Nalanda University: How India Revived the World's Oldest University
By BrainBuzz Team | May 2026 | India and History | 9 min read Nalanda University: How India Revived the World's Oldest University Eight hundred years ago, an army arrived at the gates of the greatest university the world had ever seen. It housed 10,000 students. It had a library so vast that it took three months to burn completely. Scholars from China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and across Asia had crossed oceans and mountains to study here. When the smoke finally cleared, one of humanity's greatest centres of knowledge was gone. This month, after eight centuries, the lights are back on at Nalanda. And the story of how it got here is one of the most extraordinary things India has ever done. Most Indians learned about Nalanda University in a single paragraph in a Class 7 history textbook. What that paragraph could never contain is the full scale of what Nalanda actually was what it meant to the ancient world, what its destruction cost hum...
