Programme Outcome/Programme Learning Goals/Programme Learning Outcome:

PO2: Generate research outputs that reflect a comprehensive understanding of research methodologies, approaches, and skills through the execution of research projects and formulation of research papers, critical essays, etc.

PO3: Apply critical thinking skills through analysis of texts and immediate socio-cultural contexts by applying interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives in research papers, presentations, class discussions, and debates.

PO4: Exhibit the ability to build upon qualities of enterprise, critical, and creative imagination to engage with the contemporary contexts by undertaking MOOC courses and internships.

PO5: Practice interpersonal and effective communication skills in both personal and professional domains through collaborative or external projects related to writing, content creation, service learning, teaching, policy development, publishing, translation, and other areas.

PO6: Develop an awareness of diversities (cultural, linguistic, racial, gendered, caste-based, dis/abilities, etc) and know how to engage with these productively through assignments, coursework, and independent projects.

PO7: Demonstrate the ability to spearhead individual and collaborative projects to effectively contribute towards building a sustainable and egalitarian society through various participatory engagements.

This course provides an introduction to basic concepts and theoretical developments within Cultural Studies, with the aim of imparting critical perspectives, and encouraging students to engage with their own cultural landscapes. It provides a foundational introduction to some of the key ideas, issues, and theories that have influenced Cultural Studies, and attempts to especially interrogate these debates from our own contexts in contemporary India.

Courseobjectives:

• Introduce students to significant debates and theorists within Cultural Studies 

• Enable students to engage with these debates from their own immediate

            vantage points

• Familiarise students to core methodologies of narrativising the past and the present through a Cultural Studies approach.

 This unit looks at the various meanings associated with the word ‘culture' and explores ways of understanding the relationship between culture and society.

Niranjana, Tejaswini, P. Sudhir, and Vivek Dhareshwar: ‘Introduction’, InterrogatingModernity:CultureandColonialisminIndia.

Williams, Raymond: ‘Culture’, Keywords.

This unit explores the emergence of Cultural Studies in India, with some reference to its development in the UK and North America. It focuses specifically on narratives of Cultural Studies in the Indian context.

Vinay Lal: ‘Introduction’, SouthAsianCulturalStudies:ABibliography. 

Madhava Prasad: ‘Cultural Studies in India: Reasons and a History’. 

Rashmi Sawhney: ‘Decolonising Cultural Studies’, Artha.

Grossberg, Lawrence. ‘Cultural Studies in the Future Tense’.

Introduction to Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies by Tejaswini Niranjana and Wang Xioming

This module introduces key debates surrounding the idea of the nation. An important discussion the unit will deal with is the contested nature of nation and nationalism.

Ernst Renan: ‘What is Nation?’ 

Romila Thapar: From On Nationalism.

Aloysius G: From NationalismwithoutaNation. 

Partha Chatterjee: ‘Whose Imagined Community?’

A S Rathore and Ashis Nandy: ‘Introduction’, VisionforaNation:PathsandPerspectives.

This unit will look at how the Western concept of ‘class’ is reworked into the idea of the ‘subaltern’ within Indian Historiography and Cultural Studies.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 

Vivek Chibber: ‘Revisiting Subaltern Studies’,EPW.

Dipesh Chakrabarty: ‘In Retrospect: Subaltern Studies and the Future Past’

This module shall introduce students to debates around ‘identity’ as an important factor in shaping ideas of cultural production and consumption, with a focus on the peculiar notion of caste in India.

Ambedkar, BR: Extracts from AnnihilationofCaste.

Guru, Gopal: ‘Liberal Democracy in India and the Dalit Critique’.

This module looks at how the critical category of ‘race’ has been understood in the global context, further querying its relevance within Indian society.

Gilroy, Paul (1992) Short Extract from TheBlackAtlanticLeggon: ‘Race and Ethnicity: A Global Perspective’

This unit will examine how gendered identities are formed and performed.

Mick Leach: ‘The Politics of Masculinity: An overview of contemporary theory’. 

Mangesh Kulkarni: ‘Reconstructing Indian Masculinities’

Gandhi, Savarkar, Godse – selected readings will be provided in class. 

Ashis Nandy: ‘Pramathesh Chandra Barua and the Origins of the Terribly Effeminate, Maudlin, Self-destructive Heroes of Indian Cinema’.

As a fundamentally multilingual state, linguistic identities form an important part of cultural

Devy, G.N: ‘The Being of Bhasha: A General Introduction’

Madhava Prasad: ‘Republic of Babel: Language and Political Subjectivity in Free India

Williams, Raymond: ‘Culture’, Keywords.

Vinay Lal: ‘Introduction’, SouthAsianCulturalStudies:ABibliography. 

Madhava Prasad: ‘Cultural Studies in India: Reasons and a History’. 

