SAST0060 - Modern South Asia and the World

The course approaches the history of modern South Asia as a story of global connections. While the region has long been in contact with geographies, communities, and polities across the world, colonial processes roped the Indian subcontinent into the global circulation of capital, commodities, ideas, and people at an unprecedented scale by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An expanding British Empire established connections of unparalleled domination, exploitation, and migration between the metropolis and the colony, as well as cross other colonies. The course explores the history of this contact by studying the political and epistemic technologies of colonial governance, the imperial trade of opium, tea, and cotton, the movement of indentured laborers and Indian soldiers, and the circulation of anticolonial ideas and political strategies across colonies. The course will complement chapters from monographs and scholarly articles with literary genres such as novels, films, and short stories to understand how global historical events shaped social relations, spaces, and the lives of ordinary South Asians.