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.

This course will analyse the forms, contexts, and politics surrounding anticolonial, left and dissident print cultures of the global south. Course materials will draw on the archive of political magazines, party newspapers, cultural journals, and pamphlets to study how these print forms shaped the cultures, institutions, and communities of revolutionary politics. Engaging the global south revolutionary periodical as form, the course will analyze its role as a forum for political debate, a tool for political organizing, and a crucial medium for literary and aesthetic experiments. We will examine revolutionary periodicals from contexts ranging from colonial India to Apartheid-era South Africa to Pinochet-ruled Chile to appreciate the ways in which periodicals often served as sites for articulating political theory and literary activism ‘from below’. We will focus on movements and political concepts that decisively shaped 20th-century struggles against colonialism, and those that followed in the wake of formal decolonization, including but not limited to Afro-Asianism, Marxist internationalism, black internationalism, Third Worldism, and Tricontinentalism. Classes will be conducted in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and a large part of the course will be dedicated to workshopping archival material from the collections.

This course is an introduction to Islam as a religion as it exists in societies of the past as well as the present. It explores the many ways in which Muslims have interpreted and put into practice the prophetic message of Muhammad through historical and social analyses of varying theological, philosophical, legal, political, mystical and literary writings, as well as through visual art and music. The aim of the course is to develop a framework for explaining the sources and symbols through which specific experiences and understandings have been signified as Islamic, both by Muslims and by other peoples with whom they have come into contact, with particular emphasis given to issues of gender, religious violence and changes in beliefs and behaviors which have special relevance for contemporary society.

This course explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in Asian America. Through interdisciplinary and cultural texts, students will consider how Asian American gender and sexualities are constructed in relation to racism while learning theories on and methods to study gender, sex, and race. We will discuss masculinities, femininities, race-conscious feminisms, LGBTQ+ identities, interracial and intraracial relationships, and kinship structures.

Sugar and Spices. Tea and Coffee. Opium and Cocaine. Hop aboard the Indian Ocean dhows, Chinese junks, Dutch schooners, and British and American clipper ships that made possible the rise of global capitalism, new colonial relationships, and the intensified forms of cultural change. How have the desires to possess and consume particular commodities shaped cultures and the course of modern history? This class introduces students to the cultural history of the modern world through an interdisciplinary analysis of connections between East and West, South and North. Following the circulation of commodities and the development of modern capitalism, the course examines the impact of global exchange on interactions and relationships between regions, nations, cultures, and peoples and the influences on cultural practices and meanings. The role of slavery and labor migrations, colonial and imperial relations, and struggles for economic and political independence are also considered. From the role of spices in the formation of European joint stock companies circa 1600 to the contemporary cocaine trade, the course's use of both original primary sources and secondary readings written by historians and anthropologists will enable particular attention to the ways that global trade has impacted social, cultural, and political formations and practices throughout the world.

A continuation of Tabla I, also open to beginning students.

This graduate seminar explores intellectual histories of contemporary South Asia. Readings will trace selected literary, cultural, political, religious, and linguistic genealogies that have shaped present-day understandings, practices, alliances and categories of thought in South Asia. Particular attention will be placed on 19th and 20th century global influences and interactions, including with England, Ireland, Germany, the Soviet Union/Russia, Turkey and the Arab World, East and Southeast Asia, the United States, and Africa. Topics will including histories of mapping and census efforts, publishing projects (including those funded by the Soviet Union and the United States), international conferences (e.g., the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions at the World's Fair in Chicago, 1955 Bandung Conference, the 2009 Durban Conference), technological influences and exchanges, and educational institutions and practices. The course will also include discussions of methods for carrying out intellectual history projects and would therefore be of use for students conducting research in other regions of the world.

This course will examine the relationship between religion and politics in South Asia from circa 1000 to 2000 C.E. This course is not designed to provide a comprehensive survey of every significant political conflict about religion over the last millennium. Instead, we will focus on key issues that have generated such contests repeatedly. The emphasis will be on political patronage of religious shrines and its converse, iconoclasm; on religious conversions; on clashes that were perceived as clashes between religious communities; and on popular religious movements and their appeal at particular historical moments. We will explore the politics of religion and of religious affiliation from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries by reviewing the rich historiography. No prior knowledge of South Asia is expected.

This course will visit some of the existing studies that contradict, facilitate and challenge the extant discourses on hierarchies and status observed through the conceptualisation of race and caste. These two concepts have overlapped throughout the past two hundred years. The concept of caste is as old as the nineteenth century, seen through public policy interventions led by Boston Senator Charles Sumner. Similarly, race is studied through the South Asian topography by colonialists such as Herbert Risely, emphasizing the racial dimensions of societies. These studies were influential for the next one hundred years. But they were also challenged and critiqued. These studies aid us in informing the contemporary scales of societies that weigh oppression and control through antecedent-held concepts of race and caste, which can be effectively understood through colour-castes, a term popularized by Du Bois. In this course, we will study cross-national historical, anthropological, and political debates to make sense of our times. Students will learn about the twenty-first century’s new concepts and what they mean to our times and near future.

This seminar engages topics in the history and theory of South Asian art from antiquity to the present emphasizing global connections and comparisons. Topics vary from year to year and might include the arts of the book in South Asia; Indian Ocean art worlds; and fragments, ruins, and traces in the art of South Asia. We shall explore objects in area collections and incorporate special excursions and programs when possible. A background in South Asian studies or languages is not required. Students from related disciplines such history, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, feminist studies, cinema and media studies, and architecture are welcome.