Rashmi Sawhney: ‘Decolonising Cultural Studies’, Artha.

Grossberg, Lawrence. ‘Cultural Studies in the Future Tense’.

Introduction to Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies by Tejaswini Niranjana and Wang Xioming

Ernst Renan: ‘What is Nation?’ 

Romila Thapar: From On Nationalism.

Aloysius G: From NationalismwithoutaNation. 

Partha Chatterjee: ‘Whose Imagined Community?’

A S Rathore and Ashis Nandy: ‘Introduction’, VisionforaNation:PathsandPerspectives.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:  Can the Subaltern Speak?

Vivek Chibber: ‘Revisiting Subaltern Studies’,EPW.

Dipesh Chakrabarty: ‘In Retrospect: Subaltern Studies and the Future Past’

Ambedkar, BR: Extracts from AnnihilationofCaste.

Guru, Gopal: ‘Liberal Democracy in India and the Dalit Critique’. 

Ashraf, Ajaz: ‘Three reports on the Story of Dalit Journalists’, TheHoot.

Gilroy, Paul (1992) Short Extract from The Black Atlantic Leggon: ‘Race and Ethnicity: A Global Perspective.’

Screening/ Discussion: Sudani From Nigeria (Zakariya Mohammed, 2018, Malayalam)

Mary Kom ((Omung Kumar, 2014, Hindi) 

Mick Leach: ‘The Politics of Masculinity: An overview of contemporary theory’. 

Mangesh Kulkarni: ‘Reconstructing Indian Masculinities’

Gandhi, Savarkar, Godse – selected readings will be provided in class. 

Ashis Nandy: ‘Pramathesh Chandra Barua and the Origins of the Terribly Effeminate, Maudlin, Self-destructive Heroes of Indian Cinema’.

Devy, G.N: ‘The Being of Bhasha: A General Introduction’

Madhava Prasad: ‘Republic of Babel: Language and Political Subjectivity in Free India

https://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-the-race-for-mary-kom-2021820

http://www.thehoot.org/media-watch/media-practice/caste-on-the-campus-6959http://www.thehoot.org/media-watch/media-practice/farewell-to-media-dreams-6962 

Arun Mathavan, Chennai Photo Biennieal -

https://scroll.in/magazine/915568/photos-in-tamil-nadu-dalit-sanitation-workers-are-told-to-help-doctors-perform-autopsies

Screening/ Discussion : Article 15 (Anubhav Sinha, 2018, Hindi) alongside Nandhana Prem’s “A Critique on Article 15https://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?

option=com_content&view=article&id=9680:a-critique-on-article-15-unravelling-the-brahmin-saviour-complex&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132)

Mid-semester exam(30 marks): presentation of a 1500 word research paper along with a written submission. May be held in the form of a 2-day symposium.

End-semester exam (30 marks): submission of the final 3000 word research paper on a topic approved by the faculty before mid-term.

*This is a submission paper.

This course introduces students to narrative forms across a range of creative mediums such as literature, photography, cinema, visual arts, video games and so on. The course aims to familiarize students with methods and approaches to reading, understanding and experiencing aspects of narrative and narratology in a wide range of forms, in order to introduce students to the inter-dependencies as well as distinctiveness of narrative construction across these mediums.

Courseobjectives: The course will introduce to students: 

• The fundamentals of storytelling

• Different narrative forms across literature, cinema, photography, performance art, and video games

• Meaning construction through narratives

• Emergent narrative forms in digital and interactive media

This unit introduces the socio-economic context within which the novel as a literary form takes shape in Europe, and examines its corresponding developments across different languages in India, each of which had their own distinctive deliberations on ‘modernity’ and its representative idioms.

The Theory of Narratives: Introductory lecture

What is a narrative? What are the elements that constitute it? How have narratives been historically understood in different cultures?

This unit looks at how narratives are constructed within what would be popularly be seen as ‘still images’, i.e. in painting and photography, and in some cases in murals and sculptures. It specifically focuses on the element of ‘perspective’, drawing attention to the different interest in, and histories of ‘perspective’ in European and Indian artistic traditions.

This unit looks at the basic elements of cinematic language, to understand how narratives are constructed within fiction, documentary and short films, and how technologies of recording, editing and post-production impact narrative strategies in cinema.

This unit explores how one can understand narrative structures within an ephemeral art form, that often remains undocumented, and therefore, cannot be returned to. Do narratives unfold in ‘real time’? And how do we understand ‘liveness’ as an element of an updated theory of narratives?

This unit looks at modularity and interactivity as an integral part of contemporary digital narrative practice and theory. It returns to some fundamental questions raised by spectatorship theory, revisiting these debates in light of the promise of limited agency.

