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More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India. By David Shulman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 333. $45.
Building on more than two decades of collaborative work with Don Handelman, V. Narayana Rao, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam that explores extensively the medieval and early modem literary cultures of South India in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, David Shulman here offers an ambitious, sweeping look at the history of the imagination in South India, rooted in close readings of carefully selected textual passages often brilliantly attuned to the specifics of word-choice, usage, and poetic register. Ultimately arguing that, from the sixteenth century onward, one "can observe a far-reaching thematizing of the imagination as a distinctive, largely autonomous human faculty, one of the defining features of the human as such ... [a]s an index of major civilizational change" (p. 3) not without parallels in Renaissance and early modem Europe (pp. 162-163), Shulman characterizes this late medieval South Indian imagination as that which "governs perception, [yet] is also a cause, possibly the main cause, of what passes for reality," pointing toward a human anthropology of "autonomy, singularity, effectuality, reality" (p. 271). In the world of Shulman's sixteenth-century writers, "I imagine, therefore I am .... I imagine, therefore you are .... You imagine, therefore I am" (p. 269), suggesting an understanding of human imagination quite distinct from our own "crystallized European axiology" (p. 281) that pits inner against outer, objective against subjective, truth against fiction. As the author himself notes (p. x), such a study of South Asian understandings of the imaginative faculty is long overdue; covering thousands of years of Indian history and a diverse array of texts in multiple languages, this is a ground-breaking work certain to generate scholarly discussion, dissent, and further research for decades to come.
Part I, "Theorizing Imagination," outlines the basic contours of the imagination as understood in Indian sources before the fifteenth century. While historians may wince at the first chapter's breathless moves from a twelfth-century Tamil text (the story of Pücalär in the Periyapuränam) and the Éatapathabrâhmana to a Kütiyättam dramatic performance in present-day Kerala, the Sanskrit grammatical and philosophical traditions, and the village goddesses of contemporary South India (pp. 3-23), Shulman effectively establishes bhävanä and...