2009-10 AM Incredible India: Colonisation, Decolonisation and Contemporary Issues, We 18-20

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Preliminary Seminar Schedule


Aims and objectives

This seminar will try to make some inroads into the complexities of Indian history, society, polity and cultures. In particular, we will concentrate on three basic objectives:

  • Providing a survey, necessarily sketchy, of factual information on important events and developments about India past and present,
  • Understanding which main issues some important scholarly debates raise about Indian history and society,
  • Last, but not least, developing our own questions about what holds this country of tensions and contradictions together

Note: This seminar will operate in coordination with the literature seminar Fictions of India: Colonial, Postcolonial and Contemporary offered by Anton Kirchhofer, and with the Cultural Studies seminar The Indian Diaspora in History, Literature and Film offered by Annika McPherson.

Session 1

Introductory meeting, in which we will use the short story The Elephant by Aravind Adiga to find out what we need to learn in order to develop some understanding of India. The text has been uploaded on stud.ip; please read it for the first meeting!

Session 2

What is and when was India? Geographical and historical constellations in a subcontinent.

Session 3

The South Asian potpourri – an important cradle of human civilsation

  • empires
  • polities, societies, ethnicities
  • cultures & religions

Session 4-5

The emergence of Indo-Islamic empires, the Mughals, and the Hindu-Muslim divide

Session 6-9

The Rise and Fall of the British Raj

Session 10-12

Post-colonial (= post 1947) India

Session 13

Overflow

Session 14

What's so incredible about India? Evaluation of our findings...


Bibliography

We will use a variety of fictional and non-fictional sources and secondary texts plus visual material to approach our topic, e.g. chapters and sections from the following titles:

  • Bose, Sugata; Ayesha Jalal: Modern South Asia. History, Culture, Political Economy. 2nd ed. New York & London: Routledge 2004. (strongly recommended for purchase!)
  • Chakrabarty, Bidyut: Indian Politics and Society since Independence. London: Routledge 2008.
  • Das, Gurcharan: India Unbound. From Independence to the Global Information Age. New ed. New Dehli: Penguin Books India 2002, 2007.
  • Luce, Edward: In Spite of the Gods. new ed. London, New York: Little, Brown Bookgroup Abacus 2007. (strongly recommended for purchase!)
  • Mehta, Suketu: Maximum City. Bombay lost and found. New Dehli: Penguin Books India 2006.

One of the fictional texts we will read and discuss is:

  • Prawer Jhabvala, Ruth: Heat and Dust. new ed. London: John Murray Publishers 2003. (strongly recommended for purchase and reading prior to the beginning of the semester!)

All these books and quite a few more on our topic more can be found on a reserve shelf in the library.

How we will work

  • For starters, we'll need some common ground of information. This will be provided by background reading assignments, from Sugata Bose / Ayesha Jalal: Modern South Asia. History, Culture, Political Economy. 2nd ed. London: Routledge 2004 (on order at the CvO bookstore), but also from other relevant material.
  • For meetings 4-12: Students will form expert groups of not more than 3 people for short presentations on a broad variety of topics (e.g. the Great mutiny, the Gandhi myth, the BJP and the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, the issue of caste in contemporary Indian society... a list of more choices will be provided by mid-October, but of course, but you may also suggest your own topic. Please contact me about your ideas by e-mail or in one of my office hours before the beginning of classes).

Of course, these presentations will be backgrounded by more reading assignments for the whole class, and occasional overviews delivered by me. Also, a number of literary texts like The God of Small Things or The White Tiger or excerpts from the 1984/5 TV series The Jewel in the Crown or the recent movie Slumdog Millionaire will be read / viewed and discussed in this phase...

Credit Points

You can get credit points (3 or 6) in various ways: tests on background reading, presentation and / or paper on a specific topic of your choice; please refer to your exam regulations for details about the requirements...


Office hours

Since I retired on March 31 and do no longer belong to the full-time faculty of the department, I will offer an office hour only once every two or three weeks only, to be announced by the beginning of classes (=Oct 19). Of course, you can talk to me also before or after class.