The Dravidian language family is marked historically by a protracted struggle between Tamil and its aggressively assertive supremacy, and the consequent peripheralizing of other majoritarian languages of the region. This book looks at the development of Telugu - with its unique grammatical and lexical tradition as instrumental in the construction of the concept of the Dravidian language family in 1816, and in the development of comparative linguistics since that time.

The author's arguments locate Telugu in multiple matrices: of historical and theoretical Orientalism; the...