This unit looks at how Derrida’sargument about primitive digital archives like emails, as well as the prelude about physical archives, undergoes a radical shift with crowdsourced archives as well as digital data-mining technologies.

M. Bal: IntroductiontotheTheoryofNarrative.

M. Kundera: “The Deprecated Legacy of Cervantes” from TheArtoftheNovel 

I. Watt: “Realism and the Novel” from TheRiseoftheNovel.

Watt: “The Reading Public”

M. Mukherjee: EarlyNovelsinIndia 

G. Kapur: “Representational Dilemmas of a Nineteenth-Century Painter: Raja Ravi Varma” in WhenWasModernism?

D. Bordwell: “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative” in PoeticsofCinema. 

Peggy Phelan: Interview

Introduction from A. Gallaway: Gaming:EssaysonAlgorithmicCulture. 

Selected chapters from Lowood & Nitsche (Ed.): TheMachinimaReader.

Marshall: DistributedCinema:Interactive,NetworkedSpectatorshipintheAgeofDigitalMedia

J. Derrida: ArchiveFever:AFreudianImpression, Trans. Eric Prenowitz. 

Selected Chapters from TheYouTubeReader, vols 1 & 2. 

Gulam Sheikh: “Viewer’s View” in JOAI-https://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/artsandideas/ Gulam Sheikh - https://cssaamejournal.org/borderlines/past-futures-of-old-media/

Utpal Kumar Banerjee: “The Subtle Art of Story-telling,” IndianLiterature, 52 (4): 147-152

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23347960?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

R. Sawhney: “Shadowing the Image Archive” in MIRAJ

G. Kapur: “Body as Gesture: Women Artists at Work” in WhenwasModernism?http://www.nalinimalani.com/

http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/poetics.php

www.indiancine.mawww.pad.ma

https://www.worldnomads.com/create/learn/film/understanding-narrative-structure-in-documentary

https://scroll.in/article/802453/a-hinduism-that-is-the-mirror-opposite-of-hindutva-anand-patwardhan-on-the-making-of-ram-ke-naam

MarinaAbramovic:TheArtistisPresent (Matthew Akers, 2012)

SpacesBetween (Roohi Dixit & Ziba Bhagwagar, 2016)

TheGreatHack (Amer and Noujaim, 2019)

Google cultural institute 

Indian Memory Project

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the various theoretical frameworks in literary and cultural studies that they may use to enhance their readings of texts and, eventually, to formulate their own research questions and to discover areas of inquiry that they are interested in specializing in. It also introduces students to research methodologies relevant to the disciplines, approaches to writing abstracts, formulating a research inquiry, articulating research questions, carrying out the research, and presenting it in appropriate academic forms using prescribed citation formats. 

Course Objectives: The course aims to help students 

• Demonstrate a sound understanding of a range of theoretical frameworks 

• Carry out close reading and annotation 

• Conceptualize a research inquiry and articulate research questions with clarity 

• Develop suitable methodological strategies to execute the research 

• Present their research in the form of a scholarly essay, using appropriate modes of citation

Readings may vary each year and will be selected from the following list:

• McGowan: “Structuralism and semiotics” 

• Barthes: “The Death of the Author”, 1968 

• Hall: “Encoding/Decoding”, 1980

• Belsey: “Poststructuralism” 

• Deleuze and Guattari: “What is a Minor Literature?”, 1975 

• Daly: “Marxism”

• Marx: “Preface (to a contribution to a critique of political economy, 1859)

• Lapsley: “Psychoanalytical Criticism” 

• Freud: “A Note on the unconscious in Psychoanalysis, 1912 

• Lacan: “The Mirror stage”, 1949. 

• Heckman: “Feminism” 

• Butler: “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, 1991 

• Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 1975 

• Hall: “Gender and Queer theory” Haraway: A cyborg Manifesto”, 1985 

• Hutcheon: “Postmodernism” Lyotard: What is the Postmodern? 1982 

• Baudrillard: “Simulacra and Science Fiction”, 1981 

• Benjamin: “Deconstruction” Derrida: “Deconstruction”, 1968 

Selected chapters from Research Methods for Cultural Studies and Research Methods for English Studies. 

Writing an abstract 

Literature Review 

Research Questions 

Structuring the paper 

Bibliography and Citation

• The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory

• The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader

• Research Methods for Cultural Studies 

• Research Methods for English Studies

This course is to introduce students to methodologies that are required for understanding identity and history as a multiple, layered, and often a contested set of representations. The course is built as an in-depth series of case studies, with the aim of bringing together three distinct areas of analytical questions that are implied by its title’s key terms – ‘history’, ‘memory’ and ‘identity’. Questions like – what are main approaches to social and cultural memory? What, and whose history is being remembered and narrated? And in this quagmire, how should identity be understood? – would be the prime focus of the course.

This course will give a thorough grounding in the classical works on memory from Durkheimean, psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives, including Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, and contrasting it with the studies that draw on post-structuralist and cognitive approaches, as well as theories of affect and subjectivity. Then it will proceed to asking what can be learned about societies from ways in which they are concerned with history. What are some of the types of historical consciousness and cultural notions of history, of lack thereof? How one can productively compare imperial and universalist notions of history as progress with ideas about historical and cultural uniqueness and exceptionalism, including nationalism, as well as with conceptualizations of history as justice, as trauma, and as objects of consumption. What are practices of production, exchange and consumption of historical narratives in education, tourism and politics? And finally, where does Identity – one of the key categories in historical and social analysis, fit in? One of the goals of the course is to ask what identity is, and what approaches to identity are useful for understanding historical memory.

Level of Learning: Basic

a)Performance of the Past: Theories of History, Memory and Identity, and Cultural Histories

b)Framing and Reframing Identity: Mapping the Terrain of Memory – Individual to Collective

c)Unstuck in Time: The Sudden Presence of the Past – The Politics of Submersion

Level of Learning: Conceptual/Interpretative

a)The Contested Place of Memory: The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, Sabarmati Ashram, Lincoln Memorial, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Mausoleum.

b)The Ubiquitous Past-Present and Lost: Politics of Display within and without; Marine Corps War Memorial, Jewish Museum in Berlin, Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Taj Mahal.

c)Making History: Narratives and Counter-narratives; Opium Wars, The Ayodhya Debate and the Ram Janmabhoomi Issue, Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde.

Level of Learning: Analytical

a)Tracing the Ghost and the Geographies of Violence: The Kashmir Issue, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, China-Japan rivalry.

b)Irrevocable Futures: The Dynamics of Conflict – the Aryan Debate, Hindutva Ideology and Neo-Nazis.

c)Suppressing the Text: State Secrets and Declassification – Wikileaks and the Netaji Files.

Level of Learning: Conceptual/Interpretative

a)Memory and Incongruous Images: Political Lives of Dead Bodies; Burials, Mass Graves, Exhumations, Bodies of Great People.

b)Identity and the Politics of Remembrance: Engendered Memories; Culinary Discourses and Politics of Food; Folktales and Folklore

c)The Economy of Memory: Consumption of/and Heritage, Heritage Tourism, Cultural Property and Identity

d)        Ethics and Limits of Representation: Can Culture Belong to any One Group? Can Culture be Copyrighted?

McGrattan, Cillian. 2012. Memory, Politics and Identity: Haunted by History, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, New Delhi: Penguin Books Ltd.

Thapar, Romila. 2000. History and Beyond, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Thapar, Romila. 2013. The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India, New Delhi: Permanent Black.

Thapar, Romila. 2019. Time as a Metaphor of History: Early India, The Krishna Bharadwaj Memorial Lecture. New Delhi: Oxford.

Tilmans, Karin, Frank van Vree, Jay Winter (eds). 2010. Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Venner, Dominique. 2015. The Shock of History: Religion, Memory, Identity, Arktos Media Ltd.

Ballinger, Pamela. 2002. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Banerjee, Sumanta, 2003. Ayodhya: A Future Bound by the Past, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 38, No. 27, pp. 2795-2796.

Chassot, Joanne. 2018. Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity, Re-Mapping the Transnational – A Dartmouth Series in American Studies Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 2012. The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Counihan, Carole, and Steven L. Kaplan. 1998. Food and Gender: Identity and Power, Food and Nutrition in History and Culture Series, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Dorn, Sherman, Barbara J. Shircliffe, Deirdre Cobb-Roberts (eds). 2006. Schools as Imagined Communities: The Creation of Identity, Meaning, and Conflict in U.S. History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Finney, Patrick. 2010. Remembering the Road to World War Two: International History, National Identity, Collective Memory, New York: Routledge.

Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm. 1994. Consumption and Identity, Studies in Anthropology & History Series, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Genova, Ann, and Toyin Falola. 2006. Yoruba Identity and Power Politics, Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora, Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

Kumar, Ravinder 1989. The Past and the Present: An Indian Dialogue, Daedalus, Vol. 118, No.4, pp. 27-49.

Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. 2004. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare (English Edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matten, Marc Andre. 2011. Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity, Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography, Leiden and Boston: BRILL.

Shrimali, K.M. 1998. A Future for the Past? Social Scientist, Vol. 26, No. 9, pp. 26-51.

Sikes, Alan. 2007. Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History Series, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stevens, Maurice E. 2003. Troubling Beginnings: Trans(per)forming African American History and Identity, Studies in African American History and Culture Series.  London: Routledge.

Thapar, Romila, Harbans Mukhia, Bipan Chandra. 1969. Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, New Delhi: People's Publishing House.

Thapar, Romila. 1979. Dissent in the Early Indian Tradition, Volume 7 of M.N. Roy memorial lecture, New Delhi: Indian Renaissance Institute.

Wangler, Alexandra. 2012. Rethinking History, Reframing Identity: Memory, Generations, and the Dynamics of National Identity in Poland, Bremen: Springer.

Webster, Wendy. 1998. Imagining Home: Gender, Race and National Identity, 1945-1964, Women's History Series, London: University College London Press.

White, Geoffrey M., 1991. Identity through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology Series, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zachmann, Urs Matthias. 2009. China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895-1904, Routledge Leiden Series in Modern East Asian Politics and History, London and New York: Routledge.

As mythologies continue to shape and define the world around, it is imperative to discern what makes myths meaningful expressions across cultures. The course attempts to introduce students to the historical as well as the contemporary approaches to understanding mythologies, with particular focus on the oeuvre of Indian myths. What makes myths windows to various cultures? What gives Indian mythology its peculiar character? How have contemporary attempts at retelling myths transformed the Indian cultural tapestry? The course will investigate some of these areas in order to understand what has contributed to the preservation and dissemination of myths across Indian history. The course will also look at the role of performative art forms in retelling and revisioning of Indian myths. The course, therefore, is aimed at encouraging an interdisciplinary scholarship.

The unit seeks to familiarise students with the anthropology of myths and establish the necessary connect between myths, rituals and symbols. The attempt is to elucidate the cross-cultural overlaps that myths bring to the fore.

CompulsoryReading

(Excerpts and selected chapters from the following list of texts will be specified in class)

Sir James George Frazer: TheGoldenBough:AStudyinMagicandReligion John Fiske: MythsandMyth-Makers:OldTalesandSuperstitionsInterpretedbyComparativeMythology

Mircea Eliade: CosmosandHistory:TheMythoftheEternalReturn Amar Chitra Katha

Thomas Bulfinch: Bulfinch’sMythologyHesiod: “Theogony”

Aesops Fables

Thomas Malory: LeMorted’Arthur Geoffrey Chaucer: TheCanterburyTales

The focus of this unit is on contemporary Indian mythical narratives. The texts under this unit will help locate the manner in which myths have been reinterpreted and retold by contemporary authors to offer alternate, if not multiple readings of such narratives. The unit will also bring to the fore the difference between ‘myth’ and ‘history.’ By exclusively focusing on the treatment of myths in India, the unit is going to delve into the process of decoding myths and the ways in which popular imagination helps to reinterpret myths and keep them alive.

CompulsoryReading

(Excerpts and selected chapters from the following list of texts will be specified in class)

Amish Tripathi – Shiva Trilogy Chithra Devakaruni: Palace of Illusions Devdutt Patnaik: Shikhandi

Kavita Kane: Menaka’s Choice

Shivaji Sawant: Mrityunjaya-TheDeathConqueror Carole, Satyamurti. Mahabharata-aModernRetelling.

Ajay K. Rao. Re-FiguringtheRamayanaasTheology:AHistoryofReceptioninPremodernIndia.

This unit will introduce students to the concept of ‘mnemocultures’ or the cultures of memory and how through the enactment or performance of memories, they help in the transmission of mythologies, traditions, and cultural beliefs.

CompulsoryReading

(Excerpts and selected chapters from the following list of texts will be specified in class)

D. Venkat Rao: CulturesofMemoryinSouthAsia:Orality,LiteracyandtheProblemofInheritance

Donald H. Mills: TheHeroandtheSea:PatternsofChaosinAncientMyth

This unit will focus on the role of performative art forms in the dissemination of myths. The focus will also be on the manner in which myths pervade contemporary living through popular cultural mediums or digital platforms.

Possible Art Forms to be considered include:

∙Kavad

∙Thiruvathira

∙Mata Ni Pachedi ∙Koodiyattam

Poorakali

∙Villu Paatu

∙Sarpam Thullal ∙Chaau Dance

∙Yakshagana ∙Gondha

∙Puppetry shows

∙Ramleela Performances

As specified under each unit above.

Eliade, Mircea. TheSacredandtheProfanetheNatureofReligion. Harcourt Brace, 1959.

Ellwood, Robert S. ThePoliticsofMyth:aStudyofC.G.Jung,MirceaEliade,andJosephCampbell. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Grimal, Pierre, et al. AConciseDictionaryofClassicalMythology. Basil Blackwell, 1994. Hiltebeitel, Alf. RethinkingtheMahabharata:aReader'sGuidetotheEducationoftheDharmaKing. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Jensen, Jeppe Sinding. MythsandMythologiesAReader. Taylor and Francis, 2014. Morford, Mark P. O., et al. ClassicalMythology. Oxford University Press, 2019. Ramanujan, A. K. “Telling Tales.” Daedalus118:04. 1989.

