Introduction to Modern South Asia

This course will explore the making of modern South Asia through a dynamic conception of its peoples as historical actors who contributed to and engaged with the varied facets of the empire, resistance, and modernity. We will ask: How did resisting colonial rule include, exclude, or form creative attempts to adapt, appropriate, question, and reject elements of European modernity? What were the various complementary and competing visions of anti-colonial nationalism? How were these represented and turned into history writing? In other words, what is the relationship between power, culture, and knowledge? Finally, what are the contemporary political stakes in different narratives of the past? This course thus grapples with history as well as post-colonial theory, and provides students with comparative tools to engage with imperial forms, nationalism, and struggles that remade much of the global south by the mid-twentieth century.