The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion.

• Author: Richman, Paula

David Shulman has written a disturbing, yet surprisingly lyrical, book about a haunting narrative motif: the father who sacrifices his son in response to a seemingly inscrutable divine command. Although the book begins with Shulman's translation of Abraham's binding of Isaac in Genesis (the aqedah) and circles back to it, most of his discussion centers on Hindu tales from Tamil, Sanskrit, and Telugu texts. An exploration of a theme whose variations resonate with each other in increasingly nuanced ways, his analysis takes on issues of immense theological, literary, and psychological complexity. Essentially Shulman has composed an extended essay about the relationship between an extreme demand originating in the divine sphere and the human emotions that arise in response to that demand.

Shulman devotes a good deal of his attention to the Tamil story of Ciruttontar from Cekkilar's Periva Puranam (mid-12th century C.E.), where Siva takes on the guise of an extreme ascetic and asks a father to cook a meal from his only, son's flesh as alms. Father and mother joyfully fulfill the difficult request, serving the ascetic a curry made from the child's head. Perversely, the disguised god refuses to eat unless the very son who has been killed joins them in eating the curry. The deity directs the baffled mother to go outside and call her son, who miraculously reappears. At that moment, the whole family melts into union with Siva.

Next Shulman examines the way the Telugu tradition transforms the story in several tellings. For example, one Telugu Viragaiva text, Basavapuranamu, recounts the same story, but subtly critiques it by juxtaposing the story of Nimmavva. When Siva and Ciruttontar come to her house as ascetics, she cooks for them. While the food is cooling, Nimmavva's son begins to eat it, thereby polluting it. Although the mother kills the boy as punishment, when Siva insists that her son must eat with them, she refuses to let Siva revive him, because he committed a wrong action. Furthermore, she informs him, "I don't think of you as separate from me, and there is nothing to be afraid of ... So stop these tricks! I am wise to all of them. Take whatever form you like, but I am going to feed you" (p. 59).

In the Sanskrit tradition, Shulman examines a story from the Aitareya Brahmana and one from the Mahabharata. The former, the Vedic tale of Sunahsepa, concerns a cruel father who offers his son as a sacrificial victim to another father in...