Obituary for Hermann Kulke

Dr. Georg Berkemer and Dr. Margret Frenz

On a beautiful spring day in May 2008, a lecture hall at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London was filled to the brim with scholars and students for Hermann Kulke’s lecture on ‘The Invented Traditions of Yayati Kesari and Sankaracharya’, rounding off a workshop in honour of his 70^th birthday. It prompted a lively discussion, which was then continued at a celebratory dinner at a local Indian restaurant. All along, the animated conversation revolved around the history of India from its early stages to its legacy in contemporary times. This evening is etched in the memories of the authors of this obituary, as it reflects much of what drove Hermann Kulke: the engagement with the long and deep history of the Indian subcontinent and its repercussions to this day. 

But let us turn to the beginnings: Hermann Kulke was born in Berlin in 1938 as one of seven brothers. His father was an architect. The Kulke family lived in Berlin where Hermann experienced the Second World War first hand, and then sought refuge in St Anton (Austria). After completing school and obligatory community service (in lieu of military service), Hermann Kulke went on a trip around several countries in South and Southeast Asia. This is when his fascination with India and Southeast Asia struck root. His experiences on the journey led him to study history, sociology, and political science at the University of Freiburg and the University of Madras. Hermann Kulke focused on topics related to Southeast Asia, and eventually added the study of Indian languages to his portfolio in order to be able to read documents written in the languages of the region. For his PhD, awarded in 1967, Hermann Kulke chose to explore the religious and historical context of the Cidambaram-Mahatmya, the founding text of the temple in Cidambaram. His thesis opened up a new thematical avenue, in particular, the history of temple cities and their socio-political significance for local states and communities. The administrative structures, processes of ritual legitimation, and their transformation over time became the recurring themes Hermann Kulke spent much of his life researching on and writing about. 

In the same year, Hermann Kulke moved to the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, which had been established only five years previously and constituted the first interdisciplinary research centre focusing on the South Asian subcontinent in Germany. It was co-founded by Professor Dietmar Rothermund with whom Kulke maintained a collegial friendship up to Rothermund’s death a few years ago. Together, they are perhaps most well-known for their co-authored ‘History of India’ which first appeared in German in 1982. To this day, it has seen six editions in both English and German. Each edition was very carefully revised and updated (latest English edition 2016, latest German edition 2024). It was also translated into Italian and Turkish. 

Just three years into Kulke’s time in Heidelberg, the new building for the research centre on South Asia opened its doors in the heart of the campus Im Neuenheimer Feld. It was specifically designed for the South Asia Institute and its approach for academics to be working closely across disciplines. To enable easy communication between them, the building offered open spaces, seminar rooms, and offices for the various subject areas which included history, geography, anthropology, geology, political science, literary and linguistic studies. Within this conducive atmosphere, Hermann Kulke developed the Orissa Project together with colleagues in India and in Germany as an interdisciplinary research project to look into the history of the Jagannath Temple in Puri, the rituals associated with it, and its economic and political significance of the state for Orissa (today Odisha) through the centuries, based on documents written in Indian languages as well as undertaking ethnographic field work in Orissa. It was funded as a Priority Programme (‘Schwerpunktprogramm’) by the German Research Foundation from 1970 to 1975. Hermann Kulke moved to India with his family for a few years to coordinate the project on site. This helped build and strengthen his networks with colleagues, his deep understanding of the region, and his local approach. Not only Hermann Kulke himself, but also his wife Ursula could narrate wonderful stories of their ‘Indian years’ – some of which they shared at the above mentioned celebration of Hermann Kulke’s 70^th birthday party.

Perhaps the most important publication arising out of the Orissa Project is the edited volume ‘The Cult of Jagannath and Regional Tradition of Orissa’, jointly edited with Anncharlott Eschmann and Gaya Charan Tripathi (1^st ed. 1978), which provides profound insights into the interdependence and interconnections between temple and monarch, court, and local communities as well as the legitimacy of the dynasty and its socio-political ambitions. This volume built the foundation for any research conducted in Orissa and over time has become one of the most important reference works in the study of South Asia. This was followed by Hermann Kulke’s monograph on the ‘Jagannath Cult and the Gajapati kingdom’ (1976), which provides an in-depth study of the religious legitimation of Hindu rulers taking the example of the Gajapatis of Orissa.  Another publication connected to the Orissa Project, is Hermann Kulke’s monograph on the ‘Devaraja Cult in Southeast Asia’ (1974) which allowed him to investigate historical and social processes in the context of ‘Hinduization’ of local concepts of kingship, mainly in Angkor, and allowed comparisons between South ans Southeast Asia. Together with the team of Indian colleagues Hermann Kulke also published ‘A Comprehensive and Classified Bibliography’ on Orissa, which proved to be a treasure trove to anyone engaging with the study of Orissa.

