Norman Cutler, 52, a scholar who expanded classical ideas on Indian culture and literature to include Tamil writings–a tradition that while 2,000 years old still hadn’t gotten the same respect within modern academia as Sanskrit–died from a heart attack Tuesday, Feb. 26, on his way home from his University of Chicago office.
A student of novelist A.K. Ramanujan and a contemporary of Bengali cultural writer Edward Dimock, Mr. Cutler spent his entire career at the U. of C., where he “broke out of the old Orientalist view of old India being good and new India being bad and uninteresting,” said Wendy Doniger, a professor in the U. of C. Divinity School and Department of South Asian Languages and Literature. Mr. Cutler was chairman of the department.
Tamil, a language spoken in South India with a literature that dates as far back as the 1st Century, fascinated Mr. Cutler since he began studying it under Ramanujan in the 1970s. It was at a time when Western scholarship discovered entire literatures in obscure languages like Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam and Tamil, upsetting the long-held academic dominance of classical Sanskrit study, said Sheldon Pollock, a George V. Brobinskoy Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the U. of C.
“Think of an analogy in Europe: In Europe, if you can imagine going to school and all you hear about is Latin literature [at the expense of French or German], you would get a sense of how South Asia has been dominated by a very glorious and important tradition of Sanskrit literature,” he said. “But at the same time, there were a whole range of other literatures which had risen. And Western scholars, to some degree, had ignored that in favor of this other, very dominant tradition.
“It was thanks to people like Norman that the richness of this literature became more widely known and more widely appreciated.”
A steady flow of Mr. Cutler’s former students have spread his broad view of South Indian literature at other major universities, said Martha Selby, an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas in Austin.
Though Mr. Cutler had a reputation for intense academic focus, he led a somewhat wild youth. As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, he spent three days in jail for hopping train cars on a low-budget, high-adventure bid to see America.
Later he was more apt to play Bach preludes and Mozart piano sonatas in his Hyde Park living room, surrounded by books, South Asian statues and Southwest American pottery.
His niece Rachel Lugn said he had a quiet personality until he shared high-minded jokes or humorous dog stories with small groups of colleagues and friends. Mr. Cutler had a fondness for German shepherds and dachshunds, she said.
A native of Silver Spring, Md., Mr. Cutler earned his master’s degree from the University of Washington in 1975 and his PhD from the U. of C. in 1980. During that time, he received an award from the American Institute of Indian Studies and a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship to study Tamil.
He joined the faculty at the U. of C. in 1980.
Other survivors include his life-partner, Marshall Keltz; his mother, Sylvia; and a sister, Joy.
Services will be private.
