A senior Indian Armed Forces official once told me that citations are what make the world run. He did not simply mean footnotes. He was talking about the scholarship that begins in universities and then finds expression in policy memos and business reports. This knowledge eventually settles into the assumptions that people — whose decisions move money, weapons, and treaties — carry to work every day. He was describing the slow process of one country’s knowledge embedding itself in another country’s mind, shaping how they see and engage with that country. By that measure, India is undercited.
Citation is infrastructure because it lives in institutions. Whether India is studied as a serious actor or dismissed as insignificant depends on how steadily scholarship on India propagates among countries engaging with it. India’s rise has outpaced its citation footprint, and the gap is widening.
Where this infrastructure is missing, shoddy substitutes appear in its place: India is admired as a civilisational puzzle, studied as one half of an India-Pakistan dyad, or dismissed altogether as a backsliding democracy not worth partnering with. Often, then, India lies at the mercy of either those who have built their assumptions on unserious scholarship or those who simply do not bother about it. A country becomes legible through scholars free to find it wanting, not through flattery or condemnation.
The move from ignorance to knowledge is not accidental. In the West, China studies was not built by curiosity but by money: the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in the mid-twentieth century, then Chinese diaspora wealth, then the Chinese state briefly, until the Confucius Institute backlash. Japan studies was built by Toyota, Sasakawa, and the Japan Foundation. The result, in both cases, is a generation of American officials who reach for a well-informed China or Japan analyst by reflex when a question demands one. India produces no such reflex. With one and a half billion people and great-power ambitions, it has not made the equivalent decision at anything close to comparable scale. A country that calls itself a vishwaguru — a teacher to the world — must first build the institutions from which it teaches.
“Why is the West not curious about the great Indian civilization?” Erik Solheim, a former Norwegian environment minister, recently asked on X after Narendra Modi’s visit to Norway. He recounted what the Norwegian press did with the occasion. Aftenposten, the country’s largest newspaper, ran a caricature of Modi as a snake charmer and called him “a slightly annoying man.” NRK, the state broadcaster, asked why the Norwegian prime minister was “clearing his desk” for Modi — rather than asking why the leader of the world’s third-largest economy (adjusted for PPP) had found time for a small country. Solheim further notes that not one journalist closely follows India.
Notice what Solheim is doing. He asks why the West is uncurious, turning the question inward onto his own country. That inward turn is the move worth borrowing. The question Indians should be asking is not why the West remains uncurious about us. It is what we have failed to build that would make them think about India seriously — not necessarily favourably, but seriously. Curiosity does not arise unprompted. Curiosity and action are the downstream output of institutions that someone has to have funded.
American universities have agency, but they follow the money. The Indian government has a narrower role here than commonly imagined: facilitating easier academic visas, permitting archive access, and encouraging scholarship at home itself. Moreover, state-funded foreign academic centres are seen as propagandist vehicles and are a dead route in Western higher education. That leaves the actor with both the proven record and the legacy incentive: Indian and diaspora capital. Their capital can fund rigorous research on India that yields them, India, and its partners long-term dividends.
The proof of concept already exists. The Mittals endowed Harvard’s South Asia Institute with $25 million. The Tatas helped build the Oxford India Centre. The Chadhas endowed Princeton’s India centre; the Saxenas built theirs at Brown; the U.S.-based Dhar family endowed one at Indiana University. In the low millions, families have funded professorships in India studies too. Indian capital has built some citation infrastructure for India studies across the West, fossilising family legacies. But the footprint is conspicuously small, with a handful of centres, chairs, and scholarships. Washington, D.C., the city where citations matter most, is a dangerous gap. Here, citations are written that translate into US foreign policy on India.
Indian and diaspora capital has built business schools, hospitals, and science wings across continents. It has barely touched the citation infrastructure that decides how India is understood by those who can help shape its future. International Relations (IR) centres deliver significantly greater benefits than science wings. They serve a civilisation’s citation; moreover, they carry the family or enterprise name of the donor into the working assumptions of decision-makers twenty years from now. The most consequential legacy is the one no Indian family or business has yet claimed in Washington, D.C, at universities like Georgetown, American University, and George Washington University.
This is an open goal. The institution that will sit at the centre of Washington’s India conversation has not yet been built. The first donor will claim the address uncontested — because nobody else has yet chosen to score.
Citations make the world run, and we have not built them. Solheim took ownership for Norway. Now, it is our turn. We must not complain about inadequate Western incuriosity that leads to those vignettes in Norway, since we are largely responsible. We must address what we have failed to build. Taken seriously, India will appear as a serious actor and potential partner, not as a threat to manage or a curiosity to file away.
