Text and World in Medieval India

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course is intended as a graduate seminar (undergraduates are welcome to attend, too) concentrating on the cultural and intellectual history of medieval southern Asia. For the purposes of the course, 'medieval' is roughly delimited by the half-millennium 700-1200 CE; 'southern Asia' refers mostly to the Indian subcontinent, with collateral attention paid to mainland and insular Southeast Asia. The recurrent focus will be on the reciprocal connections between texts-as physical artifacts, concretizations of cultural knowledge, articulations of traditions of wisdom, and realizations of intentional projects-and the social and physical world of their emergence and circulation. The class meetings will be divided between thematic and regional topics. Themes include the royal court, the nature of religious plurality, literary intertextuality, and the nature and efficacy of linguistic reference; regional concentrations include the Tamil country, Pāla-Sena Bengal, Angkor, central Java, and Kashmir.