The School was created on the suggestion of the then
Prime Minister and
Foreign Minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, that there was the need for an institution to help build a pool of academic experts on
international affairs and
area studies who could give an informed second opinion on India's relations with the world. The school was inaugurated on 1 October 1955 in the presence of
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and
Vice President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Though initially affiliated to the
University of Delhi, it was granted
deemed university status in 1961, and could independently grant degrees.
Centres The School had eleven departments of study. • International Politics and Organisation (including European studies) •
International law •
International economics •
South East Asian studies • West Asian studies •
American studies •
African studies • Commonwealth studies •
Russian studies Directors of the school The school's first director was Professor A. Appadorai, who served from 1955 to 1964. Several steps were taken by him to nurture this first effort of its kind. All students had to compulsorily attend a one-year pre-Ph.D course since they did not have a background in
International relations. The School's second Director was Prof.
M.S. Rajan and he served until the School was merged with the
JNU in 1970. The School building at 35, Feroze Shah Road was constructed during his tenure and inaugurated in 1968. Prof. Rajan also solicited fellowships from the governments of the various Indian states for financially disadvantaged students from those states, a practice that continues to this day.
Merger with Jawaharlal Nehru University The merger with
JNU was opposed by the staff and scholars of the School since it was seen to imposed on the school by the government. However, there was nothing much that could be done since the government held the financial purse strings and began to squeeze the school financially to persuade it to fall in line. Even prior to this action, the School had been in the middle of a controversy in Parliament with a parliamentary committee set up to look into various allegations, in response to an intensive campaign run by various vested interests. A controversy that followed the merger was the decision to bifurcate the library of the ISIS on the basis of ownership of books, documents and journals. The bifurcation was done in a bureaucratic style without regard to the wholeness of collections built up over a period of time, leading the last Director of the ISIS, Prof.
M.S. Rajan to describe it as "one of the tragedies that struck ICWA as well as ISIS". ==Accomplishments over 15 years==