The Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata is an autonomous research institute under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, based at Calcutta. It is devoted to Area Studies, with special reference to South Asia, Central Asia and West Asia, especially dealing with social, cultural, economic, political and administrative developments in Asia from the nineteenth century to the present. M.Phil. and Ph.D. level students of the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi are also associated with it. The institute is named after Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the nationalist leader and India's first Education Minister. The need for a research institute devoted to area studies, especially to the study of secular Islam in Asian countries was felt in the late 1980s, with few such institutes and universities existing in India at that time. The Governor of West Bengal, Professor Saiyid Nurul Hasan, took the main initiative in founding such an institute in Calcutta. It took a few years before such a plan could be fully implemented, and the foundation stone of the Institute was laid on a newly acquired plot off J.B.S.