Reading Indian Pasts: Early Texts and Modern Readers in South Asia

Undergraduate / Graduate

How do different readers read the same text differently? How have intellectuals in South Asia interpreted, and continue to interpret, their textual pasts? This course will explore questions related to the receptions of premodern South Asian texts, engaging students in debates in intellectual history and histories of reception, with a focus on questions of periodization, social categories, and constructions of identity in premodern South Asia. How, for example, have modern readers interpreted questions of caste and gender in early South Asian texts? How did premodern readers interpret their own textual pasts, and what are the tools by which we, as modern readers, may understand these negotiations? What are the stakes in and consequences of reading these debates in our own times? We will explore these and other questions through both primary and secondary materials. The course will enable students to explore broad conceptual questions related to histories of reading and debates in South Asian reception and intellectual history. Additionally, students will read sections of premodern texts, in translation, which have enjoyed significant lives outside their own times and contexts, alongside different interpretations of these texts. Students will work towards gaining conceptual tools to examine both premodern and modern texts as well as the many frameworks of interpretation that emerged out of them. No prior knowledge of South Asian topics is required.