2017-2018
GATEWAY COURSES
HIS-101 | European History from Renaissance to Revolution
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Spring, annually)
HIS-201 | Ancient India
Nayanjot Lahiri
(Monsoon annually; was Kelly HIS 201 in Monsoon 2015; till the academic year 2017-2018)
HIS-202 | Medieval India
Pratyay Nath
(Monsoon annually; was Mukherjee HIS 202 in Monsoon 2015; till the academic year 2017-2018)
HIS-203 | Modern India
Mahesh Rangarajan/ Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Spring annually; was HIS-201 Spring 2016; till the academic year 2017-2018)
CRITICIAL THINKING SEMINAR
CT 218 | Animal Histories
Mahesh Rangarajan
(Cross-listed with Environmental Studies in Monsoon 2016; Monsoon 2017; cross-listed with Environmental Studies and History in Monsoon 2018)
CT 212 | Critical Concepts in Islam
Muhammad Ali Khan
(Monsoon 2016; Monsoon 2017, Monsoon 2019)
CTS-223 | The Disputed Meanings of Human
Gwen Kelly
(Monsoon 2017; will not be offered again)
Through this course we trace the intellectual history of anthropology, archaeology and history, from Ancient Greece, and Rome, the Medieval Islamic world, through the European Enlightenment, Colonialism, and through the decolonization movements of the 20th century. We will consider the ways in which these disciplines are and have been intertwined, even at points indistinguishable from each other, and how they ultimately developed their distinctive disciplinary identities. We will build an understanding of what it has meant, and what it means now, to think critically through these disciplines, and about the distinctive genres of writing and argumentation that each one has developed. We will work to develop skills of writing and thinking through a study of the history of writing and thinking through these disciplines.
CT-111 | History, Novel and Cinema
Aparna Vaidik
(Spring 2016; Monsoon 2017; cross-listed as 200-Level History Elective in Spring 2018, Spring 2019)
CT-128 | History, Memory, Memorialization
Nayanjot Lahiri
(previously titled ‘History and Memory across Asia’; cross-listed as 200-level History Elective in Spring 2017, Spring 2018)
CT-143 | Thinking through Buddhism
Sanjukta Datta
(Cross-listed as 300-Level History Elective in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
Buddhism, the fourth largest religion in the world today, had its origin essentially as a renunciatory tradition with a strong message of non-violence in the mid Gangetic plains of north India in the 6th-5th century BCE. This Critical Thinking Seminar engages with important features of Buddhism’s remarkable transformations in different parts of Asia across time. Some of the themes which will be explored include memorialization of the Buddha in literature, visual and plastic arts, the perception of the doctrine by distinct social categories at specific points across time and space, the enduring legacy of nineteenth century Western academic understanding of ancient Buddhism, and the diverse manifestations of Buddhism in the modern world, which include the rather surprising involvement of Buddhist monks in political violence.
READING COURSES
HIS-302 | Reading Archaeology
Sanjukta Datta
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2018, offered every Monsoon)
This course, which is concerned with the study of the material remains of the past, is divided into three sections. The first investigates the methods employed by archaeologists to obtain data and analyze the available data to reconstruct the human past. The second traces the history of the discipline, taking into account the use of archaeological theory. The third concludes with a review of archaeology in practice using three case studies: first, the discovery of the ancient Roman town of Pompeii, second, the monastic experience of nuns in medieval England, and third, the development of Anglo-American culture in North America from the seventeenth century onwards. References from Indian archaeology will be discussed in the first two sections of the course.
HIS-301 | Reading History
Aparna Vaidik
(Spring 2016, Spring 2018, offered every Spring)
ELECTIVES
200 LEVEL
HIS-204 | Gender, War, History
Pratyay Nath
(cross-listed with Political Science and Sociology in Summer 2018)
At first sight, war may appear to be an exclusively masculine domain. But how far is such an impression historically correct? How have women contributed to war-making and anti-war activism over human history? Why has war traditionally acted as a site for states and societies to define gender roles? Why do armies rape? What kind of space do armies give to carnal desire and to various forms of sexualities? These are some of the questions this course addresses. We explore six broad themes in six weeks. We begin by unraveling the role women played in warfare in ancient and medieval times. In the next week, we continue to study the role of women in war-making through the early modern and modern era, right up to the twentieth century. In the third and fourth weeks, we discover how various societies use war to define specific gender roles for men and women respectively. After this, we will learn about women’s role in anti-war activism and the value of women’s war-memoirs. In the final week, we will explore issues of desire, love, and sexuality in the context of warring armies. By the end of the six weeks, the course will have imparted a sound understanding of the inter-relationship among warfare, gender, and human history.
