Mission & Vision
The Department of South Asian Studies provides students with an opportunity to study the civilizations of South Asia and of related cultures by developing competence in Sanskrit, Hindi-Urdu, Tamil, Tibetan, or another South Asian language, and by examining the literature, the religious and philosophical traditions, the aesthetic and artistic traditions, and the moral and social traditions of that civilization.
While the Department of South Asian Studies is small, the resources available to students at Harvard are not, and include related degree programs and courses in Anthropology, Religions, Linguistics, Economics, Fine Arts, Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, Social Medicine, and Near Eastern Languages, among many others. In addition, the Sanskrit Library (Widener A) and the Widener and Houghton Libraries contain a collection of reference works, periodicals, and tape recordings of oral recitations, as well as one of the largest collections of Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscripts and printed texts in the West.
New Course Highlight
SANSKRIT 207AR — Pāṇini Is Only a Click Away: Introduction to Grammar as a Knowledge System
This course introduces the Sanskrit discipline of language analysis (vyākaraṇṇa) though portions from Varadarāja’s Sārasiddhāntakaumudī (17th cent. CE), which is the shortest abridgement of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Siddhantakaumudi. Both texts are based on the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇṇini (5th cent. BCE), the oldest extant grammar of Sanskrit, and give a topic-based rearrangement of its rules designed for easy derivation of forms. In addition to acquainting themselves with the traditional methods of Pāṇṇini’s tradition as taught by Varadarāja,students will learn how to use online platforms, multimedia, modern commentaries, and other materials that help find and identify the steps of form derivation (prakriyā).
The goal of this course is for students to learn enough of the basics of Pāṇṇini’s method to be able to start using Pāṇṇinian grammatical texts and related materials as references for their own research. This will be achieved through a combination of memorizing some of Varadarāja’s derivations and learning to use related websites and published prakriyā materials as a starting point
Our History
Sanskrit was first taught at Harvard in 1872, when James Bradstreet Greenough, a Latin grammarian, began offering courses in Sanskrit and comparative philology as Latin electives. Charles Lanman, who began at Harvard in 1880, was the first to preside over the department of Indo-Iranian Languages, as it was then called. During his tenure, Lanman produced A Sanskrit Reader (1888), a collection of Sanskrit and Indic manuscripts which is still the standard introductory text today, as well as founded The Harvard Oriental Series in 1891. By 1902, as a result of the relinquishing of Avesta and the addition of Pali and Prakrit, the name of the department was changed to Indic Philology.
Degree Programs
Contact Us
1 Bow Street, 3rd floor
Cambridge, MA 0213
1 (617) 495-3295 – phone
1 (617) 496-8571 – fax
southasianstudies@fas.harvard.edu