Rahul Peter Das

Who is Rahul Peter Das?

Rahul Peter Das is the professor of South Asian studies at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he is also the Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy I and erstwhile Director of the Centre for Languages of the University. He is a Board Member of the German Association for Asian Studies, and received the Hind Rattan Award in 2006, the Nav Rattan Award in 2009.

Das, of mixed Indian and German parentage, was born in Germany, but raised in Calcutta. He attended the Calcutta Medical College and the Maulana Azad College, both affiliated to the University of Calcutta for his medical preparatory education. He returned to Germany in 1974, where he studied Indology, Islamic studies and Tamilology at the University of Cologne and the University of Hamburg, obtaining all his degrees from the latter. Through his teachers Klaus Ludwig Janert and Albrecht Wezler, students of the famous Paul Thieme, he was influenced by the stringent principles of philological research of the latter. He applied these principles when he instituted, in 2000, the new subject of South Asian Studies at his university. This subject is based on an approach to the study of South Asia different from Indology, which too continues to be represented at the university. In a manner new for the German-speaking area, it combines elements of philology and the social sciences, but with a methodology derived from philology: data-based and not taking its cues from models or theories, in which respect it differs from approaches prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon world. The languages of reference are modern South Asian languages, not Sanskrit; South Asian Islam is a part of the curriculum.