Special Topics In History Interdisciplinary History

AY2024/2025 Semester 1

The aim of this course is to introduce students to contemporary themes and directions in the historiography of South Asia. The material for the course covers the period starting from the early modern to the contemporary moment. The list of themes covered in the course is by no means exhaustive; they reflect only one of several possible ways of mapping the contemporary terrain of debate. The readings are also not meant to be a list of 'greatest hits.' Rather, they serve as openings into specific subfields of South Asian history. We will explore topics and themes such as Early Modern India, Partition and memory, migration, movement and indenture, citizenship and belonging, sex and sexuality, knowledge production and frontier-making, and so on. We will cover subfields such as environmental, social, cultural, intellectual histories and read broadly on the historiographical developments in the field of South Asian history in the past two decades.