| Early Medieval to early Modern India

This course is the second in a series of three courses offered to History Major students in the B.A. program. Apart from being a survey of the early medieval to the early modern period (i.e. seventh through the eighteenth centuries) in Indian history, the course will introduce students to ten major debates in the field that have been studied by historians in the last two decades. Each module of the course addresses one such debate framed as a big-ticket question related to the field. Moving away from the tired framework of “medieval India” students will learn new ways of thinking about periodization, space, and historical processes in the seventh through the eighteenth centuries. One key aspect of the course is to train students in reading primary texts (both written and visual) and offer an environment (through assignments) for developing ideas in response to the primary sources. Thus, students will learn to think actively and critically about the early medieval and early modern past, in relationship with the present that we inhabit. Some of the questions that we will ask in the course include -– How do new themes enable us to write global histories of early medieval to early modern India from the perspective of maritime empires, cultural encounters, legal pluralism, and mercantile economies across the Indian Ocean littoral?

How can our understanding of the early medieval and the global early modern as concepts sharpen our understanding of local realities of regions across the Indian subcontinent? In what ways have historians rethought key categories of state, region, land, caste, economy, and religion in the new scholarship of seventh through the eighteenth centuries in South Asia? Overall, the course will provoke students to think about India in alignment with trans-regional historical realities of connections, circulations, and change.