HIS202 | History II

History II builds on our understanding of historical methods and interpretation and thereby introduces modern South Asia through a set of themes that span the early eighteenth to the early twentieth-centuries. The course looks at colonialism as one of the important historical processes towards making meaning of the history of modern South Asia. Although the readings assigned follow a loose chronological structure, the course has been arranged thematically in order to facilitate a conceptually rigorous discussion on the colonial condition, modernity, institutions, ideologies, and identities in South Asia.

We will begin our discussion with the eighteenth-century marking it as a moment of transition and multiple beginnings and then move towards understanding the “colonial” as a key concept underpinning the interpretation of socio-cultural processes and histories of nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asia. Next, we will study British colonial law, its relationship with legal practices and ideas in the precolonial period, its status as a “colonial episteme”, and its conceptions of key legal ideas like equality, justice, and governance. Along with law, we will look at the gender question, the caste question, and the Muslim question in nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia. Apart from an understanding of the social, economic, and cultural processes this will offer us the opportunity to look at the faultlines within the “colonial archive” and the role of power in the production of “colonial knowledge”. In what ways was “colonial subjectivity” related to processes of knowledge production in colonial South Asia? How did anti-colonial nationalism address the problem of representation? In what ways was the nation question addressed both in the heyday of British colonialism and in the inter-war period leading to the partition of British India in 1947? What kind of challenges did the “nation” (as an idea) face within anti-colonial and nationalist political thought? How did the multiple people-nations accent the fragments of the nation and thereby produce new political imaginaries in twentieth-century South Asia? The course will answer such questions amongst several others towards offering a comprehensive understanding of colonial modern South Asia and its historical trajectories.