In the Company of Gods (Essays in Memory of Günther-Dietz Sontheimer)

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When Günther Sontheimer died at the early age of fifty-eight on 1 June 1992, he had done a good thirty years of research and teaching on a variety of subjects including traditional Indian law and ethics, contemporary literature in Marathi, Hinduism, and folk religion in Maharashtra. He guided a generation of students at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg and a 'Sontheimer School had begun to take shape there. This volume contains twenty essays divided into four sections: folk religion, bhakti, history and law, and an epilogue that reflects on Sontheimer's thoughts on Hindu law, the constituents of Hinduism, his interest in folk bronzes, documentary film-making, and a poem by Dilip Chitre on Sontheimer. The chapters on folk religion reflect his deep understanding of this aspect as being boundary crossing, incorporating the trans-local and the local, the high and the low-a simultaneous networks of traditions. The chapters on bhakti show how devotion, in the Varkari tradition in Maharahstra and in Kabir's poetry, transcends the categories of folk, tribal and brahmanical. The chapters on history and law deal with the application of the forest (vana) and settlement (ketra) spatial and symbolical categories used by him in his analysis and customary law during the early colonial period in Maharashtra. The contributions in the fourth section are biographical and trace his thoughts on law, his analysis of Hinduism, his fascination with 'folk bronzes' and his discovery of the film medium. The resultant volume is testimony to the shoreless reach of Sontheimer's work.

Günther-Dietz Sontheimer (1934-92) taught History of Religions and Philosophy of South Asia, traditional Hindu Law, and Marathi language and literature at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. He was a scholar of Indian folk culture, especially the oral traditions, religion and customs of pastoral communities in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

Aditya Malik is Senior Lecturer in Indian Religions in the School of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Anne Feldhaus is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

Heidrun Brückner is Professor of Indology and South Asian Studies at the Department of Cultural Studies of East and South Asia, University of Würzburg, Germany.

When Günther Sontheimer died unexpectedly at the age of fifty eight on 1 June 1992, he had completed a good thirty years of research and teaching on a variety of subjects including traditional Indian law and ethics, contemporary literature in Marathi, Hinduism, and folk religion in Maharashtra. When asked to compose a brief biographical note for the volume Flags of Fame: Studies in South Asian Folk Culture (1993) in which his final and most mature essay on Khandoba appeared, he wrote:

Professor Günther Sontheimer teaches History of Religion and Philosophy of South Asia, traditional Hindu law (Dharmashastra), Marathi language and literature at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. He studied law and Indology in Tubingen and Hindu Law at the Law College in Poona (1958-61). Diploma in Law and Ph.D. on The Hindu Joint Family: Its evolution as a legal institution' (Delhi, 1975) at the SOAS in London. Since 1966, [he conducted] field research on Indian folk culture, especially on the oral traditions, religion and customs of pastoral communities in Maharashtra, Andhra and Karnataka. Publication include Pastoral deities in Western India (OUP, New York, 1989); ed. with S. Settar Memorial Stones of India (Dharwar/ New Delhi, 1982); ed. with H. Kulke Hinduism Reconsidered (New Delhi, 2nd ed., 1990). In October 1987 he received the Rabindranath Tagore Prize of Literature instituted by the Indo-German Society of the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) for his translations from Marathi.

These varied accomplishments of his found expression not only in the large number of his publications, but also in the inspiration and guidance he provided for an entire academic generation of post-graduate and doctoral students at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. At the time of his untimely death, something of a 'Sontheimer school' had begun to take shape in the Indological research being done at Heidelberg. Sontheimer had-mainly through his studies of Maharashtrian folk culture, and through his understanding of Hinduism as constituted by the interaction of five 'components'-begun to forge a new paradigm for Indology in Germany, which for the most part deals with Sanskrit literature and language, and Indian philosophy. Although Sontheimer remained an outsider to mainstream German Indology to some extent a fate natural to all changers of paradigms-his work was admired by scholars in other countries. Not surprisingly then, the conference recognizing his contribution: to the discipline was hosted in India by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, an institution the founding academic director of which Kapila Vatsyayan, and Günther Sontheimer admired each other's ideas and work. The conference in his honour was held in two cities, Delhi and Pune, in February 1994. Delhi was chosen because it was the city in which the host institution is situated, and Pune because it was Sontheimer's hometown in India. While Sontheimer was very familiar with the population and the centres of scholarship of both cities, Pune was his 'base camp' from where he journeyed to shrines, temples, and pilgrimages in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra, to the Dhangar 'vādās, to Pandharpur and Shingnapur, and to Jejuri the fortress of Lord Khandoba.

**Contents and Sample Pages**