Where India went to study: Takshashila, Nalanda and the ancient universities

Long before the modern university, India ran residential centres of learning that drew students from China to Central Asia. Takshashila, Nalanda, Vikramashila and Valabhi were not single buildings but whole academic towns, with libraries, debate halls and thousands of scholars. Their story is the story of how knowledge was made, funded and, eventually, lost.

The great institutions at a glance

Taxila and Nalanda: two models of the ancient university

Takshashila (Taxila) is the Gandhara learning hub of roughly the 6th century BCE to the 5th century CE, organised not as one chartered campus but as a cluster of independent teachers, each Guru drawing fee-paying or labour-paying students to his own household school. Tradition associates it with medicine and the physician Jivaka, with grammar in the line of Panini, with statecraft in the line of Chanakya, and with archery for princes, while its frontier position absorbed Persian, Greek and Central Asian knowledge. Nalanda is the contrasting Gupta and Pala Mahavihara of the 5th to 12th centuries CE in Bihar: a single monastic university with multi-storey dormitories, the Dharmaganja library complex, free board supported by the revenue of more than a hundred villages, and a Mahayana curriculum centred on theology and logic with grammar and medicine beside it. Admission turned on oral examination by the Dvarapala, the gatekeeper scholar who questioned applicants at the entrance. A. S. Altekar's contrast is the useful exam frame: Taxila resembles a guild of master teachers, Nalanda a centralised residential university closer to the Oxford or Cambridge college model. The Pala-period flourishing of Nalanda and its sister Mahaviharas is narrated in full in the Pala article; here it matters only as the institutional setting these universities shared.

Dharmaganja is the Nalanda library complex, remembered as three buildings holding manuscripts that students copied and carried to Tibet, China and Korea. Gurukula is the older household school in which a student lived with the Guru and learned by residence and service; Taxila scaled that household model up, Nalanda replaced it with the endowed monastery. The distinction explains their different survivals: a guild of teachers disperses under invasion, while a single endowed campus concentrates wealth, manuscripts and risk in one place.

How these universities actually worked

Nalanda is the best documented because Chinese pilgrims wrote about it. Xuanzang studied there in the 7th century and Yijing a generation later; their accounts describe a residential campus with thousands of students and teachers, a multi-storey library, and a formidable entrance examination. Admission was through debate: applicants had to defend a thesis before the gatekeepers, and most failed.

The curriculum was deliberately wide. Alongside Buddhist scripture and logic came grammar, medicine, mathematics, astronomy and law. Takshashila was even more eclectic, training princes in archery and statecraft alongside philosophy. The gurukul ideal of the teacher's household scaled up into an institution, but the method stayed oral: memorisation, recitation and public disputation.

Features of ancient Indian education

• Residential academic towns: whole campus towns with libraries, debate halls and thousands of scholars, not single buildings
• Admission by debate: applicants defended a thesis before the gatekeepers at Nalanda, and most failed
• A wide curriculum: scripture and logic beside grammar, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, law and statecraft
• Oral method at scale: memorisation, recitation and public disputation, the gurukul ideal grown into an institution
• Royal patronage: Gupta and Pala endowments funded the great mahaviharas; when patronage dried up, decline followed
• International draw: students and pilgrims came from China to Central Asia, leaving accounts like those of Xuanzang and Yijing

Why they declined

The destruction was real but it was not the only cause. Repeated invasions in the 12th century burned the great Bihar mahaviharas, Nalanda and Vikramashila among them. Behind that blow lay slower rot: the Gupta and Pala patronage dried up, new rulers favoured the madrasa model, the curriculum drifted toward ritual and rote, and caste and gender exclusions narrowed the pool of minds. A knowledge system that stops renewing its funding, its students and its questions does not survive its buildings.

Relevance today

The National Education Policy of 2020 explicitly reaches back to this model: multidisciplinary study, residential campuses and Indian knowledge systems in the curriculum. The modern Nalanda University, whose new campus was inaugurated in 2024, is the most visible attempt to revive the old brand as a 21st-century research university. Whether the revival succeeds will depend on the same things that made the originals work: endowments, open admissions of talent, and a culture of fearless debate.

Key Terms

• Nalanda: The great residential mahavihara in Bihar, patronised by Gupta and later rulers and described by Xuanzang and Yijing; thousands of students, a multi-storey library, and admission through debate at the gate.
• Takshashila: Among India's earliest centres of higher learning (traditions to the 6th century BCE), famous for secular subjects: law, administration, medicine, archery and statecraft.
• Vikramashila: The Pala-era mahavihara in Bihar, second to Nalanda, known for tantric and Vajrayana studies and destroyed in the 12th-century invasions.
• Valabhi: A major centre of learning in Gujarat under the Maitrakas, a western rival to Nalanda in Hinayana and secular studies.
• Mahavihara: A great Buddhist monastic university: a self-governing residential complex of monasteries, temples, libraries and lecture halls.
• Xuanzang: The 7th-century CE Chinese pilgrim whose account of Nalanda is the fullest surviving description of its campus, curriculum and entrance debate.
• Yijing: The Chinese pilgrim who studied at Nalanda a generation after Xuanzang and recorded its monastic discipline and courses.
• Vajrayana: The tantric form of Buddhism taught at Vikramashila, Odantapuri and Jagaddala, the last centred in Bengal.
• NEP 2020: The National Education Policy of 2020, which explicitly invokes the ancient model: multidisciplinary universities, residential campuses and Indian knowledge systems.