Topic for Winter 2025: Reading India

PREREQUISITES: None
The economist Joan Robinson once observed that “whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.” But how – and with what consequences – can such a polity hang together? This discussion-based course offers a non-major friendly introduction to the political history of this country of contradictions: How was secular democracy established and contested in this extraordinarily diverse and deeply-divided society? What impact has deepening political participation and economic transformation had on entrenched inequities along caste, class, gender, and religious lines? How, if at all, might the study of India inform the way we think about “tradition” and “modernity”? Although we will focus on India’s political history after independence, readings will cover a range of topics and will be drawn from a variety of genres. Assignments will include regular, short writing and research tasks designed to complement course readings, and students will be introduced to some core concepts and theories in comparative political science along the way.