This presentation focuses on South Asian involvement in Arab affairs after 1947 by examining how Indian and Pakistani intellectuals approached their neighbors to the west in their travels, polemics, and scholarship. I narrate how an anti-colonial and Arabophile cadre of South Asian scholars was dispersed and conscripted into competing national projects after the subcontinent’s partition. Examining the intellectual activity and institutional itineraries of intellectuals working in government and universities, I determine the different political positions and points of emphasis, as well as the shared networks of prestige and patronage, between “West Asian Studies” and its American counterpart, “Middle Eastern Studies.” This scholarly arrangement, distinct from centuries of Arabo-Islamic learning on the subcontinent and part of the global invention of area studies, has received little critical attention. The formation of West Asian Studies, inextricable from the rise of non-alignment and competing visions of unity and liberation in South Asia, represents a valuable site from which to study the intellectual history of purportedly post-colonial politics. In addition to the memoirs of academics and scholar-diplomats, the archives of international institutions like UNESCO, the records of American foundations like those of Ford and Rockefeller, this presentation also draws on the papers and publications of South Asian institutions of political and academic power like the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Aligarh Muslim University’s Centre for West Asian Studies, and Delhi’s Institute for Afro-Asian and World Affairs.