David Shulman at CSDS, Golden Jubilee Lecture

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Presents:
Truth and Words: A View from the Tamil Ramayana
Speaker: David Shulman
Chair: Kunal Chakravarty
Monday, 28 January 2013, 6.30 pm
India International Centre,
New Delhi
Abstract: We tend to think that truth is a universal, independent of cultural inflections; but this can hardly be the case. David Shulman argues that in the south Indian world beautifully articulated by the 12th-century poet Kamban, truth (mey, unmai) is only tangentially linked with knowledge. It's primary source lies in the spoken word, which has a life of its own and exacts an existential cost from both speaker and listener. In addition to this strong linguistic aspect, itself close to a Bhartrharian view of language and meaning, true statements have an iconic structure; they can be distinguished from mantric speech, on the one hand, and from false speech, on the other, by the ellipses and gaps, with their emotional burdens, that are always built into truth. He will show how Kamban thematizes these issues in his Ayodhyakandam.
David Shulman was trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies by the great Tamilist John Marr. He is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has worked in the areas of Telugu literature and history, the history of the Nayaka period, south Indian historiography, and south Indian Saivism. His main interests lie in the cultural history of southern India. In recent years he has been captivated by Kudiyattam, the classical theater of Kerela, and is working on a book about this remarkable tradition. He is active in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement and has written a book about this work, Dark Hope.