Honour for Shulman

HYDERABAD: The Universi ty of Hyderabad today conferred the degree of D.Litt., Honoris Causa, on Prof. David Shulman for his abiding engagement with Indian arts and letters.This is given to honour his dedication to the life of the mind and for his unmatched insights and articulate championing of the literatures of languages of South India.It confers this honour for his courage and for a life dedicated to the discovery of truth, beauty, knowledge, wisdom and reason. Prof Shulman delivered a lecture titled, A South Indian Concept of ‘Nature’: Notes from Telugu Kavya.In his lecture he said, “I was arguing that the new concept of nature and the natural crystallized in south India beginning about the 16th and 17th centuries as we see from materials in Telugu poetry, Tamil, Malayalam and South Indian Sanskrit.This new notion of nature is connected to a changing sense of what makes a human in the context of natural world which is defined as different from the Human being as governed by rules and as capable of being observed and defined.Taken together, this is a moment of conceptual revolution in all the major areas of this civilization.”