Professor van der Kuijp  is Chairman of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Harvard University. He worked at the Nepal Research Center, Universität Berlin, and University of Washington before joining the Harvard Faculty in July 1995.

His research focuses primarily on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history, and Tibetan-Mongol and Tibetan-Chinese relations. His books include Still in Search of Dharma: Indian and Ceylonese Travellers in Fifteenth Century Tibet, Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and contributions to the Development of Tibetan Buddhist Epistemology from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries. He has been instrumental in restoring Tibetan manuscripts and making efforts to create a socio-cultural history of the Himalayan area including India, Nepal and Tibet.

Professor van der Kuijp received his M.A. from University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, and his PhD from the Universität Hamburg, Germany. In 1993, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

The Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies has an outreach program which hosts lectures of academic and cultural interest to the extended Harvard community. The outreach effort is convened by Dr. Bijoy Misra, and is held on the second Saturday afternoons at Harvard Science Center.  The lectures began in the Spring of 1995 and an Annual India Poetry reading was added in 1997.  As part of the outreach effort, Dr. Kuijp will be speaking at Harvard University Science Center(Hall A), located at 1 Oxford Street in Cambridge.on March 12th at 3:00 pm.

Dr. Kuijp spoke to Lokvani about his work and the growing interest in Indian studies at Harvard.

How did you develop an interest in Tibetean Buddhism? It seems quite a off-the beaten track research topic for a westerner.

It certainly was. I originally was enrolled as a Math and Biology major. My intellectual curiosity prompted me take an interest in western philosophy and later to far Eastern studies. I had the opportunity to study under Herbert V. Gunther who has published many books on Buddhist philosophy. I was very intrigued by his work and it motivated me to take a deep interest in the topic. I liked his work because he made Indian philosophy accessible to westerners. Thus rather than doing literal translations, he coined many a phrase to present the ideas in a manner that would make sense to a westerner.  I switched majors and moved into my current area of interest. 

Could you tell us a little about your research?

My area of research is dealing with the history of textual transmission. I am very interested in how texts shape over time and how they interact and affect each other. Buddhism has changed considerably over time. While in the early stages there were no deities during the later time period, Ganesha, Saraswathi, Garuda and Vishnu where accepted as Gods by the Buddhist, but the Buddhist have  their own angle on these Gods. When Buddhism went to different countries, people gave it their own twist.

There is a perception that the research in Indian studies that goes on in westerners is somehow disconnected from the work that is done by Indian scholars. Do you agree with this perception? Is there a problem here?

There is a perception that the work proceeds in parallel universes. But I do not perceive a problem. Rational analytical thought is very much a part of India and India has produced formidable thinkers like Nagarjuna, Shankaracharya, Gangesha who could be compared to Spinoza, Hume, Kant and others in the west. Today there are people like Parimal Patil, Bimal Krishna Matilal, Kishore Chatterjee and others who have used the rigorous and sophisticated analytical methodology used in the west to study Indian philosophy. Thus there is no disconnect.

You are the chair of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University. Could you give us the history of the department?

Sanskrit was first taught at Harvard in 1872, when James Bradstreet Greenough, a Latin grammarian, began offering courses in Sanskrit and comparative philology as Latin electives. Charles Lanman, who began at Harvard in 1880, was the first to preside over the department of Indo-Iranian Languages, as it was then called. During his tenure, Lanman produced A Sanskrit Reader (1888), a collection of Sanskrit and Indic manuscripts which is still the standard introductory text today, as well as founded The Harvard Oriental Series in 1891. By 1902, as a result of the relinquishing of Avesta and the addition of Pali and Prakrit, the name of the department was changed to Indic Philology. In the following years the Department continued to add instruction in other languages, including Tibetan and Urdu-Hindi, and in subjects connecting with the subcontinent and its cultural traditions, while retaining the study of Sanskrit as the common ingredient in its various graduate degree programs. As a reflection of these additions, the name of the departments was changed in 1951 to 'Sanskrit and Indian Studies'. The creation of the Wales chair for Sanskrit was important for bringing Sanskrit to Harvard.

How would you describe the department as it is today?

The Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies provides students with an opportunity to study the civilizations of South Asia and of related cultures by developing competence in Sanskrit or another South Asian language, and by examining the literature, the religious and philosophical traditions, the aesthetic and artistic traditions, and the moral and social traditions of that civilization.   

We offer a wide range of courses. We have ten undergraduates who are majoring in Sanskrit and Indian studies and fourteen graduate students. The demographics of the student body of Harvard is changing and we are seeing an increased percentage of South Asians. This has resulted in greater interest in our courses and an increased enrollment in our undergraduate programs.   In the general student population there is an increased interest in our department.

We offer several language programs which have high enrollment. Our Gujarati class was full the first day we offered it.  Diana Eck teaches Hindu Myth, Image, and Pilgrimage as a core course and that has become very popular. We have one student who deferred his medical admission to Stanford University by a year so he could complete his MA in Indian Studies and Sanskrit.

While your department does call itself as department of “Indian” studies, people in the US shy away from the term  "India" and use the term “South Asia”. Many people from South Asian countries take an issue with the term and often feel it is meaningless. What is your opinion?

During the recent times, South Asia has gained political and strategic importance. As a department in one of the most prestigious institutions of the world do you perceive a special role for your department?

We are not a social science or political science department. We deal with intellectual history.  But our goal is to present our students with most up to date information on all historical questions that may have impact on present day politics. Questions such as the Ayodhya issue would benefit from a critical understanding of history. One of our colleagues Michael Witzel did a lot of work on clearing up the controversy surrounding the Indus Valley Script.

You have actively engaged in outreach efforts.  Why is this important to the core mission of your department?

The goal of the outreach program is to create a platform where the Indian community can come together and listen to talks and discuss topics, both academic and non-academic that are of interest to them.  Dr. Bijoy Misra has been leading this effort and we have had a wonderful panel of speakers. The annual poetry reading is very popular. It is an event where any member of the community can come and read a poem in any language. This year the poetry reading is on May 14th.

We also hope that through such outreach efforts, people in the community understand and support our work. The support we look to is of many different kinds. We hope their children take an interest in our department and enroll. We hope the interest will encourage people to provide funding that can be used for scholarships for graduate and undergraduate students in our department.

We also encourage people in the community to be part of our outreach advisory board so that they can help us with the outreach.  We are a small department and hence can use all the support we can get.

Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to your talk on March 12th.

Thank you.

Click here  to get more information about the outreach lecture

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