Travel to the village of Bargaon in Bihar today, walk past the rice fields, and you will find a quiet rectangle of brick rising from the earth. The British archaeologist who first dug here in 1861 thought he was looking at a fort. He was looking at the foundations of what was, for a long stretch of the early second millennium, the largest organised library and university the world had ever seen.
Nalanda.
A scale that is hard to recover
In its peak years, between roughly the 5th and 12th centuries CE, Nalanda housed an estimated 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers. Its central library, called Dharma Ganja, was so large it was said to consist of three separate buildings, one of which rose nine storeys. Manuscripts in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Tamil, Sogdian, and Chinese sat side by side.
The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who spent five years there in the 630s, wrote that scholars came "from the most distant cities and the smallest mountain villages." The Korean monk Hyecho passed through. The Tibetan emperor sent expeditions. Persian, Khmer, and Javanese travellers all wrote of it.
"Of those who came from foreign lands seeking enlightenment, the highest ambition was always Nalanda." — Xuanzang, Records of the Western Regions, c. 645 CE
What Nalanda actually did
It is tempting, in 2026, to picture Nalanda as a Hindu or Buddhist seminary. It was that, but it was also far more. The curriculum, as preserved in fragments, includes:
- Logic (Nyaya, Buddhist Pramana)
- Grammar (Sanskrit, Pali, Apabhramsa)
- Mathematics (the place-value decimal system that would later travel to Baghdad and then to Europe was systematically taught here)
- Astronomy
- Medicine (Ayurveda alongside compounded surgical methods that astonished Chinese visitors)
- Metallurgy and architecture
- Comparative religion (Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jain — and after the 8th century, even early Islamic texts)
This was, by the measure of any era, a research university. It produced texts that the rest of Asia would copy and pass forward for centuries.
What happened
In 1193, the Turkic general Bakhtiyar Khalji, leading a force toward Bengal, attacked Nalanda. The Persian chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj, writing decades later in the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, says the destruction was thorough. The library was burned. Sources from the period suggest the manuscripts smouldered for three months.
Some of the scholars who escaped fled to Tibet, where they helped found the great monastic universities of that plateau. Others went south, to Sri Lanka. The Indian core of the network simply collapsed.
What we lost was not only the books. We lost the institutional habit of pooled inquiry — of thousands of researchers, in one place, talking to each other across disciplines.
Why this matters now
For four hundred years after Nalanda's burning, India had no comparable institution. The traditions of learning continued — at Vikramashila for a while, at Mithila, at Kanchi, at small forest schools. But the scale was gone. The continental conversation was gone.
When the East India Company set up its first colleges in the 1820s, they were not building on top of an active culture of large-scale interdisciplinary research; they were starting almost from scratch, importing a European model into a country whose own model had been ash for six centuries.
Nalanda's loss is therefore not just an event in the 12th century. It is a structural loss whose consequences took centuries to play out — and which, arguably, the modern Indian university system is still recovering from.
The Indian government's revival of Nalanda University as an international postgraduate institution in 2014 is one symbolic answer. The deeper one will come only when the country again becomes a place foreign scholars travel toward — for the same reason Xuanzang travelled toward it: because that is where the work is being done.