B.A. (Hons.)

Effective reading and writing lie at the heart of both academic success and professional development. At NLSIU, we understand writing not merely as a skill, but as an essential component of the learning process itself. This Common Core course in writing, integral to both the B.A. (Hons.) and B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) curricula, is designed to strengthen students’ ability to read critically, think analytically, and express their ideas with clarity and precision.

Recognising the diverse educational and linguistic backgrounds of incoming students, the course fosters equitable learning by building foundational skills essential for thriving in higher education. It addresses common challenges—such as moving beyond rote learning, engaging deeply with texts, and formulating coherent arguments—through guided instruction and sustained practice. Students will gain confidence in synthesising ideas, crafting persuasive prose, and communicating effectively across contexts. The overarching aim is to enhance students’ ability to participate meaningfully in an NLSIU education while cultivating life-long writing and communication skills that will serve them in a range of professional settings.

As a first-year course, it is designed to establish a strong foundation in university-level reading and writing. Drawing on both learning to write and writing to learn approaches, the course prepares students to write across disciplines. Academic writing, in particular, demands the ability to convey complex ideas with depth and clarity—an undertaking that requires thoughtful engagement with a broad range of ideas and texts. Each session will be structured around individual and collaborative reading, classroom demonstrations, and in-class exercises. These activities emphasise reading and writing as mirrored processes, reinforcing the central idea that good writing is grounded in attentive, critical reading. Through this iterative approach, students will learn to absorb, respond to, and eventually contribute to academic debates.

By the end of the course, each student will have compiled a Student Portfolio, comprising all written work produced during the term. This portfolio will be maintained throughout their time at NLSIU, serving as a record of their progress, labour, and intellectual engagement. It also enables a trajectory of feedback, allowing students to reflect on their development, identify persistent challenges, and trace the impact of course interventions on their growth as writers and thinkers.

Numbers shape our daily lives in multiple aspects, influencing personal finance, work, voting, policymaking, and more. The purpose of the Numbers course in the Common Core curriculum is to cultivate a problem-solving mindset among students. Socially, numbers represent quantifiable aspects of life that shape governance, policy, and decision-making. They play a key role in everyday decision-making, wage structures, inflation, and labour markets. Numbers also shape media narratives, public opinion, public health strategies, and cultural discourse, while impacting education and social mobility through metrics like test scores and academic rankings. Understanding how numbers are produced, interpreted, and used to construct social realities forms the core aspect of this course. This course is designed to introduce numerical thinking in students irrespective of whether they will go on to choose numbers-based disciplinary training later or not. This course introduces principles of statistical thinking, probabilities, descriptive statistics, sources of data, and data visualisation.

In this interactive, activity-oriented course, we will investigate the invisible rules of social behaviour. Through experiential learning, real-world observation, and reflective journaling, we will engage with our surroundings and ask: How do we come to belong to particular social groups and distinguish ourselves from others? Why and how do permissible and forbidden formats of behaviour emerge? How do we live with each other in grades of discomfort, disagreement, and sometimes in conditions of direct conflict? Are friendships acts of political freedom? What is the state and why does it matter more for some over others? What expectations do societies have of the rich and the poor? We will engage with canonical texts and thinkers as well as contemporary popular writing, fiction, films and memoir. In this course we will critically examine social facts—such as laws, beliefs, and desires—in the personal, global, and digital realms. We will also question whether these seemingly “natural” and commonsense ideas, practices, and institutions are truly universal or culturally specific, instinctive or mediated. Finally, we will explore how social norms evolve, sometimes gradually, and at other times, suddenly.

This course is a primer on Economics covering fundamental instruments of analysis used in Microeconomics and Macroeconomics with applications. It deals with decision making by individuals, institutions and governments, the choices they make and the tradeoffs involved. The course introduces students to the many ways in which the economy shapes our lives—and how we, in turn, shape the economy. But its application is not just limited to understanding the economy. It also provides an alternate way of understanding the world around us –inequality, crime, corruption, discrimination and also altruism, belief in fairness and why our search for nirvana is constantly ambushed, among others.

