Scholar, chronicler of inner lives of Tamils

CHENNAI: David Shulman's latest book published in 2015 has an amazing title 'More Than Real: A History of the imagination in South India'. In his preface, Shulman says, "All the great civilisations, and probably all human societies, have known that human beings are capable of imagining; India merely cultivated this art, or faculty, more boldly than most."
Elaborating further, he writes that in premodern South India imagination played a central role in what the people thought of the universe, the self and the mind.Turning to the puranic story of Poodsalar in Chekkilar's 'Periya Puranam', Shulman describes how Poosalar builds a temple in his mind Shiva chooses to reside, preferring it over the grand physical temple built by the Pandiya king. Shulman's questions appear to be what are the emotional, cultural, and intellectual resources that are required to build a temple in the mind? How do south Indian societies nurture such social imaginaries of the divine? In Shulman's proposition, imagination is not relegated to the realm of arts but pervades individual and social life.
In retrospect it appears that Shulman, as a scholar of South Indian folklore, literature, religion, philosophy and history, has always been interpreting the imaginary worlds of south Indians and discovering intimate truths about their inner lives. His celebrated early work, 'Tamil Temple Myths' sought to explain the central motifs that define our religious life. Collating oral and written sources of 'talapuranams' (site histories) in TN, Shulman unearthed that sacrifice is a primal and pervasive theme in Tamil temple mythologies. The talapuranams equated goddesses and the women to the earth and created sacredness to the localities that are pacified by the grace of the feminine. According to Shulman, the goddess in our temples invites us to have a sense of belonging with the place through its beauty and purity. The bhakti expressed in the talapuranams is not concerned with the ultimate release or moksha but it is concerned with the Tamil affirmation of the self, person, and life by engaging in relation with the divine, a relationship often expressed in sensual terms. For instance, the myth of the Ekambaranathar temple in Kancheepuram, is an example of not only sacredness but as a symbol of sensual love between Shiva and Parvati.

In his book 'The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry' Shulman declared that he was going to reveal the "inner world of feelings and ideas" of Tamils. Shulman discovered that the power invested in the Tamil kingship was weak and nebulous. Though a king, his relationship with his double, the clown who thrives on tripping with king with comic wisdom, provided a democratic critique of kingship. Collaborating with Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for 'Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamil Nadu', Shulman argued that the definitive feature of the Nayaka state was its fluidity and that throughout its rule the kingdoms of Thanjavur, Senji, and Madurai were in the processes of becoming.
As a translator, Shulman excels in communicating the uniqueness of the original author. 'In Songs of the Harsh Devotee: The Tevaram of Cuntaramurtinayanar', he distinguishes the poetic voice of Sundarar from that of Appar and Sampanthar and writes that his voice, unlike theirs, is "complex, probing, characterised by internal tension, often angry or antagonistic to the deity addressed, bitterly personal, extreme in tone - in a word 'harsh' as the Saiva tradition has always recognised".
It is the Saiva tradition Shulman has taken to forums of comparative religion and spirituality. Co-editing a volume on 'Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions', Shulman wrote that Tamil Saivism offers a rich programme for self-transformation beginning with daily rituals which are meant to turn the devotee into Shiva. In another work co-edited with Galit Hasan Rokem, 'Untying the knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes' Shulman contributed an insightful essay on Shiva's game of dice with his consort Parvati.
David Shulman's scholarly journey into south India is a karmic passage, as he himself would title one of his books, which has been suitably rewarded by the prestigious Israeli Prize.
The author is a folklorist