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. In the following years the Department continued to add instruction in other languages, including Tibetan and Urdu-Hindi, and in subjects connecting with the subcontinent and its cultural traditions, while retaining the study of Sanskrit as the common ingredient in its various graduate degree programs. As a reflection of these additions, the name of the departments was changed in 1951 to ‘Sanskrit and Indian Studies’.
Of the present courses offered by the Department, those in Sanskrit and Vedic give students access to a language that for over three thousand years served to record, transmit, and shape major movements of Indian thought. The courses in Pali make available the primary sources for the Theravada branch of the Buddhist tradition, and those in Tibetan and in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit do so for the Mahayana branch. The courses in Urdu-Hindi give instruction in the language of greatest political and practical importance in modern India and Pakistan, and the Department also offers courses in Tibetan, Thai, Bengali, Nepali, Sindhi, Gujarati, and other regional languages of the subcontinent. Other courses in South Asian Studies teach aspects of South Asian culture and thought without requiring the knowledge of an Indian language. With the establishment of a Chair for Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, in 1995, a range of courses in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies is now offered.