With the global rise of leaders often described as authoritarians or populists, concerns about the abuse of power have become increasingly prominent. Lord Acton’s well-known observation —“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—suggests that power, especially political power, must be subject to limits. But what happens when large majorities in democratic societies choose to support leaders with authoritarian tendencies? Is this, too, an expression of democratic will? From ancient phrases like vox populi, vox dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”) to modern theories of the general will, popular sovereignty, and populism, this course explores how “the people” are imagined in relation to power. It also raises more fundamental questions: What is power? Where do we find it? Is power located solely in government institutions, or can it be found in culture, discourse, and even in texts—including this one? If 15 August 1947 marked a formal “transfer of power” from colonial to elected governance in India, this course presents a more contested and non-linear account of how power has been configured and reconfigured in postcolonial India. Influential Indian thinkers have imagined democracy as a project of distributing power, preventing its concentration in the hands of a few. The course introduces students to foundational political questions about representation, freedom, territory, and popular movements, examining how power is exercised, resisted, and reimagined. It addresses state power, political power, and social power, showing that the meaning and function of power are far from settled. Students will engage with the question of whether power is inherently coercive or whether it can also be productive or emancipatory. How is power challenged and limited through political, legal, and social mechanisms? How do we make sense of powerlessness? These questions will be explored through a mix of classical and contemporary texts, alongside examples drawn from everyday life.

We have learnt a fair bit from the Common Core course on Narrative, Society, and Power about how the world works and how it is organised. In this course, we are confronted with the question: how did it all come to be this way? We read our long past(s) in this course, through emotions and objects. These emotions range from faith, fear, dominance to pride. Each of these emotional histories is constructed through objects or things. Each of the thing(s) we examine, tells a distinct history of human attachment to and embeddedness in the world.

The built environment, objects, food, dresses, languages and scripts as well as our thought-world to say the least, have remnants of pasts and have been shaped by the past. In moments of rupture a particular past can dominate over the others. Why and how some past(s) become more important than others? Is it possible to retrieve all human past(s)? Is it possible to retrieve the past in totality and move beyond the past of a particular social group? Is it possible to retrieve the past of other animals and move beyond anthropos?

The course thus invites learners to understand these processes of interactions/engagements with the past and invite them to think historically. We will use a curated group of objects (archaeological artifacts, manuscripts, paintings, buildings, texts etc.) as entry points into history and try to cultivate a historical temper in understanding the world around us.

This course aims to foreground Early India within the context of broader changes that happened in early phases of human history. We begin the discussion with human evolution, prehistoric hunting gathering societies and the traces they left. Diverse migratory patterns and shifts towards agriculture, complex social formations and early state structures shaped early India in specific ways. These historical processes are crucial to our present shape; our life-world as well as thought-world. By focusing on society, economy, polity and cultural spheres of human lives we discuss major changes in the region in the longue durée. We will study the Neolithic South Asia, Harappan experiment, Vedic people, changes in the sixth century Ganga Valley, Mauryan state, Gupta rule and early Tamilkam as an entry point to discuss several changes in the region. We also aim to introduce the diverse nature of sources and the many ways in which they have been read by historians.

In this course we introduce new ways of thinking about “medieval India” in terms of periodisation, space, and historical processes. Some of the questions we will ask include -– How do new debates enable us to write a global history of early medieval/medieval and early modern India from the perspective of maritime empires, legal pluralism, joint-stock companies and mercantile economies across the Indian Ocean littoral? How can our understanding of the global sharpen our understanding of local realities of India (and vice-versa)? In what ways have historians rethought key categories like state, region, land, caste, tradition, and transition in the new scholarship of seventh through eighteenth century South Asia? The course will provoke students to think about South Asia in alignment with transregional historical realities of connections, circulation, and change.

