How the Study of Indian Civilization Became an Export Industry
There is a small but persistent oddity in the global academic landscape.
If a student today wishes to study Sanskrit philosophy, classical Indian texts, or the intellectual traditions of South Asia at the highest levels of international academia, the most prominent destinations are rarely located in India. They are in Oxford. Leiden. Heidelberg. Chicago. Harvard. In other words, the world studies India largely outside India.
The situation is so normalized that it rarely invites comment. Yet it is worth pausing to consider the strangeness of the arrangement. A civilization that produced one of the largest textual traditions in human history has somehow outsourced the most influential institutions studying that tradition. Even more curiously, many of those institutions are partly funded by Indian money. This introduces a rather distinctive civilizational habit: India finances the global study of itself, but largely abroad.
The philanthropy paradox
Consider Harvard University.
In 2017, industrialist Lakshmi Mittal and his family donated $25 million to expand Harvard’s South Asia research programmes. The institute was subsequently renamed the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and it now operates as one of the most prominent academic centres in the world dedicated to the study of the region.
Another example sits comfortably within the same campus. In 2010, Anand Mahindra donated $10 million to support Harvard’s Humanities Center, which now carries the name Mahindra Humanities Center.
Then there is the Murty Classical Library of India, funded by Rohan Murty and published through Harvard University Press. The project seeks to translate and publish India’s classical literary works across centuries and languages.
All of these initiatives are serious intellectual enterprises. They have produced scholarship, fellowships and translations of undeniable value. But the broader pattern remains difficult to miss.
A civilisation that produced the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Sangam corpus and the Arthashastra has located one of its flagship translation programmes not in Delhi, Varanasi or Pune, but in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One suspects the ancient authors might have found the geography mildly surprising.
How the imbalance began
The roots of this arrangement lie in the nineteenth century.Indology as a formal academic discipline developed primarily in Europe. German philologists, British orientalists and French scholars began systematically studying Sanskrit texts, classical Indian philosophy and Vedic literature.
These scholars produced grammars, dictionaries, translations and critical editions that introduced Indian intellectual traditions to the structures of modern academia. More importantly, they built institutional capacity to interpret it all.
Universities such as Leiden, Heidelberg and Oxford developed specialised chairs, archives, research libraries and academic presses devoted to South Asian studies. Over time these evolved into dense intellectual ecosystems capable of producing sustained scholarship. Western academia did not merely study India. It competently built and set guardrails infrastructure for studying India.
India itself inherited the archive but developed the institutional machinery far more slowly, and sometimes not at all.
India’s own response
It would be inaccurate to claim that India has neglected its civilisational inheritance entirely. The National Mission for Manuscripts estimates that the country holds close to ten million manuscripts, one of the largest manuscript collections in the world. Institutions such as Central Sanskrit University, the Archaeological Survey of India, and various specialised research institutes continue to produce important work. India has also funded academic chairs abroad through the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. These initiatives are meaningful and necessary. Yet they remain fragments rather than a comprehensive ecosystem.
India possesses a civilisational archive of staggering scale. What it has not yet built is a network of institutions capable of studying that archive with the same intensity, funding and global visibility found in the major research universities of Europe and the United States. The imbalance therefore persists not because India lacks heritage. It persists because it lacks institutional density.
The ecosystem problem
Manuscript civilisations, require manuscript infrastructure. That means large-scale digitisation programmes, coordinated translation projects, interdisciplinary doctoral training, specialised research libraries and globally recognised academic presses capable of sustaining scholarly debate.
Western universities possess many of these advantages because they accumulated them gradually over two centuries. Endowments matured. Archives expanded. Academic presses gained reputations that allowed them to shape international intellectual conversations. Institutional gravity does the rest. Once a university becomes a global centre for studying a subject, scholars, funding and prestige tend to orbit around it.
India, by contrast, has often approached civilisational scholarship with the patience of a bureaucracy rather than the urgency of a cultural power.
The role of the Indian state
Which brings us to the uncomfortable question.
Why do Indian philanthropists fund South Asian studies abroad rather than building similar institutions at home?
The honest answer is that donating to an established Western university immediately plugs into an ecosystem that already possesses prestige, networks and publication infrastructure. Building such an ecosystem domestically requires coordination between government policy, private philanthropy and academia on a far larger scale. That coordination has rarely been systematic & yet the issue is not merely academic.
Civilisational scholarship is also a form of intellectual diplomacy. It shapes how a civilisation is interpreted, translated and understood across the world. Countries that recognise this invest accordingly. China funds extensive research programmes on classical Chinese philosophy and history. European states maintain elaborate archival and philological traditions devoted to their intellectual past. India has tended to approach the matter with admirable calm.
Whether that calm is strategic or simply bureaucratic remains an open question.
What “decolonising Indology” actually means
The phrase “decolonising Indology” is often used in ways that obscure the real issue. It does not mean dismissing Western scholarship. Many foreign scholars have made extraordinary contributions to the study of Indian philosophy, literature and history. Decolonisation in this context means something far simpler.
It means building institutions within India capable of studying India at the highest levels of global scholarship. That requires scale. Digitisation of manuscripts must accelerate dramatically. Classical languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit and Tamil must be integrated into interdisciplinary programmes linking philosophy, linguistics and history. University presses must develop internationally respected translation platforms.
In other words, India does not need fewer conversations with global academia. It needs more conversations in which its own institutions occupy the centre rather than the periphery.
Returning Indology to India
The irony underlying the current arrangement is difficult to ignore. Indian wealth helps finance major centres studying South Asia in Western universities. India itself holds the world’s largest archive of classical Indian manuscripts. Yet the intellectual centre of gravity for interpreting that archive remains largely outside the subcontinent. This situation is not irreversible.
Civilisations do not lose narrative authority because they lack heritage. They lose it when they lack institutions capable of interpreting that heritage with intellectual confidence and institutional scale. India already possesses the archive.
What it must now build is the infrastructure capable of studying that archive with the same seriousness found in the world’s leading universities. Because a civilisation that produced the Upanishads, the Arthashastra and the philosophical traditions of Buddhism should not have to rely primarily on foreign lecture halls to explain itself. And ideally, it should not require Harvard’s lawn to lend the conversation its authority.