Ramen, Fred. IndianMythology. Rosen Central, 2008. Roland, Barthes. Mythologies. Points, 2014.

Soni, V & Thapar, R. (2017). Mythology, Science and Society. The Hindu. Retrieved from:

Susan Sontag. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1976. 242-251.
Balme, Christopher B. Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies. Cambridge

University Press, 2010.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998. Brandt, George W. Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and

Theatre 1850-1990. Oxford University Press, 1998. Chambers, Colin. The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century

Theatre. Continuum, 2002.
Else, Gerard. (Trans.) Aristotle: The Poetics. University of Michigan, 1967.
Esslin, Martin. “The Theatre of the Absurd.” The Tulane Drama Review 4.4 (1960): 3-

15.
Fortier, Mark. Theory/Theatre: An Introduction. Routledge, 1997.
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. Methuen, 1964. Montell, Amanda. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Investigating Language Attitudes: Social Meanings of Dialect, Ethnicity and Performance by Garrett, Coupland, and Williams.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”
Bigger, Stephen. “Victor Turner, Liminality, and Cultural Performance.”

his course has been conceptualized in order to introduce the learners to multiple curriculum frameworks, associated range of pedagogies involved in the process of teaching and learning, and several assessment tools pertaining to teaching English in particular and Humanities in general. The course is designed in such a way that it would not only promote an in- depth understanding of the components that lead to successful pedagogic practices but will also enable the learners to foster an understanding of how pedagogic spaces are constructed. This course is a mixture of theoretical and practical approaches for it incorporates not only theoretical understanding of multiple curriculum frameworks and pedagogic practices but also aims at providing hands-on training to the learners for developing content for teaching, framing course plans, and identifying teaching and learning strategies that can be applied to specific classroom contexts.

This unit critically examines the main issues and concerns in the field of education in general and English education in particular in India. Besides trying to understand the gaps and challenges in the field of higher education in India, this unit also elaborately

deals with innovations in the field of education, which can mitigate the gaps thereby paving way for more inclusive teaching practices.

1. The Structure of Indian Education: Both longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of the structure of Indian Education should be conducted in order to promote a better understanding of the same.

2. The Indian Education Policy: Special focus to be given on the language policy in Education.

3. The Innovations in the field of Education: ICT, AV aids, Google Classrooms, Gamification, etc. to be discussed in detail.

4. Reflective and Inclusive Teaching Practices: The concepts of learner-centred pedagogy, heutagogy, mixed-ability learning groups etc. should be discussed.

This unit focuses on understanding the prominent theories in the field of language education and tries to situate the popular methods of language teaching through the ages across the various paradigms.

1. The Grammar Translation Method

2. Behaviourism and Audio-visual Teaching Method · Input Hypothesis and the Natural Method

3. Cognitivism and Communicative Teaching Method · Skill Based Instruction

4. The Post Method Approach

The main objective of this unit is to develop a clear understanding of the various theories of curriculum and analyse the technical aspects involved in construction of curriculum. This unit will not only lead to a theoretical understanding of various aspects of curriculum but application of these theories to generate content for teaching.

1. Understanding curriculum: Various Curriculum Theories can be discussed to understand the process of development of curriculum. The politics behind construction of curriculum can be also looked at.

2. Writing Course Plans: The main emphasis is not only to learn how to write a course plan but how to incorporate knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the course outcomes. Bloom’s Taxonomy should be discussed in great detail in this context.

3. Outcome Based Approach: The focus of this approach will be to discuss how to align learning outcomes, teaching Strategies, and, assessment tasks.

This unit will introduce the learners to various methods of assessment and evaluation and discuss the practical applicability of these methods. This unit will discuss how certain assessment methods can be applied to test the learning outcomes of the course.

1. Summative and Formative assessment methods: Brief introduction to be provided.

2. Summative assessment: Key issues of validity, reliability, bias, and fairness to be discussed in detail.

3. Formative assessment: Key issues of learning intentions, feedback, peer and self-assessment to be discussed in detail.

4. Accountability, assessment policy, international assessment and vocational assessment to be discussed in detail.

The main objective of this unit is to apply the theoretical knowledge gained over the previous units and develop skill- specific (e)content/ courses for target learners. The learners may actively seek the help of their respective mentors to identify the area in which content has to be developed and co-create the teaching modules.

1. Register Analysis, Error Analysis, and Need Analysis: Basic overview of these fields is to be developed in order to create a learner centric module.

2. Learning Styles oriented teaching modules: Comprehensive understanding of learning styles to develop to construct effective teaching modules catering to

all types of learners.

