Books by David Shulman

Spoken by eighty million people, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil, emphasizing how its speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history.

For decades, we've been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The author takes the reader into the heart of the conflict. He, then, attempts to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong - and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might be brought back.

From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the imagination came to be recognized in South Indian culture as the defining feature of human beings. Shulman elucidates the distinctiveness of South Indian theories of the imagination and shows how they differ radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind.

A diary describing the experience of the author in Andhra Pradesh. It reflects on daily events - from explorations of crumbling temples to battles with ineradicable bugs to joyous dinners with friends. It also considers the ancient poetry and myths that remain such an inextricable part of life in contemporary India.