The Humanities, down to the last dot

Reconstructing India's past from sources, silences, and struggles over memory

A rigorous introduction to historical method as practised on the Indian subcontinent: how historians read inscriptions, chronicles, colonial archives, and oral testimony; how nationalist, Marxist, subaltern, and postcolonial schools have argued over the meaning of India's past; and how students can move from primary sources to a defensible research article.

7 lessons

Excavating the material record of South Asia's deep past

An introduction to archaeological method, major excavated sites, and the interpretive debates that shape how the Indian subcontinent's prehistoric and historic material culture is understood, from stone tools to Harappan cities to colonial-era antiquarianism.

7 lessons

Studying human society, culture, and diversity in India and beyond

An introduction to social-cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology as practised in and on India, covering caste, kinship, tribe, fieldwork method, and the discipline's own colonial and postcolonial history.

7 lessons

The disciplined pursuit of wisdom across Indian and world traditions

A survey of classical Indian darshanas, Buddhist and Jaina logic, and their dialogue with Western epistemology, ethics, and political thought, designed to train rigorous argumentative writing.

7 lessons

Understanding caste, family, religion, and social change in India

A grounding in classical and Indian sociological theory, covering caste, kinship, religion, and social movements through the work of Indian and global sociologists.

7 lessons

Reading power, identity, and representation across Indian cultural texts

An interdisciplinary study of postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, media, and popular culture, focused on how power and identity are represented and contested in Indian cultural production.

7 lessons

Political economy, development, and the moral life of markets in India

This strand treats economics as a humanistic and historical discipline as much as an analytical one: it asks how colonial extraction, planning, poverty, and inequality have been measured, argued over, and lived through in the Indian subcontinent.

7 lessons

People, land, migration, and the shaping of Indian space

Human geography here examines how physical terrain, colonial cartography, migration, and urbanization together produced the social map of the Indian subcontinent, treating maps and census categories as historically constructed artifacts.

7 lessons

Mind, culture, and the Indian human sciences

This strand approaches psychology as a human science shaped by cultural context, examining the emergence of psychoanalysis and psychology in colonial and postcolonial India, indigenous concepts of selfhood, and the discipline's engagement with caste, trauma, and community.

7 lessons

From colonial curricula to postcolonial voice

This subject traces the entry of English literary study into India, the emergence of Indian writing in English, and the theoretical debates over language, nation, and representation that continue to shape literary criticism in South Asia.

7 lessons

Ghazal, revolution, and the Progressive imagination

This subject introduces the classical ghazal tradition, the Progressive Writers' Movement, Partition literature, and the modern Urdu short story and criticism, with attention to script, prosody, and translation.

7 lessons

From bhakti abhang to Dalit testimony

This subject covers the Varkari bhakti tradition of Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram, twentieth-century modernism, Dalit literature's radical intervention, and modern Marathi theatre, situating Maharashtra's literary history within its social and political movements.

7 lessons

Archives, oral history, translation, and the digital humanities

This subject equips students with cross-disciplinary research methods for humanities scholarship in the Indian context: working ethically with archives, conducting oral history, practising comparative and translation studies, and applying digital humanities tools to South Asian literary and historical material.

7 lessons

Reading global connections, comparisons, and ruptures from antiquity to the present

A comparative and connective survey of world history that treats civilisations, empires, and revolutions not as isolated national stories but as nodes in shared networks of trade, ideas, conquest, and resistance. The course consistently situates the Indian subcontinent within these global processes, training students to compare, contextualise, and write research articles that avoid both Eurocentrism and uncritical nationalism.

5 lessons

Reading epics, novels, and poetry across languages and continents in comparative perspective

A comparative survey of world literature moving from oral epic traditions through the global novel, modernism, and postcolonial writing to poetry in translation, always asking how texts travel across languages and how Indian writers and readers participate in, respond to, and reshape global literary movements.

5 lessons

Tracing the idea of law from custom and scripture to constitutions and human rights

A course in jurisprudence and legal history that treats law not merely as a technical craft of statutes and courtrooms but as a civilisational conversation about authority, justice, and obligation. It moves between classical natural law, Islamic fiqh, Hindu and colonial legal codes, modern legal positivism, and the making of the Indian Constitution, training students to read legal texts and institutions as historically situated arguments about how power should be constrained and justice pursued.

5 lessons