Nalanda: The Memory of a Civilization
Image: Jaipur Literature Festival / YouTube
Nalanda was not a singular anomaly but the culmination of a thousand years of intellectual tradition. Amritesh Mukherjee reflects on Abhay K.’s latest book on the subject, and how the ‘mahavihara’ can serve as a beacon for contemporary educational institutions.
Time has a way of swallowing its own stories. Civilizations rise, knowledge flourishes, and then, just as suddenly, the embers fade. What remains? Ruins, records, and the stubborn persistence of memory.
Most of us know Nalanda mahavihara through its absence—its red-brick skeleton is a testament to a world that once was. But before it was a ruin, the renowned Buddhist monastery in modern-day Bihar was a universe of thought, a nerve centre of scholarship, a crucible where ideas met, collided, and reshaped themselves. From the 5th to the 14th centuries CE, students from across Asia debated philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics in its courtyard. It was a place where a Chinese traveller—after braving the Gobi Desert and the snowbound passes of the Himalayas—could arrive and believe they had reached the centre of civilization.
It was a place that lived for centuries and then, in the blink of history’s unfeeling eye, ceased to exist.
This erasure, and the history of this marvellous centre of learning, has recently found new life. Nalanda’s past was present again at the Charbagh lawn at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where diplomat, poet, and author Abhay K., launched his book Nalanda: How It Changed the World (Vintage Books, 2025) while in conversation with historian William Dalrymple, Professor Shailendra Raj Mehta, and author Narayani Basu. As Mehta pointed out during the discussion, Nalanda was not a singular anomaly but the culmination of a thousand years of intellectual tradition.
Through his book, Abhay K. brings to life the life and times of Nalanda, from its intellectual practices to its religious aspects. It emphasizes the importance of the institution to its time and beyond, as well as its impact on global scholarly traditions through philosophical, scientific, and cultural exchanges. It demystifies Nalanda by taking the reader through its life journey, from its rise and fall to its recent revival. Through its many scholars and teachings, the book celebrates intellectual dialogue and cultural exchange.
Before Nalanda, there was Takshashila: a centre of learning built along the crossroads of the empire. Situated on the Persian Royal Road and the Silk Road, Takshashila attracted scholars from Greece, Persia, and India, a true meeting point of cultures. But time and conquest are relentless. The Huns sacked it. The Guptas, having watched it fall, turned inward.
Unlike Takshashila—which was an organic hub—Nalanda was designed as an intellectual powerhouse. It was a mahavihara—an institution of higher learning long before the modern university system took shape. As the panellists noted, it had a structured system of learning, complete with seniority determined not by caste but by sangh aayu (the years spent in rigorous study). According to Abhay K., Nalanda’s admission process was far from arbitrary. Prospective students were required to engage in rigorous intellectual discourse, often undergoing intense questioning by senior scholars before they were deemed worthy of entry. Evidence suggests that scholars from all castes and backgrounds walked through its doors, making it an early meritocracy at a time when birth dictated one’s destiny.
The panelists also touched on how Nalanda followed a structured approach to education, with monks at various stages of study and mentorship. The continuity of intellectual tradition was ensured through this layered system of scholarship and debate.
For many in the West, the idea of an ancient Indian university that rivalled Plato’s Academy sounds almost mythical. But as Dalrymple emphasized, to Xuanzang (Tsun Tsang)—the Chinese traveller who arrived in the 7th century—Nalanda was more real than anything he had seen before. Dalrymple noted that Xuanzang’s writings are a miraculous moment in history, one in which the lights flickered on just long enough for us to glimpse a world now lost.
The legacy of original Nalanda is more relevant than ever. Education today faces a crossroads: Does it serve as a space for genuine intellectual exploration, or does it become a tool wielded by those in power? If we are not careful, history will repeat itself, not in fire and conquest, but in silence and erasure.
