South Asian Culture Courses

This course will introduce students to some of the major philosophical and religious teachings from Asia that have existed from ancient times to the present. Representative material will be drawn especially from Indian (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sufi, Sikh), Chinese (Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist), and Japanese (Zen, Shinto) schools of thought. Readings will consist largely of primary materials translated into English. The main focus of the course will be to highlight the central philosophical concepts and to ask how these ideas contribute to their respective world-views and ethical outlooks, and how they affect the religious expressions of these cultures. Asian 220 will give you the tools to think critically about the diversity of philosophical and religious traditions and ideas that exist in Asia. Students will also gain an understanding of how these philosophical ideas have been influential in shaping the religious cultures of much of Asia. The course also serves as a general introduction to philosophical thinking on a number of profound philosophical questions. What is the nature of the self? What is really real? What happens after death? What is the relationship between the individual and society? The course also aims to develop the student’s skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking.

Hinduism is a major world religion practiced by over a billion people, primarily in South Asia, but it also was the precursor of Buddhism. Along with Buddhism, it had a major impact on the civilizations in East and Southeast Asia. This course will cover its origins and development, its literature, its belief and practices, its unique social structures and doctrines, its interactions with other religions, and finally its confrontation with and accommodation of 'modernity.'

In this course, we will read 20th-century works of literary nonfiction by writers with South Asian links—the people write about a different place than they write from. This course encourages you to think about these issues first-hand with your own creative, as well as produce critical exercises in writing about place. We begin by comparing four short accounts of Mumbai/Bombay to see how narrative personality affects the portrait of a place, and then in subsequent weeks, develop a critical vocabulary for discussing these rhetorical decisions by having you talk about your own writing experiences, and pairing travel writing with travel theory. How do writers’ identities impact the way we construct a narrative “I” as our traveling selves and as our writing selves? What do we assume we have in common with our readers and what do we assume readers won’t share with us? What preconceptions of “here” and “there” (as “desh” and “videsh”) do we rely on to construct narrative authority? How is South Asian identity created in the diaspora? This course emphasizes the honing of skills both in expository writing and in the close reading of literary texts. Special attention will be paid in both the reading and writing exercises to the special case of literary nonfiction, and how the creative and the critical elements necessarily come together in the ways we approach this genre.

This course examines the relationship between race, caste, and religion in two different democracies, India and the United States. To do this, in the first part of the course, we shall compare the historical struggles of two geographically disparate populations in India and the United States. Through this comparison we probe the language and construction of race, nation, religion, color, and ethnicity, as well as the linkages between these categories. The juxtaposition of these very different locations and histories, each with its own public and private narratives of struggle, will allow us to analyze and discuss issues at the heart of public policy agenda, such as asylum, immigration, hate crimes and citizenship. The second part of the course will look at more recent forms of racial and religious profiling related to the effects of the post 9/11 War on Terror in both India and the United States. In this way the course will introduce students to systematic patterns of intolerance and chauvinism in Europe, India and the US – hence covering both Asia and the West.

Like ancient Greece, ancient India produced two great martial epics: the Mahabharata and Ramaya?a. In comparison to the Greek epics, however, the influence of the India epics has been far greater and more enduring. These tales of gods and heroes are known to virtually every Indian alive today and continue to inform the lives of millions of Hindus around the world. This undergraduate seminar provides students with a chance to explore these great works of world literature in depth. The course will begin with an examination of the epics in their earliest surviving forms, written in the Sanskrit language. Here we will consider both the epic narratives in their entireties and closely read especially important passages from them. Following this, we will then look at some major retellings of the epics both in Sanskrit and in various Indian vernaculars as well as in various media, including poems, plays, television series, and even comic books.

This course examines the relationship between race, caste, and religion in two different democracies, India and the United States. To do this, in the first part of the course, we shall compare the historical struggles of two geographically disparate populations in India and the United States. Through this comparison we probe the language and construction of race, nation, religion, color, and ethnicity, as well as the linkages between these categories. The juxtaposition of these very different locations and histories, each with its own public and private narratives of struggle, will allow us to analyze and discuss issues at the heart of public policy agenda, such as asylum, immigration, hate crimes and citizenship. The second part of the course will look at more recent forms of racial and religious profiling related to the effects of the post 9/11 War on Terror in both India and the United States. In this way the course will introduce students to systematic patterns of intolerance and chauvinism in Europe, India and the US – hence covering both Asia and the West.

This course investigates nonfiction accounts of systemic gender discrimination in colonial and postcolonial India. The focus is on written protests aimed at those within the society, as well as appeals to those without. How can readers reconcile the contentious truths of these narratives? We start with the issue of “sati” that was the basis for Spivak’s essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? to examine our own expectations of right and wrong in first-person accounts. What moral mandate is invoked in these genres, and where can we see that at work in the writing? We then ask more specifically how religious, class, and caste affiliations of a nonfiction narrator influence our understanding of the events described by looking closely at women’s autobiographical writings during the nationalist movement. With whom do they seek an alliance, on what basis, and to what political end? After midterm, we examine oral histories told by survivors of Partition-era sexual assault, which complicates the simplistic us/them and true/false binaries often read into nonfiction accounts. In what ways do unifying nationalist narratives undermine or even silence more painful personal narratives? How do we come to terms with our own complex moral investments in their stories? The course ends with examples of Dalit writing in postcolonial India that interrogate set distinctions, not only between us and them, true and false but also between literary and non-literary works. Thus we may inquire more deliberately into the political deployment (and even marketing) of narratives from the downtrodden, especially when caste-based oppression is claimed to trump gender-based oppression. What is the role of the literary in establishing the value of these nonfiction accounts?