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 King (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.