2015-2016

HIS-101 | European History from Renaissance to Revolution

Rudrangshu Mukherjee

(Spring, annually)

This is the first of the compulsory courses that is offered to students wanting to major in History. It introduces students to some of the major themes of modern themes of European history and to its historiography. Students will be expected to do a fair amount of reading of some complex texts and will be assessed on the basis of two essays.

HIS-201 | Ancient India

Nayanjot Lahiri

(Monsoon annually; was Kelly HIS 201 in Monsoon 2015; till the academic year 2017-2018)

This course aims to provide students with a sense of space, time and culture in ancient India. It looks at the prehistoric hunter-gatherers, the advent of food producing societies, the cultures of interconnected differences (from the Harappan Civilization and its neighbours to the historical world of cities and states), and the landscapes of empire till the end of the Gupta dynasty. Society and religion, art and architecture (and forms of patronage), women and their reintegration into the study of the ancient past, and the environment as a variable form part of the course so as to provide a rounded and balanced perspective of early India.

HIS-202 | Medieval India

Pratyay Nath

(Monsoon annually; was Mukherjee HIS 202 in Monsoon 2015; till the academic year 2017-2018)

Between the demise of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and the rise of British colonial power in the eighteenth, South Asia underwent momentous transformations. The alignments of merchant networks, the workings of princely power, the forms of popular devotion, the techniques of military engagement, the relationships between environment and societies, the workings of social hierarchies, the modes of cultural expression, the realm of technologies, and the geography of the world of knowledge – everything went through profound and multiple shifts. Contrary to the familiar association of the idea of the ‘medieval’ with isolation and decline, the rich history of South Asia during this long period was deeply shaped by its ceaseless and virile interactions with West, Central, and Southeast Asia as well as China, East Africa, and Western Europe. The present course unravels this complex history in its global context through the categories of politics, warfare, economy, society, culture, and religion.

HIS-203 | Modern India

Mahesh Rangarajan/ Rudrangshu Mukherjee

(Spring annually; was HIS-201 Spring 2016; till the academic year 2017-2018)

This course seeks to discuss some of the broad features of early British rule from the conquest of Bengal to the revolt of 1857. This will form the first part of the course. The post 1857 developments will be taught by Professor Mahesh Rangarajan. The second section of the Modern India course will take the story forward from the onset of Crown rule in 1858 to the early phase of the Indian Union till the early 1960s. The consolidation of imperial rule and the revolts against it each had long term consequences for ruler and ruled alike in a myriad ways, in socio-political, economic and cultural as much as strategic terms. Interweaving different strands of life and attention to regional dimensions can help illumine in many ways the India of today. Themes include the rise of new business groups, contested identities, the disparities between and across states and the challenges of crafting democracy in a climate of Cold War.

CT-203 | Historical Thinking

Aparna Vaidik

(Monsoon 2015)

This course introduces the students to the art and science of historical thinking. What does it mean to think and write like a historian? Historical thinking is a training in questioning what we know, challenging the world as it is presented to us and mastering the skill of drawing out connections between disparate events in the human past. The fact that History is an evidence-based field of knowledge distinguishes a historian from creative writers and philosophers. That is, it forces us to ask how do we know what we know; compels us to explain the connection between evidence and conclusion; and to differentiate between an assertion and an argument. In this course the students have an opportunity to conceptualize their own ‘historical-inquiry project’ where they will be choosing and refining a topic of personal and historical significance, digging deeply and critically into that topic, connecting their findings with broader themes, all the way to creatively sharing their conclusions in a public forum. The format of the course will be a series of conceptual lectures interspersed with lab work and discussion.

CT-112 | Environmental History

Mahesh Rangarajan

(Spring 2016, Spring 2017)

The course opens up themes in India’s rich ecological pasts. Animal-human relations and water conflicts, ethics and science, landscapes and their multiple meanings come together in a first look as we ask why we stand today vis a vis the human environment. The course ranges from Early to contemporary India and is designed to encourage a historical view while drawing in students of different disciplines. Forest rights and endangered species, state making and the forest, environmental movements and contested ideas of natural beauty are among the themes taken up.

CT-111 | History, Novel and Cinema

Aparna Vaidik

(Spring 2016; Monsoon 2017; cross-listed as 200-Level History Elective in Spring 2018, Spring 2019)

History, Historical Fiction and Historical Cinema are imaginative dialogues with the past. Each creates, retrieves and invents the past – a past that serendipitously seeps into the present. This course explores the intersections, dissimilarities and shared aspects of these different narrative genres that seek to convey the past for the present. The course material is woven around the conceptual and methodological issues that historians encounter while crafting their narratives – time, spatial imagination, memory and narrative distance; and the choices that a historian makes while mapping forgotten pasts, using personal testimonies as historical evidence, unearthing historical silences and taking ethical positions while writing histories of violence. Course material is divided into two parts. Part I consists of a piece of historical writing, a novel and a movie on each theme. We will read works of history alongside novelists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gillian Flynn, Edward Jones, Mahasweta Devi, Rigoberta Menchu and watch Inception, Rashomon, Hiroshima: My Love, Gangs of New York, The Reader and Motorcycle Diaries. Part II consists of analysis of different kinds of sources – oral, visual, institutional records and material objects that historians use to construct the past.

HIS-301 | Reading History

Aparna Vaidik

(Spring 2016, Spring 2018, offered every Spring)

This is a course in Philosophy of History – the philosophical bases for historical study, and Historiography – a review of the development of historical knowledge and the historical profession. It examines the different ways in which different schools of history have made sense of their discipline and of human past from eighteenth century to the present. The course begins with examining the Whig and the Positivist school of historical writing and traces the history of history-writing to the Marxist, Annales, New Historicist, Structuralists, post-structuralists, down to Narrativists, Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial and Postmodern writings. This course aims to familiarize the students with the essentials of the discipline of history.

HIS-302 | Reading Archaeology

Gwen Kelly

(Spring 2016, Spring 2017; will not be offered again)

Archaeology as a discipline is comprised of three things: data, the methods of obtaining that data, and theoretical frameworks and paradigms in which to interpret and understand the data, in order to create narratives of the past. In this course we will first explore the fundamental sources of data, along with the methods used to obtain and analyze the data. Using this basic understanding of the field, we will delve into multiple case studies including Ancient Egypt, the colonial Caribbean, South India, and others, in order to examine and critique the multiple theoretical frames that have been and can be used to interpret the past through archaeology.