This undergraduate seminar will explore the interplay between music, media, and performance in the making of modern South Asia (c. 1750 to the present). We will study primary source materials including manuscripts, printed texts, sound recordings, films, and video-clips. What can the emergence of print and recorded sound on the subcontinent teach us about modernity? How did authors, entrepreneurs, politicians, and performers across time and space make use of new media and technologies? How did colonial rule and anti-colonial nationalism affect traditional methods of knowledge transmission and communities of hereditary performers? The class is organized along thematic fields that provide exposure to the content, history, and effects of various media and performance practices. Beginning with the function of music and dance at royal courts, we will familiarize ourselves with the transformation of North Indian Hindustani and South Indian Karnatak music under colonialism. We will pay particular attention to the multiple ways in which print, performance, and sound recording and transmission media played a role in the development of colonial institutions, nationalist mass movements, and cultural identities on the subcontinent. We will look at the realm of commerce and technology to explore the impact of lithographic print, the gramophone, the radio, and film on the development of knowledge and the shaping of colonial power and anti-colonial resistance. Finally, we will reflect on new modes of media consumption in the post-colonial nation states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and what they tell us about contemporary narratives of South Asian history.

Modern Western colonialism impacted the world in many ways. However, each country and community has had a different encounter and experience with colonialism. For the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of India, it was catastrophic and marked a new phase in their history. The pre-colonial symbolizes a period of freedom in the hills and forest, whereas the colonial era symbolizes state coercion, eviction from land and the end of free movement in the forest. The proposed course discusses Adivasis' encounters with the British colonial state. The course examines Indian history from the perspectives of Adivasis and contrasts these with dominant paradigms of Indian history. In this way, the course allows students to understand India from a different perspective.
Under British colonialism, the diverse ethnic self-governing communities were imagined as primitive, uncivilized, barbaric, violent, backward and childlike people. The course discusses how such constructions impacted Adivasi social life and development. It traces how the expansion of the colonial state in forests and hills put an end to self-rule and induced massive migration from the plains of India and asks how Adivasi areas were integrated into the colonial economy. How did the colonial state use revenue and forest policies and regulations to bring these areas under its control? How did commercialization of agriculture and forest conservation work to further marginalize Adivasis? The course also examines how Adivasi knowledge of cultivation and forest conservation were viewed by the colonial state and asks why the colonial state encouraged caste-Hindu peasant migration into Adivasi areas. Finally, it traces the ways that colonial intervention has resulted in a series of contestations, acts of resistance, and insurgencies by Adivasi groups? Tracing forms of Adivasi resistance, the course puts these into conversation with intellectual history, emphasizing the role of rumours, myths, and orality, which provided the basis for the new insurgent consciousness that spread throughout Adivasi communities.
Adivasi resistance movements have been documented and analyzed by colonial rulers and anthropologists. Colonial discourses were successful in criminalizing Adivasi politics. Ironically, many colonial-era discourses concerning Adivasis have been perpetuated within the post-colonial academy. The anti-colonial struggles of Adivasis were constructed as sporadic, spontaneous, unorganized and apolitical. The inauguration of the Subaltern Studies Project has reversed such arguments and attempted to provide ideological integrity to Adivasi politics. Students will be introduced to important literature on Adivasi anti-colonial insurgent consciousness and will be encouraged to think critically about the concepts and theories of subaltern politics. Assigned readings include texts by James Scott, Ranajit Guha, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Ajay Skaria, Dhanagare, Ramachandra Guha, Biswamoy Pati, Alpa Shah, Crispin Bates, Jangkhomang Guite and Bhangya Bhukya. One aim of the course is to sensitize the students to how the political and cultural mobilizations by subalterns have contributed to the shaping of democracy.
Course Requirements:
Short writing responses to readings
In-class presentations on readings
Midterm short essay
Final research paper based on primary and secondary sources.
(No exams)
Instructor's Objectives:
1. Students will understand indigenous perspectives on Indian culture and history
2. Students will be able to situate indigenous movements in relation to Subaltern Studies, dominant schools of historiography, and colonial and postcolonial ethnography
3. Students will be able to analyze primary sources and identify different schools of thought within secondary literature
4. Students will be able to analyze the impact of colonial practices and discourses on indigenous cultures, histories and practices, and the forms of resistan

