Claus Peter Zoller studied Classical and Modern Indology, and Germanic philology in Tübingen and Heidelberg. He did his Ph.D. in 1980 on the grammar of a Bhotia language of the Garhwal Himalaya. Then followed fellowships from the DAAD and the DFG for the study of Pahari languages and Himalayan folk traditions. Between 1985 and 1994 he was representative of the South Asia Institute in New Delhi and assistant professor in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. He then had a two year's fellowship from the DFG for the completion of the habilitation with a postdoctoral thesis on the grammar and poetic style of an oral version of the Mahabharata from the Garhwal Himalaya. Since 1997 he has been working as a research fellow in the Pakistan-German research project Culture Area Karakorum' on the dialects and oral folk traditions of Indus-Kohistan.