Does the ‘modern’ period of India’s history begin with the onset of British colonialism? How did ‘nation’ as a political entity emerge in the region? Was it the only political imaginary through which ‘freedom’ was envisioned? In this course, we will examine such questions by charting the complex histories of colonialism, nationalism, and the subsequent making of ‘Modern India’. We begin in the mid-18th century with the Company state to consider whether these early transitions determine the nature of imperial rule. The course progresses to the 19th and 20th centuries to examine how colonial regimes restructured the milieu of South Asia, engendering radical economic and political changes, and making it a site of complex interaction between caste, gender, and religion. Further, the readings analyse the emergence of nationalism amidst these changes and the contested meanings it acquired. We conclude by focusing on the history of the ‘Partition’ – which marked the end of the British Empire and the creation of two political sovereign states India and Pakistan. Readings for this course will weave together regional politics and histories of South Asia with larger global political forces at play. The course provides a comprehensive understanding of the history of modern India and prompts students to reflect on the broader legacies of colonialism in the present – the many ways in which the Indian nation state continues to be shaped by its colonial past, while also departing from it.

What do we mean by historicising present day experiences? Are all narratives of the past histories? Is doing history a different mode of thinking (if not unique) about the past? What is the place of traces/sources from the past in history writing? Are traces/sources found only in archives, or do they reside in everyday objects, songs, and memories? In this course, we examine how historians construct accounts of the past by working with time, space, and sources in distinct ways. We will draw on a range of primary sources to learn how to read these materials as constructs of the past, shaped by the context, historical perspective and discourses of their time. The course invites students to critically study the imaginative and interpretive aspects of historical writing, understanding how narratives are constructed and how historical reasoning influences our understanding of the present.

This course deploys historical thinking to events from the 1950s onwards, putting India’s post-independent history in conversation with contemporaneous world history. Students will learn about Nehruvian state-building in the 1950s, the successes and failures of Indian democracy, and the social and ideological currents that shaped India during these decades. They will weave connections with critical global events and processes that marked the Post Second World War world, including decolonisation and the rise of varying sovereignties in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the establishment of the post-1945 international world order; the Cold War, collapse of Soviet socialism and victory of global capitalism; and the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide.

This course builds upon conversations on the histories of state from previous period courses and asks what essentially constitutes the modern state in South Asia, specifically India? It focuses on the making of the colonial state and its gradual transition towards the postcolonial nation-state. Specifically, we will study the relationship between law, sovereignty, and justice by analysing the making of colonial legal regimes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries— their interactions with pre-existing South Asian legal cultures and institutions, and the subsequent consolidation of the modern bureaucratic state. Further, the course unpacks the early 20th century as a period marked by multiple claims of political representation, with a special focus on the Constituent Assembly Debates. It will conclude by reflecting upon the career of the postcolonial nation-state and the many ways in which it engaged with its colonial pasts. Over all, this course explores the fraught transition from colony to nation-state, where questions of citizenship, rights, and obligations were continuously reimagined and contested.

This course explores the origins and evolution of modern economic theories. It examines where these theories come from, identifying their historical beginnings and the schools of thought from which they emerged. The course also investigates alternative or dissenting perspectives that coexisted with mainstream economics throughout the twentieth century—tracing their roots and development. In particular, it provides a comprehensive overview of key economic ideas from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, with a focus on theories of value and distribution, as well as output and economic growth. The course provides a comprehensive understanding of economic thought covering historical development of economic systems, institutions, policies, and societal structures. The discussions combine both economics and history, allowing students to analyse how past economic events have shaped current economic realities.

This course covers the mathematical instruments needed for economic analysis at an intermediate level. The course starts at a basic level and advances to an intermediate level required for rigorous economic analysis. The course will cover key concepts such as algebra, calculus and optimisation techniques for analysis of economic situations. This will enable students to formulate theories in a precise manner and enable forecasting outcomes. There will be extensive use of real world cases and applications to ground concepts and facilitate an applied understanding of the economic world.

A foundational course for understanding the behaviour of individuals and firms in economic decision-making and resource allocation. It enables understanding fundamental microeconomic theories, analysing consumer choices and firm behaviour using microeconomic principles, and applying microeconomic concepts to real-world policy issues, such as market regulation and economic welfare.

A crucial branch of economics that focuses on the behaviour and performance of an economy as a whole. The course involves discussions and lectures on the interrelationships between different sectors of the economy and economic issues such as inflation, unemployment, and economic growth. This course is essential for understanding how countries interact economically and the implications of these interactions on a global scale.

