Stephen Fuchs (April 30, 1908 – January 17, 2000) was an Austrian Catholic priest, missionary, and anthropologist who researched the ethnology and prehistory of India.

After obtaining a Ph.D. in ethnology and Indology from the University of Vienna in 1950, Fuchs moved to India where he assisted in founding the Department of Anthropology at St. Xavier's College in Bombay.

Originally when he moved to India, he researched solely the social and cultural customs of modern-day central Indian tribes.

There, he learned English, Hindi, and the local dialects of Madhya Pradesh, before carrying out studies and fieldwork in central India.

He was able to complete his PhD in 1950, just two years, because of the large amount of field material he brought back from India to Austria and the articles he had already published on ethnography.

Sebastian M. Michael, the director of the Institute of Indian Culture, writes: "...like Wilhelm Schmidt, he was convinced of the need to collect historical material about simple people throughout the world in order to understand humanity.

He researched central India's tribal communities, including the Korkus among who he stayed recurrently, learned the Korku language, and garnered data on their customs, festivals, and religious beliefs.

[8][9] During the second world war, along with other missionaries from Germany, he was designated as an enemy alien by the British government in India and sent to a prison camp.

[11] Fuchs had argued that the idea of a savior or messiah exists not only in the Biblical Christian thought, but it has persistently surfaced in the Indian religious movements and occurrences through historical and mythological persons of note, e.g.

[5] He was of the opinion that the Aryans were migrating to India and Europe from the inner Asian regions which had resulted in the genesis of the Indo-European language family.

[14] He believed that to ascertain the origination of the practice of untouchability, the Indologists must "penetrate deeply enough" in the history of the peoples who have had ascendancy in India.

[17] Fuchs' Rebellious Prophets: A Study of Messianic Movements in Indian Religions (1965) was assessed by Kenelm Burridge[18] and Owen Lynch.

Assessing the essays, Bidney stated that though the authors were focused on the prehistory, they did not "clarify and resolve the basic issues" which their predecessors left for them.

University of Delhi's Sudha Gupta noted that Fuchs had done fieldwork among the tribal people of Vindhya hills region for over 20 years.

[9] Kingsley Davis noted that he provided an "aptly illustrated" description of the "life-stages", "material culture", "social organizations", and magical and religious beliefs of the Balahis, but "without much theoretical interpretation".

[8] David G. Mandelbaum stated that the purpose of Fuchs' work was "primarily descriptive" and that he made few "historical and analytical" comments in the book.

In the book, he presented research on India's "prehistoric races" of the early, middle and late Stone Age; the Indus Valley civilization; and the "post Harappan" era.

[28] Along with the ethnic origins of the Indian subcontinent's aboriginal tribes, his research also focused on their language's general features, art, economy, political organization, religion, social structure.

Giving an example of Fuchs' lack of archaeological analysis of a subject matter in his study of the middle Stone Age's races, Jay stated that a number of his conclusions were "conjectural" in nature.

[32][note 7] Soumendra Mohan Patnaik showed disappointment in the book's last chapter on the welfare of the tribal people in India.

He stated that the parts of the book built on his field studies reflected "a greater depth of understanding" of the subject "than those based on literary sources".

[33] According to Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, Fuchs provided "convincing evidence" of the migrations of the "Dravida-speaking tribes" in the middle of the first millennium CE from India's southern regions to Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar.

Fuchs propounded that, "...untouchability is probably an ancient social trait from animal breeding culture which was brought to India by the Aryans and also the Dravidians."