As Sapru House marks its 70th anniversary in 2025, commemorating its founding in 1955 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as the home of the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), India’s World interviewed Dr. Martin Bayly, Assistant Professor of International Relations Theory at the London School of Economics. In this conversation, Dr. Bayly reflects on Sapru House’s pivotal role in shaping Indian international thought, its contributions to highlighting IR as ‘global at birth’ reposting Eurocentric perspectives in global IR scholarship, and the enduring legacy of its founders, including Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, H.N. Kunzru, and A. Appadorai. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kirti Singh: As a British scholar, what made you study Indian intellectual history?
Dr. Bayly: It’s a long story! My family has close connections with India. My mother was born in Pithoragarh in Northern India in the 1950s where her parents were working for a leprosy charity and she spent most of her childhood there. She moved back in her teenage years. On my father’s side, my Uncle, Professor Sir C. A. Bayly was a celebrated Indian historian, and later global historian. Despite working in a different discipline, his example and his scholarship were an inspiration to me. So you could say that India was very much a presence in our lives. I first visited India in 2004 with my brother and parents. I’ve been back several times since for research and for travel.
During my PhD research, which was on Anglo-Afghan relations in the nineteenth century, I began researching the history of South Asia. I was interested in how colonial knowledge had shaped British perceptions of the Afghan polity. This led in my postdoctoral research to an interest in how Indian intellectuals responded to the knowledge that had been developed about them. Much of this knowledge was developed in the learned societies of late-colonial India, such as the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the United Services Institute, and the Royal Geographical Society. In many ways, these were the colonial antecedents of what we would today call ‘think tanks’, such as the ICWA. Partly in response to the knowledge that these colonial societies developed, a host of Indian intellectuals cultivated a rich tradition of studying the history, as well as political and international thought of South Asia, including those ideas embedded in ancient texts. Very often this offered a riposte to the ways that Europeans had studied South Asia, recovering forgotten thinkers, and re-narrating past periods of regional history. I was fascinated with this body of work—surprised at how little coverage it had received in the disciplinary histories of International Relations— and sought to address this in my present research.
India has always been important in world history, and once again, India is gaining considerable influence in world affairs. By researching the histories of Indian international thought, I hope to shine some light on the deeper lineages of India’s contemporary visions of world order.
Kirti Singh: As we are celebrating Sapru House’s 70th anniversary, how do you see it as shaping modern South Asian international thought?
