Edwin F. Bryant is Associate Professor of Hinduism at Rutgers University, where he teaches Hindu religion and philosophy. His publications include The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (2001). He is translator of Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God, Srimad Bhagavata Purana Book Ten (2004). He is also editor of Sources of the Krishna Tradition (in press) and with Maria Ekstrand, of The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (2004). Bryant is currently at work on a translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and its commentaries.
Christian Carpelan is Researcher at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki. His special field is archaeology of northern and eastern Europe. He has presented papers on the early contacts between Uralic and Indo-European in a number of international settings. He is the co-editor (with Tony Hackens and Hagne Jungner) of Time and Environment: A PACT Seminar (1992) and Early Contacts Between Uralic and Indo-European: Archaeological and Linguistic Considerations (2001).
Madhav M. Deshpande received his MA (1968) at the University of Pune in India and his PhD (1972) at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1972 he joined the University of Michigan where he is currently Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics. He has published several books and hundreds of articles on Indo-Aryan and Paninian linguistics, religion, and philosophy.
Koenraad Elst earned MA degrees in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His PhD dissertation on Hindu nationalism, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, became a best-seller in India. Making his living mostly by journalism, he has been active as an independent scholar in the fields of comparative religion and philosophy and of the history of India. Among twenty published titles, most attention has been drawn by his Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate; Gandhi and Godse (a close discussion of the apology of Mahatma Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse); The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of “Hindu Fascism”; and Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple.
Lars Martin Fosse is an independent scholar with a doctorate in Sanskrit. He has also studied Hindi and Middle Indic languages, as well as Greek and Latin, at the Universities of Oslo, Heidelberg, and Bonn. His research interests involve stylometry (statistical analysis of the language and style of Sanskrit texts) as well as Vedic and epic studies. In addition to authoring several articles in these areas, he has taught at the University of Oslo in Sanskrit, linguistic statistics, and Hinduism.
Hans Henrich Hock is Professor of Linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Illinois Urbana. His research interests include Sanskrit linguistics, especially with an emphasis on phonology, syntax, and sociolinguistics. He has written extensively on historical Indo-Aryan linguistics and the Indo-Iranian and comparative Indo-European backgrounds of Sanskrit. Among other works, he is the author of Principles of Historical Linguistics (1991), senior author (with Brian D. Joseph) of Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship (1996), Editor of Studies in Sanskrit Syntax (1991) and of Historical, Indo-European, and Lexicographical Studies: A Festschrift for Ladislav Zgusta on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday (1997).
Subhash Kak is the Delaune Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor in the Asian Studies Program at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His research interests include foundations of physics and information, cognitive science, history of science, and Vedic studies. His recent books are The Astronomical Code of the Rgveda, The Wishing Tree, The Gods Within, and The Architecture of Knowledge. He has also published several books of poems.
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer is Professor of Anthropology, and teaches archaeology and ancient technology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has a BA in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and completed his MA and PhD (1983) in south Asian archaeology at the same university. He has conducted archaeological research and excavations at both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, two of the most important early sites in Pakistan, and has also worked in western and central India. Since 1986 he has been the Co-director and Field Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project in Pakistan, a long-term study of urban development in the Indus Valley. His work is most recently featured in the July 2003 issue of Scientific American and on the website www.harappa.com
B. B. Lal served as the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972. In the latter year, he took voluntary retirement from that coveted post, better to pursue his research programs independently. Soon thereafter he joined Jiwaji University, Gwalior, as Professor and Head of the School of Studies in Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology. In 1976 he moved on to the renowned Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, of which he was also the Director for a number of years, finally retiring in 1986. He has held prestigious visiting lectureships at the University of Chicago and University of London, and in 1994 he was awarded an honorary degree by the Institute of Archaeology (St Petersberg), Academy of Sciences, Russia. The same year he was elected the President of World Archaeological Congress–3, held in Delhi. He has also been President and Member of several Committees of UNESCO.
