About Martin Gansten

I began to teach myself Sanskrit in 1982 at the age of thirteen, using Michael Coulson’s primer and Whitney’s grammar, and within a few years became reasonably proficient. My interest in Indian forms of thought and religion eventually led me to academia, reading Indology and Sanskrit at Stockholm University (1994–96) followed by History of Religions at Lund University (MA 1998). In addition to Sanskrit, in which I am now fairly fluent – reading it, writing it, conversing in it at a pinch – I read some Pali, medieval Latin and Koine Greek, especially astrological sources. My doctoral thesis (2003) combined the area of Indic religions with that of astrology in a study of South Indian nāḍi divination, based partly on ethnographic methods but chiefly on Sanskrit texts apparently originating in Kerala and dating to the 18th and 19th centuries. In 2010 I was made docent in History of Religions at Lund.

My research, which is historical and philological in a broad sense, has continued to revolve around these two areas: on the one hand, the indigenous religions of India – in particular, classical and modern Hinduism – and on the other, the intercultural transmission and development of horoscopic astrology. The latter field of research, occupying the borderland between the historiographies of science and religion, is of immense importance for global intellectual history but has only recently begun to come into its own. Within that field I have tried to move beyond the common discourse of ‘western esotericism’ to include the much-neglected contribu­tions of South Asia and a plurality of intellectual contexts.

My latest major research project, undertaken jointly with Professor Olle Qvarnström and entitled The Hindu Reception of Perso-Arabic Traditions of Knowledge and the Role of Jainism in Cultural Transmission, was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. It recently resulted in the publication of my edition/translation of The Jewel of Annual Astrology, an encyclopaedic seventeenth-century work on Tājika (Sanskritized Perso-Arabic) astrology, available under Open Access here.