The course focuses on the economic aspects of the development process in developing countries. The objective of the course is to understand the complexities of economic growth, poverty alleviation, and the various factors that influence the economic development of nations. The discussions help in understanding how economies grow and develop over time, emphasising the importance of both economic theory and practical application in addressing global challenges. The discussions include the impact of gender and social structure differences on markets in analysing economic issues effectively.

Econometrics is a vital instrument in an economist’s toolkit that helps bridge the gap between economic theory and real-world data. It involves use of statistical and mathematical techniques to study the relationship between variables, test hypotheses or theories and forecast micro and macroeconomic outcomes. Econometrics backed by theory provides a sound basis for decision making, whether it is a firm taking a strategic decision with respect to product price or the government deciding on taxes. Quantified estimates of decision or policy outcomes help to arrive at appropriate decisions and avoid costly errors. Econometrics provides the foundation skills for such data analysis.

In the past and in the present, democratic order, and its prioritisation of values such as equality, political participation and an orientation to the common, is much discussed both by its proponents and critics. But what is democracy? Does equality, one of democracy’s constitutive values, lie in tension with the value of liberty, and can that tension pose a challenge to the sustenance of democracy? What are the kinds of challenge, internal and external, that can afflict democratic orders? Keeping in mind the aforementioned, this course will interrogate how the values of a democratic order relate to other themes that are significant for discussions of political community — namely, justice, freedom, diversity, conflict, and coercion. This will be done by focusing on concepts like political membership, deliberation and representation, and via consideration of the place of associational as well as electoral activities for sustaining democratic political community. The course materials will engage these issues from diverse methodological perspectives with a view to reckoning with the complexities of democracy.

This course will introduce students to Indian politics since the time of Independence till the contemporary moment. India has had a unique and tumultuous journey into democracy in the last 75 odd years which deserve to be looked into. Following India’s independence, the adoption of universal suffrage and a democratic Constitution was seen as a bold experiment. Despite enduring challenges, including social and economic inequalities, Indian democracy has managed to persist, adapt, and evolve, but has also faced new and recurring pressures. While this course would be chronologically ordered, it would also focus on a few core constituent assembly debates, institution building, party systems and electoral processes and how they have evolved over time.Secondly, the course provides a detailed understanding of the formal institutional structure of the Indian state and democracy-legislature, executive, and judiciary. The course will examine how these institutions function, with a focus on judicial power and rule of law, executive and political leadership, legislatures and representation, federal institutions, and new institutions and governance. The course will enable students to understand the historical and institutional dynamics that have structured and transformed Indian politics since Independence.

This course builds on the previous course— Introduction to Indian Politics to expand students’ ability to analyse Indian politics using different analytical framings. How does regionalism affect the workings of Indian politics? What are the long standing issues with federalism in India? How has identity politics and rising communalism changed the contours of Indian politics since the 1990s? Why are ethnic conflicts on a rise in North Eastern India? How have social movements of caste, gender and even environment transformed the nature of Indian politics? How have economic reforms since the 1990s influenced political processes and the relationship between the state and society? This course will seek to introduce students to some of these complex and dynamic political phenomena and offer students a nuanced and historicised perspective in trying to understand and explain them.

The discipline of politics uses a range of methods to make descriptive, constitutive and causal inferences to understand and explain phenomena and practices we call political. This is only to indicate that each of these sub fields also deploy a range of methods drawing on from quantitative to qualitative traditions – to address specific questions. The course will familiarise students on the one hand with survey based and multivariate quantitative analysis and on the other, discursive methods like interviews, participant observation and ways of doing field-based methods of interpretation. On one hand, they will build dexterity to work with data and numbers and on the other, they will also be taught how to work with discourse analysis, content analysis and how both could contribute to interpreting and explaining the world of politics.