Throughout, Kulke thought intensely about theoretical questions, for instance of how states emerge, how empires are structured, and how rulership is legitimised. He pondered over Max Weber’s role in research on Asia in ‘Orthodoxe Restauration und hinduistische Sektenreligiosität im Werk Max Webers’ (1984) and in ‘Max Weber's Contribution to the Study of “Hinduization” in India and “Indianization” in Southeast Asia. (1986). Increasingly, Hermann Kulke deliberated over Asia’s historiography and its history. When discussing these topics with his colleagues and students, Hermann Kulke every now and then referred to a question he was asked time and again: ‘Why are you digging up the history of people you don’t have anything to do with?’ Hermann Kulke took this to be a valid academic question – after all, it was the foundation on which his research and teaching rested – rephrased as ‘Why does it not suffice to engage with one’s own regional, national, or European history?’ This was perhaps the most profound, deep seated stimulus that ran like a red thread through Hermann Kulke’s intellectual and professional life. His open mind would always think outside the regional, national, or European ‘box’. In short, his history writing moved beyond the categories of the nation-state. Taking these as the foundation of his thinking, Hermann Kulke further prodded theoretical concepts of historiography and structural phenomena in a comparative perspective, namely in his ground-breaking article on ‘Gibt es ein indisches Mittelalter? Versuch einer eurasiatischen Geschichtsbetrachtung’ (1982), in which he argued his case on the level of deep structure, something entirely new at the time. It prompted his younger colleagues to talk of ‘early middle ages’ for the time between the end of the Gupta empire and the rise of the states from the Delhi Sultanate in the North to the Vijayanagara Empire in the South.

In Germany, this elicited much criticism by conservative academic and political circles. Hermann Kulke was very clear that individuals, communities, and socio-political entities such as kingdoms in South and Southeast Asia had their own historical consciousness. He held on to his convictions despite European historians more often than not denying anyone else historical consciousness but themselves and quoting Friedrich Hegel as their evidence. Stoically, Hermann Kulke continued on his path and conceptualised historical phenomena and processes in South and Southeast Asian history, exploring how this historical knowledge is coded and in which conditions it developed and survived the colonial period. He also looked into the misperceptions of both European and Indian historians on the respective ‘other’. Hermann Kulke’s thinking on Indian history writing also encompassed acknowledging the complexities of society in India and its historiographical terminology, for instance, in his piece on ‘Fragmentation and Segmentation versus Integration? Reflections on the Concept of Indian Feudalism and the Segmentary State’ (1982). Considerations regarding what Hermann Kulke termed the processuality of phenomena were taken further in his ‘Die frühmittelalterlichen Regionalreiche. Ihre Struktur und Rolle im Prozeß staatlicher Entwicklung Indiens’ (1985, English 1986). At the same time, Hermann Kulke provided an excellent overview of the history of India in his study on ‘Indische Geschichte vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart’ (1982), and the co-authored history of India with Dietmar Rothermund mentioned above. Besides Kulke’s intensive professional engagement, he enjoyed family life, and together with his wife Uschi supported incoming refugees from Sri Lanka in their local neighbourhood.

After more than two decades in Heidelberg, Hermann Kulke moved to a newly established Chair in Asian History at the University of Kiel in 1988. Although only just established, the Chair came with its own academic and political legacy. Politically, the introduction of the Chair on Asian history was discussed rather controversially, particularly between the more conservative Christian Democratic Union under whose government the Chair was founded, and the more progressive Social Democratic Party. The idea of introducing the subject area was originally floated by Karl Dietrich Erdmann who intended the Chair to extend the study of history at the University of Kiel all the way to Japan, and to ensure that historical, socio-political, and cultural phenomena and contexts were studied alongside the existing departments studying the languages of the Middle East and Asia. The underlying assumption was to recognise history and historiography of Asian countries and to facilitate the study of the documents and sources produced there. These were to be investigated on the basis of the well-established historical-critical methods. And still, despite all good intentions, the expectations on the Chair and its running appeared to be a conceptional monster. 

