“This impressive book, concerned with the paradigm of South Indian kingship found in works of literature, is itself a paradigm of the new South Asian scholarship—interdisciplinary, comparative, and grounded in poststructuralist theory. At once a bold, broad inquiry into social symbolism and a painstakingly documented treatise, it amasses warmly sensitive, detailed readings of an eclectic group of texts which includes some of the most famous stories of traditional India. Shulman’s concept for the book is complex, his language is sophisticated, and his points are densely argued, yet, emerging from many passages as well as the overall design, there springs a lively engagement of the imagination and intellect only too rare in academic writing…A most significant contribution to our understanding of South Asian culture, Shulman’s book deserves wide reading and discussion.” --Katheryn Hansen, Pacific Affairs “This is one of those splendid books which effortlessly bridge the gap between two alien cultures and bring a different level of perception within our own periphery, while at the same time making it intelligible not only to the scholar but also to the average intellectually informed reader.” --Albertine Gaur, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society “This book is a major addition to a growing corpus of works expounding and interpreting Indian myth and epic tales. Professor Shulman’s contribution will undoubtedly remain a classic in its breadth, scholarship and subtlety. In particular, his brilliant analysis of Hindu comic themes and figures should serve as a seminal starting point for future scholars, whether Indologists, literary critics or cultural anthropologists…The full complexity of this book can only be hinted at. Its scholarship extends well far beyond the south Asian literature, embracing universal general themes. It is, without doubt, a marvelously evocative book, providing a broad humanistic vision of Hinduism in its wider context.” --Pnina Werbner, Man David Dean Shulman is Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition (Princeton) and coeditor of Orthodox, Heterodoxy and Dissent in India (Mouton).

South India is a land of many temples and shrines, each of which has preserved a local tradition of myth, folklore, and ritual. As one of the first Western scholars to explore this tradition in detail, David Shulman brings together the stories associated with these sacred sites and places them in the context of the greater Hindu religious tradition. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: The Demon's Daughter (Prabhavati-pradyumnamu) is a sixteenth-century novel by the south Indian poet Pingali Suranna, originally written in Telugu, the language of present-day Andhra Pradesh. Suranna begins with a story from classical Hindu mythology in which a demon plans to overthrow the gods...read more

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This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilizations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the "self" is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilization to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Christian Europe. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The classical literatures of Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu are among the richest in the world. These essays explore major issues and themes in the poetry and poetics of these three literatures, focusing on the role of the poet as making present an experience of the divine, and addressing the problem of the self and its processes of disintegration, disguise, and recomposition...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume offers a comparative, cross-cultural history of dreams. The essays examine a wide range of texts concerning dreams, as culled from a rich variety of religious contexts: China, India, the Americas, classical Greek and Roman antiquity, early Christianity, and medieval Judaism and Islam...read more

Product Description: Looking at the three major Nayaka states--ruled from Senji, Tanjavur, and MAadurai/Tiruccirapalli--as well as at minor states located at their periphery, this volume deals with the political culture of the NaAyaka period in medieval South India, an era which extends from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century...read more

Product Description: A Poem at the Right Moment collects, and preserves, poems—called catus—that have circulated orally for centuries in South India. The poems are remarkable for their wit and precision, their lyrical insight on the commonplace, their fascination with sensual experience, and their exploration of the connection between language and desire...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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This book collects eighteen previously unpublished essays on the riddle--a genre of discourse found in virtually every human culture. Hasan-Rokem and Shulman have drawn these essays from a variety of cultural perspectives and disciplines; linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, and religion and literature scholars consider riddling practices in Hebrew, Finnish, Indian languages, Chinese, and classical Greek. The authors seek to understand the peculiar expressive power of the riddle, and the cultural logic of its particular uses; they scrutinize the riddle's logical structure and linguistic strategies, as well as its affinity to neighboring genres such as enigmas, puzzles, oracular prophecy, proverbs, and dreams. In this way, they begin to answer how riddles relate to the conceptual structures of a particular culture, and how they come to represent a culture's cosmology or cognitive map of the world. More importantly, these essays reveal the human need for symbolic ordering--riddles being one such form of cultural ritual.

Product Description: India's folklore and classical literature abound with stories of parents who sacrifice their children. In The Hungry God, David Shulman examines one set of such tales—Hindu texts that bear similarities to the biblical aqedah, the account of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac...read more

Product Description: The book looks at the three major Nayaka states--ruled from Senji, Tanjavur and Madurai, Tiruccirappalli--as well as at minor states located at their periphery. While these states had differing life-spans, developmental patterns, geo-ecological environments, and distinct forms of historical experience, they also shared salient structural and cultural features...read more