How American universities embraced the study of Indian languages | Research News

A more significant achievement followed in 1785, when Orientalist Charles Wilkins translated the Bhagavad Gita into English. Two years later, William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, delivered the iconic lecture in which he observed striking affinities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. This observation laid the foundation for the discipline of comparative linguistics and inaugurated the formal study of Indo-European philology.

By the nineteenth century, the influence of Sanskrit had travelled far beyond German Romanticism. In the United States, philosopher Henry David Thoreau read the Gita, while essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson found an alternative to European metaphysics in Indian philosophy. Even early chemists borrowed Sanskrit numerical prefixes to label undiscovered elements in Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table.

One of the foremost American Sanskritists was Arthur William Ryder, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early twentieth century. His translations of the Panchatantra and Bhagavad Gita are still widely regarded for their literary merit. GR Noyes, a contemporary, wrote of him, “Taken as a whole, Ryder’s work as a translator is probably the finest ever accomplished by an American. It is also probably the finest body of translation from Sanskrit ever accomplished by one man.”

Among Ryder’s pupils was J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’. In 1933, Oppenheimer began learning Sanskrit under Ryder’s guidance and read the Gita in its original form. At the detonation of the first nuclear device in 1945, Oppenheimer famously recalled the Gita’s verse: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

While the academic pursuit of Indian languages gained traction through philological channels, early American engagement with India was also shaped by commerce and religion. Following the American Revolution, ships from New England sailed to India for British residents in Bengal. Around the same period, the East India Company’s restrictions on proselytising led many British missionaries to travel to India via the United States, according to Jeffery Long, a scholar at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, who was interviewed by indianexpress.com.

These missionary connections soon evolved into transatlantic religious exchanges. By 1818, members of the Unitarian Church in New England were circulating the writings of social reformer and founder of the Brahmo Samaj, Raja Ram Mohan Roy.

By the early nineteenth century, a number of American students had also ventured to research-driven universities of Germany, where comparative philology was flourishing. There, they encountered Sanskrit. One such scholar, Edward E Salisbury, returned to the United States to become the first professor of Sanskrit at Yale University in 1841.

Salisbury’s appointment inaugurated a slow but steady institutionalisation of Sanskrit studies in the United States. Chairs followed at Johns Hopkins (1876), Harvard and Columbia (1880), the University of Chicago (1892), and the University of Pennsylvania (1904). These early departments offered instruction in both classical Indian texts and the Sanskrit language, with individual professors often introducing elements of Indian religion and philosophy, depending on their scholarly interests.

Powerful people and institutions

W Norman Brown, a towering figure in American Indology, was born in 1892 in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, George William Brown, had made a modest living as a grocer and farmer before feeling a spiritual calling. In 1900, ordained into the ministry, he set sail with his family for British India, having been appointed to a teaching post in a small town in the Central Provinces.

Norman, then only eight, found himself immersed in a world of oral traditions and sacred lore. These encounters left a lasting impression on Norman, fostering a lifelong engagement with Indian civilisation.

After five formative years in India, Norman was sent back to the United States to continue his education at John Hopkins University. It was a chance recommendation, made years later in 1926, that secured his appointment as Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania — a position he would hold for the next four decades.

Beginning in the 1920s, he used his platform in publications such as The Baltimore Sun, Asia, and The Nation to voice strong support for the Indian independence movement. In 1931, addressing the American Philosophical Society, Norman delivered a powerful lecture titled India’s Will to Be a Nation, a spirited assertion of India’s civilisational coherence and political aspirations. Later, in a 1938 essay in Prabuddha Bharata, a monthly journal published by the Ramakrishna Order, he lamented the appalling lack of serious engagement with India in American education. “The fact is that it is scarcely studied,” he complained.

The events of 1947, including India’s independence and the formation of Pakistan, catalysed a fresh academic interest in South Asia. That same year, Norman secured foundation support to conduct experimental summer programmes in India. These served as prototypes for a permanent programme, and in the autumn of 1948, the University of Pennsylvania formally launched its South Asia Studies Department, one of the earliest such initiatives in the country.

The effort soon drew wider philanthropic backing from the Carnegie Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

A major milestone came in October 1961, with the incorporation of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). Fourteen institutions joined as charter members, and at the Board’s first meeting, Norman was named its inaugural president. His vision of a robust and interconnected academic infrastructure for South Asian studies had, at last, taken institutional form.

According to Long, the American fascination with India in this period cannot be disentangled from the larger cultural ferment of the 1960s. “Of course, you have the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King is deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and his teachings. So, ideals of nonviolence start to come in opposition to the Vietnam War, as you mentioned, and then you have the more, the sort of psychedelic side. You know, this happens more in the later 60s, The Beatles,” he says.

