The Hind Explorer Fellowship: Building a Generation of Cultural Practitioners
At a time when global education increasingly gravitates toward abstraction and standardization, the need for an India-rooted, place-based, and practice-driven model of learning has become urgent. In response, The Hind School launched the Hind Explorer – Cultural Fellowship — a selective three-month hybrid program designed to equip emerging practitioners with the tools to understand, engage with, and contribute meaningfully to India’s cultural and regional landscapes.
In its very first cycle, the Fellowship received over 450 applications for a cohort of just eight seats, affirming a growing demand for serious, grounded, and context-specific learning opportunities among India’s youth.
The Rationale: Why a Cultural Fellowship for India?
India is not a monolith. It is a civilizational continuum — complex, layered, and deeply rooted in lived experiences that often elude the frameworks of conventional academia. And yet, much of Indian higher education remains disconnected from its own soil: theoretical, examination-driven, and culturally dislocated.
The Hind Explorer Fellowship is a corrective step — a program that offers young thinkers, creators, and change agents the opportunity to:
Engage with real communities and cultural ecosystems,
Participate in field-based research and consulting,
Explore the everyday India that lies beyond textbooks and tourist circuits.
By combining immersive fieldwork, critical reflection, and collaborative projects, the Fellowship cultivates a new generation of learners capable of interpreting India from within — historically aware, regionally sensitive, and ethically grounded.
A Highly Selective, High-Impact Program
The inaugural response — with more than 450 applications for only 8 seats — reflects not only the program’s relevance but also the urgency of the questions it seeks to address:
How can India’s creative and intellectual capital be developed without losing cultural rootedness?
What does it mean to be a practitioner, policymaker, or storyteller who is of India, in India, and for India?
With an acceptance rate of less than 2%, the Hind Explorer Fellowship is among the most selective cultural fellowships in the country — and perhaps, one of the few that explicitly privileges India-centric epistemologies over global templates.
Looking Ahead: Building a New Vocabulary for Indian Education
This Fellowship is not a standalone initiative. It is part of a larger mission at The Hind School — to build the world’s first institution for Applied India Studies. Our belief is simple but radical:
India must be studied, understood, and reimagined on its own terms — by those who are willing to listen, learn, and lead from within.
As the inaugural cohort begins its journey, we are reminded that real education is not about the number of degrees one holds — but the depth of insight, responsibility, and imagination one brings to the world.
The Hind Explorer Fellowship is not just a program. It is a quiet, determined act of reclaiming India as a legitimate site of knowledge, meaning, and future-making.
