David Shulman awarded Israel Prize
N. Ganesan
Renowned Indologist awarded prestigious Israel Prize
Prof. Shulman introduced the field of India studies to Israeli academia and the general public, acting as a sort of ambassador for Indian civilisation in Israel.
Renowned Indologist Professor David Shulman has been awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for his breakthrough studies in fields like religion and philosophy.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett made the announcement at the recommendation of the prize committee, headed by Professor Shaul Shaked, leading to a bitter debate in right—wing leaning media here which disapproved of the award for Prof. Shulman’s known left—wing inclinations.
The committee said that Professor Shulman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem is “a brilliant researcher who had done breakthrough studies on the religion, literature, and culture of southern India“.
“He is an internationally renowned expert in this field, and his work is enhanced by his command of a wide range of languages, including Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu and Malayalam”, it added.
67-year-old Shulman is known to be active in a left—wing organisation, Ta’ayush, a joint Israeli—Palestinian initiative active in the south Hebron Hills.
This made several media outlets to push the Education Ministry for a comment as it is headed by a right—wing minister who has been in news for his views against left—wing activists.
“The Israel Prize for Religious Studies is given to Professor Shulman for his breakthrough research into the literature and culture of southern India. Minister Bennett believes that one should not disqualify someone for his opinions, left or right, whatever they may be,” the Ministry said.
Israel Prize is considered the country’s highest honour presented annually on Independence Day. It is given to those who have displayed excellence in their fields, or have contributed strongly to Israeli culture or the State.
The prize committee in its recommendation wrote that Prof. Shulman’s studies “excel in their diversity, dealing with literary genres and various research topics including religion, mythology, art, folklore and imagination.
In Israel he founded the field of India studies and most India researchers in Israel are his students.
Professor Shulman has made an important contribution to research management and teaching in Israeli universities.
Through his books and translations, Prof. Shulman introduced the field of India studies to Israeli academia and the general public, acting as a sort of ambassador for Indian civilisation in Israel.
U.S. born Shulman won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, making him the first Israeli to be conferred with the honour.
He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Sciences and a winner of the Emet Prize, awarded annually by the Prime Minister’s Office for excellence in academic and professional achievements.
Keywords: Renowned Indologist awarded, prestigious Israel Prize, Professor David Shulman
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Expert on India research to win Israel Prize for religious studies and philosophy
Education Minister Naftali Bennett approved the recommendation of the prize committee headed by Prof. Shaul Shaked and offered his praise to the US-born professor.
The other members of the prize committee included: Prof. Gideon Bohak, Prof. Deborah Diamant, and Prof. Samuel Harvey.
In its decision, which it announced Sunday night, the prize committee stated that Prof. Shulman is a “brilliant and groundbreaking researcher of the religion, literature, and culture of southern India.”
“Prof. Shulman is known for a variety of publications in these areas, which has bought him renown in Israel and in the world and has won cooperation with leading researchers in the field. One of the characterizing aspects of his research work is the command over a wide variety of languages including Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam,” the prize committee wrote.
“His outstanding research in diversity deals with different literary issues and numerous research topics including: religion, myth, art, folklore and imagination. In Israel he founded the field of study of India and the majority of researchers of India in Israel are his students.”
The Israel Prize is largely regarded as the state’s highest honor. It is presented annually on Independence Day in a state ceremony in Jerusalem in the presence of the president, the prime minister, the Knesset speaker and the Supreme Court president.
N. Ganesan
Shulman’s Exploration of the Imagination in the South Indian Cultural World
Steven P. Hopkins, … a longer version of a review in South Asian History and Culture, vol. 3, no. 4, July 2013, pp. 424-26 (see below)
Coming away from a close reading of this remarkable book one cannot help feeling much like the bemused lover in Ativīrarāmaṉ’s 16th century Tenkasi Tamil poem on the tale of Nala and Damayantī. The goose messenger has just described in vivid imaginative detail the body of Nala’s beloved, almost placing her “before his very eyes,” when he wonders aloud: “Seeing through the mind [thought, imagination] of a true friend is really seeing (mēyt tuṇaiyār karunttiṉāṟ kāndale kāṇṭa)” (186). Seeing the histories of South Indian literatures through the singularly perceptive and creative mind of David Shulman is, indeed, “really seeing.” And what we have before our eyes in Shulman’s seeing is an exhaustive and deeply nuanced work of scholarship on the nature of the “imagination” in India.
