2020-2021
GATEWAY COURSES
HIS-1001 | European History from Renaissance to Revolution
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Spring, annually)
HIS-2001 | History of India I: From Prehistoric Beginnings to the Mauryan Empire
Nayanjot Lahiri
(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
HIS-2002 | History of India II: From the Mauryan Empire to c. 1000 CE
Upinder Singh
(Monsoon annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
HIS-2003 | History of India III: From c. 1000 CE to 1764 CE
Mahmood Kooria
(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
HIS-2004 | History of India IV: From 1764 CE to 1967 CE
Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Mahesh Rangarajan
(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)
READING COURSES
HIS-3001 | Reading History
Aparna Vaidik
(Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Spring 2021 offered every Spring)
HIS-3002 | Reading Archaeology
Sanjukta Datta
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2018, Monsoon 2020 offered every Monsoon)
ELECTIVES
200 LEVEL
HIS-2501 | War, Politics, Society
Pratyay Nath
(Summer 2021)
How have military techniques of human societies evolved from ancient times to the modern age? In what ways has war historically shaped the ways in which gender roles are defined? How have computer games, movies, and museums made war an object of popular consumption in modern societies? These are some of the questions that the present course grapples with. It offers a global history of the inter-relationship between warfare, politics, and society. In the first two weeks, we will study the evolution of military techniques from the ancient times to the twentieth century. In the third week, we will analyse the role of infrastructure – labour, logistics, animals, and resources – in war-making. In the fourth week, we will unravel the world of war-propaganda and anti-war protests. Next, we will delve into the realm of cultural representations of war. By focusing graphic novels, movies, photographs, letters, and computer games, we will explore the politics of representing war in popular culture. In the final week, we will study how societies have defined and contested ideals of masculinity and femininity in relation with participation in war. We will also look at issues of war-memory and war-trauma. The present course will study this rich history through a close reading of recent scholarly literature on the subject as well as a handson experience of analysing modern cultural representations (movies, graphic novels, and games) of war.
300 LEVEL
HIS-3202 | Hinduism: Myth and Reality
Sanjukta Datta
(Monsoon 2020)
Who is a Hindu and what defines Hinduism as a world religion? In the absence of a historical founder and a single text outlining the tenets of the religion, what unites the bewildering variety of thoughts and practices within the broad umbrella of Hinduism? Does the long, dynamic history of Hinduism corroborate its popular characterization as an eternal, tolerant and non-proselytizing religion? As the subtitle suggests, the course will examine such widespread stereotypes about Hinduism from a historical perspective. In this exciting journey, we will encounter foundational texts, sacred centres of worship, mystical devotional cults, militant ascetic orders and social reform movements. Glimpses of some of the finest pieces of pre-modern Indian religious literature, such as hymns of the Rig Veda and devotional poetry of medieval bhakti saints, will be an added attraction.
HIS-3204 | Introduction to Mughal History
Pratyay Nath
(cross-listed with Political Science; Spring 2019, Monsoon 2020)
Mughal emperors believed that they are the divinely-mandated rulers of the entire universe. This reflected in their imperial titles like Jahangir (Conqueror of the World), Shah Jahan (King of the World), and Alamgir (Conqueror of the Universe). However, how much power did they actually wield? How did they use paintings and architecture to articulate their grand visions of power? What role did war, diplomacy, ideology, and religion play in the process of imperial expansion? These are some of the questions we will engage with. This course offers a comprehensive introduction to Mughal history and historiography. We will explore how the legacy of Chinghiz Khan and Amir Timur Gurgan shaped the empire in South Asia. We will look into the ideals of masculinity that animated Mughal courtly etiquette and study the role of Mughal women in court society. We will investigate how the empire legitimised its rule, disciplined its elite, and created its fabled riches. Finally, we will study why such a huge and prosperous empire fragmented away in the eighteenth century.
HIS-3205 | The World of War in South Asia, 1000-1800
Pratyay Nath
(cross-listed with International Relations; Monsoon 2019, Spring 2021)
How did armies fight in medieval and early modern South Asia? Who were the warrior ascetics and the armed peasants? What was the role of animals in war? How did issues of gender, environment, and culture relate to warfare? These are some of the questions this course addresses. It unravels military processes in South Asia between 1000 CE and 1800 CE in relation with broader social, political, and cultural processes. We will also study military matters related to technology, tactics, strategy, fortification, logistics, and military personnel. We will begin our journey in the early-11th century with the Chola kings of South India invading Southeast Asia and with North India facing Turko-Afghan invasions.We will stop at the end of the 18th century, with the English East India Company poised to become the dominant military power of the subcontinent. By the end of the semester, students will have a sound understanding of the workings of the world of war in medieval and early modern South Asia. In turn, this historical background will help students understand military and political processes of colonial and post-colonial South Asia better.
