Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao.

• Author: Cutler, Norman
• Position: Review

Edited by David SHULMAN. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xi + 478, plates, index of subjects. $29.95.

Those who know David Shulman are well aware that he has found the experience of studying and working with V. Narayana Rao to be enormously satisfying, stimulating, and enriching. Likewise, those who know Narayana Rao are aware that the admiration is reciprocated. Here we have a case of two humanist scholars engaged in a collaboration that has contributed significantly to knowledge about South Asian civilization.

The volume under review is a collection of essays edited by David Shulman as a tribute to Narayana Rao, and the contributors are all scholars with significant accomplishments to their credit in the field of South Asian studies. The introductory essay by Shulman offers a glimpse of Narayana Rao's remarkable career and journey of self-discovery which began in a remote village in coastal Andhra and eventually brought him to Madison, Wisconsin. Shulman's essay - both a capsule intellectual biography and an introduction to major themes in Narayana Rao's work - suggests a close interconnection between the particulars of Narayana Rao's personal experience and the originality of his insights into Indian, and specifically Telugu, literary culture.

In a sense the subtitle of this volume - Studies in South Indian Civilization - is a misnomer, because collectively these essays do not really make a case for and are not predicated on the notion of "South India" as a definable civilizational entity. In his introductory essay Shulman describes this collection as "perhaps the first to attempt an Andhra-centric vision of south India" (p. 17). While it is true that the majority (but not all) of the essays are concerned in one way or another with Telugu textual materials or with sites of cultural practice located in Andhra, no vision of south Indian civilization per se emerges from the collection. Telugu and Andhra may be operative terms for many of the contributors to this volume, but "South India" more broadly is not, except in the sense that some of the contributors tend to duplicate by analogy the problematic tendency of many Tamil scholars to treat Tamil and Tamilnadu as synecdoches for South India.

But the issue of "South India" aside, the fruits of some impressive and important research is brought together in this volume, and whether by design or chance, there is considerable interplay among these essays. Excepting Shulman's...