David Shulman
Over the last twenty years Shulman, along with various colleagues, notably Don Handelman, V. Narayana Rao, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, has been tracing, though exhaustive studies of Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit literatures of medieval and early modern South India, lineaments of what might be termed “non-dual imaginaries,” for the most part explicitly Śaiva-derived forms of advaita distinguished from monistic Advaita Vedānta. In work that spans narratives of the god Śiva in the Pine Forest (the dāruvana cycles in their Śaiva Siddhānta contexts), the Dice-Game narratives of Śiva and Umā/ Pārvatī, and the “melting and marrying” of god and goddess, tapas and kāma, in Kālidāsa and the Purāṇas, Shulman and Handelman have focused on the dynamic (“not one,” “not two”) relationships between various oppositions in Indian thought, from the images of a god’s yogic absorption to the necessary vulnerability in love; remote self-mastery to the sometimes self-lacerating process of self-knowing; of disciplined order to fecund chaos; of willed ritual inwardness to discrete alienated externality; stillness to the dance; and the opposing but equally hot and melting powers of tapas and kāma. Implicit in many of these studies is the unstable relationship between objective and subjective worlds, what is viewed as “real” and “unreal,” reality and “fantasy,” waking and dreaming, the “true” and the “really real,” empirical hardness, and the soft flowing liquid world of imaginative creation and “grace” (aruḷ in Tamil). Shulman’s work places focus on the fissiparous and dynamic, the unstable, tensile, indeterminate, vulnerable “middle” between such extremes, places of emergence, elasticity, flow, transition, and creative transformation, imaginal spaces favored by poets. So it is not surprising, given these preoccupations, that Shulman’s scholarly focus would eventually be trained on the imagination itself as an object of inquiry in the history of South Indian literatures.
In More Than Real Shulman tackles systematically what western sources have termed the “imagination” in the history of Indian literature (with some references to ancient and contemporary ritual) and aesthetic theory. He begins his study with some vivid examples of “mind-born worlds” in disparate historical, literary, and religious contexts: a charming story from Cekkiḻār’s 12th-century Pēriya Purāṇam about the magnificent shrine built by the humble god-lover Pūcalār in his mind (maṉattiṇāl), an elaborately detailed and perfected imaginative act (niṉaivu), laboriously built up mentally over a period of many days, a temple made out of thought (niṉaippiṉāl) by one whose “devotion never knew a gap,” that the Lord Śiva vastly preferred to king Kāṭavar Komān’s material shrine made from all too physical stone, forcing the king to throw himself to the ground before the humble Brahmin (4-6); a reference to the ancient Vedic sacrificial cult (yajña), where one of the Brahmin priests “sits silently thinking the entire ritual in his mind,” even “repairing – mentally — what might go wrong with it,” while around him fellow priests are “performing the visible, concrete tasks of pouring the oblations” and “chanting the mantras” (7); and a contemporary Kūṭiyāṭṭam dancer who, along with singer, drums, cymbals, and ritually lit oil lamps, through a “precise choreography of gesture and rhythm”(14), patiently builds up a “thick space” made up of the four cardinal points, the entire cosmos in miniature, a dense “real, existentially sold, complete, three dimensional, fully populated and autonomous” visionary world present before the eyes of the spectators, where “the gods, celestial musicians, yakṣa spirits, perfected yogis and great sages in the heavenly world; the demons and serpents in the Nether World; the Brahmins, Warriors, Merchants, and Peasants, the domestic animals and wild beasts, the birds and other creatures” (15), among them Lord Siva and Pārvatī, all made present for the duration of the dance drama, “kneaded, chiseled, woven together, and help in place by the puṟappāṭu dancer” (17). These are indeed impressive displays of the powers of mental acts to systematically create and project “imagined” worlds onto “real” material space.
