More than Real is an arresting book, right from its title which in one stroke asserts the ontic status and indeed superiority of literary imagination, which has long suffered the displeasure of materialist historiography and empiricist history in general. The author strikes a sincere chord when he expresses surprise that a book like this was not written earlier, so obvious and overarching the influence of the mental phenomenon or force that he traces seems to be. In fact while there have been works, including by the current reviewer on specific forms the application of this imagination took in the Sanskrit literary culture of early urban India, none perhaps has taken up imagination in as literal and specific a way as David Shulman sets about doing. He goes on to claim that “imagination was one of the organizing principles” of Indian culture, and tries to demonstrate this via, first, motley texts from the Sanskritic corpus and then threadbare analyses of select Tamil and Telugu texts from the late medieval period.

Categorically, Shulman maintains that “Notwithstanding modern biases and politically driven preconceptions, Sanskrit and the south Indian cultures are intimately interwoven from the beginning of historical time; there is no useful opposition to be drawn here, only a continuous cross-fertilization and a common range of expressive means and modes” (p. x). Nonetheless, in south India between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, “new ideas about the imagination came to serve as indices of wider civilizational change”, i.e. the rise of a humanism of which the use of imagination was symptomatic. For regular readers of David Shulman, thus, there is little that is absolutely new in More than Real. From of course the elegant, extraordinarily complex and layered prose to the argument of the dawn of an “early modern” sensibility on south Indian shores, which is the subtext to the textual analyses brought together in this book, to some of these analyses themselves – parts of which have appeared before to wide notice (Marriage of Bhavana and Best, Nala in Tenkasi, Manu-caritramu) – More than Real is quintessentially Shulman even while it carries a sense of déjà vu about it.

There is something compelling about a book that purports to be the history of a mental faculty as nebulous as imagination in a civilization as intellectually prodigious as the Indian. But is More than Real a work of history? And how does it define the faculty or realm it so passionately and with massive erudition identifies and dissects across varied moments in time? The two questions may be related.

In the first section of the book where he looks at select Sanskrit texts from widely divergent periods and contexts, such as the Shatapatha Brahmana (a Vedic manual of ritual), the Ratnavali (a romance play), and the Yoga-Vashishta (a text on yoga), Shulman identifies ‘imagination’ with different verbs/terms including samkalpa (‘to determine’), bhavana (‘to bring into being’), pratibha (‘poetic intuition’), utpreksha (‘intense visualization’), etc. He all the time emphasizes the fact that the acts signified by these terms conjured something that was not ‘real’ (which he controversially translates terms like ‘sat’ to mean) but still intensely experienced, making it “more than real”. Thus Shulman's understanding of imagination is a profoundly philosophic one – imagination is that which negotiates the ontic balance between the real and the unreal – and often he wanders off into pure metaphysical exegeses. Indeed, an ode perhaps to Shulman's breadth of learning, it is hard to strictly categorize the book as either a work of literary criticism or philosophy or semantics or religion.

While the experiential argument setting up the hyper-reality of imagined truth claims is perhaps easy to relate to and accept, not so the very wide ambit of cognitive processes that are assimilated to the realm of “imagination” in this book. Thus everything from thought, intuition, perception, emotion, attention, memory, consciousness, meditation, and creativity, often in conjunction, to lovers' fears and fantasies, dreams, painting, and the art of magic are in different places in the book cited as instances of imagination. It takes no effort to see that this all-encompassing definition practically collapses every kind of intellectual and psychological faculty into one, which is to the detriment of the author's case that imagination was “an independent entity distinct from other mental activities” (p. 4). The merit of such a take may well be that it nudges us towards a better appreciation of the complex nature of every mental action which is arguably always an admixture of many different impulses and processes. But it does leave one wondering at the analytical utility of erecting “imagination” as coterminous with and hegemonistic of the mind. For why then should imagination be privileged for study over a category like cognition? Because of imagination's generative aspect, as the book would argue? But are apprehending reality and generating reality actually two discrete things? Or are the two not implicated in each other? Is the unreal (the imagined) not somewhere constituted of what we know of the real and how we respond to it? In other words, the ontic may not be the only kind of existential question tied up with a study of imagination; the question of newness in the world is another.

This is particularly relevant to the literary world where to argue for a hermetically sealed and self-absorbed autonomy of the imagined universe of the text is inevitably to reiterate the stereotype of its isolation from the material world. More than Real tends somewhat, especially in its second section on south Indian literatures, to run this risk, whereas the isolation of the literary is likely to be just as untenable in a work of literary criticism today as in one of history. To give an overarching example, despite asserting the singular and potent efficaciousness and causal power of the generative function of imagination in works like Annamayya's Telugu padams or Varatunkaraman's Tamil Piramottara-kantam and its story of Simantini, the book never argues for the effect extending beyond the text and its performance. At one place it is explicitly asserted for sixteenth-century south India that “The new theory of bhavana, a process producing effects unquestionably real for both the poets and their audiences, is not concerned with approximating any external world” (p. 154). This is curious since the author himself very reasonably states elsewhere that “internality and externality are somewhat artificial divisions given their tremendous interpenetration and mutual embedding” (p. 270).

Indeed it would be fair to say that despite recent advances authored by Sheldon Pollock, Narayana Rao, Shulman himself, and others, the biggest challenge for literary historians of pre-modern South Asia remains establishing a historically demonstrable correlation between literature and the material world – between what Shulman would call man's inner and outer worlds. Attempts have been confined to broadly implicating literature in political discourse – as an instrument of education of political elites or of the expression of their aspirations for sovereignty. Shulman's is a more socio-cultural vision when in the concluding pages of his book, he returns to the strain of “civilizational shift, a Renaissance-like reimagining of human life” occurring in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century south India, wherein “the imagination was identified as the single most crucial aspect of human thinking and feeling” (p. 281). While this point is well brought out especially in the chapters analysing the Tamil allegorical play Bhavana-Purushottama by Srinivasa Dikshit and the discursive Telugu poem Manu-Caritramu of Allasani Peddana, why this apparently concerted change occurred is not quite gone into.

In all of two paragraphs across the book, the author takes up the question of explaining this postulated change and suggests that there must have been a connection with “radical experimentation in the forms and modes of economic and political life” and the emergence of a powerful new Deccan culture under the Nayakas. The connection he hints at between the supposed emergence of notions of individual autonomy and singularity in society and an intensified focus on human capacities in literature is fascinating. Unfortunately, it is not developed. Readers are told that “this is not the moment to speculate on causes”! The book would without a doubt have benefited from a full discussion, even if speculative, of precisely the changes in the socio-cultural matrix within which postulated changes in literature – that too of a “revolutionary” order, according to Shulman – occurred. As things stand, “wider civilizational changes” remain unaccounted for and the very important contribution of the book – drawing attention to the late medieval literary focus on creative powers of the individual mind which in turn foregrounded the Self – hangs somewhat suspended.

That said, the strength of the book lies in what is David Shulman's forte: dexterous literary criticism displayed text after text, essay after essay, sprinkled with some gems of philosophic insight. I leave readers with the following lines from the chapter “The Marriage of Bhavana and Best”: