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The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion. By DAVID SHULMAN. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. x, 157 pp. $27.50.
In this brief and intensely engaging book, David Shulman analyzes three Indian tales of divinely instigated filicide. The title's "Hungry God" is most literally evident in the South Indian Saiva story of Ciruttontar, the "Little Devotee," whose devotion to Siva is so great that he kills and cooks his son when the god appears in the guise of an ascetic demanding human flesh to fulfill a vow. In addition to suggesting the book's title, the story of Ciruttontar receives the most detailed attention, with one chapter devoted to its classic Tamil version as told by Cekkilar in his twelfth-century Periya Puranam, and a second following it through two of its most important later transformations in the Telugu literary tradition, where it appears as a central episode in both Palkuriki Somanatha's Basava Puranamu (thirteenth century) and Srinatha's Haravilasamu...