Why should politics within and between countries be compared? We compare because we get a better understanding of who we are in relation to the rest of the world. Are the paths being followed by countries around the globe leading them to a more humane and fairer place to live? Asking similar questions and comparing experiences within and beyond India provides us with a richer understanding of where India stands today. Political modernisation, which is central to this comparative inquiry, revolves around the evolution of the idea of democracy and what it entails, and the redistribution of resources. This course is crafted to reflect primarily upon the democratic and developmental evolution in post-colonial contexts, with India as a reference point. How do the state and market intersect in post-colonial contexts? How are state-led modernisation responded to by the social movements (e.g. feminist movements, anti-globalisation/anti-development movements, Islamic movements) across various contexts? Dwelling on these questions, the course gauges the success and failure of democratic institutions in disparate contexts, both within and beyond India.

In a world fraught with wars and conflicts, how do we map the ‘political’? Who are the actors in international politics? What role does the international community play? This course on Global Politics provides avenues to explore answers to these questions. In this course, the foundational concepts of international relations are introduced and addressed through debates that mirror contemporary world concerns. The course broadly covers three themes: 1. history and narrative of international politics; 2. the politics of international organisations; 3. challenges of a globalised world. Reflecting on these themes, the course critically evaluates the state-centricity and centrality of power politics. Alongside nation-states and their relations, the course delves into race and gender dynamics and highlights the importance of morality, emotions, and aesthetics, among other reflective perspectives. These themes are theoretically and empirically addressed in modules along the key conceptual anchors of the discipline— power politics, state and market, international institutions, war and conflict, and peace and security.

While the disciplines of sociology and sociocultural anthropology share overlapping concerns such as — society and culture, the individual and the collective, continuities and ruptures, conflicts and solidarities—which have been explored since the 19th century, significant differences persist in how the two disciplines are practised today. These differences lie not so much in the themes or questions they address, but in the methods they adopt in scholarly inquiry.

Sociology has increasingly embraced a diverse range of methodological approaches, including focus group discussions, quantitative analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research. Anthropology, by contrast, has deepened its commitment to ethnographic methods, while also expanding into visual techniques, object-oriented approaches, and experiments with multimodal ethnography. As Tim Ingold (2017) notes, anthropology is not merely ethnography and narrative rendered in books and articles using specific methods; it is, fundamentally, a way of seeing the world, one that underscores the “speculative nature of anthropological inquiry.” This approach is often described metaphorically as “finding the world in a grain of sand.”

Attentive to this overlap and divide, we have built our major/minor curriculum to combine both methods and perspectives, while also borrowing from allied disciplines like geography, development studies, history, science and technology studies. This curriculum is designed with attention to both canonical and contemporary concerns within the fields of sociology and anthropology. It engages with both theoretical and speculative texts, as well as demonstrative ones such as ethnographic monographs and case studies, to provide students with a rich and varied reading experience.

The Sociology and Anthropology major introduces students to both qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry. This includes a diverse methodological toolkit, ranging from small-N comparisons and case studies to large-N datasets, geographic information systems, and spatial analysis. Through the application of these methods to real-world scenarios, students will develop a grounded understanding of data collection and analysis strategies—skills essential across a wide range of professions today. Importantly, methods are taught not as a fixed set of rules to be mechanically applied, but as a flexible and reflective toolkit—to be used thoughtfully, experimented with, and carried with a sense of ethical responsibility in engagement with the world.

The Sociology and Anthropology major/minor track equips students with a reflective and analytical approach to understanding the complexities and contradictions of the social world. It prepares them for diverse career pathways in government, civil society, the development sector, international organisations, and the media. Our pedagogy encourages students to examine how knowledge is produced and applied, fostering the ability to respond thoughtfully and rigorously to complex social issues beyond commonsense assumptions. The programme emphasises experiential learning, comparative perspectives, and a balanced engagement with real-world problems.

Social Forces is the first major course in the Sociology and Anthropology stream, designed to introduce students to the disciplines and key thinkers through accessible texts, ethnographic narratives, and India-centred case studies. The course orients them toward key commitments: understanding sociocultural diversity, how societies hold together, and the interdependence of humans and nature. Across ten weeks, students engage with topics such as cross-cultural thinking, caste, class, gender, religion, indigeneity, and postcolonial transformation. The readings—from field-based case studies to graphic guides and feminist reflections—demonstrate how the “normal” can be made strange and how the everyday is shaped by social structures. Through discussion, reflection, and contrapuntal readings, students develop the tools to recognise and critically analyse the patterned ways in which people live, relate, and contest power, ultimately learning to see both themselves and the world through a sociological and anthropological lens. The course follows three modules: (1) social order and constraint, 2) social structure and hierarchy, 3) social transformation.

Central Commitment #1: Exploring Sociocultural Diversity
Central Commitment #2: Understanding How Societies Hold Together
Central Commitment#3: Examining the Interdependence of Humans and Nature

This course introduces key concepts and frameworks through which sociologists examine questions of belonging and inequalities in different human societies. It begins with the much-used concept of identity and situates it in relation to questions of individual and collective belonging and of social and political action. The readings will range on caste, race, tribal, gender, sexuality and ethnic identities. The course will then survey the debates on difference and inequality. It introduces the basic distinction that is often made, in social stratification studies, between difference and inequality and between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ inequalities. Students will be familiarised with the processes, institutions, and structures through which inequalities are produced and reproduced.

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of methods employed in sociological and anthropological inquiry. It begins with an introduction to social statistics, progresses with training in qualitative and ethnographic tools, and concludes with an orientation to mixed methods. Students will learn the fundamentals of descriptive statistics, design quantitative surveys and draw sociological insights. They will be introduced to probability and non-probability sampling methods and sampling errors. Students will be introduced to key data sources for the Indian social context such as the NSSO sample surveys, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), the Indian Human Development Survey, the population census, agricultural censuses and the recent caste censuses.

The course will then train students in qualitative and ethnographic research methods. Highlighting the value of the ethnographic lens, students will be introduced to the history of the method as it evolved globally as well as in India. In the latter case, students will be introduced to work in the ‘village studies’ tradition that animated sociology and anthropology in India during its formative years. Students will learn about troubled histories of ethnography as well as the efforts in methodology from feminist and indigenous methodologies. They will be introduced to positionality, reflexivity and a range of ethical dilemmas that have kept ethnographers troubled. These conceptual discussions will be complemented with training in a number of fieldwork tools: participant observation, interviews, archival studies, critical discourse analysis, photovoice, oral histories and life stories, participatory methods (including action research), writing field diaries, coding and theorising from ethnography.

The latter part of the course will try to train students in the creative use of mixed methods, alerting students to the idea that emerging global challenges demand the use of new combinations of methods.

Work is central to the sustenance and reproduction of human societies on the one hand and to notions of what it means to be human on the other. Notwithstanding this transhistorical centrality, sociology recognizes that the nature of work underwent significant transformation with the emergence of capitalism and industrialization. This course introduces students to the key frameworks and concepts through which work and labour have been understood by sociologists and anthropologists. These include issues of production and reproduction; the intersections between class and other kinds of social relations such as caste, gender, and ethnicity; the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economies; uneven development; work in ‘postindustrial’ societies; technological advancements and the changing nature and future of work. These issues will be approached through attention to their historical and social specificities.

Gods play multifarious roles in social life. They crucially interact with kings, rulers, political parties – in transmitting their power to earthly subjects. They are carried into social life through institutions of organised religion that tune social life towards paying keen attention to gods, spirits, and supernatural forces. Religion, here, is broadly understood as institutions and practices that shape the relations between earthly world and other worlds, especially the ones that are not easily perceptible via the human senses. Religion, in controlling the dominant social imagination of what is sacred and what is profane, is crucially, a source of social and political power. For instance, ritual power is bestowed on the upper castes – the Brahmins – among Hindus in India, who use that power to control the lives of lower caste men and women. This power, throughout the longue duree history of religious institutions, has been harnessed by certain sections of society (upper caste communities being a good example) to dominate others, and generate a vulnerability of the latter to the diktats and rules and regulations provided by the former, using the institutions of religion. Religion has also, historically, been the source and arbiter of sovereign law. The king-god amalgamation is a very old one. But invocation of the power of gods continues to be a good source of political power even in the milieu of democracy. Thus, this course will take us through topics and questions of what religion means in India and the contemporary world, how it relates to social and political power, how it argues with and/or incorporates modernity, social hierarchies and violence that carry religious sanction.

This course investigates how social structures and everyday social interactions are shaped by the law, state, and organisations. Conversely, this course will also focus on how societies maintain and shape the law, state, and organisations. Students will be introduced to the sociology of law, key debates and perspectives on the modern state and the organisational norms that govern social behaviour and civic life. To be able to identify how law, state and organisational norms and values shape social reality and vary across social groups, the course will be designed around case studies drawn from a wide range of institutional settings in India and globally – corporations, the UN, International NGOs, political parties, courts and government offices, specialised tribunals like the International Criminal Court, welfare bureaucracies, the police, financial markets, professional and voluntary/civic associations. Some of the key objectives of the course are to understand the fulcrum of cooperative life, democratising principles, and notion of rights and dignity. Organisations have played an increasingly important role in shaping contemporary social life- in different domains – science, commerce, education, health, the arts, politics, criminal justice, development. They are often the source and the potential solution to some of the most vexing social problems of our times. Law plays a similar role in weaving social life together and resolving conflict. However, how the law is applied, interpreted, adhered to varies. This course will examine the processes, structures and effects of the State, law and organisational structures in society and how society constructs, attaches meaning to and restrains them.

• The NLS BA (Hons) programme is a three-year offering with the option of an additional fourth year.
• The majors and minors will be in the disciplines of (i) History, (ii) Sociology & Anthropology, (iii) Economics, and (iv) Politics.
• The four-year-track students will graduate with a BA (Hons. with Research) degree.

Every student in the NLS BA (Hons.) programme will have the option of electing a major-minor combination, or a double major. The majors and minors will be in the same areas/disciplines that are currently taught within the BA LLB (Hons.) programme. These disciplines are:
1) History,
2) Sociology & Anthropology,
3) Economics, and
4) Politics.

We will expand these areas and disciplines as our faculty strength and diversity enhances over the years. Over time, we hope to introduce Philosophy, Literature, Environment Studies, Data Analytics as majors and minors.

Every student in the NLS BA (Hons.) programme will have the option of electing a major-minor combination, or a double major. Each student will provide a ranked list of first major choices at the time of applying to the programme.

At the time of admission, students will be allotted only their First Major. Each student will, thereafter, have the choice of opting for a minor or second major at the end of the first year, as per specified criteria.

• Application forms are available on nlsatadmissions.nls.ac.in
• Admission to the programme will be through an all-India written admissions test: the NLSAT-BA.
• The NLSAT-BA will be held on April 27. 2025, from 10am to 12:30pm in specified test centres across the country.

The NLSAT-BA will have a single question paper comprising two parts – Parts A and B. All candidates shall be required to attempt both parts of the question paper. The examination shall be for a duration of 150 minutes.

Part A of the NLSAT-BA paper will consist of Multiple-Choice Questions in Reading & Comprehension, Reasoning, and Quantitative Analysis, and shall be for a maximum of 75 marks.

Part B shall consist of subjective questions, which shall be for a maximum of 75 marks.

Part B will have four short questions of 150 words each which will test critical thinking ability and analytical depth. They will be concerned with contemporary themes regarding India and the world.

Part B will also have four options for one long essay (400 words) question. These questions will include a range of themes from the domains of history, politics and governance, society, and economy, and require a response to a prompt which could be a statement or a keyword.

Offers of admission shall be made according to this final rank list, subject to the candidate satisfying the following conditions: (a)  The candidate should have secured more than zero marks in both Parts A and B of the NLSAT-BA. (b) The candidate’s cumulative score (sum of Part A and Part B) should be above the 75th percentile of the eligible candidates if they have applied under the General and EWS categories. Their score should be above the 40th percentile of the eligible candidates if they have applied under the SC/ST/OBC-NCL or PWD categories. Admission offers will be made to the top 60 candidates on the merit list for each of the majors, prepared on the basis of cumulative performance in Parts A and B of the NLSAT-BA.

