Today’s Israel looks like South Africa at the height of the apartheid: David Shulman

You studied Persian and Arabic while doing your BA. Now you have a rich body of work on south Indian literature, languages, and history. What brought you to south India?

It was a complete accident. I’ll give you a short version of this story. I was finishing that BA. I was not a very assiduous student. The one thing that I truly loved in my BA years was Persian language, and Persian poetry, I was drunk on Persian poetry. One day, my Persian teacher Yohanan Friedmann, a very important person in my life and a very fine scholar and Arabist, came to me and said, ‘You know, we have here at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem the world’s finest concentration of Islamicists and Arabists. And we also have the beginnings of a Far Eastern programme, in Chinese and Japanese, but we don’t have anyone here who knows about India. So maybe you would consider doing a graduate degree somewhere in the world on any topic relating to India. And perhaps the university will send you abroad with some kind of stipend, and maybe when you finish, there might even be a job waiting for you.’

This was a complete shock to me, and in fact I had no intention of going on to a higher degree. I thought I was going to go into the army as an intelligence officer, like nearly all my teachers. But I didn’t know what it was like to be in an army, and it was a very different time in Israel.

Then two happy things happened. One was that I met Eileen, who soon became my wife. She said, ‘This idea about the army, it’s really not suited to you.’ She was right about that. And then I had a friend who had a great love for India because, when he was a student in Jerusalem in the early 1960s, he had walked to India from Istanbul. He would take a boat from Tel Aviv to Istanbul for a few dollars. And then he would walk from Istanbul to Bengal. He did it seven times. His name is Danny Sperber, a scholar and economic historian. In the early 1960s, that route was the most peaceful route in the world. You could go through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. There was no disturbance and no trouble. I told him about what my teacher had said to me. He said: ‘You’re making a mistake.’ He started bringing me books about India, which he would leave on my doorstep at night. I like books, and I began reading these books that Danny lent me and I slowly began to think that maybe this was a possible idea. But then there was a question of what to study in or about India.

There was a professor at the Hebrew University named Chaim Rabin. He was a linguist, a very good one, specialising in Semitic languages. He knew 20 or 30 languages. He had studied Tamil because of the Tamil loan words in the Hebrew Bible, which are among the oldest attestations we have of Tamil. He said to me that the Tamilians have a beautiful ancient literature, and almost nobody in the West knows anything about it. I had never even heard the word ‘Tamil’. I went to the library to see what there was. There was a book by A.K. Ramanujan, The Interior Landscape. It’s a translation from Sangam love poetry, very beautiful translations. That was enough. Then there was a question about where to study Tamil, because in those days, there were not very many places in the world that were teaching Tamil, even in much of India. Finally, I found a really fine teacher, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. That was John Marr. He was a very great scholar of Tamil, a student of a direct student of U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer, also a great musicologist and a botanist and many other things. That’s how it all began.

Eileen and I came to India right after we were married in 1972. In the summer of 1972, we travelled around India, but we especially loved Madras — love at first sight. It was hot and humid in July. But we loved the people, the sounds of this rather exotic language, the food, the music, especially the music, the landscapes and the smells and the tastes and all of that. And we came back in 1975 for a longer stay. That was a formative time for us.

You have written about ‘systemic change’ in 16th century south India. The 16th century was also a period where you saw, in Europe, the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, and the rise of the Westphalian system, which is the principle in international law that each State has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. Do you see any parallels between the south India of the 16th century and Europe?

I think in both cases there was a systemic change, a civilisational change, you could say. In Europe, that was the great watershed when the Catholic Church split into Protestants and Catholics and they went to war with one another, and that was also the time of the emerging imperial autocracies like the Habsburgs in Vienna and Spain and also the French. That eventually produced the modern revolutions in France and in America, and later in Russia. It happened here, in India, in a very different way, in an indigenous way that had nothing to do with the influence of what was happening in Europe. This was a time when the European powers began slowly to come to India, when they would build factories in the port cities and so on. But actually, what happened in India in terms of systemic change developed out of purely internal processes.

Systemic change means that in all of the major arenas, there are substantial structural changes — in the social realm, in the economic sphere, in the political domain, for example. We had a new kind of south Indian States, with a new mode of political thinking, and new kinds of political legitimisation. And in the expressive domains, that is, literature, music, graphic arts, sculpture, architecture, theatre, you can see that there’s a whole new world. A new conceptual world, a new understanding of how the mind works, a new understanding of what it means to be a human being. And many other themes, such as issues of gender, and natural science, along with a whole set of ideas that are present in all of the literatures, cultures, and languages from that same period, late 15th, early 16th centuries, 17th century. You begin to see these new themes emerging and crystallising.

For example, our research team in Jerusalem made an unexpected empirical discovery. We noticed that there was a burst of personal, individualistic introspection. In India since the very beginning, there has been introspection — looking into the mind or into the deeper reaches of the self. But most of the relevant texts that we have are focused on what I would call metaphysical introspection, like in Yogic meditation, or Buddhist Mahayana thought, or Advaita.. But in the early modern period, suddenly there’s an interest in the empirical mind and in the empirical self — in diaries or autobiographies, in the musical corpus, in painting, and in architecture. We see this sudden shift toward an introspective mode that is based on individuals paying attention to their shifting moods, experiences, dreams, fantasies, and fears.

