This past October, a dear friend and colleague, Allison Busch passed away. Professor Allison Busch was a scholar of riti poetry in brajbhasha, focusing on the early modern periods. Today, we gathered at Columbia to recognize the impact she had on the field of Hindi literature, and on our community. We heard from her family, her friends, her students, and her colleagues. It was a profoundly moving experience to recognize the gravity of our collective loss. As a scholar, she created a rich network of Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in US, in Europe and in India. With her first book, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, she inaugurated new ways with which the history of language (and the language of history) could be approached and studied. As a teacher, she poured her intellectual resources into making the scholarly and social lives of her students, enriched and supported. As a colleague, she generously mentored junior faculty. She was instrumental in making material changes to the ways in which the University treated (and paid) ladder rank faculty and language lecturers. As a friend, she was a dear interlocutor and someone whose firm sense of justice and injustice was always there to give guidance.
At the behest of her partner, and scholar Sheldon I. Pollock, we have created an online repository of all of her published materials. You can go to Allison Busch: a complete bibliography and repository and read the works of this amazing scholar. My thanks to Alex Gil for his work on this repository.