But this is not all. Shulman will trace a progression throughout this book, arguing that something unusual and original begins to emerge in 16th-century South Indian literature, where the “imagination” attains a new kind of radical autonomy, “infinitely more than a form or extension of perception,” becoming a unique “causal force generating the worlds,” and indeed “the primary mechanism and inner logic of all creation per se” (277). But how did we get here, from the efficacy of mental faculties to reproduce pre-existent ritual structures (and deities) to an individual and subjective creative causal power of the mind able to bring new worlds “into being” (bhāvanā)? This may have to do with specific civilizational shifts that reflect the rise of new elites in Nāyaka South India, forms of entrepreneurship and cash-oriented economies, all of which have a deep impact on “the notion of a personal, generate, image-driven faculty of the mind” (152). Specific historical arguments are beyond the scope of the book, but as Shulman states in the conclusion: “There is a world of difference between effective acts of inner visualization, unspecified beyond being situated somewhere inside, and the imaginative perception of the self-defined, self-aware individual who knows himself or herself to be gifted in bhāvanā in the sense of activating a particular, central faculty of the mind to far-reaching effect” (286).
Shulman begins his genealogy of the active “imaginative process” with relevant Sanskrit terms from Indian theories of the mind and poetic inspiration. We have common terms derived from the verbal root kḷp: kalpa, “doing, generating;” kalpanā and vikalpa, “mentation,” “thinking,” a thought or “concept;” there is also saṅkalpa, “intention,” “thought,” determination, “imagination” (18-19). There is a Tamil term, niṉaivu, “visualization” or “imagination,” and cintai, a “disciplined and highly detailed” mentation. But the set of terms most critical to Shulman’s study of Indian forms of active imagination derive from the verbal root bhū, “to come into being,” or its causative form bhāvaya, “to bring something into being” (19-20). Much of Shulman’s survey tracks various transformations of this latter root across a variety of grammatical and literary traditions, from logicians and linguists to 16th century South Indian poets (Ibid.).
While it is impossible in the scope of this review to do justice to every detailed example in this closely argued study, I will focus on a few salient ones. Shulman treats, in separate chapters, a variety of texts and traditions, from romantic projections and paintings that take on a life of their own in Harṣa’s Ratnāvalī (27-39); “landscapes enlivened and transformed by intense, detailed, projected senarios” in Sanskrit sandeśas or “messenger” poems, notably the Meghadūta of Kālidāsa and the Haṃsasandeśa of Veṅkaṭanātha; to lovers in the fevers of separation who re-imagine the bodies of their absent beloveds in the 7th century Kadambarī (40-48). Though Shulman’s analysis of the speeches of Kadambarī, where he sees her longing with performative “nostalgia” that “takes on an aspect of helplessness and hopelessness” and “trauma” (47-48) is nuanced and powerful, he misses one important aspect of these speeches. Kadambarī’s taunting insults also follow the literary structures of female lament (vilāpa); they express not only a passive hopelessness and retrospective longings, an “unraveling of personal identity” (48), but an active rhetoric of resistance and critique, witnessing to particular loss and a claim made for fidelity. Female laments in Indian literatures, such as that of Sītā’s in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, possess their own forms of positive imaginative power, witnessing to particular loss in a positive mode of active critique, witness, and confrontation.
After treating examples of utprekṣa (fancy) as the imaginative reconfiguration of reality, a “figurative domain” where “imagination requires a high-grade, tensile suspension in which reality and unreality come together in the mind of the listener or spectator without resolving the contradiction between them” (60), Shulman’s discussion of dhvani and rasa theory is admirable in its focus not on Bhatta Nāyaka, Abhinavagupta, and the Kashmiri theorists’ overly-rehearsed emphasis on sādhāraṇī-karaṇa or “universalization/ generalization,” but on the “irreducible particular aliveness animating external form” [ ] “made accessible by dhvani,” a focus on particularity and the singular personal in a way that is more loyal to Ānandavardhana’s core theory (71-75). Bhāvanā balances, in a sometimes precarious, “tensile” way, the particular and the general, “general potentiality,” and that “pretty girl’s face that is like the moon in a uniquely personal way” (74-75). New critics in the 17th century like Jagannātha will decouple rasa metaphysics entirely from the poetic imaginative enterprise (106-107), which offers us an example of what lies ahead in a vision of the independent, autonomous creative imagination.
After a focus on the active bhāvanā in yogic visualizations of the goddess in the remarkable 7th-century Ānanda-laharī attributed to Saṅkarācārya, and the dense imaginal processes of temple pūjā (117-143) that establish a “cojoint quiver” between devotee and god/ goddess (127), where we have “highly patterned, determined, and probably irreversible” processes that reflect “true but latent identities” (124), the remainder of the book focuses on what is “new” in 16th-century South India.
