F B J Kuiper

Who was F B J Kuiper?

Franciscus Bernardus Jacobus Kuiper was a distinguished scholar in Indology, and "one of the last great Indologists of the past century ... His very innovative work covers virtually all the fields of Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan philology, linguistics, mythology and theater, as well as Indo-European, Dravidian, Munda and Pan-Indian linguistics".

Kuiper was born in The Hague, in the Netherlands, studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Indo-European linguistics at Leiden University, and in 1934 completed his doctoral thesis on the nasal presents in Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages. After 5 years as a high school teacher of Latin and Greek at the lyceum of Batavia, Indonesia, in 1939 he was appointed Professor of Sanskrit at Leiden University.

Kuiper was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Amsterdam, and a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. He was buried in the Rijnhof cemetery at Leiden.