2019-2020
GATEWAY COURSES
HIS-101 | European History from Renaissance to Revolution
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Spring, annually)
HIS-216 | History of India I: From Prehistoric Beginnings to the Mauryan Empire
Nayanjot Lahiri
(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
HIS-217 | History of India II: From the Mauryan Empire to c. 1000 CE
Upinder Singh
(Monsoon annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
HIS-218 | History of India III: From c. 1000 CE to 1764 CE
Pratyay Nath
(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
HIS-219 | History of India IV: From 1764 CE to 1967 CE
Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Mahesh Rangarajan
(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
CRITICAL THINKING SEMINAR
CT 212 | Critical Concepts in Islam
Muhammad Ali Khan
(Monsoon 2016; Monsoon 2017, Monsoon 2019)
CT-143 | Thinking through Buddhism
Sanjukta Datta
(Cross-listed as 300-Level History Elective in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
READING COURSES
HIS-302 | Reading Archaeology
Sanjukta Datta
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2018, offered every Monsoon)
HIS-301 | Reading History
Aparna Vaidik
(Spring 2016, Spring 2018, offered every Spring)
ELECTIVES
200 LEVEL
HIS-2502 | Global Capitalism in the Long Twentieth Century
Srinath Raghavan
(Spring 2020, cross-listed with IR and Economics)
This course focuses on key moments in the history of global capitalism through the long twentieth century. Starting with the depression of the 1870s, we will chart the rise of globalization up to the First World War, its reconfiguration during and immediately after the war, the great depression and challenges to liberal democracy, the reordering of the global economy after the Second World War, the collapse of this order in the 1970s, the remarkable resurgence of globalization through to the financial crises of the past decade. The course situates this arc of the global economy within the broader international history of the 20th century as well as the history of ideas and policymaking paradigms such as the gold standard, neoliberalism, Keynesianism, monetary coordination, development, capital account liberalization, macroprudential regulation and so forth. By so doing, the course allows us to understand global capitalism as more than an economic phenomenon—as embedded in geopolitics and social conflicts, ideas and ideologies.
300 LEVEL
HIS 313 | Love and Laughter in Antiquity
Nayanjot Lahiri
(Monsoon 2017 and Monsoon 2019)
HIS-327 | Querying the Early Medieval
Sanjukta Dutta
(Spring 2019, 2020)
HIS-303 | Politics and Society in India, 1937-77
Mahesh Rangarajan
(Cross-listed with Political Science as POL 304-01 in Monsoon 2016 and Monsoon 2019)
HIS 311 | Age of Empires: A Global History of Early Modern Imperialism
Pratyay Nath
(Monsoon 2017 and Monsoon 2019)
HIS 312 | History of Political Thought: Karl Marx
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Cross-listed with Political Science in Monsoon 2017, Monsoon 2018, Monsoon 2019)
HIS-318 | Tarzan and Mowgli: A History of Colonial Culture
Aparna Vaidik
(Monsoon 2018 and Monsoon 2019)
HIS-333 | The World of War in South Asia, 1000-1800
Pratyay Nath
(Monsoon 2019, cross-listed with International Relations)
How did military techniques in battles, sieges, and naval engagements evolve in medieval and early modern South Asia? What was the role of the natural environment as well as various forms of human and animal labour in the conduct of military campaigns? What kind of political ideologies, gender dynamics, and representational mechanisms were entangled with processes of war-making? Who were the warrior ascetics and the armed peasants? Finally, what kind of changes in military techniques accompanied the fragmentation of the Mughal Empire into regional powers and the advent of the British colonial empire? These are some of the questions the present course addresses. It begins at the 11th century, with the warships of the Chola kings of South India invading Southeast Asia and the Turko-Afghan horse-warriors running over the great plains of North India. It closes at the end of the 18th century, with the British East India Company poised to become the dominant military power of the subcontinent. On the one hand, we will unravel the various dimensions of military matters in South Asia during this period. These include technology, tactics, strategy, fortification, logistics, and military personnel. On the other, we will explore the wider connections between war and society in this part of the world through the lens of gender, ideology, environment, representation, and culture.
