The Hind School: A New Chapter in India Studies
India has been studied more than it has been understood. For decades, India Studies has thrived in the lecture halls of foreign universities—interpreted through distant lenses, often without fieldwork or fluency in the rhythms of Indian life. The Hind School begins with a simple reversal: what if India were studied in India, by those immersed in its questions, and for those building its future?
This is the promise of The Hind School—the world’s first autonomous institution exclusively devoted to Applied India Studies. A school not of the past, but of the possible. Not confined to a campus, but rooted in cities, field sites, and lived experience. As India reimagines its place in the world in the run-up to 2047, this new institution seeks to reimagine how India is learned, taught, and lived.
A Fellowship on Wheels
The Hind School does not offer a conventional postgraduate course. It offers a Postgraduate Fellowship in Applied India Studies—a program that takes participants across India’s intellectual, economic, and cultural landscapes. It is rigorous, immersive, and unapologetically interdisciplinary.
Fellows travel across Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, and Kolkata, engaging with faculty, policy experts, entrepreneurs, civil society leaders, and cultural practitioners. They don’t just attend seminars—they visit temples and slums, start-ups and think tanks, museums and mandis. Learning is structured Oxford-style—with weekly essays, tutorials, and guided immersions.
Each city becomes a classroom. Each week, a provocation.
In its inaugural year, The Hind School will admit a cohort drawn from across India and the Global South. Selection will prioritise diversity, intellectual curiosity, and civic imagination.
What is Applied India Studies?
The Hind School makes a bold claim: India is not just a country—it is a civilisational system worth studying on its own terms. But such study must go beyond theory.
Applied India Studies is about asking grounded questions:
How does a panchayat actually function on the ground?
Why do Indian cities grow without plans, yet survive with jugaad?
What can Ayurveda teach the world—not just about health, but about knowledge systems?
How does caste operate in start-up culture?
What happens when development collides with dharma?
At The Hind School, these questions are not abstract debates. They are lived case studies, requiring both reflection and immersion.
The curriculum includes modules on governance, culture, religion, business, sustainability, and foreign policy—with each theme anchored in real-world settings. The program also features an online certified module in Hindu Civilisation delivered in collaboration with international partners.
A School Without Walls
The Hind School is intentionally mobile. It has no single campus. It partners with universities, think tanks, and civil society organisations in each city—borrowing infrastructure while creating its own learning community.
Why? Because India is too large to be reduced to a single vantage point. Each region offers a different idiom of modernity, a different memory of history. Learning India must mean moving through it.
This design is also pragmatic. By keeping overheads low and partnerships deep, The Hind School can focus on scholarships, quality teaching, and field-based learning.
The result: a high-impact program that remains nimble, affordable, and scalable.
Inspired by Global Excellence, Rooted in India
The Hind School draws inspiration from the world’s best interdisciplinary programs: the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, the Yenching Academy in China, the Schwarzman Scholars in Beijing, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies.
But unlike these programs, The Hind School does not use India as a case study. It treats India as the world itself—a site of theory, not just application.
Its faculty includes public intellectuals, domain experts, and visiting scholars. But it also includes immersion mentors: those who understand India not through books, but through practice—activists, artisans, fieldworkers, and policymakers.
This blending of the academic and the applied is The Hind School’s distinctive strength.
What Kind of Graduate Does India Need?
The Hind School does not promise a job. It promises direction.
Graduates may go into policy, entrepreneurship, media, research, or civil service. What binds them is a shared sensibility: curiosity without cynicism, critical thinking without deracination, ambition without alienation.
In an era of global flux and domestic complexity, India needs leaders who understand both the idea of India and its implementation challenges. The Hind School aims to cultivate such minds—not by providing answers, but by sharpening the questions.
Governance, Structure, and Sustainability
The Hind School operates on a hybrid philanthropic and earned-revenue model, with most funding allocated to fellowships, program delivery, and content development.
Its core academic partners include select public universities and research centres. Governance is overseen by an advisory board of scholars, practitioners, and cultural leaders.
In all its formats, The Hind School holds one principle sacred: learning must be earned through engagement, not just attendance.
Conclusion: A School for India’s Next Chapter
India today is not short on engineers, MBAs, or administrators. It is short on interpreters—people who can read between the lines, across disciplines, and across regions. People who understand the language of development and the dialect of the village. People who can speak to the world without losing their roots.
As India approaches its centenary of independence, the question is not just how to grow—but how to know ourselves. The Hind School begins with that question. And invites a new generation to pursue the answers.
