Pol Soc in Modern South Asia

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course is a semester-long introduction to politics and society in the Indian subcontinent, now termed “South Asia.” Over the next fourteen weeks, we will draw on classic and contemporary scholarship across the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, economics and political science to gain a critical understanding of major political themes and issues in the region, in terms of actual events and processes as well as the interpretive debates around them. In doing so, we shall inquire into the nature of the postcolonial state and its institutions, state-society relations, modernization, secularism, the politics of identity, and the political economy of development in South Asia. Our inquiries should help us contextualize the abstract concepts of modernization, development, and state formation, and to make meaningful comparisons with similar processes in other parts of the world. This course is, therefore, based on the premise that theoretical reflections on politics must be arrived at inductively on the basis of rigorous empirical knowledge rather than via abstract speculation or deductive reasoning.