Johannes Beltz is Assistant Curator of Indian Art at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, Switzerland since 2002. After pursuing ethnographic, religious and Indian studies at the universities of Halle, Strasbourg, Paris, Lausanne and Heidelberg, the author in 1994 proceeded for his first fieldwork to Maharashtra where he focussed on the emancipation of the so called ‘untouchable’ castes and their collective conversion to Buddhism.
