Dietmar Rothermund
Dietmar Otto Ernst Rothermund (20 January 1933 in Kassel - 9 March 2020 in Dossenheim[1]) was a German historian and professor of the history of South Asia at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg.He read the early Indian philosophical Upanishad texts at a young age and made a map of India's most important temples while still at school.[6][7] It dealt with the "growing politicisation of denominational groups in Pennsylvania in the late colonial period and in the run-up to American independence".[13] He arrived in Bombay (today's Mumbai) on a freighter in mid-January 1960 and was immediately impressed by the diverse culture of South Asia.[17] With History of India,[26] Rothermund, together with his colleague Hermann Kulke, created a true standard work, which has been translated into Italian, Turkish, Romanian and Chinese.Progress and Problems,[30] which was based on a conference he organised at the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi, attended by many senior Indian government officials.[37] The historian from Heidelberg did not limit himself to South Asian studies alone, he also focused on topics related to colonial history and Asia in general.One of his works on this field is Asian Trade and European Expansion in the Age of Mercantilism,[38] which can also be subsumed to his research focus on economic history.In this book the decolonisation processes in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific are described in individual chapters, which are presented chronologically and clearly with maps.His publications mostly relied exclusively on English sources, which, according to some critics, promoted a pro-government interpretation and ignored indigenous perspectives.In a national context, it can be argued that Dietmar Rothermund liberated South Asian studies in Germany from the "academic ivory tower".[23] With Dietmar Rothermund, the Heidelberg South Asia Institute became an important contact point for Indian scientists, diplomats and politicians.Historians' Conference) in Würzburg in 1980, Dietmar Rothermund gathered a small group of like-minded people who wanted to try to bring "non-European topics" more into the focus of German historical scholarship.[48] A priority programme established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) was decisive for this, entitled Transformations of Non-European Expansion from the 15th to the 20th Century.[45] The SAI wanted to make its contribution to the discussion and shaping of the cooperation between the Federal Republic of Germany and the countries of South Asia.Rothermund had been a member of the institution founded by Helmut Kohl at the suggestion of Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao since 1992.[53] In Dietmar Rothermund, the foreign students in particular, had an important comrade-in-arms, because the doctoral regulations at the time stipulated that the dissertation had to be written in German or Latin.[54] Rothermund's publications are published in his Festschrift,[57] which was edited by, Georg Berkemer, Tilman Frasch, Hermann Kulke and Jürgen Lütt.