Historyइतिहास
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.
- 01
Sources and Evidence: Reading India's Past
How historians of India identify, classify, and critically interrogate archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, literary, and archival sources.
5 concepts · 6 sources · 3 exercises
- 02
State Formation in Early India: From Janapadas to Empires
Tracing the emergence of states from Vedic tribal polities through Mauryan centralization to early medieval regional kingdoms.
5 concepts · 6 sources · 3 exercises
- 03
Colonialism and the Indian Economy
How colonial rule restructured Indian agriculture, trade, and industry, and the historiographical debates over deindustrialization and the drain of wealth.
5 concepts · 6 sources · 3 exercises
- 04
Indian Nationalism: Strands, Strategies, and Contested Meanings
Examining the plural strands of the Indian national movement — liberal, extremist, Gandhian, revolutionary, and subaltern — and historiographical debates over their interpretation.
5 concepts · 6 sources · 3 exercises
- 05
World Historiographies: How Civilisations Have Written Their Own Pasts
Comparing the founding traditions of historical writing across Greece, China, the Islamic world, and modern Europe, and what each tradition assumed history was for.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises
- 06
Atlantic Slavery and the Making of World Capitalism
Examining the transatlantic slave trade as a constitutive institution of the modern global economy, and the historiographical debates over its relation to industrial capitalism.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises
- 07
Revolutions and the Making of the Nation-State, 1776-1989
Comparing the American, French, Latin American, and 1989 East European revolutions as a connected global sequence remaking sovereignty and citizenship.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises