Sir Philip Hartog: Remembering SOAS’s forgotten founder

By Angel Lambo|February 28, 2017|Uncategorized|55 comments

Sir Philip Joseph Hartog (1864 – 1947) has now become the largely forgotten founder of SOAS after he campaigned for the parliamentary committee to consider starting an Oriental school in London. Even in the face of cynicism from Oxbridge wigs and crippling underfunding Hartog still managed to see the future of the school beyond being a post-war language training arm of the University of London. While the government was only

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Who was SOAS’s first graduate?

By Angel Lambo|February 21, 2017|1910s|2 comments

K A Subranamia Iyer was one of the SOAS’s first students, enrolling on the Sanskrit and Pali programme in 1917 at the then School of Oriental Studies. Born in 1896, he matriculated in 1912 and by the time he came to the School had already studied in Paris and London. He was the School’s first graduate, receiving in 1920 the Diploma in Sanskrit for ‘research in Indology.’ He returned to

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