WHILE IT is a matter of great concern that India does not boast of several world-class institutions, it is a matter of shame if leading scholars in Indian politics and history are not India-based or if the most prestigious research centres are in the West. It is time we asked some disconcerting questions: which are the leading centres of excellence for scholarship on Indian economy, anthropology and languages? What is the Indian contribution to the field of Indian politics or culture? Where will the next generation of India experts come from? Gurcharan Das recently said that, ‘an Indian who seriously wants to study the classics of Sanskrit or ancient regional languages will have to go abroad’ (Times of India, September 9, 2012). This is an understatement. The situation is much worse and it applies to several other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. To get a broader sense of the quality of Indian scholarship in the social sciences, I collected data on the scholarship in Indian politics from The Oxford Companion to Indian Politics (2010) and the India Review (2002-2011). The Oxford Companion to Indian Politics—edited by Niraja Gopal Jayal (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Centre for Policy Research)—contains 38 original articles by 44 leading scholars—Indian and Western academics—of Indian politics. While not every leading scholar has a chapter in the book, the collection is a fairly good representation of well-known scholars who work on Indian politics. The India Review ‘publishes social science research on Indian politics, economics, and society’. Between 2002 and 2011, it published 139 original articles by 162 authors on a variety of issues in Indian politics, economy, society and international relations. (Note: 1) Two special issues on public anthropology and India Studies in the US were excluded from the count; and 2) several scholars published more than one article and are counted multiple times. Why just politics? I have two reasons for focussing on Indian politics to determine the quality of scholarship in India. First, since my academic training and experience is primarily in political science, I have a better sense of what is happening in the field of Indian politics than in say sociology or history. Second, and more importantly, there is no doubt that politics is both the problem and solution to India’s challenges—including higher education—in the coming decades. It is essential that we develop and nurture the discipline of Indian politics to understand why we have succeeded or failed in different areas as a nation and what we can do to fix our failings. To get a sense of the Indian contribution to Indian politics, I created three categories: 1) Indian/ Western scholars; 2) India/ West-based scholars; 3) Indians with PhD degrees from India/ the West. Indian/Western Scholars: Of the 44 contributors in Jayal and Mehta (2010), 32 are Indians and the rest are a mix of British, American and others. In India Review, 84 of the 162 authors are Indians. The ‘Indian’ category includes those who may have been born in or outside India and was determined on the basis of name, location and any other information that was easily available online. Many scholars who are counted as ‘Indians’ may only be nominally so. India-/West-based Scholars: Only 14 of the 44 authors in Jayal and Mehta (2010) are based in India. Of the 84 Indian scholars whose papers have been published in India Review, only 20 are based in India. Excluded from the count are current or former bureaucrats and journalists whose interaction with students is quite limited. India-based scholars with PhDs from India/ West: Of the 14 India-based scholars in Jayal and Mehta (2010) only seven have PhDs (or highest degrees) from Indian institutions. Similarly, only 10 of the 20 India-based scholars who published in India Review earned their PhDs at Indian institutions. These numbers indicate that there is a very small pool of experts in India to train and mentor the next generation of scholars. Clearly, Indian institutions have not been fertile grounds for grooming scholars of Indian politics. The number of home-grown scholars like Sudipta Kaviraj and Ramachandra Guha is far too few. Both Jayal and Mehta, incidentally, earned their degrees from Western institutions. Similarly, the founding and current editors of India Review—Sumit Ganguly and E. Sridharan—are also trained at American schools. Are these above mentioned numbers surprising? I think not. These numbers confirm what we already know but do not wish to acknowledge or address. At the moment, we are far away from being the leaders in disciplines and fields that are our own, let alone compete globally in higher education in a broader range of disciplines and subject areas. After all, even those Indian institutions which rank among the world’s best overall, such as IIM-Ahmedabad and ISB-Hyderabad, the ranking on scholarship—measured in terms of publications—is poor. Not one Indian business school ranks in the Top 100 in terms of research contribution (See The University of Texas-Dallas Top 100 World Rankings of Business Schools Based on Research Contribution 2007-2011- http://jindal.utdallas.edu/ the-utd-top-100-businessschool- research-rankings/ worldwide-rankings/). Admittedly, only two sources have been used to make sweeping conclusions. It may be that the state of affairs is specific to the study of Indian politics. As Susan and Lloyd Rudolph note in their essay “An Intellectual History of the Study of Indian Politics” (Jayal and Mehta, 2010), the discipline developed fairly late in independent India. Even today, a premier liberal arts college like Delhi’s St Stephen’s does not offer a Bachelor’s degree in political science. With the exception of some central universities, the state of teaching and research in Indian politics is poor. The question that could be asked is, is Indian politics an exception? It is possible that the study of Indian politics has suffered because better-run institutions such as the IITs and the IIMs offer only a select number of social science disciplines and politics is not one of them. None of the IITs—with the exception of IITGuwahati— have political scientists on their faculty. A good friend in the humanities and social sciences at one of the IITs quoted a colleague who once said that ‘this was to keep politics out of the institution!’ To my knowledge, IIT-Gandhinagar may have become only the second IIT to hire a faculty member with a degree in political science. Other social science disciplines such as sociology, economics or history probably fare better. They have a longer tradition of scholarship at premier Indian institutions. Furthermore, since the IITs too have PhD programmes in economics and sociology, we might expect them to produce greater number of good quality scholars. But chew on this. When Pranab Mukherjee needed an economic advisor, he invited Kaushik Basu from far away Ithaca. P Chidambaram’s man of the hour Raghuram Rajan has come all the way from Chicago. It appears that students of Indian economy are in good hands at Cornell, Chicago and scores of other institutions in the US, Europe and Australia. Are they in equally good hands today in places other than maybe JNU and the Delhi School of Economics? We need to ask ourselves, what is missing in the gravy? Worldclass institutions, research centres and departments develop around a core group of faculty members who are leading scholars in their field. These are the people who train and mentor the next generation of scholars. Unfortunately, very few of our institutions can boast of such a core group of faculty members. There is no point in taking pride in the scholarship of Indian academics based outside India. Their existence does little for our politics, history and economics departments. It is a depressing fact that the next generation of leading scholars in Indian politics and several other disciplines is currently not being trained in India, but in the West.