🎓 Centres of learning

The Sulba-sutras: geometry with a rope

➗ Mathematics

Geometric texts of the Vedic period on building fire altars — the earliest known Indian texts with methods to construct perpendiculars and perpendicular bisectors, using a rope as the compass. Baudhayana’s Sulbasutra (c. 800 BCE) already works with non-unit fractions.

Panini’s Ashtadhyayi

📜 Language and learning

The Ashtadhyayi of Panini, a work on Sanskrit grammar.

Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas

🩺 Medicine

Works on medicine in Sanskrit. Ayurveda has much older roots, but these texts — which deal with cataloguing and diagnosing diseases, among other topics — were compiled and given their final shape during the Gupta period.

Kusumapura, Aryabhata’s centre of learning

📜 Language and learning · Near Patna, Bihar

Aryabhata lived around 500 CE in Kusumapura, near present-day Patna — a famous centre of learning.

Takshashila, a centre of learning

📜 Language and learning · Taxila (in present-day Pakistan)

According to Buddhist texts, Kautilya — author of the Arthashastra, ‘the science of governance and economics’ — was a teacher at the world-renowned Takshashila university.

Nalanda is founded

📜 Language and learning · Nalanda, Bihar

According to the records of the pilgrim Xuan Zang, a monastery’s foundation was laid at Nalanda by Kumaragupta I in the fifth century CE; later kings built it up into a great university.

Nalanda Mahavihara

📜 Language and learning · Nalanda, Bihar

The Palas, like Harsha before them, continued to patronise Nalanda; large monasteries like it were, in effect, the universities of the time.

Xuan Zang and Nalanda

📜 Language and learning · Nalanda, Bihar

The Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang came in search of Buddhist texts. Most of what we know about Nalanda comes from his records.

Vikramashila university

📜 Language and learning · Banks of the Ganga, Bihar

Founded by the Pala king Dharmapala, it remained a great centre of learning for more than four centuries, with six colleges, a vast library and nearly 3,000 scholars. Each college had a ‘scholar gatekeeper’ who set the admission test.

Sharada Peetha in Kashmir

📜 Language and learning · Kashmir

Sharada Peetha in Kashmir, a renowned centre of learning that flourished between the 6th and 12th centuries CE, was a key site in the development of the Sharada script; its legacy earned Kashmir the name Sharada Desh.

Nalanda and Vikramashila destroyed

Bakhtiyar Khilji’s campaign through Bihar and Bengal destroyed the great Buddhist monasteries and universities of Nalanda and Vikramashila. It hastened the decline of Buddhism in India and scattered learned scholars.

Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara at Nalanda, Bihar

📜 Language and learning · Bihar

Remains of a monastic and scholastic institution from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE: stupas, shrines and viharas.

Indian numerals reach the Arab world

Sanskrit texts of mathematics, astronomy and medicine were translated into Arabic in Baghdad; the Arabs adopted India’s decimal numeral system with the zero.

Al-Biruni learns Sanskrit

Al-Biruni learned Sanskrit, read Indian texts and talked with Indian scholars, and compiled what he could gather from the works of Indian mathematicians and astronomers.

Madhava and the Kerala School

📜 Language and learning · Kerala

Madhava gave the series expansion for trigonometric functions — a world first — and an exact value of π as an infinite series. He and his followers are known as the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics.

Nilakantha Somayaji’s planetary model

A scholar of the Kerala School worked out a planetary model in which Mercury and Venus went round the Sun.

Dara Shikoh and the Upanishads

With learned scholars in Varanasi, Dara Shikoh translated 52 Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian.

The Asiatic Society of Bengal

William Jones and his colleagues set it up, with the journal Asiatick Researches, to study and translate Sanskrit and Persian works.

The English Education Act

Following Macaulay’s minute — which claimed that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia — the English Education Act of 1835 stopped the promotion of Oriental institutions such as the Calcutta Madrasa and Benaras Sanskrit College.

Wood’s Dispatch

The Company’s Court of Directors sent an educational despatch, issued by Charles Wood, President of the Board of Control. Known as the ‘Magna Carta of English Education in India’, it recommended a scheme of education from the primary school to the university.

The universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras

The universities of Calcutta, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Madras were set up in 1857, followed by Allahabad in 1887. The University of Madras, modelled on London University, was incorporated on 5 September 1857.

The Hunter Commission

The Indian Education Commission recommended that schools encourage native games, gymnastics, drills and other exercises.

Savitribai Phule

With Jyotirao Phule she opened schools, promoted modern education especially for girls, and challenged caste discrimination and gender inequality.

Aligarh: from MAO College to university

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan set up the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental (MAO) College in 1877. In 1920 an Act of the Indian Legislative Council raised it to the Aligarh Muslim University.

Indian Institute of Science founded

The Indian Institute of Science came into existence in Bangalore, after Jamsetji Tata’s vision and a Government of India vesting order.

Banaras Hindu University

Banaras Hindu University was founded by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1916, with the close cooperation of Annie Besant, under the B.H.U. Act of 1915.

Jamia Millia Islamia

Born of the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, Jamia Millia Islamia was founded at Aligarh in 1920 — its foundation committee met on 29 October 1920 — and moved to Karol Bagh in New Delhi in 1925.

Visva-Bharati

Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate, founded Visva-Bharati at Santiniketan in 1921. In May 1951 an Act of Parliament made it a central university and an institution of national importance.

Santiniketan

🏛 Cultural · West Bengal

Founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1901 as a school and centre for art; a ‘world university’ followed in 1921.

The University Education Commission

Soon after Independence, the University Education Commission was set up in 1948 under Dr S. Radhakrishnan to report on Indian university education and suggest improvements.

IIT Kharagpur, the first IIT

The first Indian Institute of Technology was born in May 1950 at Hijli, Kharagpur, and was formally inaugurated by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad on 18 August 1951. It began in the old Hijli Detention Camp, where freedom fighters had been held, with 224 freshers and 42 teachers.

The University Grants Commission

The University Grants Commission was inaugurated by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, then Minister of Education, on 28 December 1953, and became a statutory body through an Act of Parliament in November 1956.

Jamia becomes a central university

Jamia Millia Islamia, founded at Aligarh in 1920, became a central university by an Act of Parliament in 1988.

A new Nalanda University

Conceived as a joint project of India and the East Asia Summit countries, the new Nalanda University enrolled its first students in 2014 in a makeshift campus at Rajgir; its new campus, near the ruins of ancient Nalanda, was inaugurated in June 2024.