David Dean Shulman

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David Dean Shulman (born January 13, 1949 in Waterloo, Iowa) is an Indologist and regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the languages of India. His research embraces many fields, including the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. He is also a published poet in Hebrew, a literary critic, a cultural anthropologist, and a peace activist. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies, and now holds an appointment as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India.

Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He is married to Eileen Shulman (née Eileen Lendman) and has three sons, Eviatar, Micheal, and Edan.

Life and work

In 1967, on graduating from Waterloo high school, he won a National Merit Scholarship, and emigrated to Israel, where he enrolled at Hebrew University. He graduated in 1971 with a B.A. degree in Islamic History, specializing in Arabic. His interest in Indian studies was inspired by a friend, the English economic historian Daniel Sperber, and later by the philologist, and expert in Semitic languages, Chaim Rabin.

He gained his doctorate in Tamil and Sanskrit, with a dissertation on 'The Mythology of the Tamil Saiva Talapuranam', at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1972–1976) under John R. Marr, which involved field work in Tamil Nadu. He was appointed instructor, then lecturer in the department of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at Hebrew University, and became a full professor in 1985. He was a MacArthur Fellow from 1987 to 1992. In 1988 he was elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He was Director of the Jerusalem Institute of Advanced Studies for six years (1992–1998). He actively supports the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he is preparing, with Yigal Bronner, a forthcoming volume.

Aside from numerous scholarly articles, Shulman is the author, co-author or editor of the following books.

· 1980 Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition, Princeton University Press.

· 1985 The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry, Princeton University Press.

· 1990 Songs of the Harsh Devotee: The Tevaram of Cuntaramurttinayanar, Dept. of South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

· 1993 The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion, University of Chicago Press.

· 1997 (with Don Handelman), God Inside Out. Siva’s Game of Dice, Oxford University Press, New York.

· 2001 The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit, Oxford University Press, Delhi.