HIS-334 | Nature and Nation
Mahesh Rangarajan
(Monsoon 2019, cross-listed with Environmental Studies)
The relationship between nature and nation is a paradox of our times. All nation states claim to an extent o have boundaries defined by nature and many claim a part of nature as symbol: a mountain, a tree, an animal, a river. When and why nature came to be contested as symbol and resource in the name of the nation is the subject of study. The conquest of nature has often been part of the process of consolidation of the state's control, in cases as diverse as the US with the conquest of the West and of Siberia by Russia. More recently, the harnessing of nature via plan or market has been critical to the rise or fall of nation states.
HIS-336 | Hinduism: Myth and Reality
Sanjukta Dutta
(Monsoon 2019)
HIS-337-1 | Mughal Art and Material Culture
Yashaswini Chandra
(Monsoon 2019, cross-listed with Visual Arts)
How did the Mughals see themselves and how were they seen? The course will examine the role of art and material culture in shaping Mughal sensibilities and realising its finer nuances. It will interrogate the material means through which the Mughal Empire presented itself and interacted with its Indian subjects as well as the wider world. Methodologically, the course will be taught through case and comparative studies based, conceptually, on four interlinked themes. First, was material culture used to mediate some of the dichotomies of the Mughal Empire? For example, architecture will be discussed in terms of male and female patronage, while dress will be seen as central to the transformation of the Mughal warrior into the courtly mirza. Second, how was material culture used to forge political alliances and diplomatic relations through the exchange of gifts and commodities? Khilats as well as items previously used by the emperors, portraits of himself gifted by Akbar are some examples of imperial presents signifying the emotional intensity of bonds with the nobility. Third, how did material culture reflect the Mughal worldview? Seeing themselves as ‘rulers of the world’, in name and spirit at least, the emperors enhanced their cosmopolitan experience of the world through the avid collection of European, Persian and Chinese commodities, curios and paintings. Fourth, did the enduring reputation of the Mughals for opulence, perpetuated by European travellers, reflect an institutionalisation of luxury? It seems to have became so crucial that it was the benchmark against which the empire’s decline was measured. Throughout the course, a conscious effort will be made to weave in aspects of craftsmanship, manufacture and circulation.
HIS-3209 | Ideas and Emotions in Ancient India
Upinder Singh
(Spring 2020, previously offered as a CT)
HIS-3504 | Islam in the Indian Ocean
Mahmood Kooria
(Spring 2020)
Islam is one of the widely followed religions in the Indian Ocean littoral, from East Africa to the Middle East, South Asia and Souheast Asia. Although the religion was known in the oceanic context before, its expansion coincided with the European age of exploration and the Jesuit missions across Asia and Africa. This seminar course will read some of the most important, recent and interesting literature on Islam in the Indian Ocean. Divided into 12 themes, it will cover a wide range of books across geographical, chronological, disciplinary and methodological divides. Each session will be divided into 6 parts to discuss a book, grouped as THOMAS, followed by presentations of a research idea by one student.
HIS-3505 | A Global History of Science
Kapil Raj
(Spring 2020, cross-listed with Biology and Physics)
Over the past century and a half, science has come to occupy a crucial role as the principal arbitrator in every aspect of human life — material, cultural, economic, political and social. It is indeed brandished today as the emblem of modernity. The history of modern science is thus indispensable to an understanding of the contemporary world. Although the processes through which it come to acquire this centrality were largely global, modern science has however until recently been widely associated with Europe and with a western framework of making sense of the relationship between man and nature. Through a critical review the evolution over the past century of approaches to the history of science and its changing relationship with the non-West, this course will introduce students to the new conceptual apparatus of the discipline. It will conclude with recent attempts by historians of science to restore the global nature of the construction of modern science. Owing to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject and a case-based approach, this course is ideally suited to students from both humanities and sciences.