3. Content Creation: Hands-on exercises to develop the respective teaching modules to be conducted. The creation of the modules will follow the following steps:

                          A. Analysing important situational Factors 

                          B. Identification of Learning Outcomes

                          C. Formulating Feedback and Assessment

                          D. Selecting Teaching and Learning Activities

                          E. Selecting effective teaching and learning strategies 

                          F. Developing an effective grading system

                          G. Developing effective rubrics for grading

Brown, J. D. (1995). Theelementsoflanguagecurriculum:Asystematicapproachtoprogramdevelopment. Heinle & Heinle Publishers.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). Globalization, methods, and practice in periphery classrooms. Globalizationandlanguageteaching. 134-150.

Chauhan, C. P. S. (2004). ModernIndianEducation. Aligarh Muslim University.

Chomsky, n. (1959). Verbal behaviour. 26-58.

Krashen, S. D. (1987). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Secondlanguagepedagogy, 20. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richards, J. C.,Theodore S. R. (2014)Approachesandmethodsinlanguageteaching. Cambridge university press.

Bhatia, V. K. (2008). Genre analysis, ESP and professional practice. Englishforspecificpurposes 27(2), 161-174.

Corder, S. P. (1974). Error analysis. TheEdinburghcourseinappliedlinguistics 3. 122-131.

Farrell, T. (2015). InternationalperspectivesonEnglishlanguageteachereducation:innovations fromthefield. Springer Nature.

Fulcher, G., Fred D. (2007). Languagetestingandassessment. Routledge.

Richards, J. C. (2001) Curriculumdevelopmentinlanguageteaching. Ernst Klett Sprachen.

Slattery, P. (2012) Curriculumdevelopmentinthepostmodernera:Teachingandlearninginanageofaccountability. Routledge.

This course provides a foundational introduction to film studies, with a focus on popular Indian cinema.  It traces the development of cinemas in India in terms of form as well as industry.  It particularly emphasises the representation of diverse identities (religion, gender, caste, language etc) and looks at the aesthetic frameworks through which these are constructed.

   Prasad, Madhava.1998. Ideology of the Hindi Film. Oxford University Press. 

Vasudevan Ravi S. 2000.  “Introduction” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. Oxford University Press.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. (2010). “The 'Bollywoodization' of the Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena.Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2003 - Issue 1. 

Nandy, Ashis (ed). 1998. The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema. Zed Publisher. 

Basu, Anustup. 2010. Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic. Edinburgh University Press. 

Gopinath, Gayatri. (2005). Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Duke University Press

Nandy, Ashis. 2001. An ambiguous journey to the city. Oxford University Press. 

Dass, Manishita. 2015. Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. Oxford University Press.

Film: Supermen of Malegaon (Faiza Ahmed Khan, 2012). 

Pandian, MSS. (2014). “Tamil Cultural Elites and Cinema Outline of An Argument.”Vol. 49, Issue No. 46. 

Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007.  Bombay Cinema: an archive of the city.  University of Minnesota Press. 

Bharucha, Rustom (1994).  “On the Border of Fascism: Manufacture of Consent in Roja.”  Economic and Political Weekly,  Vol. 29, No. 23. 

Niranjana,Tejaswini. “Integrating Whose Nation? Tourists and Terrorists in Roja.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 29, No. 3. 

Nicholas B. Dirks, “The Home and the Nation: Consuming Culture and Politics in Roja” in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, Eds., Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India. 2001. Oxford University Press.

Rustom Bharucha. 1998.  In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India. Oxford University Press. 

Bharat, Meenakshi. 2020. Shooting Terror: Terrorism in Hindi Films. Routledge. 

Films: Ram Ke Naam (Anand Patwardhan, 1992), Jashn-e-Azadi (Sankay Kak, 2007)

Majumdar, Neepa. 2009. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s.University of Illinois Press.  

Mazumdar, Rajani. (1991). “Dialectic of Public and Private-Representation of Women in Bhoomika and Mirch Masala.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, Issue No. 43. 

Chakravarty, Sumita. 1993. “Woman and the Burden of Postcoloniality: The Courtesan Film Genre” in National identity in Indian popular cinema, 1947-1987, Chakravarty.University of Texas Press.  

Hubel, Teresa, (2012).  "From Tawa'if to Wife? Making Sense of Bollywood's Courtesan Genre" Department of English Publications.

Chakravarty, Sumita. 1993. “The National-Heroic Image: Masculinity and Masquerade” in National identity in Indian popular cinema, 1947-1987, Chakravarty.University of Texas Press.  

Chatterji, Soma. 2013. “The evolution of female sexuality in Hindi Cinema” in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, K. Moti Gokulsing, Wimal Dissanayake (eds). Routledge

Srinivasan, Rama. 2013. “Queer time in Bollywood” in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, K. Moti Gokulsing, Wimal Dissanayake (eds). Routledge

Super Deluxe (Thiagarajan Kumararaja, 2019), 

Kumbalangi Nights (Madhu C. Narayanan, 2019).