300 LEVEL
HIS 313 | Love and Laughter in Antiquity
Nayanjot Lahiri
(Monsoon 2017 and Monsoon 2019)
What made the Romans laugh? Did the ancient Chinese enjoy being single? How did love and sexuality negotiate caste and class in India? How are ancient jokes different from modern ones? This course explores such issues in order to understand how we might write a history of love and laughter, including how the meanings attached to them changed over time.
HIS 314 | Kipling’s India: Colonialism and Culture
Aparna Vaidik
(Monsoon 2017)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the English author was born in Bombay and is best known for his works The Jungle Book and Kim. Distinguished by their literary brilliance, Kipling’s works were unequivocally a metaphor for the age he lived in. This course will use Kipling as a doorway to enter the social and cultural world of nineteenth and twentieth century British India. It will explore the different ways in which the colonizer and the colonized engaged with the ‘Other’ and, in doing so, reconstituted each other. This cultural dialogue was evident, as the students will discover, in the way colonialism sought to colonize the mind, body, history, culture, geography and the aesthetic sensibilities of the people of Empire, and also the way it reconfigured the British sense of nationhood. The course will examine these themes in depth to bring to fore the ‘experience’ of the Raj – what it meant to be a colonizer and to be colonized.
The course will begin with theoretical readings on history of colonialism and culture. The weekly readings will be organized thematically around various different cultural themes – time, space, education, childhood, food, clothing, sports, masculinity, scientific knowledge and religious traditions. The students will also be introduced to different kinds of primary sources – photographs, paintings, cartoons, coins, speeches, sound recordings, and cinema.
Note: This is not a 'literature' course that undertakes literary criticism of Kipling’s works. It is a course on history of colonial culture. However, students should come prepared to read intensively.
HIS 311 | Age of Empires: A Global History of Early Modern Imperialism
Pratyay Nath
(Monsoon 2017 and Monsoon 2019)
Early modern empires were indeed strange milieux. In West Asia, the Muslim Ottoman Sultans went about calling themselves the new Caesars of Rome after conquering Constantinople. The Qing emperors of China converted their routine official tours across their realms into spectacular theatrical performances, memorialised in intriguing verses and paintings. The Mughal padshahs decided to boost their imperial ego by standing on globes and sitting on hour-glasses in their own portraits. In Iran, Shah Ismail Safavi, a Sufi sheikh, founded an imperial dynasty and oversaw his soldiers practice ritual cannibalism against his adversaries as an act of loyalty. European sovereigns who upheld the liberal and humanist ideals of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment at home had little qualms engaging in rampant slavery, genocide, and war in their overseas acquisitions. Meanwhile, the world around these empires was changing very fast, thanks to the dissemination of new technologies, the exploration of seas and lands, the emergence of the first truly global commercial networks, the advent of the Little Ice Age, the exchange of flora and fauna between the Old and New Worlds, massive population dislocations, and the spread of millennial ideas about the imminent end of the world and the impending arrival of the mahdi. The present course studies this fascinating global history of early modern empires (c.1500–c.1800) using diverse categories like mobility, gender, slavery, environment, warfare, cartography, gift-giving, textual regimes, visual cultures, frontiers, ideology, and space.
HIS 312 | History of Political Thought: Karl Marx
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Cross-listed with Political Science in Monsoon 2017, Monsoon 2018, Monsoon 2019)
This course seeks to introduce students to the political ideas of Karl Marx through his texts ranging from his early writings to his last letter to Vera Zasulich on Russia. It will look at Marx's method as well as the conclusions he arrived at and then occasionally revised. This will be a reading intensive course.
HIS-316 | Twentieth-Century Wars and the Politics of Representation
Pratyay Nath
(Spring 2018, cross-listed with Political Science, Sociology, and English)
Throughout the twentieth century, increasingly sophisticated technologies of war and organized violence brought death, devastation and ruin to millions of humans and animals across the globe. Interestingly, this period also saw the emergence of the most vivid and creative depictions of these wars in diverse cultural artifacts. How did the depiction of gender roles in posters differ between the two world wars? How have graphic novelists chosen to represent the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Balkan wars? Why have some of the most violent wars inspired the funniest television programmes? How have Korean poets negotiated an almost constant state of war and the tragedy of a divided nation? This course unravels the politics of representing war through hands-on study of posters, caricatures, movies, graphic novels, music, television, literature, museums and memoirs.
