Dear RISA-L sahṛdayas,
Several of Professor Ludo Rocher’s former students learned this morning of his passing last night, at age 90, peacefully, at his home in Philadelphia. Ludo was more than a mentor and guide for his students, myself included. He was a lifetime friend and a role
model of scholarship, elegance, positivity, dignity, and, not least for many of us, of how to act in a most congenial manner as a department chair in the face of truculent administrators and colleagues. He was the chair of the Department of Oriental Studies
(later renamed Asian and Middle Eastern Studies), and the Department of South Asian Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania for twenty-four years, and taught actively for nearly forty years, from 1966-2004. He mentored not just his own students, but many
of his students’ students. He was a paragon of knowledge, virtue, and love for his work. He was born in Antwerp in 1926, spent several years in India in the 1950s, then returned repeatedly, usually to Kolkata. Much of his work took him to archives in London,
Germany, and elsewhere. He is survived by his wife, the wonderful Rosane Rocher, whose indefatigable love and ministrations kept him alive and at work for at least fifteen years beyond what was expected at the time. Rosane was not just his wife, but collaborator
on many of his works, in addition to being a fine scholar in her own right. Ludo was one of the most visible and important scholars of Dharmaśāstra of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I will leave it to others to add more. I will, however, add only
one note – His Sanskrit was awesome, his versatility was unparalleled, and he constantly made the most difficult passages completely transparent through his complete understanding of the grammar and the lucidity of his presentation, whether it was in graduate
classes, in is careful reading of dissertations, or anything in his extravagantly long list of publications. Hopefully, this list. Including his most recent book, published this year(!), will be forthcoming soon.
Kind regards
Fred Smith
University of Iowa
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