To Andhra Pradesh with love

From Business Standard, April 10th 2010

David Shulman, professor of humanistic studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an expert on South Indian languages and cultures has written Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Journey (University of Chicago Press, $25/Special Indian price, Rs 1,004) which is not just a travelogue but a long meditation on Telegu literature with reflections on Andhra history. As a journey across space and time, it is rather like a genre without rules, free from precept or precedent: part travel writing, part literary appreciation but above all, a philosophy expressed in images. Shulman is also a scholar in Sanskrit and classical Hindustani music, plus much else besides, and brings to bear his formidable learning to this book, which he admits to “a restlessness that rules me, so the landscapes shift like the languages and the texts”. All of which makes it difficult to write about it in this limited space! As you might expect, the diary is lyrical, sensual but more than anything else, it is introspective. Just about everything becomes a part of the huge canvas Shulman builds his story on. There are reflections on daily happenings and the life around: “Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs, Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree.” Simple observations of the daily lives of ordinary people of Rajahmundry, on the banks of the river Godavari which like all rivers in India are sacred and determine the life styles of millions around. Shulman has been bitten by the metaphysical bug: “How did I happen to find myself in Rajamundhry in the early spring of 2006? The answer would be the river called me. She — the Godavari — is imperious, also infinitely seductive. Rajamundhry is her town. When I saw her, she extracted a promise that I would return:….” And long before he first saw India, he had a calling within, “as if India was the magnet, and I the iron filing, unconscious, unmelted…. If words mean anything — but why should they mean? —it is only when the underlying echo, the music that motivates all real language, fades into silence”.

It is classical Hindustani music which Shulman had studied in depth that had drawn him to India, along with the music of the Dravidian languages, which fascinated because he says, “Linguistics had shown that South Indians utter, on average, more syllables per second than any other attested speakers of known human languages — and sometimes give the impression of a bubbling or cascading stream.” Telugu, he adds, is in fact “the main language of classical South Indian musical compositions”. Shulman goes into history to explain “the strangely hypnotic, contrapuntal complexity of tremendous aural power — a musical experience unlike any other, perhaps transcending meaning in any of the usual senses of the word”.

Shulman uses the metaphors of music to describe early mornings in Rajahmundry. “The rooftops, white, gray, streaked with grime, partly hidden by thick green clusters of palm, seem to be humming a barely audible morning raga. Birdcalls, the bells on the bicycles, the constant backdrop of horns from the cars and rickshaws, the cries of fruit vendors, the distant ring of a radio broadcasting a Sanskrit prayer to the waking god, mothers shouting at their children: all this is the raga as it breaks through the surface to audibility.” For the non-Telugu speaker or for those unfamiliar with classical Hindustani music, we have simply to go along, overawed by the depth and range of Shulman’s scholarship, and the meanings he gives to the everyday happenings around him.

It is Shulman’s principle not only to read poetry in the original language “but also to absorb it in the setting where it was written” because language does not exist independent of the environment in which it is rooted.

Shulman plunges deep into Telugu poetry and in the process into the beliefs, philosophies, the myths and legends of the land. So, “Godavri is not somewhere outside us but deeply alive within.” Like the Hindu way, he is inclined to see divinity in the earth itself, in rocks, in trees, in stone sculptures, in mountains, in rivers but specially in the Godavri in spate: …marvelling at the dramatic swelling and acceleration of their goddess, this necklace hanging over the breast of the Andhra Earth-goddess….” Shulman does not lose his critical eye and sees the muck behind the façade of modernity and the pollution of the river “smothered in the stench of the Andhra Pradesh Paper Mills upstream”.

This book isn’t an easy read and has to be taken in small doses by the noncognoscenti. But it is fascinating the extent to which some foreign scholars go in understanding us. How many of our own do so?