400 LEVEL
HIS-403 | State, Society and Ecology in South Asia, 1800-2000
Mahesh Rangarajan
(Spring 2017, Spring 2018)
HIS-406 | Battles over Nature: Towards a Global History of the Environment
Mahesh Rangarajan
(Cross-listed with Environmental Studies in Monsoon 2017)
A global environmental history poses a challenge even at a conceptual let alone in terms of where and how to draw the line around what to study. The paper focuses on state making, science and the interactions that shaped and were in turn affected by the natural world. Its main focus is on the age of European empire but it draws on the US, and on African and Asian histories of nature and peoples. The attempt will be to pick and unpack key themes that relate nature to history and the pursuit of power to ecological outcomes and processes. (B-year, repeatable)
HIS-405 | Gandhi and the Practice of Non-Violence in India
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Cross-listed with Political Science in Monsoon 2017)
This course invites students to study Gandhi's ideas of nonviolence and how he used these ideas for mass mobilization. It also looks at the reception and the implication of these ideas. The aim is to trace the process of interaction between ideas and their translation into action. (B-year, repeatable).
HIS-404 | A Royal Performance: Kingship and Political Culture in South Asia, 1000-1700
Pratyay Nath
(cross-listed with Political Science in Spring 2018)
How has the icon and legend of Prithviraj Chauhan shaped Rajput political imagination over the centuries? How did Islamic political theorists justify the peaceful co-existence of Muslim sultanates with vast numbers of non-Muslims in South Asia? Why did the kings of Vijayanagar call themselves ‘sultans’ and wear Arabic robes and Turkish hats? How did the Mughal emperors claim the status of world conquerors and Islamic saints at the same time? Why did the Turkish invaders of the 12th century build improvised mosques using remnants of the same temples they had just demolished? These are some of the questions that the present course grapples with. It unravels how, throughout the medieval and early modern times, kings and emperors of South Asia vied constantly with each other for greatness and fame. In the process, they turned their courts into spectacular public sites for imagining, appropriating, articulating, and contesting various meanings and ideals of kingship and sovereignty. This course uncovers this rich history through the most recent publications of the field. It also offers students a first-hand experience of working with primary historical documents and texts produced by these royal courts as well as those who visited and observed them.
HIS-413/HIS-4801 | Museums in South Asia: History and Politics
Kanika Singh
(Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
This course offers a social history of the institution of the museum in South Asia, and critically examines the politics of representation through it. Here, museums are considered as a tool of cultural and political domination through knowledge production and the creation of authoritative pasts. We explore the history of museums in the context of colonial rule, the rise of independent nation-states, and the heritage and identity politics of contemporary South Asia. How did museums emerge in South Asia? What are the different museum forms in the region? Who is making them, why and when? What is their notion of heritage and whose heritage do they represent? A history of museums in South Asia is especially interesting as the region has a history, simultaneously, of a shared culture and of competing interests among its constituting national and social groups. We discuss examples of museums from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and examine the dynamic ways in which politics, identity, religion, memory, history and heritage interact in the institution of the museum.
INDEPENDENT STUDY MODULES
HIS-399-6 | War and Empire in Central Asia, 1000-1800
Pratyay Nath
(Monsoon 2017)
Throughout history, Central Asian nomadic warriors have been feared by sedentary states as the most brutal and invincible conquerors. In the fifth century CE, Attila led the Huns to ravage all of Europe and hasten the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. Around the turn of the first millennium CE, Turkish dynasties like the Ghaznavids and the Saljuqs took it upon themselves to carry forward the mantle of territorial conquests under the banner of Islam. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols under Chinghiz Khan and his descendants ruled one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, embracing all of Central Asia, China, Iran, and West Asia. In the early modern times, Central Asian (post-) nomadic warrior groups – the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Uzbegs, and the Manchus – founded some of the richest and strongest empires of the world. The cultural impact of these nomadic conquests can be gauged by the fact that the Turkish term ordo, meaning the mobile military camp of nomadic warriors, gave birth to the pejorative word horde in Western Europe as well as the name of a major South Asian language - urdu. The present course unravels this rich history of war and conquest in and around Central Asia since the Turkish moment at the beginning of the second millennium CE till the eve of the imperialist race among Russia, Britain, and China to conquer Central Asia in the nineteenth century.
HIS-399-3 | History and Post-Colonial Theory
Aparna Vaidik
(Spring 2018)
HIS-399-8 | Reading the Bhagavad Gita
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Spring 2018)
HIS-399-9 | War, State, and Society in Early Modern Europe
Pratyay Nath
(Summer 2018)
The present course is an intensive exploration of the realm of war in early modern Europe. We begin by charting the changes that engulfed various modes of European warfare – battles, sieges, and naval engagements – owing to the introduction and proliferation of different types of gunpowder weaponry. Next, the course will unravel the various facets of the Military Revolution Debate by engaging with the work of the historians who have made significant contributions to the field. Following this, we will study the nature of changes in military logistics that transpired to support the waging of war using new technologies and strategies. We will then investigate how the new methods of warfare contributed to the emergence of nation-states in different parts of Europe. Next, the course will map the changing dynamics of military culture and the relationship between war and the larger society. Finally, we will understand the military relationship of European powers with some of their imperial neighbours. We close by investigating the role of military factors in the West’s eventual conquest and colonisation of the Rest. Through this intense engagement with older classics as well as state of the art literature on the subject over six weeks, the course will provide a sound understanding of the history of early modern Europe through the lens of war.