The history of Asia was an entirely new research area to the University of Kiel. It dawned slowly on Kulke’s colleagues that Asia wasn’t just an appendix to Europe, even when there were constant attempts to compare its history to, let’s say, that of Burgundy or Venice. Hermann Kulke managed to elegantly deflect criticism of all sorts by focussing on his core areas of research in South and Southeast Asia, and especially on the regional and structural history of India during the middle ages. Within the circle of medievalists, Kulke’s research became increasingly recognised for it demonstrated that under the perceived ‘exotic’ surface similar structures and administrative processes were to be discovered through a similarly broad body of sources. One just had to know a handful of (South-)Asian languages. Hermann Kulke attracted colleagues and cooperated with neighbouring disciplines such as Sinology in order to cover as many regions of Asia as possible that lay outside his portfolio. He encouraged an atmosphere for vibrant discussion between members of his Chair, and became a strong point of reference for colleagues from India. Over the years, the ‘strange Indian’ Hermann Kulke became a respected colleague in Kiel, and for some, a good friend. Even the departmental library and its staff could finally be won over, many years into Kulke’s time in Kiel, to acknowledging the importance of the print products in ’all those foreign’ Asian languages.

Besides the extensive time Hermann Kulke invested in establishing the new Chair, he investigated new lines of thinking and research, with a particularly comparative approach. Among others, he compared state formations of India and Southeast Asia in his articles collected in ‘Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia’ (1993), and explored Srivijaya, the capital city below what is today Palembang, and the highlands of Sumatra in ‘Srivijaya – Ein Großreich oder die Hanse des Ostens?’ (1998). 

Between 1999 and 2005, Hermann Kulke led the so-called second Orissa Research Project, also funded by the German Research Foundation, took centre stage. This time round, the regional traditions outside the centre of Puri, Cuttack, and Bhubaneshwar were the focus of the research. It resulted in a publication with Burkhard Schnepel on ‘Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion and the State in Orissa’ (2001).

In 2003, Hermann Kulke retired from his professorship. Before his retirement, the University of Kiel had already decided to close down the Chair on Asian History once and for all. This came as a huge blow to the academic landscape in Germany in general, and to Hermann Kulke personally. He had spent so much energy as well as intellectual and diplomatic resources in bringing to life a new subject area at Kiel, and in educating several generations of students who now had hardly anywhere to go to. In Germany, the closure of the Chair on Asian history meant the loss of one of just three chairs on (South-)Asian history, and the only one focussing on pre-modern history. The closure of the chair was a topic that remained a source of disappointment for Hermann Kulke. Time and again Kulke was asked whether he was an Indologist, i.e. a scholar of Indian languages, as people found it hard to understand what he was doing and trying to fit this into the all-familiar canon of disciplines. Kulke always rejected being labelled an Indologist, as he perceived himself to be a historian who used whatever tool was necessary to understand the available sources, in whichever language they might have been written or printed. 

Hermann Kulke continued to read, write, and publish, returning to historical contexts that sparked his interest at the beginning of his career. He particularly enjoyed a visiting professorship at the National University of Singapore, where he spent most of the year 2007. His ‘final word’ on the theory of state structure in India appeared in 2011 as ‘The Early and the Imperial Kingdom: A Processual Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India’. Another decade on, Hermann Kulke and Bhairavi Prasad Sahu jointly edited the monumental ‘Routledge Handbook of the State in Premodern India’ (2022), the standard reference book historians on India work with. 

Hermann Kulke will always be fondly remembered as a renowned historian, a thinker and teacher, forging novel avenues in the research on South Asia with his collegiate and interdisciplinary approach. For his distinguished contributions and services to the field, Hermann Kulke received several honours both in South Asia and Europe: the Gold Medal of the Asiatic Society of Kolkata in 2005, the Padma Shri by the president of India in 2010, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by the President of Germany in 2011. The honours show that Hermann Kulke was not only held in high esteem by colleagues and students, but also by a wider public. He has influenced several generations of Indian and German historians on South Asia and the way South Asian history and historiography are thought about.