For a school that prides itself on preparing students to “shape the global order,” Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (SFS) only studies South Asia in flashes, offering limited courses and relying instead on adjuncts, student-led events and visiting speakers to fill the gap. But a region that contains a quarter of humanity cannot remain an afterthought. More than two billion people live where India balances China’s rise, Pakistan pursues Taliban containment and the Indian islands gate the Strait of Malacca; U.S.-China competition runs through it all.
Crucially, the SFS’ South Asian studies certificate lacks any structure. There are no classes on ancient Indian history; the few security courses are usually reserved for graduate students, and only three full-time faculty are primarily focused on researching the subcontinent. By contrast, both the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center on Muslim-Christian Understanding and the Center for Jewish Civilization teach at least 20 courses per semester on culture, security and language.
The primary issue is the ad-hoc language program. Georgetown only restarted regularly offering Hindi and Urdu classes in Fall 2018, and for the past three years has combined Hindi and Urdu instruction. The current proficiency standards for South Asian students neglect how we actually think, speak and live in our languages. I am being told Georgetown does not recognize my tongue; I am hearing Georgetown does not see me. We need a better method of measuring proficiency.
My experience with the second language requirement is a microcosm of what such institutional thinness produces. I tried to get SFS second language proficiency for two years. As someone who grew up speaking a Hindustani mix of Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi, I expected the process to be straightforward.
Instead, it was a bureaucratic maze. For 14 months, I tried to arrange a proficiency exam through Georgetown’s Hindi-Urdu language program, which some classmates had done successfully. After repeated attempts, I was informed that internal testing was henceforth only available if I was enrolled in a Georgetown course and encouraged to take a third-party Hindi exam. Without a clear internal pathway, a third-party test became the only practical way to judge the “Hindi-Urdu” tradition that Georgetown today teaches as overlapping.
I paid $180 to prove I could speak my own tongue. I was bizarrely marked down for using non-Hindi words that are interchangeable in my dialect — “hukumat” of Persian-Arabic origin, rather than “sarkar” for “government,” and “athe” of a Punjabi dialect instead of “aur” for “and.”
I scored below the threshold required for SFS proficiency, was deemed “not in good academic standing” and advised to take a Hindi-Urdu class next semester. Humiliated, I appealed the decision. Administrators said they understood my explanation, but the language policy was fixed and non-negotiable.
Bureaucratically, I had not satisfied the requirement. But in human terms, I was effectively told, “Sure, Akshit Jain — born and bred in Punjab, India — you can speak, think and live in this language tradition, but not in a way that Georgetown will recognize.” This is a strange message from the university whose mission is to prepare students for the world as it exists — not as an exam or nationalist project imagines it.
My great-grandparents were Partition refugees for whom Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi simply constituted colloquial Hindustani. Only later were they instructed that some words belonged to one language, and others to another.
In SFS core classes, especially “Maps of the Modern World,” we are taught to distrust the neatness of borders. Maps timelessly discipline the world more often than describing it. They turn lived communities into territories, categories and identities that later appear natural. Yet here, the university’s own policy contradicts the complexity it teaches. In South Asia, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and even English have never mapped neatly onto borders. They are overlapping registers shaped by colonial classification, religious identity-making and postcolonial state-building. A student who says “railway station” verbatim rather than the archaic Sanskritized alternative, “lauh pathgamini vishram sthal,” is not failing at Hindi but rather speaking as millions do. Rather, we often use the Sanskrit word jokingly! There is no single, pure, morally correct Hindi, Urdu or Punjabi.
I believe what makes the United States and Georgetown so special is the possibility of encounter. Geographically, my friend Zayn is my nearest fellow classmate. He lives just 70 miles from my home, but we would never meet at home because we are separated by the border in Pakistan. Only here can an Indian and a Pakistani inhabit the linguistic world our states have tried to divide. Through its language policy, Georgetown must protect this possibility. Boxing one tongue into three fixed languages reproduces the very divide the SFS aims to bridge.
Rather than lowering the standard for proficiency, we must make the requirement more intelligent. The SFS should create a clearly advertised proficiency pathway for heritage speakers of South Asian dialects: an oral evaluation with a regional language specialist without outsourcing to a third party. The benchmark can be aligned with other SFS languages; the difference should be the method, not the standard. If Georgetown decides to classify Hindi and Urdu as separate languages, they cannot be taught and tested together.
Solving this small technicality would build the foundation of a serious future India studies program. Language is where neglect is most damaging because it determines what kinds of knowledge count. By addressing this question, the SFS can address how people from the region think, speak and know.
If we want to be the torchbearer in global affairs education, we must study South Asia structurally and truly, reflecting its complexity and geopolitical importance.
SFS policy must align with its pedagogy. Either we study and test Hindustani languages as distinct languages or as one contiguous dialect. The SFS should not ask South Asian students to prove themselves by unlearning the worlds that made them multilingual. This is the first step to seriously studying South Asia.
Akshit Jain is a junior in the School of Foreign Service.
