Jan Gonda, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Jan Gonda

Dutch Indologist

Date of Birth: 14-Apr-1905

Place of Birth: Gouda, South Holland, Netherlands

Date of Death: 28-Jul-1991

Profession: university teacher, philologist

Nationality: Kingdom of the Netherlands

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About Jan Gonda

  • Jan Gonda, (14 April 1905 – 28 July 1991) was a Dutch Indologist and the first Utrecht professor of Sanskrit.
  • He was born in Gouda in the Netherlands and died in Utrecht.
  • He studied with Willem Caland at Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht (since 1990 Universiteit Utrecht) and from 1932 held positions at Utrecht and Leiden.
  • He held the positions of Chair of Sanskrit succeeding Caland from 1929, as well as of Indology from 1932.
  • He published scholarly articles on Indian Sanskrit and Indonesian Javanese texts for sixty years.
  • In 1952, he published his monumental work on Sanskrit in Indonesia.
  • His contributions to philology and Vedic literature has been oft-cited.Gonda is recognized as one of the twentieth century's leading scholars of Asian language, literature and religion, particularly on texts and topics related to Hinduism and Buddhism.
  • He wrote with ease and elegance in Dutch, English and German, and had a breath-taking range of interests from the ancient literature of Indonesia and India to comparative religion and philology.
  • Like many Orientalists of the 20th century, Gonda never visited Asia.
  • However, his lack of field experience was more than compensated for by his encyclopedic knowledge of Indic literature and his profound empathy for the religious culture of Asia.
  • Among his many students was J.
  • A.
  • B.
  • van Buitenen who moved to the University of Chicago in 1961, and Henk Bodewitz succeeded Gonda to the chair of Sanskrit at Utrecht in 1976.Gonda left a bequest to Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he was member since 1957, and in 1992 the Gonda Foundation was set up in his name.
  • The foundation offers publication subsidies and grants to projects relating to Indology, the size of the grants and scope of activities being determined by the return on invested capital.
  • The Gonda Lectures and Gonda Indological Series are also named in his honour.

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