For too long, the world’s most complex civilisation has been someone else’s academic subject. That is finally beginning to change.
There is something quietly extraordinary about the fact that, for most of the twentieth century, the most serious, the most sustained, and the most institutionally supported work of understanding India was done not in India, but elsewhere. In England. In America. In Germany. In France. The best chairs in Sanskrit, in the history of the subcontinent, in the politics of South Asia — funded, staffed, celebrated — were outside India. The country that gave the world the Upanishads, Arthashastra, Natyashastra, and the Mahabharata, was, in the great academic ordering of things, a subject — studied, categorised, filed — but rarely the author of its own intellectual biography.
This is not merely a historical curiosity. It is a civilisational problem, and one that India has been slow to take seriously.
Consider what it means for a nation of around 1.5 billion people, an economy now among the world’s largest, a democracy of astonishing and improbable complexity, to lack, until very recently, a single full-fledged Master’s degree programme in its own studies offered by one of its own universities. Other nations, far younger and far less layered, have built entire academic industries around themselves. American Studies, British Studies, Chinese Studies — these are robustly funded, intellectually defended, internationally exported disciplines. India Studies, meanwhile, remained largely a cottage industry of the Western academy, shaped inevitably, however brilliantly, by lenses formed elsewhere, for audiences elsewhere.
Recently an essay on this website lamented this gap in building comprehensive India studies programmes within India. While this article made some interesting points, it failed to recognise that things are changing.
That is why what is happening at the Jindal India Institute at O.P. Jindal Global University deserves to be taken seriously. Not merely acknowledged in a footnote, but genuinely reckoned with.
The M.A. in India Studies launched by the Jindal India Institute is a landmark initiative: the first full-degree Master’s programme in India Studies offered by an Indian university. That sentence ought to stop us in our tracks. The first. In 2025. Let that sink in.
The programme, offered over one year, moves across the full sweep of what India is — politics, history, philosophy, business, technology, literature, music, dance, and cinema. This is not a narrow disciplinary programme designed for specialists to speak only to other specialists. It is something more ambitious and, frankly, more urgent: an attempt to produce a generation of thinkers who can hold India whole. Who can see the connections between the Arthashastra and contemporary geopolitics, between Bharatanatyam and the sociology of belonging, between the monsoon economy of the eighteenth century and the startup ecosystem of the twenty-first.
The Jindal India Institute brings together experts integrating disciplines like philosophy, art, history, law, business, international relations, public policy, journalism, environment, psychology, and public health to provide a holistic understanding of India’s rich heritage and its role in the world today. This is interdisciplinarity not as buzzword but, as our students from America to Japan would testify, as intellectual necessity. Because India requires it. A civilisation of this age and this density cannot be understood by staying inside a single academic lane.
The great Indian question of our time is not only about economic growth or geopolitical positioning, important as those are. It is an epistemic question: who gets to know India, and on whose terms? For too long, the terms were set in Western common rooms and faculty lounges, however (sometimes) sympathetically. The knowledge produced there was often remarkable. But it was, inescapably, knowledge produced at a distance, and distance, as any honest historian will tell you, has consequences. It shapes what questions get asked. It shapes which silences are noticed and which are not.
Despite India’s rich intellectual traditions and its historical and contemporary significance, efforts to study India within its own universities have often been fragmented, lacking a systematic, interdisciplinary approach that provides a truly comprehensive understanding. This fragmentation was not accidental. It was, in part, a legacy of a system of higher education that inherited its structures from a colonial dispensation designed not to produce understanding of India but to produce administrators of it. We built engineering colleges and law schools and medical institutions, all urgently necessary, but perhaps we could have built, with the same urgency, many more institutions for thinking about ourselves.
That reckoning is now overdue, and there are early, hopeful signs that it is beginning.
What makes this programme particularly significant is that it is designed not just for Indians seeking to understand their own country, but for the world. With fully online, interactive learning, it draws a global community of students, including international scholars who wish to engage with India on India’s own intellectual terms. In an era when India is asserting itself, in diplomacy, in technology, in culture, the demand for a nuanced, rooted, self-aware engagement with the country has never been higher. The programme meets that demand without surrendering to simplification.
India is not a merely problem to be solved. It is not merely a market to be tapped. It is not merely a civilisation to be patronised with good intentions. It is, as those who have spent their lives with it know, an unfolding — vast, contradictory, astonishing, and irreducibly itself. To study it seriously, with rigour and love in equal measure, is one of the great intellectual callings of our time.
The Jindal India Institute’s MA in India Studies is a beginning. It is, to borrow a phrase that carries weight in Indian intellectual history, a first step in a long walk. But it is a necessary step, and it has been taken. In years to come, when scholars look back at the moment India began, seriously and systematically, to study itself from within — this will be one of the markers they point to.
India is rising. It is time, at last, for India to attain what the philosopher Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya in 1928 called ‘swaraj in ideas’.
