Manucaritramu, " or The Story of Manu, " by the early sixteenth-century poet Allasani Peddana, is the definitive literary monument of Telugu civilization and a powerful embodiment of the imperial culture of Vijayanagara, the last of the great premodern south Indian states. It is the story of Svarochisha Manu, who ruled over the previous cosmic age and who serves here as prototype for the first human being. Peddana explores the dramatic displacements, imaginative projections, and intricate workings of desire necessary for Manu s birth and formation. The Story of Manu" is also a book about kingship and its exigencies at the time of Krishnadevaraya, the most powerful of the Vijayanagara rulers, who was a close friend and patron of the poet. The Story of Manu," presented in the Telugu script alongside the first translation into any language, is a true masterpiece of early modern south Indian literature.

The Murty Classical Library of India makes available original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia in the most authoritative and accessible formats on offer anywhere."

Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil-language, literature, and civilization-emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity, and this is its biography. Two stories animate Shulman's narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil's distinctive modes of speaking, thinking, and singing. The second describes Tamil's major expressive themes, the stunning poems of love and war known as Sangam poetry, and Tamil's influence as a shaping force within Hinduism. Shulman tracks Tamil from its earliest traces at the end of the first millennium BCE through the classical period, 850 to 1200 CE, when Tamil-speaking rulers held sway over southern India, and into late-medieval and modern times, including the deeply contentious politics that overshadow Tamil today. Tamil is more than a language, Shulman says. It is a body of knowledge, much of it intrinsic to an ancient culture and sensibility. "Tamil" can mean both "knowing how to love"-in the manner of classical love poetry-and "being a civilized person." It is thus a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in its spoken and written forms but of the creative potential of its speakers.

Vedanta Deshika (1268-1369) was perhaps the most outstanding Sanskrit author in the South Indian tradition focused on Vishnu and one of the most original poets in all of Sanskrit literature. Two of his best-known works appear here. "The Mission of the Goose," in the genre of messenger-poems modeled on Kali dasa's famous "Cloud Messenger," has Rama send a goose with a message for Sita, flying to Lanka over graphically described Tamil temples. "Compassion" is a meditation about the compassionate aspect of Vishnu, particularly as embodied in the great temple of Tirupati. Appayya Dikshita (1520 -1592) and Nila kantha Dikshita (1580 1644) belong to one family as well as to the same religious world centered on Shiva. Appayya's "Self-Surrender" to his deity is the most personal of the polymath's works. In "Peace" his great-nephew Nila kantha, political high achiever as well as poet, reevaluates renunciation and transcendence in a skeptical, intimate, and deeply unsettling voice.

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From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the major cultures of southern India underwent a revolution in sensibility reminiscent of what had occurred in Renaissance Italy. During this time, the imagination came to be recognized as the defining feature of human beings. "More than Real" draws our attention to a period in Indian history that signified major civilizational change and the emergence of a new, proto-modern vision.

In general, India conceived of the imagination as a causative agent: things we perceive are real because we imagine them. David Shulman illuminates this distinctiveness and shows how it differed radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind. Shulman's explication offers insightful points of comparison with ancient Greek, medieval Islamic, and early modern European theories of mind, and returns Indology to its rightful position of intellectual relevance in the humanities.

At a time when contemporary ideologies and language wars threaten to segregate the study of pre-modern India into linguistic silos, Shulman demonstrates through his virtuoso readings of important literary works works translated lyrically by the author from Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam that Sanskrit and the classical languages of southern India have been intimately interwoven for centuries."

Composed in the mid-sixteenth century, "The Sound of the Kiss," or "The Story That Must Never Be Told," could be considered the first novel written in South Asia. Telugu, the language spoken in today's Andhra Pradesh region of southern India, has a classical literary tradition extending over a thousand years. Suranna's masterpiece comes from a period of intense creativity in Telugu, when great poets produced strikingly modern innovations. The novel explodes preconceived ideas about early South Indian literature: for example, that the characters lack interiority, that the language is formulaic, and that Telugu texts are mere translations of earlier Sanskrit works. Employing the poetic style known as "campu," which mixes verse and prose, Pingali Suranna's work transcends our notions of traditional narrative. "I wanted to have the structure of a complex narrative no one had ever known," he said of his great novel, "with rich evocations of erotic love, and also descriptions of gods and temples that would be a joy to listen to."