Modern Western colonialism impacted the world in many ways. However, each country and community has had a different encounter and experience with colonialism. For the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of India, it was catastrophic and marked a new phase in their history. The pre-colonial symbolizes a period of freedom in the hills and forest, whereas the colonial era symbolizes state coercion, eviction from land and the end of free movement in the forest. The proposed course discusses Adivasis' encounters with the British colonial state. The course examines Indian history from the perspectives of Adivasis and contrasts these with dominant paradigms of Indian history. In this way, the course allows students to understand India from a different perspective.
Under British colonialism, the diverse ethnic self-governing communities were imagined as primitive, uncivilized, barbaric, violent, backward and childlike people. The course discusses how such constructions impacted Adivasi social life and development. It traces how the expansion of the colonial state in forests and hills put an end to self-rule and induced massive migration from the plains of India and asks how Adivasi areas were integrated into the colonial economy. How did the colonial state use revenue and forest policies and regulations to bring these areas under its control? How did commercialization of agriculture and forest conservation work to further marginalize Adivasis? The course also examines how Adivasi knowledge of cultivation and forest conservation were viewed by the colonial state and asks why the colonial state encouraged caste-Hindu peasant migration into Adivasi areas. Finally, it traces the ways that colonial intervention has resulted in a series of contestations, acts of resistance, and insurgencies by Adivasi groups? Tracing forms of Adivasi resistance, the course puts these into conversation with intellectual history, emphasizing the role of rumours, myths, and orality, which provided the basis for the new insurgent consciousness that spread throughout Adivasi communities.
Adivasi resistance movements have been documented and analyzed by colonial rulers and anthropologists. Colonial discourses were successful in criminalizing Adivasi politics. Ironically, many colonial-era discourses concerning Adivasis have been perpetuated within the post-colonial academy. The anti-colonial struggles of Adivasis were constructed as sporadic, spontaneous, unorganized and apolitical. The inauguration of the Subaltern Studies Project has reversed such arguments and attempted to provide ideological integrity to Adivasi politics. Students will be introduced to important literature on Adivasi anti-colonial insurgent consciousness and will be encouraged to think critically about the concepts and theories of subaltern politics. Assigned readings include texts by James Scott, Ranajit Guha, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Ajay Skaria, Dhanagare, Ramachandra Guha, Biswamoy Pati, Alpa Shah, Crispin Bates, Jangkhomang Guite and Bhangya Bhukya. One aim of the course is to sensitize the students to how the political and cultural mobilizations by subalterns have contributed to the shaping of democracy.

This seminar addresses topics in the art of India 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 painting, 1100-now; history and theory of museums in the colony, 1750-1950; photography, cinema, and performance art in South Asia; and art, ecology, and environment in 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.

This course introduces students to two systems of inequity, caste in South Asia, particularly in India, and race in the United States. It’s main objective is to demonstrate how these modes of inequity, sometimes dismissed as outdated or irrelevant, continue to shape social and state institutions like family, law, and bureaucracy. The course will explore sociological literature on caste and race and examine how these systems existed in a range of historical contexts. It will examine how certain groups were recipients of economic, political, and social privilege, and how these groups othered communities such as Afro-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India. We will consider how privileged groups continue to represent modern institutions like state and law that fail to protect disadvantaged communities in both India and the United States. The course will also explore how privileged communities employ the tool of gendered violence of different kinds like physical violence against men and sexual violence against women of Afro-American communities and Dalit communities to maintain forms of social power and control. The final unit of the course will deal with the emerging and imagined solidarities between Afro-American social and political movements in the United States and Dalit movements in India.

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 take up recent scholarship in modernist studies, with a particular focus on literary cultures that were not part of the canonical modernism of the early twentieth century. The course deals both with definitions of modernism, as well as with key moments and case studies of literature. Is modernism single or multiple? How does modernism relate to realism, both at the level form as well as in literary history? What were the politics of modernist literature, especially in the context of the Cold War and the emergence of the Third World? What are the stakes of a temporal and geographic expansion of modernism beyond an early-twentieth century Euro-American modernism of the metropole, to include the literatures of the 1950s and beyond, as well as those of the formerly colonized world? Is the framework of modernism still useful today, or has it become, paradoxically, both too restricted and too diffuse? We will examine literatures in multiple geographic spaces, taking South Asia as an exemplary location and expanding to other contexts. Readings in English and in translation will include both major works of secondary literature, as well as primary texts as relevant. Possible reading clusters include the multiple literatures straddling symbolism, romanticism, and modernism of writers such as Rubén Darío and Rabindranath Tagore; the linguistic tension shared by Yi Sang N. M. Rashed, and Arun Kolatkar; and the Cold War literary debates that took place across the Third World, as seen in the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Bhalchandra Nemade, and O.V. Vijayan. No proficiency in languages other than English is required or expected; however, when possible we will refer to texts in their original language.

This is the second semester of a performance course in the North Indian sitar Students who have not taken the first semester but play any musical instrument are permitted to join. Principles of composition and improvisation will be explored in practice and supplemented by readings and listening. The class gives a group performance at the end of the semester.

Once all PhD course requirements, including languages, have been met, and all exams except the final PhD Oral Exam or Defense has been presented. This stage is commonly referred to as ABD or "All But Dissertation" when a student is completing their research, writing, editing and finally presenting their dissertation.

Urdu literature in translation. Topics vary by semester.