The epilogue sketches, in broad brushstrokes, the afterlives of the Greater India discourse in the postcolonial period, with particular reference to the writings and politics of Jawaharlal Nehru, the academic realm, and the Hindu nationalist imagination. It examines how the Greater India imagination reconfigured Nehru’s understanding of India’s ancient past and future role in global politics. It also shows that the story of the ‘glorious’ spread of Indian culture became a canonized theme in post-independence nationalist historiography and was promulgated by influential historians including R.C. Majumdar and K.M. Panikkar. Yet although the ‘discovery’ of Greater India had opened a new window on the ancient past, it also marginalized histories of connection and entanglement, most notably pertaining to India’s Islamic traditions, that did not fit the master narrative that celebrated an expansive ancient India as Asia’s cultural and spiritual fount. Finally, the epilogue reflects on how the legacies of the Greater India movement are mobilized in contemporary India to bolster visions of Akhand Bharat and position India as a civilizational actor on the global plane.

This chapter examines the policy learning that has taken place during the process of piloting the per-capita funding formula and the school-board governance models in Kazakhstan. It draws on evidence from policy documents, secondary data sources and the primary data from collaborative research by the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education (NUGSE) and the University of Cambridge (2019–2020) and the NUGSE research project for 2021–2023 focused on country-wide implementation of per-capita school funding. The chapter describes the process of piloting this funding and documents how school principals perceive this new approach and the new mandated policy of appointing their boards of trustees. This research concludes that the piloting of the per-capita funding model and scaling up this reform affirm the importance of time and an ongoing policy evaluation for enabling policy learning and achieving improved policy outcomes. Hence, every phase of piloting this funding resulted in some new understanding of this model among school principals. In addition, they gained knowledge about the boards of trustees’ role in school improvement.

This chapter looks at how the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) departments aimed to modernise the NIS curriculum and provide a pilot for shaping the national reform of the whole school system. The chapter also includes a critical self-reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the reform process and learnings since. This includes reactions to the changes in civil society.

This chapter examines the goals and activities of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society (GIS). Building on Kalidas Nag and P.C. Bagchi’s study-sojourn in Paris and research trips to Leiden, the GIS became, in the mid-1920s, the South Asian node in the transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. The GIS set new terms for the writing of Indian history and popularized the notion of India as Asia’s civilizational fount and cultural linchpin, not only in Bengal but across the subcontinent. The Greater India movement endorsed a pedagogical mission to rectify the ‘splendid isolation’ myth, an important trope in British colonial histories of the subcontinent, and postulated India as a shaper of world history no less than the West and a prominent trading power, colonizer and civilizer in the Asian sphere. When the European powers gradually started losing grip on their colonies, the notion of ‘Greater India’ allowed Indian intellectuals to imagine an empire of their own. Although it was located in the distant past, it served the purposes of the present and the research paradigm of Greater India energized, in the Indian context, anti-colonial and nationalist agendas.

This chapter presents results of the local implementation of the Renewed Content of Education (RCE) in schools in one large urban city. In line with the focus of Part III, the authors discuss how educational policy translates through the system via regional authorities to schools, teachers, parents and students in the city. They draw on data collected in three mainstream, non-selective schools located in different districts of the city. These schools varied in terms of their numbers of pupils, and each school’s developmental history, students, parents and community composition. The main research instruments used for data collection were semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with school principals, vice-principals, teachers, parents and students. The key purpose was to gain participants’ perspectives on the value of the RCE and their judgements and reaction to the educational innovations in their schools. The authors discuss the role of administrative support and collaboration and some unique features of the implementation process, such as work in clusters of schools and how this and other strategies fostered the implementation of these educational innovations.

In Chapter 5, we discuss the processing components that underlie the perspective-taking analogy that we articulated in Chapter 2. This analysis makes it clear that the retrieval of personal knowledge and experience is critical, and we review some of what is known about episodic retrieval and how it can be used in this context. In forming an analogy, one must be able to identify how elements of the story world are related to corresponding elements in one’s own experience. To understand this process, we discuss how readers must construct similarity relations. Finally, we discuss the mechanics of analogy formation per se and describe the notion of a structural mapping between the reader and the character that underlies the perspective-taking analogy. We close out Chapter 5 with a discussion of perspective-taking dynamics. This includes an illustration of how perspective taking can be driven by the events of the story world or evaluations of the character. As we make clear, perspective taking is an ongoing process that can unfold in a variety of ways over the course of reading a narrative.

This chapter zooms in on the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century quest to find India in Southeast Asia. Following a brief discussion of early European cartographic labels that anticipated the Greater India concept, the chapter examines the oeuvres of pioneering figures who energized the quest for the ancient past in Java/Cambodia, including the British amateur scholars-cum-administrators Stamford Raffles, Colin Mackenzie and John Crawfurd, the architectural historian James Fergusson, and the French explorers Henri Mouhot and Louis Delaporte. The early study of the Hindu-Buddhist templescapes of Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan was characterized by a strong Indocentric approach which postulated an ‘Indic’ Golden Age of cultural and artistic sophistication. This argument denied or downplayed Javanese and Khmer artistic agency and fed into a broader civilizational critique which framed the remainder of Javanese/Khmer history as a long story of decline, and the departure from classical ‘Indic’ standards as artistic degeneration.