A set of sample questions for the NLSAT – BA are available on the application portal for registered candidates.

The intake for the first cohort of the NLS BA (Hons) Programme for the Academic Year 2025-26 is 60 students.

Classes for the Academic Year 2025-26 will commence on July 1, 2025.

Yes, there is an application fee. An application fee of Rs. 2500 (Rupees Two Thousand Five Hundred only) shall be payable at the time of submission of the application.  Candidates belonging to SC/ST/OBC-NCL/PWD/EWS category shall be required to pay Rs. 2000 (Rupees Two Thousand only).

Applications shall be accepted till 11:59 pm on March 23, 2025.

Seats shall be reserved as follows: 15% for Scheduled Castes; 7.5% for Scheduled Tribes; 27% for OBCs; and 10% for Economically Weaker Section (EWS).

5% of the total intake shall be reserved horizontally for Persons with Disabilities (PWD); 30% of the total intake shall be reserved horizontally for women; 25% of the total intake shall be reserved horizontally (compartmentalised) for Karnataka Students.

NLSIU does not have any separate category for NRI/OCI. Any NRI or OCI Candidate may apply as a general candidate through NLSAT.

NLSIU provides financial aid to its admitted students, based on a comprehensive assessment of income and wealth of the applicant and family. For more information, please refer to https://www.nls.ac.in/information/students/financial-aid-for-students/financial-aid-policy/ and https://www.nls.ac.in/information/students/financial-aid-for-students/

Any person who has secured the higher secondary qualification [10+2 or an equivalent examination or programme] from any recognized board or school of education is eligible to apply to the programme.

Students in the final year of their higher-secondary education are also eligible to apply for the programme. However, proof of completion of the qualifying degree has to be submitted by selected applicants no later than December 31, 2025.

Any person who has secured the higher secondary qualification [10+2 or an equivalent examination or programme] from any recognized board or school of education is eligible to apply to the programme. Students in the final year of their higher-secondary education are also eligible to apply for the programme.

However, their provisional offer of admission shall be contingent upon the successful completion of their higher-secondary education with the minimum aggregate of not less than 55% of total marks for applicants in the general category and not less than 45% of total marks for applicants in the SC/ST category.

If you are currently a student in Class XII (or equivalent) and are appearing for the qualifying examination in 2025, you can submit a bona fide certificate from your educational institution. For sample template, see here.

Selected applicants shall receive a provisional admission offer and be required to produce the mark-sheet/transcript showing that they have completed their higher-secondary education, failing which they shall lose their right to be considered for admission. Proof of completion in the forms of marksheet/transcript has to be submitted no later than December 31, 2025.

The LLM is only open to students who already have a 5-year or 3-year law degree. But BA students are welcome to consider options of the 3-year LLB and MPP programmes at NLS after graduating.

Students will be eligible to appear for the 3-year LLB and MPP programmes.

NLS BA (Hons) is a separate degree programme from the BA, LLB (Hons) Degree. The students of the NLS BA will study a common core together with the BA, LLB (Hons) Cohort. Many of the major and minor courses and open elective courses will be studied together with the BA, LLB (Hons). However, the students of the NLS BA (Hons) Programme will obtain a separate degree and the NLS BA (Hons) degree will not be equivalent to an LLB Degree. Graduates of the Programme will be eligible to appear for the entrance examination for the three-year LLB (Hons) Degree after graduation.

Students who are admitted to and successfully complete the BA (Hons.) Programme at NLSIU shall be eligible for institutional preference. Such students must meet the minimum eligibility norms for admission to the 3-Year LLB (Hons.) Programme and the MPP Programme.

Graduates of the NLS BA (Hons.) programme must write the admission test for the 3-year LLB (Hons.) Programme (NLSAT-LLB) or/and the MPP Programme (NLSAT-MPP).

10% of the total intake in the 3-year LLB (Hons.) Programme and the MPP Programme shall be earmarked for graduates of the BA (Hons.) Programme at NLSIU as per the merit list of the respective entrance examinations.

The final institutional preference policy will be formally notified after securing governing body approvals.