HI 6565 - Topics in the History of India

Credits: 3

Description This course asks students to explore the history of India and question how that history came to be constructed. Students will survey what modern scholarship has determined to be the “facts” of Indian history and civilization- the chronology, the people, the institutions, religions, cultures, and ideas of the subcontinent’s 5,000-year history. At the same time, students will explore the different sets of historical assumptions, values, and contexts that have shaped the works of historians writing India’s history over the past two hundred years: the classic works of “Orientalist” history, the nationalist historians of the early 20th century, the secularists, the Marxists, the post modernists, and, most recently, the Hindu nationalists.