Xuanzang undertook an impossible journey, crossing deserts, mountains, and war-torn regions on foot, simply to reach Nalanda. When he arrived, he believed he had stepped into the intellectual heart of the world. His accounts describe a remarkable institution of its time, where thousands of scholars engaged in fierce debates across disciplines: astronomy, mathematics, medicine, linguistics, philosophy. The curriculum matched anything found in the great Mediterranean schools, yet it has largely been ignored in a history shaped by colonial perspectives.
Dalrymple commented how, because of colonialism, Greek and Roman scholarship has been mythologized, while Indian intellectual traditions, no less formidable, have been forgotten. The world remembers the Academy of Athens. How many remember Nalanda as its equal?
The destruction of Nalanda is often reduced to a single event: the burning of its legendary library by Bakhtiyar Khilji in the 12th century. But as Abhay K. pointed out, Nalanda’s decline was already in motion before the flames consumed its enormous collection of manuscripts. By the 10th century, Buddhism in India had shifted, evolving into a tantric form that blurred the distinctions between Hinduism and Buddhist doctrine. Meanwhile, Puranic Brahminism was on the rise, and state patronage began to shift away from Buddhist institutions. The end of Nalanda was a military conquest, yes, but it was also caused by ideological shifts.
And yet, while much of India forgot Nalanda, its echoes lived on: in Islamic madrassas, in the great libraries of Islamic Spain, and eventually in the first Western universities. The model of structured education that emerged in medieval Europe owes something to a system that once thrived in Bihar.
So, we return to the question: What happens when a civilization forgets its own knowledge? Civilizations are not just made of stone and mortar. They are made of ideas. And ideas, if not protected, can be lost just as surely as buildings can be razed to the ground.
As Mehta noted, Nalanda was a place where questioning was encouraged, where state sponsorship did not mean intellectual obedience, and where learning was seen as a pursuit of truth rather than a tool for propaganda. Unlike other regions where scholars were suppressed or persecuted for dissenting views, Nalanda thrived because of its ability to critique itself, debate openly, and allow ideological contestation.
In 2022, Delhi University removed works by Mahasweta Devi, Bama and Sukirtharani—writers well known for their feminist and anti-caste voices—from the syllabus. The NCERT textbooks in recent years have undergone ideological revisions, with Mughal history being downplayed or removed entirely, chapters on Darwin’s theory of Evolution deleted, and references to the Gujarat riots and mentions of the caste system omitted. There have been police crackdowns on students in universities across the country, from the Banaras Hindu University (2017), Jawaharlal Nehru University (2016), to Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019-20.
The modern Nalanda University (founded in 2010) itself has been a site of political buffoonery and interference, which led to its Chancellor, the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, also a fierce critic of the Modi-led BJP regime, to resign after an almost decade-long tenure. Despite being elected unanimously as Chancellor by the Nalanda board, the appointment never received the government’s required consent, following which Sen chose to resign. “I am also sad, at a more general level, that academic governance in India remains so deeply vulnerable to the opinions of the ruling government, when it chooses to make political use of the special provisions,” wrote Sen in his public resignation letter. His resignation would be followed by a barrage of false allegations by BJP ministers and journalists alike, from charges of financial misconduct to accusations of faculty appointments, with the university often having to step in to clarify the allegations.
His departure was not the first or last of such resignations, a notable example of which was the 2021 case of Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a professor at the prestigious Ashoka University, who wrote, “My public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, is perceived to carry risks for the university.”
At a time when universities are becoming battlegrounds of ideology rather than arenas of open thought, the legacy of original Nalanda is more relevant than ever. Education today faces a crossroads: Does it serve as a space for genuine intellectual exploration, or does it become a tool wielded by those in power? If we are not careful, history will repeat itself, not in fire and conquest, but in silence and erasure.
Will our age be remembered for the knowledge we created or for the knowledge we allowed to disappear?
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Amritesh Mukherjee is a writer and editor. He is a content writer at a marketing agency and the long-form lead at Purple Pencil Project, a platform to promote Indian literature (and languages). You can find him on Instagram: @aroomofwords and Twitter: @aroomofwords.
