Peter Heehs

Peter Heehs is an American historian living in Puducherry, India who writes on modern Indian history, spirituality and religion. Much of his work focuses on the Indian freedom fighter and spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo. His publications include ten books and more than fifty articles in journals and magazines.

Peter Heehs was born and educated in the United States but has lived in India since 1971. He has worked as a researcher and editor at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives since its founding, and has contributed to the editing of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library and The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.

As a historian, Heehs has written on the swadeshi period of the Indian independence movement and on the early phase of the Indian revolutionary movement. His 1992 study The Bomb in Bengal highlighted the importance of the Maniktala secret society, which was a predecessor of the Jugantar Group. In this book and other publications, Heehs made it clear that the Indian freedom struggle had a violent as well as a non-violent side, and that the violent revolutionaries helped prepare the country psychologically for the later mass movements led by Mahatma Gandhi. In the second edition of The Bomb in Bengal (2004), Heehs distinguished the aims and methods of early Indian revolutionaries from those of later terrorists in India and elsewhere.

Heehs has also written on problems of Indian historiography in History and Theory, Postcolonial Studies, and other journals. He has also contributed to popular magazines such as History Today.

As a scholar of religion, Heehs has edited the textbook Indian Religions and has contributed to journals and edited volumes dealing with new religious movements in India. He has also discussed the problems of Indian communalism.

Heehs's ninth book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press, 2008) was intended for scholarly readers. It received positive reviews in the United States, but was objected to by devotees of Sri Aurobindo, who have delayed the publication of the book in India. Heehs's tenth book, Writing the Self, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2013.

Heehs was briefly in the news in April 2012 after the Indian home ministry declined to entertain an application for extension of his resident visa after April 15. Learning of the affair on March 31, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram said he would review Heehs’s case. A number of prominent scholars, as well as union minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, wrote in support of Heehs to the home minister and to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. On April 13, the home ministry announced that it had approved a one-year extension of Heehs’s visa. The affair became a point of reference in discussions in the Indian and international press of freedom of expression, book banning, censorship, xenophobia, and visa policy.