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Temporal indexicality is deeply involved in the production of imagined communities. This article shows how the cultivation of Hindi as an "ancestral language" among Hindus in Mauritius mediates between two different modes of temporality while shaping diasporic identities. Diasporic ideologies of ancestral language are further shown to articulate with the creation of sacred geographies in the context of an annual Hindu pilgrimage.
[language and temporality, nationalism, Hindi, Indian diaspora, Mauritius]
Language ideologies are inescapably implicated in the temporality inherent in social life. One the one hand, they are the complex product of the historical contexts in which they arise, on the other hand they themselves contribute to the temporal structuring of social worlds by establishing relationships between linguistic forms, communicative practices, and sociocultural valuations. There are few instances in which this double-faced embeddedness of language ideologies in temporality is as apparent as in the modes of linking experiences of time and nationhood through language, which figure prominently in contemporary theories of nationalism.
In Mauritius, standardized Indian "ancestral" languages, promoted by Hindu activists, are fundamental to the building of ethnonational communities among the IndoMauritian majority population. The nostalgic use of ancestral languages for creating ethnolinguistic identities represents a different way of figuring community through language-mediated chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981) as compared to the notion of "empty, homogenous time" proposed by Benedict Anderson. Indo-Mauritian ancestral languages as a mediating base of national and diasporic communities for Hindus in Mauritius are presented as providing a strong link to ancestors who left a homeland in India in order to settle in Mauritius. In this article I analyze how ideologies of such ancestral languages in Mauritius are involved in processes of group identification by projecting notions of a Hindu community through a particular regime of temporalization. These do so by locating the meaning of Hinduness in Mauritius in an ancestral time, combining ideas about language with ritual performance evoking an ancestral homeland in India.
At the same time, they also represent an answer to questions of historical consciousness among Hindus in Mauritius. In several ways, the identification with ancestral Hindi addresses questions of historical change, which can be located along the axis of Anderson's "empty, homogenous"-that is, linearly progressing time measurable in uniform units. In constituting themselves as a diasporic...