Place · nationalist university · India
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi
Also known as BHU, BHU — Banaras Hindu University, Banaras Hindu University, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Madan Mohan Malaviya (1916), Varanasi
The 1916 Banaras Hindu University (BHU) at Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh — the university founded by Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861-1946), the Congress leader and Hindu nationalist educator, on the banks of the Ganga 7 kilometres south of the Kashi Vishvanath temple. BHU was the first modern Hindu-oriented university in India, with Sanskrit, Vedic, Dharmashastra and Ayurveda departments alongside modern science and engineering faculties. The 1,300-acre campus was donated by Kashi Naresh Prabhu Narain Singh. The Vishvanath temple on the BHU campus (completed 1966, exact replica of the destroyed Kashi Vishvanath) was built by Birla industrialists to compensate for the Aurangzeb-destroyed original. The 1916 founding followed Malaviya's 1902 Hindu University movement and 1904 BHU proposal, with Annie Besant and Rabindranath Tagore supporting. BHU became a central university in 1916.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.270, 82.991
Connections (2)
- Monastic foundationMadan Mohan Malaviya
Malaviya raised Banaras Hindu University by personal subscription over a decade, going to princes and to ordinary donors alike, and it opened in 1916. The insistence that Sanskrit learning and engineering belong in one institution is the argument the place was built to make. He is also credited with putting Satyameva Jayate, from the Mundaka Upanishad, into national use; it was adopted on the state emblem in 1950, four years after he died.
- Site withinKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi sits inside Kāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Banaras Hindu University”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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