HIS-3207 | Politics and Society in India: 1937-1977
Mahesh Rangarajan, Srinath Raghavan
(cross-listed with Political Science in Monsoon 2016, Monsoon 2019 and Monsoon 2020; with IR in Monsoon 2020)
The course looks at the relation of political social and changes in India correlating internal and external developments. it commences with the victory of the Congress in the provincial polls and concludes with its rout in the 1977 Lok Sabha polls. Among the issues examined are World War II and India, for instance its relation to Partition. The changing equations of regions and the emerging nation state, the making of the linguistic states and the rise of economic planning and its early crises. The Congress and its critics get attention as do the debates on environment, technology and science.
The course correlates and locates these changes in a wider context: the end of empire and decolonization; the Cold War and Sino Soviet split in Asia, and their relation to South Asia. Often as in the case of the wars of 1947 or 1962 or 1971 these conflicts had important domestic political implications as well. The transfromation of the Indian economy under planning and the criris end 1960s too cast a shadow .India's emergence as a regional power by the end of the 1971 war and the 1974 explosion at Pokhran had elements of both change and continuity with the past.
So the course spans history, politics and international relations and encourages informed and critical thinking on an exciting period of the recent past. The fabled 'Congress system' was in crisis by 1967 and the party and polity remade by Mrs Gandhi soon thereafter by 1971-72. The aftermath of 1972-73 led to serious challenges and the Emergency of 1975-77. The course also pays considerbale attention ot regional histopries including the south and North East.
HIS-3208 | Nature and Nation
Mahesh Rangarajan
(Monsoon 2019, 2020; cross-listed with EVS in 2019, with EVS, Socio-Anthro & Political Science in 2020)
HIS-3211 | Prior to Print: Documentary Cultures in the Indian Subcontinent
Sanjukta Datta
(Spring 2021)
In India, the first moveable printing press was set up in Goa by a Spanish Jesuit missionary in 1556, the year that marked the end of the reign of the second Mughal emperor, Humayun. Prior to Print presents a synoptic account of writing systems and cultures of record-keeping in the Indian subcontinent from the oldest extant evidence of writing around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE to the introduction of print in the middle of the 16th century. Snapshots of this approximately two thousand-year history are traced through definitive genres such as stone and copper plate inscriptions, letters, biographies and autobiographies. Included in this survey is a unique guide for official scribes and professional letter from the early medieval period as well as a delectable medieval Indian cookbook. Issues of interest to students of history, such as orality and materiality, literary and visual aesthetic traditions, courtly cultures, circulatory networks of merchants and monks, and perhaps most importantly, the articulations of historical consciousness, are highlighted in this course.
HIS-3504 | History of Political Thought: Karl Marx
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
(Cross-listed with Political Science in Monsoon 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)
HIS-3505 |Science in Society and the World, 1900-2020
Kapil Raj
(Cross-listed with Biology, Physics, and Sociology Spring 2021)
Over the past century and a half, science has progressively become an integral part of all major issues of public concern. Crucially, it has become the principal arbiter of every aspect of human life, defining what is natural and what is rational. Power itself is now exercised, as never before in history, through scientific expertise and the use of science to transform material, economic, cultural, environmental and biological aspects of our lives. Science is thus both the emblem of Modernity and the yardstick for measuring economic and social development internationally. A historical study of the dynamics of science as a social institution and its stakes in global, national and local politics is thus indispensable for an understanding of the contemporary world.
In the guise of a guided tour of the transformations in the global geo-political and intellectual landscape from turn of the 20th century to the present, this course traces the concomitantly changing images of science, and the (re)writing of its history as a purely Western phenomenon. It also introduces the key concepts of the interdisciplinary field of the history, anthropology, sociology and philosophy of science as they emerged in this process. It thus provides a toolkit for thinking critically about the place of science and other knowledge practices in contemporary societies.
