How Nalanda Changed the World

What does it take for an idea to survive a thousand years, even after the institution built to house it has burned to the ground?

Nalanda was one of the world’s earliest universities, drawing scholars from across Asia to study science, mathematics, philosophy, art, and poetry centuries before such an institution existed anywhere else. In this conversation, author and poet Abhay K joins Anupama Sekhar to trace the rise, fall, and re-rise of Nalanda.

Much of what we know about Nalanda arrives to us in fragments, pieced together from the accounts of foreign scholars and the material evidence…