Studies in Italy on modern and contemporary India

Italy has a long and well developed tradition in the field of classical Indian studies. Unfortunately, the situation is starkly different as far as modern Indian studies are concerned.

Since the 1940s, however, a certain number of Italian scholars - mainly historians - have focussed their research interests on modern India. Since then, Italian studies on modern India have gone through three stages.
The first started in the 1940s and went on up to the mid-1960s.
It was dominated by the research and teaching work of Giorgio Borsa (of the University of Pavia), who criticized both the traditional eurocentric approach of the colonial historians and the nationalist and Marxist historiographies which had developed in Asia as a reaction to Western intellectual and political domination. He maintained that history of Asia had to be studied as history of the development of the modern world in Asia.