Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary

"David Shulman is an Israeli academic, perhaps one of the most interesting human beings alive. He teaches at Hebrew University. He read Tamil at SOAS and then went to Wisconsin and studied Telugu, the two classical languages in southern India. Linguists say that speakers of these two languages emit more syllables per minute than any other language, and Shulman mastered both languages. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is his diary of living in a place called Rajahmundry, which is on the banks of the Godavari River. He reminisces about poets who flourished in this part of the world 500-600 years ago. The reason I picked this book is because it demonstrates the depths of India’s learning, its cultural sophistication at that time. According to Hindu nationalists, this was a period when India was being enslaved by Muslims. This place had suffered a lot of the ravages of armies coming from the north and devastating the settled kingdoms there. And yet, this kind of poetry flourished. In the worst of times, the most benighted of times, and the darkest of periods, there were Indians who produced some of the most sublime and beautiful writing. And nobody, I think, does greater justice to them in the English language than David Shulman. The beauty of his writing is hypnotic. Anyone who wants to give up on India should read this book. They’ll realize that India survives because of the genius of its people. VS Naipaul wrote about how India, “producing too much life, denied the value of life” and yet, he acknowledged, India also “produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy”. This is a book full of such people. They have always existed, and they are a reason for hope in this dark period."