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-3507 | Capitalism: A Global History
Srinath Raghavan
(Monsoon 2020, cross-listed with IR)
The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 has cast into sharp relief the inextricable relationship between economics and geopolitics as well as globalization and democratic politics. This course provides the historical context within which we can locate and understand the current crises of international political economy. Global capitalism is inherently volatile and unstable. Indeed, policies and institutions to harness and tame it are an integral part of its history. Globalization involves not just the movement of goods, capital and people, but also of ideas that shape our preferences. In consequence, the periodic crises that are endemic to global capitalism lead to sudden changes in our conception of values (both in a monetary and non-monetary sense). This revaluation of values, in turn, leads to the search for new epistemic frameworks, institutions and policies for managing the global economy. International politics bulks large in this process.
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.
HIS-3508 | Water Unites Us, Land Divides Us
Mahmood Kooria
(Spring 2021)
“The water unites and the land divides” is a common expression in Southeast Asia. It immediately refers to the archipelagic characters of the mainland and island Southeast Asia, but it also draws attention to the centrality of oceans in connecting people across time and space. The oceans have historically brought together people from different continents, countries and contexts, similar to a single water body in a deep forest that unites all the animals there. On the waters and shores of the seas, many civilizations and cultures have risen and fallen, and thousands of humans have prospered and perished in their unsurmountable yet eternal ambition to control the oceanic wilderness.
In this course, we explore the long histories of ocean-human entanglements, by looking at specific themes such as thalassophobia (fear of ocean), thalassophilia (love of ocean), thalassocracy (maritime state), along with diverse productions and circulations of knowledge systems and navigational practices. With a focus on the Indian Ocean bordering Asia, Africa and Australia and on a period between 800 and 1800 CE we shall see how the oceans dominated the human history. The course will introduce you to some foundational debates and issues in the fields of oceanic histories, and it will help you understand long histories that transcend national and continental borders and chronological brackets.
HIS-3509 | Rewriting World History
Aparna Vaidik
(Monsoon 2020, cross-listed with IR, English and Socio-Anthro)
This course examines the politics of what came to be imagined and written about as world history. Most of what we understand as world history is really a product of Euro-centric epistemic frameworks and dominated by European history narratives. Inspired by postcolonial writings, the course is an attempt to de-colonise the pedagogy of the social sciences and the humanities. The questions it asks are: what kind of world history would we have if we were to set aside the European lens? Are the terms world history, history of the world and global history interchangeable? In answering these questions this course introduces the students to a novel way of thinking about the human past that is not limited to a linear tale of human evolution or is a simple collection of dates, facts, and events, or a story of emperors, kings and great men. It will demonstrate how history involves imagining lives, selves, ideas, emotions and actions of people who are not only not us, but are very different from us, because they are a product of a different time and place. The students will have an opportunity to read about exploits of Cheghis Khan, the cities of Sumerians, the Court scribes of Moorish Spain, the lives of the Aztecs, the sexual escapades of French royalty, the artwork of the Han Chinese, the tunnels made by the Vietnamese guerrillas, the lives of Japanese women and the history of pandemics that ravaged civilizations, the revolutions which fulfilled the human quest for freedom, the technologies that revolutionized human existence, the migrations which took our ancestors across the world, the human pursuit of the sublime, and finally, the history of love, sex and desire through the ages.
HIS-3510 | Reading the Twentieth Century
Sunil Khilnani
(Spring 2021, cross-listed with English)
‘Reading the Twentieth Century’ is devoted to studying core twentieth century texts, chosen from across genres and disciplines, and including works by Sigmund Freud, M.K. Gandhi, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Rachel Carson. Students who take the course will, through close analysis of primary texts and contextual and historical study, gain an understanding and appreciation of some of that century’s most influential ideas and theories, considered through a variety of interpretative frameworks.
Themes and tensions that will be explored include: the relationship between the pursuit of totalizing theories of mind, society, evolution, and recognition of the fragmented character of modern experience; the effects of encounters between western power and non-western cultures; the relationship between humans and nature; the politics of gender; and arguments for rationality and its limits.
Throughout, we will take seriously reading in both its senses: reading as interpretation as well as, literally, the activity of reading itself - students taking the course can expect to do a fair amount of reading, mainly of primary texts. Supplemental material in the form of video and audio recordings (to be posted on the classroom webpage), will be also be used.
