Birks Lecture Series: Kudiyattam: The Last Living Sanskrit Theater

David Shulman is regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the languages and literatures of India. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in Tamil literature. His research embraces many fields, including the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Karnatak music. He is also a published poet in Hebrew, a literary critic, a cultural anthropologist, and a peace activist. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies, and now holds an appointment as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and temple poems to essays that cover a wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India. Among these are the monographs Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition (Princeton, 1980); The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry (Princeton, 1985); The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion (Chicago, 1993); and More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (Harvard, 2012); and the co-authored works, with Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam Symbols of Substance (Oxford, 1993); and Textures of Time: Writing History in South India (2002).

Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he works in Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, and Arabic. He has a passion for classical Karnatak (South Indian) music, though he has also studied Hindustani (North Indian) Dhrupad singing.