Südasienforschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bericht über eine Bestandsaufnahme

Abstract In 1999, the Institute for Asian Studies in Hamburg initiated a project on "Modernization of East Asian Studies and the Prospects of South Asian Studies in Germany" that was partly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The study was done on the basis of interviews and a survey among German scholars and also included a comparison with the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The majority of German research on South Asia is done in classical Indology. More than fifty percent of all German South Asia specialists belong to philological disciplines. With some twenty chairs, Indology has the broadest institutional background at German universities. The remaining c. fifty percent are distributed among nine other disciplines. The survey revealed a growing interest in modem topics like nationalism and foreign policy, but the academic infrastructure of German universities shows considerable gaps in the field of social sciences and contemporary South Asian Studies.