shows the emergence in India of language as the foundation for the reorganization of a wide range of forms of knowledge and practice.