Learn India by living it
You don’t understand a country from a lecture hall alone. Alongside your coursework, ISS takes you into the India that textbooks only describe: its monuments, its debates, its everyday life. The focus throughout is India’s social transformations, how its society, politics and culture have changed, and what is still changing.
Three things you’ll do:
Meet people who shape India. Academics, policymakers, civil society leaders and business voices talk with you directly about development and the questions facing emerging societies.
Walk through living history. Visit Agra and Delhi’s historic sites, and learn how the country’s social and political story unfolded.
Experience the arts, language and traditions. Take part in cultural events, learn Hindi and practise yoga. India’s culture becomes something you take part in, not something you read about.
Who Can Participate?
ISS welcomes undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, working professionals and academic groups, along with anyone with a serious interest in Indian society, culture and politics. It is an opportunity to explore traditions, social realities and intellectual resources in an academic and cultural setting.
What you take away:
India, understood properly. You leave knowing how Indian society works, what is changing in it, and why the headlines rarely tell the full story.
Real cross-cultural skill. You work, argue and learn alongside people from different countries and backgrounds, and see how the same question looks from where they stand. You get better at it every week.
A sharper mind for big questions. Development, technology, sustainability and inequality stop being topics and become problems you know how to think through.
Gandhian thought, in today’s India. You engage with Gandhi’s ideas on self-reliance, truth and welfare for all, and examine what they mean for the questions India faces now.
Experience you can point to. Your coursework and hands-on experience give you something real to talk about in your next application, interview or project.
Why ISS
Learn from inside India. ISS is convened by the Department of Political Science at Jamia Millia Islamia, with the Esya Centre. You study in Delhi, among the people and institutions you are studying.
More than a decade of experience. ISS has run since 2013 and has welcomed participants from more than 50 countries.
A cohort with range. Undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and professionals learn in the same room. You hear viewpoints you would not get in a classroom of one age group.
Learning beyond the classroom. Experts from different fields speak with you directly. Internship and service learning put your ideas into practice. Visits to Agra and Delhi’s historic sites show you the history behind what you study.
A different way of looking at the world. The program is rooted in Gandhian thought and looks at India alongside the wider challenges facing the Global South.
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A UCL student wrote about her six weeks with ISS in 2018. Read her account
