[INDOLOGY] Alf Hiltebeitel 1942-2023

[Madhav Deshpande]

Very sorry to hear Alf's passing. He was a giant in the field, and will
indeed be missed.

Madhav M. Deshpande
Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India

[Residence: Campbell, California, USA]


On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 7:41 AM Collins, Brian via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I am sorry to report that Alf Hiltebeitel passed away in the Republic of
> Colombia a few days ago. It doesn’t need saying, but he was a giant in the
> field and made important contributions as a historian of religions, an
> ethnographer, a philologist, and a scholar of intellectual history. He even
> continued producing scholarship well after his advanced Parkinson’s made it
> impossible to speak and very difficult to write.
>
>
> He was most well known for his work on the *Mahābhārata *epic. And over
> the course of his life, he practically produced an epic of his own.
>
>
> His first book, *The Ritual of Battle *(Cornell 1976), and his two most
> recent books, *Nonviolence in the Mahābhārata* (Routledge 2016) and *World
> of Wonders* (Oxford 2021) add up to about 800 pages combined. The two
> volumes of *The Cult of Draupadī,* Vol. 1, *Mythologies: From Gingee to
> Kurukṣetra* (Chicago 1988) and Vol. 2, *On Hindu Ritual and the Goddess* (Chicago
> 1991), are another 1000 pages or so.
>
>
> The two “rethinking” books, *Rethinking India’s Oral and Classical Epics:
> Draupadī among Rajputs, Muslims, and Dalits* (Chicago 1999) and *Rethinking
> the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma Kin*g
> (Chicago 2001), are about another 900 pages.
>
>
> *Reading the Fifth Veda: Studies on the Mahābhārata* and *When the
> Goddess Was a Woman: Mahābhārata Ethnographies *(Brill 2011), are about
> 1200 pages altogether. *Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and
> Narrative* (Oxford 2011) is about 700 pages. The two Freud books, *Freud’s
> India* and *Freud’s Mahābhārata* (Oxford 2018), are 600 combined pages.
>
>
> We get an estimated total of 5,200 pages (roughly the same size as Bibek
> Debroy’s ten-volume English translation of the *Mahābhārata*) if we stop
> this partial bibliography there. But Alf did not stop there, and was
> working on a book about Vyāsa as late as last year.
>
>
> There won’t be another like Alf. He will be sorely missed by his students
> and his colleagues, but will never be forgotten as long as English readers
> still want to grapple with the immensity of India’s Great Epic.
>
> With condolences to his friends and family especially,
>
> Brian
>
> Assoc. Prof. Brian Collins
> (He/Him/His)
> Department Chair and Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion
> and Philosophy
> Department of Classics and Religious Studies
> 234 Ellis Hall
> Ohio University
> Athens, Ohio
> 740-597-2103 (office)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> INDOLOGY mailing list
> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20230314/51817e4a/attachment.htm>