Introspection and Insight: South Indian Minds in the Early Modern Era

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

Introspection and Insight explores the literature, music, and graphic arts of south India between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and focuses on their theoretical and philosophical foundations as well as the distinctive features that reveal a newly emergent concept of the individual self and novel models of the mind. This is contextualized as part of a wider civilizational shift throughout the southern regions of India, involving radical changes in taste and sensibility-signifying moments of major cultural innovation. Of these, music was, perhaps, the most eloquent vehicle for personal introspection at this time.

David Shulman is Professor Emeritus of South Asian Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of The Rite of Seeing: Essays on Kutiyattam (2021); Tamil: A Biography (2017); and More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (2012).