We tend to think of truth as a universal value needing no further explication and not dependent on context; and we also think of truth as something to be discovered, a pre-existing set of interlocking, given notions that patient enquiry may reveal. But a closer look quickly shows us that truth is culturally inflected and always nurtured by deep culture-specific perceptions and intuitions. In medieval South India, as we can see in the classic text of Kampan's Ramayana, truth seems to be a matter of the spoken word and its existential force; and truth is something not found in some external domain but made or created by the adept (though not necessary self-aware) speaker. We will explore these notions of truth as inner speech in the process of self-externalization, and related themes of the truthfulness that hesitates on the verge of utterance, retaining its latent fullness. Passages from the Ayodhya Canto will be read and sung to enable this exploration.
David Shulman is Rene? Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Trained in Tamil Philology by John Marr at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, he has published widely on South Indian cultural history and philology, Sanskrit poetics, and the history of religion in South India.
He has worked closely with Velcheru Narayan Rao on the history of Telugu literature and Andhra history and historiography (together with Sanjay Subrahmanyam).
He has written a history of the imagination in South India, More Than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (Harvard University Press, 2012) and is writing a book on Carnatic music and as well as a study of Kudiyattam, the Sanskrit drama of Kerala.
At heart a vagabond-poet, his true passion is for classical Indian music. He is also an activist in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement and has published a book on his experiences in the occupied territories, Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine (University of Chicago Press, 2007).