These intertwined currents of politics, protest, and counterculture created a fertile environment for deeper American engagement with Indian philosophical and spiritual tradition.

Government policy post-WWII

In the aftermath of World War II, a new stream of resources and interest began to flow into Indian studies in the United States. As noted indologist Wendy Doniger notes in an interview with indianexpress.com, India had played a significant role during the war as a British colony allied with the United States, and a large pool of rupees was accumulated to repay American investments. Those funds, Doniger points out, became a key source for the US State Department’s support of Indian studies and were used to build major library collections and endow university chairs in Sanskrit and other Indian subjects.

The founding of the AIIS in 1961 marked a formal consolidation of this academic momentum. By that time, several universities had already begun appointing professors in Indian studies and creating dedicated programmes.

Federal support also played a crucial role. The Cold War intensified interest in the non-Western world, and the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 galvanised the US into passing the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958. As part of this, Title VI funded “critical area” studies, including South Asia, and supported language and research centres across American campuses.

This action was, in part, politically motivated, with students taking up languages based on their country’s relevance to the United States. However, it also transformed America away from being a one-language nation and sparked an interest in countries far beyond its shores.

In an article published by the Cambridge Language Press titled The Foreign Language Program (1960), historian John Ludington quotes a speech by Professor Charles V Wells from the College of Idaho reflecting on the changes made by the NDEA. “It is the particular responsibility of language teachers to keep in mind, despite the title of the Act, that the knowledge of foreign languages is not primarily a defense measure. The learning of foreign languages belongs properly in the tradition of humanistic education. It is an enriching intellectual and emotional experience.”

According to Patterson, early recruits into US South Asian studies came from three sources: children of missionaries raised in India, Americans who had served in India during World War II, and Peace Corps volunteers. Many of them returned with language skills and firsthand experience, forming the nucleus of a new academic generation. Between 1961 and 1976, more than 4,400 Peace Corps volunteers served in rural Indian villages in health, agriculture, and education, and many went on to pursue Indian studies upon their return.

However, language remained a central and contentious issue. As Herman Van Olphen, linguistics professor at the University of Austin, observed in India’s World and US Scholars, early indologists relied on classical languages like Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit, but new centres had to grapple with modern India’s linguistic diversity. English remained an elite lingua franca in India, it offered only partial access to the subcontinent’s literatures, religions, and histories.

Van Olphen cautioned that relying on English alone was inadequate, particularly for scholars interested in regional cultures or vernacular literatures. Though the Indian Constitution recognised several major languages, their limited visibility abroad made them less likely to be prioritised.

Overall, the influx of post-war funding and federal policy was a boon for indologists. As Doniger put it, World War II “left behind money, and that money built great libraries,” setting off one of the most important pushes for Indian studies in American academic history.

Reconnecting with ancestral roots

When Indian immigrants began arriving in large numbers to the United States in the 1960s and 70s, the dominant impulse was assimilation. “They didn’t expect their kids would want to learn Hindi,” says Doniger. “The goal was to assimilate. But, when these kids got to college, they wanted to connect with where they came from, and learning Indian languages was a wonderful way to do that.” That longing to reconnect with ancestral roots became a powerful engine for the growth of South Asian studies across American campuses, particularly through language programmes.

Universities began responding to the needs of second-generation Indian Americans, not just through language instruction but also through chairs in Sikh, Jain, and Hindu studies. At the University of Michigan, for instance, a dedicated chair in Sikh Studies has existed for nearly three decades. This was not accidental; Michigan had long been home to a thriving Sikh community, dating back to the late 1920s, when the Ford Motor Company actively recruited Indian workers to Detroit.

Suhag Shukla, Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group, explains the diaspora effect more poignantly: “All of a sudden you are, you know, this small fish in a big pond, and no one else in that pond knows what kind of fish you are… and the one way that you can survive is one person figuring out who you are… What is that philosophy? What are the teachings? What is the culture that has shaped you?” For Shukla, cultural education isn’t just about identity but about dignity and survival in a multicultural society.

This desire to be understood, respected, and intellectually represented has even reframed the study of Indian philosophy itself. As Doniger notes, Americans began to realise that the great Indian texts were of significant merit. “They were actually philosophers, just like the Greeks… They were intellectuals of the First Order,” she says. The late 19th-century discovery that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin shared a common Indo-European ancestry shattered the notion of India as the cultural “other.” Instead, it positioned ancient Indian thinkers as intellectual cousins of the West, offering not just exoticism but insight.

Further reading

India’s World and US Scholars, Maureen Patterson, Manohar Publishers, 1998

The Foreign Language Program, John Ludington Cambridge Language Press, 1960

India’s World and US Scholars, Herman Van Olphen, Manohar Publishers, 1998