Through a close reading of several remarkable Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit texts, including the Tenkasi Tamil retelling of Queen Sīmantinī, where a Queen’s imaginative powers (bhāvanā) turn a young Brahmin boy into the girl he always was, latently inside (155-169); the Nala story in the Tamil Naiṭatam (“two fantasies embracing,” 175-204) and the truly bewitching Sanskrit Bhāvanā-puruṣottama, the story of King Best who falls madly in love with his own Imagination (232-265). In all of these examples from sixteenth century South India, bhāvanā operates as an autonomous active power, in great measure helping to create the very concrete world in which we live.
In such an early modern South Indian world, Shulman argues, what we perceive is largely there “because of the way we imagine it.” Existential claims follow for this active, causal, autonomous, creative imagination, that marks a “new economy of mind in 16th-century South India:” in such a world, Shulman goes on to say, “I imagine therefore I am. Even better: I imagine, therefore you are; or, if you prefer, You imagine, therefore I am” (269).
In the conclusion, utilizing the work of Lorraine Daston, Shulman ventures some comparative lines of inquiry, drawing important distinctions between this South Indian “therapeutic” and causal vision of imagination and the more “passive” and ambivalent theories of Aristotle, Plato, and even Renaissance models deployed by Montaigne (278-281). Shulman rightly perceives vivid connections, however, between Indian visions and the “creative imagination” (khayāl) in the mystical theology of 12th-century Andalusian Ṣūfī master Ibn al-Arabī, opening up this remarkably rich study to a wider conversation on the imagination across traditions.
More than Real; A History of the Imagination in South India, by David Shulman, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, Harvard University Press, 2012, 333 pp, (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-674-05991-7
Steven P. Hopkins, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA USA
N. Ganesan
A book by David Shulman on changes in Thought in Vijayanagar (South India). Prof. Shulman is a specialist in Telugu, Tamil and Sanskrit.I have been reading David Shulman's books from his PhD work: Tamil Temple Myths on Tamil talapuraaNam-s. He has asked for some references of old books and where to get them off and on from me. For many years now, he is working on Telugu literature and once in a while, he touches some Tamil material. This new book, which I enjoy reading, is a welcome addition. It will serve as a nice gift to Tamils (many of them grow up without reading Tamil) and non-Tamils alike.N. Ganesan
A grand portrait of ancient poets
THE WISDOM OF POETS — Studies in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit: David Shulman; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 650.
POETS ARE the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They are worshippers of nature, admirers of life and propounders of great truths. Human life, without the soothing words of poets, would be barren and boring.
The words the poet uses, the way he uses them and the deep sentiments and feelings, which he kindles in the minds of connoisseurs of art, are all unique. The bliss a good piece of literature generates is equated in Indian literary traditions with the bliss of Divine communion itself.
Poetry is the magic wand in the hands of a poet. It is the means of bringing to our vision, the presence of God. Poetry can become the medium of any thought and feeling, provided it comes from an accomplished poet. Poetic abilities of course differ from person to person.
In the work under review, Prof. David Shulman, who is Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, provides an innovative inner vision of the poetics of the classical and medieval period in Tamil and Telugu.
The author has dealt with various dimensions of a poet from several angles and has succeeded in presenting a grand portrait of poets to whatever region or religion, age or language they belong. Some of the essays here deal with the theory of self, the organisation of the internal world of imagination, memory etc., in poetic compositions.
Describing the methodology adopted by a poet, Shulman says first there is always the voice — the musical, usually distinctive, embodied, expressive timbre that tells us that the poet is singing, at a singular moment within time, a moment that can become history. Even among poets belonging to more or less the same age, there will be a distinctiveness, which may be called the texture.
The words used by a great poet try to reproduce the primary features of the object or meaning embedded in the author's sentences: syntactical, lexical, metrical patterns — conscious or unconscious; eloquent silences and hiatuses; suggestive expressions.
Textures entail the mutual resonance and recurrence of theme, context, etc.
The words of Emily Dickinson may be quoted here: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold that no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know about it. Is there any other way?"
Poetry is undoubtedly the gift of God. Poet and God create one another, through the medium of a linguistically potent poem, remarks Shulman. Sometimes poets become so obsessed with their own conventions and rules that they fail and even refuse to accept something, which seems to defy those conventions.
The story of the Tamil Sangam poet, Nakkirar, is an example in instance. He was the president of the academy of poets at Madurai and the stark embodiment of the grammarians' ethos. He is placed in opposition to Lord Siva "who is himself a poet".