HIS-3801 | Empire, Nation and Art: Histories from the Visual Image
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2020, cross-listed with Visual Arts)
HIS-3802 | Sites and Sights: Museums, Exhibitions and the Making of the Art
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2019, Spring 2020, cross-listed with Visual Arts)
400 LEVEL
HIS-413/HIS-4801 | Museums in South Asia: History and Politics
Kanika Singh
(Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
HIS-409 | Political Thought in the Age of Nationalism
Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan
(Monsoon 2019, cross-listed with Political Science)
This course will seek to explore notions of the state, nation, citizenship and other related concepts as they took root in 18th and 19th century Europe. It will then trace how these movements and ideas travelled to and took root in South Asia as well as in parts of the Middle East. This will allow students to not only understand the origins of today's 'dominant form of political representation'- the nation state-but will also give them an understanding of various nationalist and anti-colonial movements in the 19th century. Amongst others, the works of Herder, Fichte, Mazzini, de Tocqueville, Jamalludin Afghani, Tagore, Iqbal and Gandhi will be engaged with.
HIS-407 | Histories of South Asian Art: From the Earliest Times to the Present
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2019, cross-listed with Visual Arts)
HIS-4505 | Environment and Empire in the Early Modern World
Pratyay Nath
(Spring 2020, cross-listed with EVS)
How did whales shape the history of Tokugawa Japan? What kind of impact did the Little Ice Age have on early modern (1500-1800 CE) societies? How much of early modern imperialism was based on the harnessing and managing of natural resources? In what ways did European colonisers negotiate the unfamiliar environmental conditions of the Americas? These are some of the questions the present course grapples with. It is an advanced 400-level seminar course in global history. It is not a lecture course; instead, it is geared towards intensive collective reading of and discussion on important recent works on the relationship between environment and early modern empires. We will closely engage with twelve different monographs over the thirteen weeks of the course. We will begin with an overview of the various early modern empires and by discussing some of the framing issues of global environmental history during this period. As the course will progress, we will read books on Spain, the Netherlands, England, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, Muscovite Russia, Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and colonial America. In the process, we will delve into environmental issues related to climate, forest, fuel, frontier, animals, knowledge, disease, and so on. The main focus will be to understand how early modern imperialism emerged in close and constant negotiation with the environment of an expanding world.
HIS-4506 | A Global History of Law: Premodern Courts, Codes and Canons
Mahmood Kooria
(Spring 2020)
The history of global law in the premodern world, from 500 to 1500 CE. It questions state-centric view of the monopoly over law, and explores how and why judges, lawyers, rulers and jurists produced and circulated diverse legal systems from Africa to Asia and Europe. Themes include the philosophical basis of global law; development of different forms of legislation through canons and codes; emotions, senses and discriminations in courtrooms, practice of law, and scribal cultures.
HIS-4507 | History and Critical Theory
Neeladri Bhattacharya
(Spring 2020)
Historians have long been aware that writing history is not on unproblematic act of recording the past. The ‘critical turn’ from the 1970s has deepened this awareness of the complex nature of historical practice. It has persuaded historians to ask: what does it mean to enter the archive, mine the traces of the past, to record and represent, to narrate, to write a story based on evidence? This course will explore what this critical turn has meant to the writing of history, how it has forced historians to question earlier frames, and opened up new worlds of research. It will do so by focusing on a some of the major turns of thinking in the last 5 decades, and a set of crucial texts.
HIS-4508 | Why Global? Transnational Histories and Methods
Kapil Raj
(Spring 2020)
The construction of knowledge through processes of intercultural interaction; migrations; the administration of imperial spaces; scientific, technological and cultural transfers; the formation of globalised elites… — these are just a few examples of phenomena that traditional micro- or national historiographies are not tailored to confront. Based on case-studies, this course will present different historiographical approaches to transnational and global processes, their fields of applicability as well as their limitations: diffusionism, comparativism, connected, entangled, circulatory and cross-roads history, to name some of these approaches. This course is ideally suited to students in the humanities and social sciences.
INDEPENDENT STUDY MODULES
HIS-399-11-1 | A History of Food in Antiquity
Nayanjot Lahiri
(Monsoon 2019)
The purpose of this module is to explore the history of food through specific ingredients. Salt, pepper, tea,alcohol, pasta, dairy products and vinegar are some of them. Through such ingredients, the economic, technological, religious and social histories relating to food will be analyzed and understand.
VA-6099-1/ HIS-5801-1 | Critical Methodologies of Art History
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2020)
HIS-6099-1 | Folk and its Discontents
Ravindran S
(Spring 2020)
HIS-699-3 | Islam and the Indian Ocean
Mahmood Kooria
(Spring 2020)
CROSS LISTED COURSES FROM OTHER DEPARTMENTS
IR-2014/ HIS-3035 | India Pakistan Relations: An Overview of Conflict and Peace-Making
Pallavi Raghavan
(Monsoon 2019, cross-listed with International Relations)
In this course, we will examine how inter-state, and international relations are shaped by different perceptions of history and how this process manifests itself. This course will develop the argument that the history of South Asia is a crucial, but also deeply contested element, in understanding the modalities of conflict, cooperation, and coexistence in South Asia, and that, in the final analysis, is also an attempt by states to reconcile themselves with the dilemmas of the past. We shall aspects of the developments of the states of India and Pakistan, including their interactions with one another, from a historicized perspective. Our attempt will be to break down and interrogate the elements that go into much of the present day discussions about India- Pakistan relations, and understand the historical basis for this. Secondly, we will look at the role of major political figures since the transfer of power, and examine their motivations in their contributions to the making of India- Pakistan affairs. We will offer an overview of the major episodes of dialogue and animosity between India and Pakistan, and examine the sources of conflict in the region, as well as the reasons for commonalities between both countries. Lastly, it shall also provide a basis for the ways in which the political processes of India and Pakistan can be compared and contrasted with one another. We will analyze why the institutions of the army and civilian legislature, and regional centers of power are important in the shaping of the relationship between the two states.
POL-2026/ HIS-2013/HIS-213 | Critical Concepts in Islam
Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan
(cross-listed from Political Science in Monsoon 2019)
This course will offer students the chance to tackle individual concepts within Islam and then go into an in-depth analysis of their origins, changes in meaning and their relevance to the everyday lives of Muslims by using a longue durée approach. Furthermore, there will be a constant effort to underscore how these issues remain deeply relevant today and thereby introduce students to currents debates as well. Over the course of the term, concepts like Islam itself and its manifold manifestations, prophethood, revelation , shariah, fiqh, and many other such ideas and concepts will be deconstructed and analysed keeping in mind their relationship to broader political, social and religious formations in Muslim societies. By the end of the course the student should have a firm grasp of both scholarly debates and their location in contemporary discourse.
VA-205/HIS-328 | Sites and Sights: Museums, Exhibitions and the Making of Art.
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
Elective Course in Visual Arts. Course Open for Credit and Audit for students enrolled in other disciplines.
HIS-2502 | Global Capitalism in the Long Twentieth Century
Srinath Raghavan
(Spring 2020, cross-listed with IR and Economics)
VA-3002/ HIS-323 | Empire, Nation, and Art: Histories from the Visual Image
Sraman Mukherjee
(Monsoon 2018; Spring 2020)
POL-202/ HIS-409 | Political Thought in the Age of Nationalism
Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan
(Monsoon 2019)
VA-306/ HIS-407 | Histories of South Asian Art: From the Earliest Times to the Present
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2019)
VA-308/ HIS-337 | Mughal Art and Material Culture
Yashaswini Chandra
(Monsoon 2019)
VA-2005/HIS-3802 | Sites and Sights: Museums, Exhibitions and the Making of the Art
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
ENG-3035/ ENG-5035/ POL-3048/ HIS-3803 | Seminar in Genre: Epic History
Ishleen Juneja, Sharif Youssef
(Spring 2020)
We will immerse ourselves over the semester in two major works of history that also have claims to significant literary status and influence, Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. We won’t engage in true “slow reading,” in the sense that it will be beyond us to consume these two enormous books chapter by chapter from start to finish, but we will consider the possibilities of slow reading and the imperatives and realities of reading selectively, including the fear of missing out that inhibits an embrace of abridgement in an era after the poststructuralist emphasis on the “text” gave new weight to the idea that literary works, even ones that are gigantic and/or fractured, should be read either in their entirety or not at all. We'll consider questions of modern versus postmodern history, historiography and methodology, status and standards of evidence, among other things.
HIS-3505/ BIO-3624/ PHY-3910 | A Global History of Science
Kapil Raj
(Spring 2020)
HIS-4505/ ES-4001 | Environment and Empire in the Early Modern World
Grishma Purewal, Pratyay Nath
(Spring 2020)