Hans T. Bakker

Hans T. Bakker (born 1948) is a cultural historian and Indologist, who has served as the Professor of the History of Hinduism and Jan Gonda Chair at the University of Groningen.

He worked in the British Museum as a researcher in the project "Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State".

Bakker has been working as researcher in "Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State", a project based in the British Museum that is funded by the European Research Council (2013–2019).

Before joining the British Museum in 2014, Bakker was at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands where he was director of the Institute of Indian Studies at Groningen and, from 1996, Professor of the History of Hinduism in the Sanskrit Tradition and Indian Philosophy and holder of the Jan Gonda Chair at the University of Groningen.

He has been a visiting fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at the University of Vienna and the University of Kyoto.

Bakker's main research interest has been the political and religious culture of India in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries.

As part of this work he led the study of the earliest known version of the Skanda Purāṇa preserved in Kathmandu, Nepal.

This version of the Skanda Purāṇa is substantially different from the Skanda Purāṇa known from manuscripts and the printed edition in India.

Bakker has continued and expanded the best traditions of Dutch Indology and has trained a number of able scholars, among them Peter Bisschop (Leiden University), Harunaga Isaacson (University of Hamburg) and Yuko Yokochi (University of Kyoto).