In response to Walter Russel Mead's "The Delicate US Task of Courting India" (July 31, 2023), Washington has indeed funded "the study of Indian languages and history" in the past. However, that particular effort has helped create a gap between the academic understanding of India and the Indian reality than bridge one.
In response to the need to understand the world, including India, the US set up Centers for South Asian Studies. In the beginning, most U.S. Centers for South Asian Studies were primarily run by the intelligence wing of the US, and many South Asian scholars were spies of the US government.
The first department of South Asian Regional studies became operational in the US at the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. The Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations funded this department that offered geography, linguistics, Hindustani, sociology courses, etc. Within the first two years, the department boasted undergraduate and graduate programs and had an affiliated faculty of 21 academics.
The person behind the establishment of the Department at Penn was W Norman Brown. The son of a missionary father, Brown spent some time in India as a child, where his father was doing his missionary work. Due to his 'familiarity' with India, Brown was tasked with collecting information and preparing reports on various aspects of contemporary India. Brown was an Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA) operative.
On the other hand, until 1991, according to Nicholas Dirks (Chanceller, UC Berkley), the most significant percentage of active South Asia academics were in religion and philosophy. Many of these scholars would do missionary work in India.
These South Asia departments were primarily an American affair. It wasn't until the 1990s that more Indian scholars were hired in these departments. Even among Indians, those who came after the 1990s probably knew that pursuing a pro-India stance won't get them anywhere.
Many of the experts and scholars of our tax-funded enterprise were created with a Pakistan focus owing to the Cold War legacy, and they could never give up that legacy for understanding India.