CROSS LISTED COURSES FROM OTHER DEPARTMENTS
HIS-207/IR-207 | Diplomacy and Statecraft in South Asia
Rudra Chaudhuri
(Spring 2018; IR course cross-listed with History)
This course examines the history and practice of diplomacy and statecraft in and across South Asia. It is intended to provide students with both conceptual and historical frames of analysis, allowing them to develop an informed understanding of the regional and international politics of South Asian (including Afghanistan) states. The course will introduce students to primary archival sources with the view to analyse and re-visit the stated and largely accepted diplomatic and international histories of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It also situates other states in in the subcontinent within larger thematic arguments around civil-military relations, intelligence, maritime security and the ‘Commons’. Further, whilst Dr. Rudra Chaudhuri leads the course, it will also introduce students to practitioners (such as journalists, former Foreign Service Officers and intelligence chiefs) for a well-versed understanding of how policy works in practice. Other parts of the course will be taught using eclectic pedagogic methods – through workshops, and with the help of audio (podcasts) and visual (movies and documentaries) aids.
HIS-317/POL-216 | History of Revolutions
Muhammad Ali Khan
(Spring 2018; Political Science course cross-listed with History)
Students will be introduced to the concept of revolution as a political idea. The course will seek to unpack the political thought and historical context of revolutions as well as outline their origins, developments and outcomes. This will help in answering key questions about this often used but widely misunderstood word. Starting with the American Revolution we will discuss the French, Russian, Chinese and Iranian revolutions through a reading of some primary texts of the works of major figures. In addition to this background reading will also be given in order to set out the context.
HIS-410/VA-202 | Understanding Art
Janice Erica Pariat
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2018; Visual Arts course cross-listed with History)
This course explores the definitions of art developed by societies from the ancient Greeks to our globalised world. ‘What is art?’ is the question posed as we consider objects and activities in settings both remote in time and place and present around us. It attempts to build a critical language for classifying and evaluating a broad range of visual forms of expression. The disciplines of aesthetics, hermeneutics, iconography and iconology are explored in order to find an approach that works across the cultures East and West. The course looks into connoisseurship, taste and the role of the institutions of the art world.
HIS-407/VA-306 | Histories of South Asian Art: From the Earliest Times to the Present
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2019; Visual Arts course cross-listed with History)
What is Art and who is it meant for? What is specifically South Asian about South Asian Art? What does it mean to think of South Asia and Art as analytical categories? Did South Asian Art always exist? Or were historical processes involved in the making of the field? What are the objects of South Asian Art? Where do we locate the “genesis” of art in South Asia? Did art forms in South Asia emerge in a zone of cultural and social isolation? Or can we trace trajectories of trans-regional contacts, encounters, and exchanges as central to the shaping of the field of South Asian Art? What is space of tradition and innovation in the visual arts of South Asia? Did arts of South Asia “influence” artistic practices in other 2 regions? How did artists at different points in history think about the region we identify as South Asia? Seeking to address some of these questions, this course examines aspects of the visual arts of South Asia from its earliest traces in cave paintings and stone implements to sculpture,painting, illustrated manuscripts, calligraphy, and architecture. The course follows a chronological scale, from pre-history to c. 1950. The vast geographical as well as the temporal span of the field will restrict the course from delivering an encyclopaedic survey. Instead it will prioritize intensive analysis of selected themes. Rather than placing the teleology of South Asian “art” solely in the context of changing dynastic histories, the course takes up specific themes in art across a range of objects, artefacts, archaeological sites, built spaces, religious and political symbols, and institutions of art pedagogy and exhibitions. In the process we address the questions of image, icon, and representations of body, landscape, portraiture in the context of social and ideological changes, aesthetic turns, shifting patrons and markets, and introduction of new material media. The course will probe both ‘South Asia’ and ‘South Asian Art’ as stable (art) historical categories and map the new methodologies and vocabularies employed by art historians. Class lectures and discussions will be supplemented by visits to museum and art gallery which will enable us to study the original works of art and explore the visual dynamics of organization of exhibition spaces. There are two museum/ gallery visits planned for the entire course – one to the National Museum and another to the National Gallery of Modern Art.