As recent media reports suggest, a battle for control is underway at the venerable Asiatic Society of Mumbai. Its outcome is yet to be seen. But this brief moment offers a rare opportunity to consider the significance of this 221-year-old institution.

James Mackintosh, a Scottish jurist and historian, founded it as a literary society at the beginning of the 1800s, imitating William Jones’s Asiatic Society of Bengal. Jones, a Sanskrit scholar and philologist, is considered to be the father of Oriental studies. Mumbai’s Asiatic Society similarly aimed at promoting useful knowledge, particularly connected with India.

Bringing the collections of the Medical and Literary Library, the Geographical and Anthropological societies of Bombay under its ambit and merging with the Royal Society of Great Britain and Ireland as its Bombay Branch in 1826, the Society emerged as a potent force in the city. Indians were admitted........

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