Visions of Greater India offered a wide-ranging study of the overlapping scholarly and nationalist quest for the legacies of ancient Indian cultural agency in different geographies from the late eighteenth century onwards, and showed that research on the Indian cultural factor in the Far East was often informed by overt assertions or subtle assumptions of Indian civilizational superiority and exceptionalism. This book foregrounded a new generation of Indian intellectuals whose formative study experiences at the Sorbonne in Paris, research trips to the Kern Institute in Leiden, and travels across Asia culminated in the Greater India movement during the mid-1920s. It reconstructed how Calcutta became the South Asian node in a transimperial knowledge network that synchronized the research agendas of the Greater India Society, Indological clusters in Paris and Leiden, the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies in Batavia, and L’École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi. But Greater India was more than a transimperial research paradigm that influenced the framing and interpretation of cultural heritage from the Silk Roads to Central Java.

An Indocentric lens shaped the early interpretation of the cultural heritage of Chinese Turkestan at sites such as Khotan and Dunhuang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Buddhist studies, the discovery of Gandhara, and the German, French and Raj-sponsored archaeological explorations along the ancient Silk Roads opened a new perspective on the spread of Indic art, culture and religions beyond the Himalayas. The recovery of this Buddhist past, and the art historical interpretation of the finds, were closely linked to debates on Gandhara’s cultural heritage and the importance of the ‘Greek factor’ in Indic/Asiatic art, a question which preoccupied Indian and European experts such as the French art historian Alfred Foucher. This chapter explains how ‘Indic’ gradually replaced ‘Greek’ as the superior classicism and civilizing impulse traced in Central Asia and shows how Aurel Stein’s notion of ‘Serindia’ was incorporated in the interwar Greater India imagination. GIS-members reframed the Far Eastern odyssey of Buddhist doctrine and art as a glorious saga of Indian civilizational diffusion, and a crucial chapter in the formation of an ancient Indian cultural empire.

This chapter offers insights into the policy and practice of science education in English in Kazakhstan. Science education is currently seen as synonymous with education in English through the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, but this position has evolved over time as the policy has expanded across schools. Previous studies in Kazakhstan have found that teachers hold positive attitudes towards teaching science in English but experience practical challenges in teaching methods and linguistic resources. To better understand these challenges, a case study of science teachers was conducted jointly by the University of Cambridge and the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education (NUGSE) in 2019. Observations were conducted and evaluated using a modified Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP). The data indicate a dearth of innovation and transformation of STEM education, and of application of CLIL pedagogies. Overall, these findings seem to point to the need for sustained professional development that lasts over an extended time so that teachers can understand how to implement STEM education reform efforts and CLIL pedagogy.

Chapter 7 provides a rationale and description of the main transformation processes in the content and standards for assessment of student learning achievements in Kazakhstan introduced within the Renewed Content of Education. Revision of assessment is a complex process that requires consistency with the socio-cultural context and well-structured communication to achieve its credibility. The presented assessment framework was intended to develop the internal structure and content of assessment based on criteria that could be reflected in improving learning outcomes, reducing disparity and building a sustainable culture of interaction based on transparent assessment mechanisms. As with any system, the assessment system depended on the integrity of its consideration and the interrelatedness of teachers’ actions in each classroom. Despite facing a problem of implementation complexity in the initial stages, the teaching community coped with the rethinking of the traditional approach and showed a willingness to develop its own methodological potential in assessment, which made it possible to expand the understanding and involvement of students, parents, politicians and society.

This chapter is an introduction to the research and writing undertaken by those who have researched the reshaping of the education system. It begins by giving a recent history of the country and particularly the disruptive events of 2022. The argument is that Kazakhstan is at a pivotal moment in its culture and development as an independent, post-Soviet state. The introduction also outlines the key aspects of the education system, previous research by this team plus the major themes and structure of the book.

“Possibilities” explores contingency in history by following Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino athletes and physical educators on their parallel journeys to Springfield College in the 1920s. Over the course of the decade, some of the leading figures in athletics from the Philippines and China, such as Regino Ylanan and John Mo, studied at the famous center for physical education research in the United States. When they returned to their respective home countries, they moved into positions of power and influence in their respective fields, serving at leading universities and publishing articles and monographs on athletics and kinesiology. They also continued to engage with the Far Eastern Championship Games, serving as coaches and organizers. This chapter shows how Filipino and Chinese educators sought to expand their expertise and help lead their respective nations toward a more prosperous future. In so doing, it hints at the possibility that existed for deeper and longer-lasting collaborations between people from the two polities. This chapter heightens the drama of the final chapter, which traces the moment when many Springfield Alumni gathered in Manila in 1934 to coach teams for the tenth and final Far Eastern Championship Games and to decide the fate of future competitions.