400 LEVEL
HIS-4203 | Museums in South Asia: History and Politics
Kanika Singh
(Spring 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
HIS-4204 | The Making of the Indian Republic
Aparna Vaidik
(Monsoon 2020, cross-listed with English and Sociology & Anthropology)
This course examines the history of India from the Raj's twilight to the early decades of the republic. The students will get a chance to re-examine the familiar story starting from the second world war, the coming of the independence, partitioning of the British Empire, the making of the Indian constitution and the beginning of planned industrialization from a new perspective. This course lies at the intersection of history, politics, literature and sociology where the focus is not just the big political leaders, the state policies, and realpolitik but on the civil society drivers and the lesser-known figures, regional movements, grassroot workers, histories of labour, food and everyday technology. We will begin each segment through a primary source workshop involving an examination of the ephemera of the past such as the newspaper reportage, cartoon, paintings, advertisements, film posters along with regional literature, oral histories, memoirs, theatre and cinema of the period along with etc. This will be followed by a discussion on the prescribed readings that introduce to new ways of understanding their past. The students are expected to have read a novel and seen a film from each of the decades.
HIS-4205 |The Indian Unrest: Resistance and Protest in Post-colonial India
Aparna Vaidik
(Spring 2021)
HIS-4501 | Love and Laughter in Antiquity
Nayanjot Lahiri
(Monsoon 2017, 2019, 2020)
HIS-4505 | Environment and Empire in the Early Modern World
Pratyay Nath
(Spring 2020 and 2021, cross listed with EVS)
HIS-4507 | Why Global? Transnational Histories and Approaches
Kapil Raj
(Spring 2021)
Ever since its institutionalisation as a university discipline in the course of the 19th century, history — along with the vast majority of social sciences — have been entrapped in “methodological nationalism”, the assumption that nations are the natural units for study, thus equating society with the nation-state, and conflating national interests with the purposes of the social sciences. Questions thus very often get reduced to explanations limited to national parameters without taking account of broader dynamics and relations. In the context of nations that gained independence from European colonialist in the post-WW II era, Postcolonial Studies have sought to engage with this nationalist framework by attempting to situate their histories especially during the colonial period as a process of resistance to European imperial domination and imposition of the latter’s outlook and values. However, a number of questions and issues are thus blindsided in this systematically agonistic perspective, or for that matter in its opposite, a free-flowing diffusionist model based on a simple-minded Whiggish model of progress.
This course looks to go beyond this double-bind in order to examine a whole swathe of historical questions — migrations; the administration of imperial spaces; scientific, technological and cultural transfers; the formation of globalised elites; the construction of knowledge through processes of intercultural interaction … just a few examples of phenomena that traditional national historiographies are not tailored to confront. Based on case-studies from early-modern and modern history, this course will present and discuss 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 them. This course is ideally suited to students in the humanities and social sciences.
HIS-4508 | Colonial Power: Theories, discourses, practices
Neeladri Bhattacharya
(Spring 2021, cross listed with Political Science, International Relations, Sociology and English)
This course explores the way colonial power was discursively, culturally and legally constituted, and the different sites on which it unfolded. After a consideration of some of the important theoretical interventions, it shifts to a discussion of the practices through which colonial power was shaped, moving from travel writing to cartography, from education to photography, from production of records to collection of statistics, from codification of laws to performance of violence. The object of the course, is to understand the specificity of colonial power, and its modes of articulation in the Indian context, but thinking about the colonial specificity also helps us understand the way power operates in other historical contexts. In looking at the new realms of ideas opened up by the post-colonial turn, it explores both their conceptual underpinnings and their limits.
HIS-4509 | War and Empire in the Early Modern World
Pratyay Nath
(Monsoon 2020)
Why did Japanese society give up the gun after the initial spread and success of the technology? How did the Russian state win the frontier wars against nomadic warriors and then expand into Central Asia and Siberia? Why did Europe end up conquering and colonising various parts of the modern world and not the other way around? These are some of the questions the present course grapples with. It is a seminar course in the global history of early modern warfare. It is geared towards intensive collective reading of and discussion on important monographs about the relationship between warfare and empire-building in the early modern world (c. 1500 – c. 1800). We will closely engage with ten different books in the thirteen weeks of this course. We will begin with an overview of the various early modern empires and by discussing some of the framing issues of global military history for this period. Throughout the course, we will focus on military tactics, strategy, technology, logistics, military culture and explore their connections with state-formation and empire-building in different parts of the world. As the course will progress, we will read books on Europe, colonial America, Russia, Africa, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Ming and Qing Empires of China, Southeast Asia, and the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan.
