Jan Gonda was a Dutch Indologist and the first Utrecht professor of Sanskrit. He was born in Gouda, in the Netherlands, and died in Utrecht. He studied with Willem Caland at Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht and from 1932 held positions at Utrecht and Leiden. He held the positions of Chair of Sanskrit succeeding Caland from 1929, as well as of Indology from 1932. He published scholarly articles on Indian Sanskrit and Indonesian Javanese texts for sixty years. In 1952, he published his monumental work on Sanskrit in Indonesia. His contributions to philology and Vedic literature has been oft-cited.