Robert J. Zydenbos is a Dutch-Canadian scholar who has doctorate degrees in Indian philosophy and Dravidian studies. He also has a doctorate of literature from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Zydenbos also studied Indian religions and languages at the South Asia Institute and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He taught Sanskrit at the University of Heidelberg and later taught Jaina philosophy at the University of Madras in India. Zydenbos later taught Sanskrit, Buddhism, and South Asian religions at the University of Toronto in Canada. He was the first western scholar to write a doctoral thesis on contemporary Kannada fiction.
R. Zydenbos is a strong opponent to some writers, like Koenraad Elst or N. S. Rajaram, about the controversies pertaining to the Aryan Invasion Theory, which Zydenbos sees as driven by political motives. Zydenbos wrote review articles in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Moreover, he has written the first comprehensive Western history of Kannada literature and translated Kannada literature into both German and English. He also translated Dvaitin, Virasaiva, and Jaina writings from Sanskrit. He has lived in Mysore, India for 17 years.