HIS-4510 | Cross-Cultural Exchanges between India, China, and the World
Barnali Chanda
(Spring 2021)
500 LEVEL
HIS-5101 | Histories of the Region
Pratyay Nath
(Monsoon 2020)
Course description unavailable
INDEPENDENT STUDY MODULES
HIS-IS-4001 | Museumising Partition: Memories, Objects, Spaces
Kanika Singh
(Monsoon 2020)
HIS-IS-4002 | Studying Intercultural Scientific Exchange in 19th Century Bengal: The Case of Reverend May’s Gonito
Kapil Raj
(Spring 2021)
HIS-IS-4003 | Inscribing Landscapes: Perspectives from Bengal Epigraphy
Sanjukta Datta
(Spring 2021)
CROSS-LISTED COURSES FROM OTHER DEPARTMENT
IR-2014/HIS-3807/POL-2047 | A History of India Pakistan Relations
Pallavi Raghavan
(Monsoon 2020)
The object of this course is to offer a causative framework to understand the trajectory of India- Pakistan relations.
The course shall offer an analysis of the progression of the different ways the conflict has been conceptualized: from a question of a legally contested accession, a border dispute, to a war of attrition and stalemate, to a dilemmas involving questions of identity, citizenship and the nature of belonging, and, latterly, as a site of non state actors and terrorists.
Offering a chronological overview of some of the major episodes of conflict in India- Pakistan relations, we will probe more deeply the means of creating an analytical framework for understanding these episodes: Nationalism; Territoriality; Federalism; Religion; and the contours of a Security Dilemma. We will explore how each, and all of these frameworks offer a basis of being able to better understand the nature of the India- Pakistan dynamic.
POL-2026/HIS-3808 | Critical Concepts in Islam
Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan
(Monsoon 2019, 2020)
POL-2046/HIS-3809 | Political Thought in the Age of Nationalism
Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan
(Monsoon 2019, 2020)
SOA-2202/HIS-3810 | Language and Power in South Asia
Kathryn Collins Hardy
(Monsoon 2020)
Language is inextricable from other social practices, and is deeply imbricated in human struggles: identities, political practices, and power relations are made and unmade through language. Nowhere is this more apparent than South Asia, where language has long been an site of explicit political and social contestation.
This course is an introduction to the anthropological study of language through historical and contemporary case studies in the South Asian subcontinent. We will consider the ways in which language functions to reflect social contexts as well as change them, describing existing social relations as well as forging new ones. We will examine colonial translation practices, affective attachments to the “mother tongue,” language-based state formation, Hindi and Tamil nationalism and other cases. Readings from linguistic, historical, and sociocultural anthropology will animate our discussions as we explore South Asia’s linguistic landscape.
VA-2001/ HIS-3806 | Visual Culture of Indian Painting: Courtly Traditions
Preeti Bahadur
(Monsoon 2020)
This course offers a critical survey of miniature paintings made for Mughal, Rajput and Decani courts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in India. It will focus on this period but also look at the sources of these traditions within Persian and Indian schools of paintings on the one hand, and their production beyond the eighteenth century into the present on the other, as contemporary miniatures made in India and Pakistan. The course will open ways of entering the intensely visual fields of these paintings for students. It will map the field by exploring schools, workshops and ateliers and offer an understanding of style as a dynamic tool, both for artists and patrons. Following this, the course will focus on themes both as subject matter of the paintings, and for understanding the affective, cultural and political value of these works. Themes will include the relationship of texts and paintings, representation of music, devotion, and courtly etiquette
VA-3006/HIS-3804 | Histories of South Asian Art: From the Earliest Times to the Present
Sraman Mukherjee
(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2019 and 2020, Spring 2021)
POL-2052/ HIS-3805 | Modern India: Political Theory and History
Sunil Khilnani
(Spring 2021 )
The future of Western political theory will be decided outside the West. And in deciding that future, the experience of India will loom large. This course explores the preceding proposition, examining ideas of political theory in relation to modern India’s history. How have concepts of democracy, nation, rights, citizenship, and global order shaped India, and how has the Indian experience in turn altered them? The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to modern India’s political thinking while at the same time challenging our understanding of core political ideas.
Modern India is constituted through some of the most intricate and intense debates in recent political history - arguments about identity and difference, representation and dignity, individuality and communitarianism, justice and inequality, freedom and power. We will consider these debates, and also the practices and institutions (sometimes innovative, often flawed) to which they have given rise. The course offers a historically grounded approach to the study of Indian political thinking, while also examining normative political ideals in a comparative context, in order to clarify these ideals.