You have also written about ‘newness’. Can you explain that?

Many people, for example Sheldon Pollock, actually have written about navata or newness. In early modern times, before the massive intrusion of the European powers, there was a palpable sense of novelty. Suddenly, people are talking about something being and feeling really new. This is also true of music and literature and painting. There’s an amazing sense of new discoveries. So, in music, for example, in Carnatic music, which was formalised — you could say ‘grammaticalised’ — in 16th century Thanjavur, we begin to see an emerging corpus of Carnatic compositions, with strong introspective elements in the sense of the word I have mentioned. In literature, we have what we call prabandha texts. This is something quite new. Prabandha means, in general, a composition in any language. But a particular genre that we can call prabandha appears in all of the literatures, in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Sanskrit. A prabandha text is a self-contained book, usually not too long, that can be recited over a period of maybe a week or two. It’s meant to be read from the beginning via the middle to the end. That’s a rather new thing in south India. Even today, the pandits don’t usually read sequentially from beginning to end. The new prabandha forms demand sequential reading, that comes with an acquired newness of taste and themes. For example, we see a kind of realism in meticulous detail — of life in the home, in the village, in the street, in the court, in the natural world. Along with that, there’s a notion of the creative powers of the mind, and in particular the imagination, what is often called bhavana. So a model of the mind comes into play with these prabandha texts, and there’s also a new audience for these texts. That’s really quite important, because in the social area, what we see is that groups that were relatively marginalised suddenly were becoming dominant socially , economically, and politically.

These are traders and warriors, mostly non-Brahmin elites, self-made men or women. These are people who set out to make money in a period where there’s a thriving cash economy, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and I have described in our books. These processes eventually generated new audiences for all of the expressive domains.

You live in Jerusalem. You are a scholar. And you are also a peace activist. How do you look at the developments in West Asia in light of Hamas’s October 7 [2023] attack and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza?

Well, we’re in a very deep crisis. And that includes the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. The Hamas atrocities of October 7 were unparalleled in Israel’s history. Now the war has gone on for some fifteen months and shows no sign of stopping. The situation is deteriorating day by day. On the West Bank, we have Israeli colonisation that has been going on for several decades. All of the Israeli settlements, without exception, sit upon stolen Palestinian land. and the settler population has grown to several lakh planted in the midst of a Palestinian population on the West Bank of some two and a half million. The extremist settlers often tend to be religious in a fanatical, distorted way, with a messianic and apocalyptic ideology; and although they are a small minority, they are given to vicious, all too effective violence. They are driving the Palestinians on the West Bank into a situation of horrible precariousness. Their idea is to drive out the Palestinian population in Area C, about 62% of the West Bank.

There’s a system in place that supports this. That means the army, the police, the military courts, the Israeli media, public and social media, and the government, which funds and supports the settlements — all of that constitutes a kind of system. The goal is to take as much Palestinian land as they possibly can with as few Palestinian people living on it as possible. That’s been true for a long time. But since October 7, this situation has exacerbated enormously. First of all, there is a settler-ruled government. But aside from that, the extremist settlers now actually rule the West Bank. They are the virtual sovereign there — not in a legal sense, of course, but in a practical sense. They tell the soldiers what to do and they tell the police what to do. and they tell the Palestinians to go away.

Since October 7, we have seen violent intrusions into the Palestinian villages. A group of armed settlers will invade the village, many of them quite young, teenagers. They’ll break anything breakable, doors, windows, furniture, sheepfolds, they’ll empty the refrigerators of food, dump it on the ground. They’ll sometimes shoot the sheep and the goats. Sometimes they’ll shoot at Palestinian people. They shoot holes in the water tanks — it’s a dry area, you can’t live there without water. They break the wind turbines and they beat up whoever they can find. They’re being used by the extreme right politicians. The result is a continual intensification of settler violence.

In addition to that, there are military operations in Jenin and Nablus, where the army is fighting Hamas units or the Islamic Jihad. Meanwhile, settler violence in Area C continues to be the norm, fostered by the State authorities. The West Bank has become a cauldron that could explode at any moment. I think it’s extremely likely that there will be a third intifada [uprising], worse than the first two. And it could happen at any time, because the Palestinian people are not going anywhere, and their life is no longer bearable. 

As you pointed out, there is an extreme right-wing government in Israel. And you see this intensification of settler violence. And you also see the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. States generally are violent. Still, you might see internal and external constraints on States. Do you think it doesn’t work in the case of Israel?

I think it works to some extent. There are still some constraints, including on the army operations in Gaza. The information coming out of Gaza is extremely patchy, so it’s hard to know. But the figures of killed and wounded are shocking. In the northern part of Gaza, there are no buildings left standing, and the population has been displaced into tent cities farther south..

We have some two million people living in tents. There’s not enough food, although there are attempts to bring in food. There’s no clean water to drink. Obviously, no electricity. It’s cold, it’s winter now. And the shooting and the bombing continue. In the north, to make it even worse, now that they’ve cleared out most of the population, the army is paving roads and putting up military camps. It looks like the government wants to stay there permanently, to annex it, either by some act of the Knesset or just de facto. And there are people in the government who want to settle northern Gaza with Jews.