"The Sound of the Kiss" is both a gripping love story and a profound meditation on mind and language. Shulman and Rao include a thorough introduction that provides a broader understanding of, and appreciation for, the complexities and subtleties of this text.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? This volume provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selections come from a variety of Indian languages, genres, and periods, from the classical to the contemporary. The translations are accompanied by short essays written to help readers engage and enjoy them. Some of these essays provide background to enhance reading of the translation, whereas others model how to expand appreciation in comparative and broader ways. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia.

The classical tradition in Telugu, the mellifluous language of Andhra Pradesh in southern India, is one of the richest yet least explored of all South Asian literatures. In this volume, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have brought together mythological, religious, and secular texts by twenty major poets who wrote between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, providing an authoritative volume overview of one of the world's most creative poetic traditions. An informative, engaging introduction fleshes out the history of Telugu literature, situating its poets in relation to significant literary themes and historical developments and discussing the relationship between Telugu and the classical literature and poetry of Sanskrit.

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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. Taken together the catus offer a penetrating critical vision and an understanding of the classical traditions of Telugu, Tamil, and Sanskrit. Each poem is presented in a contemporary English translation along with the Indian-language original. An introduction and a concluding essay explore in detail the stories and texts that comprise the catu system. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

"There are always clients to please, rules to subvert, difficult tasks to perform, work to shirk, and upward mobility to seek. . . . Most people with work experience have encountered at least some version of exaggerated resumes, exploitative bosses, self-interested shirking, collusion against disliked colleagues, lying to clients, and countless other variants of lies on the job. This book tells the tale of such lies in the workplace and examines their impact on ethics, administrating work, and productivity." from the IntroductionAccording to David Shulman, deception is a pervasive element of daily working life. Sometimes it is an official part of one's work-as in the case study he offers of private detectives, who lie for a living-but more often it is simply part of the fabric of life on the job. Shulman argues that workplace cultures socialize individuals into using deception as a tool in performing their everyday work. To make his point he focuses not on extreme cases but rather on less obvious forms of deception, such as pretending to show deference, shirking one's work, crafting misleading accounting reports, making false claims to customers and coworkers, and covering up business transgressions. Shulman analyzes the motives, tactics, rationalizations, and ethical ramifications of acting deceptively in the workplace. From Hire to Liar offers readers both detailed accounts of workplace lies and new ways to think about the important effects of everyday workplace deceptions."

Lately, it seems as if we wake up to a new atrocity each day. Every morning is now a ritual of scrolling through our Twitter feeds or scanning our newspapers for the latest updates on fresh horrors around the globe. Despite the countless protests we attend, the phone calls we make, or the streets we march, it sometimes feels like no matter how hard we fight, the relentless crush of injustice will never abate. David Shulman knows intimately what it takes to live your beliefs, to return, day after day, to the struggle, despite knowing you are often more likely to lose than win. Interweaving powerful stories and deep meditations, Freedom and Despair offers vivid firsthand reports from the occupied West Bank in Palestine as seen through the eyes of an experienced Israeli peace activist who has seen the Israeli occupation close up as it impacts on the lives of all Palestinian civilians. Alongside a handful of beautifully written and often shocking tales from the field, Shulman meditates deeply on how to understand the evils around him, what it means to persevere as an activist decade after decade, and what it truly means to be free. The violent realities of the occupation are on full display. We get to know and understand the Palestinian shepherds and farmers and Israeli volunteers who face this situation head-on with nonviolent resistance. Shulman does not hold back on acknowledging the daily struggles that often leave him and his fellow activists full of despair. Inspired by these committed individuals who are not prepared to be silent or passive, Shulman suggests a model for ordinary people everywhere. Anyone prepared to take a risk and fight their oppressive political systems, he argues, can make a difference-if they strive to act with compassion and to keep hope alive. This is the moving story of a man who continues to fight for good in the midst of despair. An indispensable book in our era of reactionary politics and refugee crises, political violence and ecological devastation, Freedom and Despair is a gripping memoir of struggle, activism, and hope for peace.