But unlike Lord Siva, the crusty academician is impaled on the rigid rules of his own system, unable to contain with his own resources the internal process by which this system periodically moves beyond itself, renewing itself through indeterminate experience.
In effect, the scholar-poet had to be released from his own rules; while the grammar he defends to his cost turns out in the end to be poised rather precariously between normative and self- subverting, or self-transcending vectors.
Here the systemic is art, its core. A mode of transition and grammar is only an initial frame to be either shattered or stretched to incorporate newer spaces and perceptions.
Shulman has studied selections from the classical and medieval literature in Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu to illustrate his point. The work is in three sections.
The first section, entitled "Authority, structure and voice", contains several essays such as the "Historical poetics of the Sanskrit epics; the Yaksha's questions (from the Mahabharata); Poets and patrons in Tamil literature and literary legend", and "From author to non-author in Tamil literary legend".
The second section deals with the subject of "Being human in the Sanskrit epic: The riddle of Nala; Harsa's play within a play'' and "The prospects of memory and dreaming the self in South India''.
Section three comprises thought-provoking essays and "Bhavabhuti on cruelty and compassion" (as reflected in his Uttararamacharita, "the testing of Sita in the Tamil Kamba Ramayana"; "First man and forest mother: Telugu humanism in the age of Krishnadevaraya" (based on the Manucharitram of Allasani Peddana who flourished in the court of Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagar) and "Does God have moods?" (based on the famous Samkirtanas of Annamacharya).
Annamacharya who lived in the 15th century sang about a single God, Lord Venkatesvara, the presiding deity at Tirumala.
His "padams" are full of impulse, ideation, breath, feeling and emotion, reminiscent of the "Viraha bhakti" of the Azhvars.
If we follow what Annamayya says about his God, or the manner of his singing, we will have to conclude that this God is subject to an intense and restless process of varying moods.
In a way, these moods reveal the unfolding of a richly textured sensibility, which is the medium of God's connectedness to his devotees. We can say that the moods the poet conjures up are a means of awakening him into a fuller presence.
The author has succeeded creditably well in his presentation of the wisdom of poets in this unique work. He has caught the modes and moods, melodies and maladies, inspirations and aspirations, dedication and devotion of poets, taking representative selections from well-known Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu works — both of classical and medieval periods.
There is a saying in Sanskrit that none can goad the poets. The author has driven home this truth through his marvellous selections.
This is a work, which every student of literature should read for an insight into the workings of the gifted poets of our land.
This would help in widening the vistas of comparative studies in literary criticism, narrowing down their apparent differences by tracing the common ground of their works — experience of a unique bliss by the interaction of notions and emotions, sights and insights, imitations and limitations.
http://www.thehindu.com/2001/10/09/stories/1309017e.htm
N. Ganesan
தமிழை மாத்திரம் படித்தால் சங்க இலக்கியமோ, பிற்கால இலக்கியமோ சொல்லும் இந்திய கலாசாரம், ரிலிஜன், சமூக அமைப்பு (community structure) விளங்காது என நிறுவிவரும் பேரா. டேவிட் ஷுல்மன் ஆவார். அவரது பழைய நூல்: தமிழ், தெலுங்கு, சம்ஸ்கிருதம் மொழிகளில் பெருங்கவிதைகளை - ஒற்றுமை வேற்றுமைகளை - ஆராய்கிறது. அனைவரும் படிக்கப் பரிந்துரை. ~NG
“Shulman is a priceless advocate of the language and its many masterpieces.”—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
“David Shulman’s Tamil is akin to a delightful and elevating musical composition. Spanning centuries and capturing minute details, this book reveals the inner energy of Tamil. Tamil is lucky to have such an erudite ‘biographer’ to tell its story.”—S. Ramakrishnan, Editor, Cre-A: Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil
“David Shulman has raised an impressive monument to Tamil, written with erudition and wit. This ‘biography’ deals with much more than language—literature, culture, geography, history, all combine in praise of beauty and love.”—Tzvetan Todorov, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris
தமிழின் வாழ்க்கை, டேவிட் ஷூல்மன்
Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil—language, literature, and civilization—emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity, and this is its biography.
