UCL and India: A historic relationship

The rich heritage of collaboration between UCL and India serves as the cornerstone for our activities, rooted in principles of mutual respect, equitable partnerships and trust. This profound history is exemplified by numerous remarkable milestones and notable figures. 

Connections dating back to the 1800s

Indian languages were integral to UCL's curriculum from its early days. Dadabhai Naoroji, famously known as the ‘Grand Old Man of India’, taught Gujarati at UCL from 1856 to 1865.

He also made history as the first Indian UK Member of Parliament, elected to London’s Finsbury seat in 1892.

One of the only monuments commemorating his legacy can be found on the exterior wall of Finsbury Town Hall, not far from UCL's main campus. 

Sir William Ramsay, UCL Professor of Inorganic Chemistry between 1887 and 1913, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904. In 1900, he visited India on a trip sponsored by Jamsetji Tata to consult on the formation of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru.

Ramsay conducted extensive research and the resulting report was instrumental to the choice of location for the IISc.

His co-workers, Professor Morris William Travers FRS, and then Sir Alfred Gibbs Bourne, both UCL alumni, went on to become the institute’s first and second directors.

Augustus De Morgan was born in Madurai, India. At just 22, he became UCL’s first Professor of Mathematics, shortly after the university’s formation. Today, the headquarters of the London Mathematical Society is called De Morgan House and the student society of UCL’s Mathematics Department is called the Augustus De Morgan Society.

Professor Otto Koenigsberger, UCL’s first Professor of Planning, was Director for the Indian Ministry of Housing from 1948 to 1951 in the Nehru Government. He was instrumental in designing settlements for refugees displaced by partition and migrating from Pakistan. He also crafted the town plan for Bhubaneswar in Odisha and, guided by J.R.D. Tata’s vision, contributed to the layout of Jamshedpur in Jharkhand.

Notable scholars

UCL counts a number of notable Indian figures among its alumni, including the acclaimed Bengali poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore, who studied law at UCL in 1880.

Romesh Chunder Dutt was another UCL student and later lecturer of Indian History who completed a seminal piece of work on economic nationalism. He also translated the Ramayana and Mahabharata. He served as President of the Indian National Congress in 1899.

Baroness Shreela Flather is a British-Indian politician, teacher and life peer. Baroness Flather studied Law at UCL in 1955 and was elevated to the peerage as Baroness Flather, of Windsor and Maidenhead in the Royal County of Berkshire, in June 1990.

This made her the first Asian woman to receive this honour in Britain.

S. R. Ranganathan, considered the father of library science, documentation and information science in India, came to UCL in 1925. It was here that he found inspiration for some of his notable contributions to the field, including the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification, which is still widely used in libraries today.

Today, UCL continues to seek collaborators and students from India to enrich its diverse community.

Featured image

Bust of poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore in Gordon Square

Further links

Learn more about UCL's connections with India at the links below. 

• UCL and India 
• UCL and South Asia