History

Founded in 2004, the India China Institute is located within The New School, in New York City. Our goal is to enhance academic and public understanding of the global significance of India and China, which we pursue through support of interdisciplinary research and scholarship, fellowships, publications, workshops, and courses. The India China Institute also organizes public lectures and conferences featuring the participation of a global network of scholars, entrepreneurs, artists and diplomats.

“At the India China Institute, we are bringing together key people to rethink vital questions like: What are the truly important issues? How is the world changing? If we can get thinkers in India, China and the United States not only to agree about the biggest questions, but also to decide the shape and scope of them, then the answers will have a certain range of durability that answers in the past have not had. That’s a big ambition. But The New School has always been about big ambitions.” – Arjun Appadurai, ICI Co-founder.

Our Past Leaders

In 1997, Appadurai with a group of scholars, prepared a White Paper for the Ford Foundation entitled “Area Studies, Regional Worlds.” They argued for the need to move beyond “trait-based geographies” to “process-based geographies” in light of the fact that existing approaches, focused on bounded civilizations, cultures, and areas, “frequently draw the wrong boundaries, ignore important interactions and are driven by obsolete assumptions about national interest, cultural coherence and global processes.” The large regions that dominated existing area studies thinking were seen as problematic for the contemporary study of global geographic and cultural processes. This intellectual commitment to finding new ways to think about how different regions of a globalized world interact has shaped the ICI’s work. ICI continues to be an innovative institute with an India-China-US trilateral focus that brings together current and future leaders from the three countries to address issues of global concern.

ICI was started with a generous $10 million endowment from the Starr Foundation. In line with the Institute’s initial vision, the endowment was split between two endowed professorships, an “Asian Leaders” fellowship program (the ICI Fellows), and a publications and research component.

Ashok Gurung, who joined The New School as a Professor of Practice in the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy, was asked to take on the role of first Senior Director. Grace Hou, then senior paralegal in the Office of the Vice President and General Counsel, was appointed to the Institute. In 2012 ICI hired Mark Frazier and Sanjay Reddy as Co-Academic Directors, which provided an opportunity to focus on expanding the research agenda within The New School. In 2019 Manjari Mahajan joined as ICI Academic Co-Director.

ICI receives support from the original Starr Foundation endowment, as well as project-specific grants received from the Ford Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation.