Stephen FUCHS (1908-2000)

Stephen Fuchs SVD, born in 1908, died on 17 January 2000 in his native Austria but in between those years, he lived and worked around fifty years in India.
From 1922 to 1927, he gained his education at St. Rupert School run by the Divine Word Missionaries. In 1930, he completed philosophical studies at St. Augustin, near Bonn and finished his theological studies at St. Gabriel’s Major Seminary in Mödling near Vienna in 1934. There, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt inspired Fuchs and introduced him to linguistics. He gave him linguistic material from Papua New Guinea to devise a grammar and being satisfied with his work, recommended him as a linguistic researcher to be assigned to work in New Guinea.
Nevertheless, Fuchs was appointed to India. His earliest work, Die Hochzeitsgebräuche der Balahis (The Wedding Customs of the Balahis) appeared in Anthropos in 1937. The Balahis are a lower caste and the untouchable weavers, in the Nimar district of the state of Madhya Pradesh in India.
The historic decision of the SVD General Chapter in 1947, for a trained ethnologist to help every mission, was a turning point for Fuchs to return to Vienna to study ethnology, Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy. His book, “The Children of Hari” (1950) was a detailed, ethnological work on the lower caste harijan (people of Hari, God). He researched the untouchables, especially the Balahis, the Gonds, the Bhumias, and the Krokus, and wrote meticulous monographs on all of these groups describing their origin, race, and language. He researched these small-scale communities and tribals as an early flexible form of culture. In his works, he did remind the Hindus of their social, political economic exploitation of the adivasis (tribals) and the untouchables.
In 1950, the Anthropos Institute, which was then located in Posieux (Switzerland), established its branch in Bombay. Fuchs was its founding director until his return to Austria in 1996. The Institute (later renamed “Institute of Indian Culture”) became the centre for extensive research projects and studies, a meeting place for conferences of researchers of various nationalities, religions, races and castes. Fuchs built up a rich and varied library.
Fuchs related cultural anthropology to history. In an article “The Contribution of Anthropology to Indian History” (Indica, 1953: 154-160), he delved deep into the ancient history of India. Starting from the Aryans, he turned to the Dravidians and further back to the original inhabitants of India, the so called “primitives or aborigines”. These, for Fuchs, were representatives of the earliest inhabitants of India. Studying them gave him a glimpse into the earliest history of India. In his search for the aboriginals and untouchables, he felt that he found the high cultures of ancient India. His later publication “Anthropology for the Missions” (Allahabad 1979) presents the epistemological challenge of scholarly and missionary work.
Fuchs was a visiting professor at St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, Philippines, at the Major Seminary at St. Gabriel in Mödling in Austria, and moreover, he lectured at various Catholic Institutes in India. He gave occasionally special lectures on ancient Indian culture at Bombay University. On 26 March 1998, he was honoured with Honorary Cross for Science and Art by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.