Carl C. Lamberg-Karlovsky received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and then worked as the Director of Archaeological Survey in Syria as well as at the Director of Excavations at Tempe Yahya in southeastern Iran. There he has been engaged in collaborative excavations in the Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. In 1999 he launched what is anticipated as a long-term excavation of the site of Panj Piye in Balochistan, Pakistan, a major urban Bronze Age settlement. Dr Lamberg-Karlovsky's current research interests are in the cultural interaction and trade patterns that brought distant centers into contact such as Mesopotamia, the Gulf, and Central Asia. Dr Lamberg-Karlovsky is the Director of Graduate Studies for Stephen Phillips, Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.
Diane A. Lichtenstein received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1977 and is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Baldwin-Wallace College and the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Her dissertation research, conducted among the Langi of northern Uganda in 1970–72, focused on village social dynamics in the context of the advent of national military rule. She has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Egypt, Pakistan, and India and has maintained a long-term research interest in South Asian prehistory. She has co-authored several articles with Jim G. Shaffer, which focus on archaeological details of the Indus Valley (Harappan) civilization.
Satya Swarup Misra was Professor of Indology and Linguistics at the Benaras Hindu University. He was the author of many books on comparative Indo-European linguistics, including New Lights on Indo-European Comparative Grammar (1996); The Aryan Problem: A Linguistic Approach (1992); The Old Indo-Aryan: A Historical and Comparative Grammar (1991); and Avestan: A Historical and Comparative Grammar (1979).
Asko Parpola PhD, is Professor of Indology at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the University of Helsinki. He has published several books and over one hundred articles on the Indus civilization; Indus script and religion; Vedic ritual, particularly the Samaveda and the Jaiminiya Samaveda texts and rituals; the religious history and archaeology of South India; the prehistory of Indian languages, and the prehistoric archaeology of South Asia and (in a broad sense) Central Asia. His home page with a list of publications is: www.helsinki.fi/∼aparpola/
Laurie L. Patton is Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Early Indian Religions at Emory University. Her interests are in the interpretation of early Indian ritual and narrative, comparative mythology, and literary theory in the study of religion. She is author or editor of six books and thirty articles in these fields. Most recently, she is the editor of Jewels of Authority: Women and Text in the Hindu Tradition (2002), and the author of a book on the use of poetry in Vedic ritual, Bringing the Gods to Mind (University of California Press, 2004). Her book of poetry, Fire's Goal: Poems from a Hindu Year (2003) will be followed by a translation of the Bhagavad Gita (forthcoming) from Penguin Press Classics.
Jim G. Shaffer received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1972 and is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. His academic career focus on South Asian prehistory began with his dissertation research of Bronze Age Afghanistan, detailed in Prehistoric Baluchistan: A Systematic Approach. Additionally, he has conducted extensive archaeological fieldwork at Bronze Age and Neolithic sites in Pakistan and in north and south India. He is author of numerous articles analyzing details of the Indus Valley (Harappan) civilization and other cultures of South and Southwest Asia, with a research emphasis on the origin and processes of domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and state formation, and archaeological application of the concept of paleoethnicity and paleogroup migration.
Shrikant G. Talageri was educated in Bombay where he lives and works. He has been interested in wildlife, comparative music, religion and philosophy, history and culture, and linguistics. He has made a special study of the Konkani language, his mother tongue. He has devoted several years, and much study, to the theory of an Aryan invasion of India, and interpreted the Vedas with the help of the Puranas. He is the author of The Aryan Invasions Theory: A Reappraisal (1993) and The Rig Veda: A Historical Analysis (2000).
Michael Witzel is the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University. He received his PhD from the University of Erlangen in 1972 and has continued to work in the fields of Indology, Indo-European, Indo-Iranian philology and linguistics, and Japanology. In addition to teaching positions at the University of Tuebingen and the University of Leiden, he has taught at the Sanskrit Campus, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, and served as the Director of the Nepal Research Center of the German Oriental Society. He has served as the chief editor of the Indo-Iranian Journal, and, since 1990 he has been the editor of the Harvard Oriental Series as well as the founding editor of Electronic Journal for Vedic Studies. He is the author or editor of over 100 articles and books in early Indian history and philology.