What is the way out, for Israel and Palestine?

I can tell you the way-not-out — that is constant, eternal war. The only real way out is some kind of settlement with the Palestinians who are our neighbours. The only way to make life viable for everybody, Israelis as well as Palestinians, is to reach an agreement in which the Palestinians have some form of political framework which will allow them to realise their own cultural and civilisational ambitions. For the Israelis, for the Jews, we’ve got that, we have a State that embodies some form of collective identities. It’s not a very effective State, in many ways, but it’s there. But Palestinians don’t have any such framework. And like any other people, they need basic security, they need to feel that their homes and their lives and their children are going to be relatively secure and that the soldiers and the police and the settlers are not going to come into their villages every night and start shooting. They need that the way they need oxygen to breathe, and they need dignity.

Now, what form a settlement will take, nobody can clearly say. But first of all, there has to be a will to make a settlement in Israel — and there’s no will at the moment (from the leadership). If you look at the polls, though they fluctuate, some 70% of the Israeli population would apparently accept some reasonable settlement of the conflict. That is also largely true on the Palestinian side. Within Israel, if we had a leader, a true opposition capable of articulating a vision for peace and a path toward that goal, I think most Israelis would support it eventually. But we don’t have a real opposition in Israel.

We also have a dysfunctional political system, which is like a crazy jigsaw puzzle. This structural situation perpetuates the logic where the extreme right has complete control over what is happening. It’s an absurd situation. So what would a solution really look like? it could be two States west of the Jordan River. But [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has devoted his life to preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state. There are two things that he really cares about. That’s one, and the second is the perpetuation of his own government. And they’re linked. He — like the extreme right in general in Israel, along with many of the religious nationalists — believes that a Palestinian State is an existential disaster for Israel. I think what should emerge someday, somehow, is some system that could be like a confederation, in which the Palestinians would have control over their own lives and their own security.

It would have to be a demilitarised State. Israelis would have control over their lives, and there would be some overarching framework addressing security, policies, social services, and everyday needs. I’m not saying it would be easy to achieve it. There will be huge resistance, probably on both sides. But people said that about Ireland. South Africa is another example. It is not a happy place, but nonetheless, the apartheid was overturned. I think sometimes that today, we in Israel may be experiencing something like South Africa at the height of the apartheid system. Just a few years before the system collapsed. The attempt to maintain the system of the Occupation [in Israel] is not tenable. And in general, Israeli policy has always been based upon very short-term vision. It’s always about getting through the present moment of crisis, which will be some kind of military crisis. You just want to solve the immediate problem. That’s how Israeli politics has always worked. What we need is a vision of some viable future.

Before we wrap up, let’s go back to your work. What are you currently working on? Any new books coming out? What text you are reading?

I am working on a book with [Kerala-based historian] Abhilash Malayil. It’s about an Atmakatha, an autobiography, written by a Namboothiri Brahmin in the early 18th century, who got involved in political problems because the Zamorin state turned against his village of Panniyur, producing a series of personal crises. It’s an amazing book, an epitome of the transformations of early modern Kerala — the social, economic, cultural, conceptual changes, especially in central and northern Kerala in the 18th century. I’m also working with a friend of mine, Sudha Gopalakrishnan, a former Kathakali artist and a scholar, on a translation and annotation of Punam’s Bhasa Ramayana. That’s a large-scale work that will go on for some years. I’m also part of a team of scholars, led by Archana Venkatesan, working on producing a complete translation of the Kamba Ramayanam. We hope the first volume will come out with Penguin in 2026. And I would like to do a book of essays on Carnatic kritis. I’m not a musicologist, but I love Carnatic music.

There are certain Tamil texts that I’m very much connected with. Tamil has a tradition of some two thousand years of continuous literary production of the highest order. But many of the great texts produced over the last thousand years are now largely unread and unstudied, perhaps because we’ve forgotten the protocols of reading them and now have to rediscover them. For example, there is a text that I came upon recently, the Anandarudresar vandu vidu thoothu, by Kachiyappamunivar, on a little temple in Kanchipuram. I’d like to write something about it and indeed about Kachiyappar himself, one of the great Tamil minds of the 18th century.

I’m also interested in the Jaffna Tamil literature of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th century. That was an extended period that I sometimes call the Jaffna Renaissance. It includes not only literature but also philosophy, historiography, and music. These works, from this early modern period, are even more forgotten than the texts that I just mentioned, partly or largely because of the trauma of the Civil War [in Sri Lanka]. The great library in Jaffna, which was destroyed during the war, was probably the last place in the world where they actually had copies of the many great Tamil prabandha texts that were composed in Jaffna. Some central texts have been published and are still being read and studied, but many others have disappeared. I’m trying to collect these texts. I want to go to Jaffna, to go from house to house and see if anybody has surviving copies of these poetic masterpieces. I’d like to try to help to somehow bring this highly creative literature from Jaffna back into people’s lives before it’s completely lost.