MAKING OF MODERN SOUTH ASIA

ARTHIST/ASIAN 179

Historical overview of India and South Asia's global architectural histories from the ancient to the modern periods. While focusing predominantly on architectural sites in India, examine architecture at multiple sites across the globe which share connected histories with South Asia. We live in a world of nation states and are shaped by national histories. However, in the arc of human history, nation states are of recent vintage. Examine India's global architectural histories not only through comparison but, in the words of historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected" India to "the globe." Capturing the mobility of populations, traders, conquerors, missionaries, pilgrims, tourists, colonists, architects, artists, scholars, religion, merchandise, art, architecture, and ideas, we show that South Asia's global architectural histories are themselves the complex products of varied histories of cultural encounters.

HISTORY 790

Designed to develop historiographic command of colonial and postcolonial South Asian history as a teaching and research field. Carefully explores the master narratives or "schools" of historiography of South Asia, and analyzes the erasures as well as the normative theoretical and archival axes around which the sub-field has developed. Topics include pre-colonial modes of representing the past; the social, cultural and economic turns in colonial and nationalist historiography; legal and environmental historiographical methods; South Asia in the world/global South Asia.

HISTORY 142

Survey of the development of societies within the Indian subcontinent. Equal segments for the ancient, medieval and modern periods.

ANTHRO/ASIAN 305

South Asia has long been a region of significance in anthropology, offering rich and varied contexts for exploring questions about social organization, cultural practices, and religious diversity. Engage with evolving anthropological perspectives on the region, drawing from foundational theorizations of caste, kinship, and the state while attending to contemporary ethnographic insights on care, poverty, health, medicine, and gender. Address questions like: How does the ethnographic method reveal the complexities of social worlds and cultural life in South Asia? What insights and limitations does this approach offer? How might it be enriched with other analytical tools? Engage critically with anthropological theory and recent ethnographies to explore the structures, relationships, and beliefs that shape everyday experiences and broader social patterns in India and the region in local and global frameworks.

ASIAN 252

An interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary Indian society, politics, and culture. Consider the diverse, complex, and often contradictory fabric of modern India through the lens of several conceptual themes which consider emergent discourses and dynamics of change as the joint product of India's classical heritage and its transformation into a post-colonial nation-state since 1947. Explores tensions and continuities between the pre-modern and modern.