Robert J. Zydenbos

Robert J. Zydenbos (born 1957) is a Dutch-Canadian scholar who has doctorate degrees in Indian philosophy and Dravidian studies. He also has a doctorate of literature from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Zydenbos also studied Indian religions and languages at the South Asia Institute and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He taught Sanskrit at the University of Heidelberg and later taught Jain philosophy at the University of Madras in India. Zydenbos later taught Sanskrit, Buddhism, and South Asian religions at the University of Toronto in Canada. He was the first western scholar to write a doctoral thesis on contemporary Kannada fiction.

Quotes

• Why should it be so important that the Aryans . . . have been in the subcontinent since all eternity? That would come close to the Blut and Boden ideology of Nazism, with its Aryan rhetoric. Why the xenophobia? Does he really not see the parallel between Nazi attacks on synagogues in the 1930's and what happened in Ayodhya on December 6th?
  • (Zydenbos 1993). Zydenbos, Robert, J. 1993. "An Obscurantist Argument." Indian Express, December 12. Quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13

Quotes about Zydenbos

• We would not have believed it, but it is really printed there, black on white: an academic tries to score against a fellow academic by arbitrarily linking him with an event which had not yet taken place when the latter's paper was published, and with which he had strictly nothing to do, viz. the demolition of the Babri mosque. Add to this that he accuses Prof. Rajaram of something "close to" Nazi ideology, and we wonder: how would he fare if he accused a western colleague in the same vein in a western paper?
  • Elst (1996) 1996. Linguistics and the Aryan and Non-Aryan Invasion Theory. quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13