ABSTRACT
As in most third world countries, particularly former colonies, India's contemporary higher education draws only marginally on indigenous traditions of learning. And, in India's case, castes associated over long periods with higher learning, the bureaucracy, and the older professions, e.g., medicine and priesthood. India's higher education, more than almost any other country, also draws upon a diversity of major classical languages associated with their respective religions, for example, Sanskrit and Tamil (Hindu), Arabic and Persian (Islam), and many more major modern languages (14 listed therein at the commencement of the Indian Constitution in 1950), each in use by tens to hundreds of millions of people.