Two stories animate Shulman’s narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil’s distinctive modes of speaking, thinking, and singing. The second describes Tamil’s major expressive themes, the stunning poems of love and war known as Sangam poetry, and Tamil’s influence as a shaping force within Hinduism. Shulman tracks Tamil from its earliest traces at the end of the first millennium BCE through the classical period, 850 to 1200 CE, when Tamil-speaking rulers held sway over southern India, and into late-medieval and modern times, including the deeply contentious politics that overshadow Tamil today.
Tamil is more than a language, Shulman says. It is a body of knowledge, much of it intrinsic to an ancient culture and sensibility. “Tamil” can mean both “knowing how to love”—in the manner of classical love poetry—and “being a civilized person.” It is thus a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in its spoken and written forms but of the creative potential of its speakers.
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Book Review: Tamil http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-tamil/
by David Shulman
The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2016
David Shulman, the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at Hebrew University, opens his new book Tamil: A Biography in a scholarly playful tone that’s virtually calculated to make the blood of everyday normal folk freeze in their veins:
A language is never a thing, even if its speakers sometimes do whatever they can to turn it into one – to make it an “it.” The ideas people have about their language may be things, and as such may have a history; even so, the language will always exceed those ideas and, given certain basic conditions, will continue to grow and thus to fulfill the organic, uncertain, and lively destiny encoded in its grammar. Old languages like Tamil, given to intense reflection over many centuries, write their own autobiographies, in many media, though we may not know how to read them. Sometimes they ask the assistance of a ghostwriter, a biographer, like me.
A language is not a thing? It exceeds its ideas and uses? It can grow independent of its speakers, maybe sneaking out after supper to attend pop music concerts? Languages write their own autobiographies? They ring up their agents to hire ghostwriters from the Valley, for a nice up-front fee and some comfortable residuals but no cover credit? And these ghostwriters then do what, exactly? Write a biography of a thing that isn’t a thing?
There are few things more alarming than a scholar in a puckish mood, but the reckless glee can also be contagious. Shulman intends to take his readers through the cultural and literary history of Tamil, a language spoken by some eighty million people in South Asia, a language with roots reaching back through many centuries of works, poems, criticism, schools of criticism. Shulman knows that most of his potential audience has never heard a single spoken syllable of Tamil and couldn’t pick the Tantiyalankaram out of a police lineup, and when, on page 68, he finally comes out and says “I’ll try to keep things as simple as I can,” we can sense that his heart is in the right place. And since no professor in the 100-year history of Hebrew University has ever said “I’ll try to keep things as simple as I can” and then succeeded, we can’t even really hold Shulman’s failure against him.
He tries with a will for about 69 pages, but the usual linguistic suspects start creeping in, and pretty soon you can’t turn around without bumping into Whorfian determinism or diglossia and polyglossia. There’s a technical murk throughout the book that will baffle the general reader to the same extent that it pleases Shulman’s fellow specialists. Those kinds of technicalities are endemic to any study of a language’s biography, and although Shulman dishes diphthongs with the best of them, he saves his narrative, time and again, with an ardent enthusiasm that tries its best to reach outside the specialist huddle. “Good Tamil is clarity itself, an intense and luminous, or translucent, form of being,” he writes, “It is clearer than clear. It is also delicious.”
The Tamil in Tamil certainly comes across as clear and delicious. Shulman is a priceless advocate of the language and its many masterpieces, and given the abstruse nature of his subject, it’s really marvelous in a way how persuasive he is when rhapsodizing about a literature most of his readers will likely never have heard about. He completely avoids the trap that tends to close on lengthy linguistic studies like this – he always remembers that languages are personal things, shaping the experiences of people:
Those who want to read more of the Tamil bhakti poets can now easily find annotated translations. Anyone who visits a Tamil temple is likely to hear a pilgrim gently singing these very poems as he or she comes within sight of the image of a god or goddess. When you see the deity, you might feel the familiar, unappeasable longing, tearing at your very breath, disrupting “normal” metabolic processes, driving you to the limit of sensation and thought; and at the same time, you might feel block, disconnected, lost in the stony surface of self. These two moods tend to coincide.
That offhand mention of easily-found annotated bhakti translations is downright charming – why, I just saw one left on a park bench this morning. But the wonder of Tamil is that it actually moves you to go and find such a translation, to go and sample this vast and complex and, you’re now thoroughly convinced, beautiful literature and see if it can live up to its biography. And for that, all hail the ghostwriter.