Philip Lutgendorf

Philip Lutgendorf is an American Indologist. He is Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. His areas of work and interest include the epic poem Ramcharitmanas, the life and works of Hindu poet Tulsidas, the worship of Hanuman, Indian popular cinema, and the Indian tea culture. He is currently translating the Ramcharitmanas into English: this translation will be published by the Murty Classical Library of India in seven volumes. He serves as the President of American Institute of Indian Studies.

Lutgendorf received a B.A. degree from the University of Chicago. In 1987, he received a PhD degree with distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago. His dissertation was titled "The Life of a Text: Tulsidas' Ramcaritmanas in Performance."

Since 1985, Lutgendorf has taught at the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literature of the University of Iowa. He has developed and taught courses on several subjects including Hindi language and written and oral narrative traditions of South Asia including the Ramcharitmanas, Hindu mythology, Indian literature, Indian theatre, and Indian cinema.

Lutgendorf received the A. K. Coomaraswamy Prize for the book The Life of a Text. In March 2002, he received the Guggenheim Fellowship for research on the Hindu god Hanuman. In 2014, he received the Fulbright-Hays fellowship for research on the cultural history of chai (tea) in India.

Historians Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf called the website on Hindi films maintained by Lutgendorf "an excellent website on Hindi films." Freek Bakker wrote that Lutgendorf is an "expert in the Indian Ramayana tradition" and has done "profound research into the Ramayana katha tradition."

Professor Lutgendorf has written distorted stories in his book Hanuman's Tale, distorting the mother-son relationship of Hanuman and Sita mata. This can be found in Page 307 of his book. He's criticized in India for writing books on Lord Rama without knowing the reverence with which Lord Hanuman is worshipped traditionally in India.

• The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, University of California Press. 1991. ISBN 978-0520066908.
• Ramcaritmanas Word Index/Manas shabda anukramanika (with Winand M. Callewaert), New Delhi: Manohar Publisher & Distributors, New Delhi. 1997. ISBN 817304208X.
• From the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, Book Five: Sundar Kand, Indian Literature, vol. XLV, no. 3: 143–181.
• Hanuman's Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey, New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. ISBN 9780199885824.
• The Indo-Aryan languages, RoutledgeCurzon, 2002 ISBN 0-7007-1130-9
• Tulsidas: The Epic of Ram (7 volumes), Murty Classical Library of India: Harvard University Press. Forthcoming.