Goutham Raj Konda, 2020. “Dalit Narrative and Dalit Representation in Indian Cinema.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 55, Issue No. 49. 

Jyoti, Nisha. 2020. “Indian Cinema and the Bahujan Spectatorship.” Economic and Political Weekly,Vol. 55, Issue No. 20. 

Karthick Ram Manoharan, (2016). “The Missing Periyar and the Curious Tamil Nationalism of Kabali.” Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 51, Issue No. 33. 

“Cinema and Caste: Examining Marginalised Narratives in Film.”  Economic and Political Weekly. 

Films: Sairat (Nagaraj Manjule 2013), Fandry (Nagaraj Manjule 2014), Article 15 (Anubhav Sinha, 2019),  Masaan  (Neeraj Ghaywan, 2015)

Deshpande, Anirudh. (2007). “Indian Cinema and the Bourgeois Nation State.”  Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 42, No. 50

Sutoris, Peter. 2016. Visions of Development: Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress, 1948-75. C Hurst & Co Publishers. 

Our lived experiences are shaped by the ways in which varying systems of privileges and oppressions work. Every individual acts in the world based on the influences of identities that they adopt or are imposed by the social systems. Each identity – whether it’s, class,  race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or caste - exists along a hierarchy that determines how visible and valued that person’s experiences are in their particular social context. These identities and hierarchies intersect with each other in ways that shape how a person is able to move and advance within their society.

Pedagogy: The concepts and ideas given in the syllabus will be engaged in-class discussion. Reading is for learners to get a larger insight into the discourses emerging. The facilitator can choose to engage with any one of the readings in the class and refer to other readings for discussion purposes.

The unit engages in a discussion on the ideas of intersectionality and asserts that there is  a necessity to understand gender in intersection with various other identities to understand the mode in which power structures and oppression works. 

Understanding complexities of identification. 

Basic introduction to Gender/sex/ roles.  

• Dr. Veena JS’s Gender talk ; 

• Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. “Subject of Sex/Gender/ Desire” (Selection) 

Crenshaw Kimberle’s idea of Intersectionality 

• On Intersectionality. 

Contestations on the notion of oppression

• Tate Taylor (2011) The Help ; bell hook’s critique on Betty Feminine Mystique. 

Autobiography and fictionality. 

• Fadia Faqir ed. In the House Of silence ( Selections) 

Body and intersections with various identities 

• Mahashweta Devi’s Breast Giver in “ Behind the Bodice” 

Bodrelesness and intersex 

• Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza ( Selections)

The unit brings into discussion the various modes in which normativity is constructed by various institutions and in the process validates and normalizes few identities that exert power on identities that exist in margins.

Social construction of masculinity - Hyper masculinity - toxic Masculinity 

• Priscilla Franks’ photo series on “The fragile Complexities  

of Masculinityhttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/dreamy-photo-series-explores-the-fragile complexity-of-masculinity_n_56e849e1e4b0860f99da8b45; Gaptooth: Documentary Series;  R. W Connell ‘s History of Masculinity. 

Unnatural Sex and the construction of normative. 

• Case study of Article 377 and debate around it . 

Homosexual panic and construction of Homophobia. 

• Call me by Your Name ( 2017, Luca Guadagnino); Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s, “The  Beast in the Closet”. 

Heteronormativity and Gender Roles 

• Foucault’s Herculine Barbin (introduction); Boys Don’t Cry (1999, Kimberly Peirce) 

Sexuality and Race. 

• Kobena Mercer’s “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic  Imaginary” 

Gender and Caste - Case study of caste based murders 

• Works of Kancha Ilaiah, Uma Chakravorty and Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana  Kannabiran. 

Ability/ Disability discourse 

• Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journal 

The unit considers how the various identities help in asserting and occupying different power positions in the society that largely impacts the mode in which one asserts basic human rights, the  access to legal rights and visibility of the lived experiences. 

Visibility and Absence in representation of black male/female oppression 

• Stephaine Newell “Postcolonial Masculinity and the Politics of Visibility” 

Migration and intersection of class/race /gender. 

• Dolly and Milan Kang. Migrant Labourers in Metropolitan city refer to Kikon, Dolly  and Milan Kan; Sarah A. Harvard’s Three pictures that make a powerful statement about race  and power.https://mic.com/articles/177195/these-three-pictures-make-a-powerful-statement about-race-and-power-among-women#.DQDAhevhR 

Dalit women and legal rights 

• Visual text Bandit Queen (1994, Shekhar Kapur) 

Activism and Gender queer 

• A Revathi’s Life in Trans Activism 

Religion , accessibility and visibility

The case on Sabarimala; Kovagam : Wedding of Lord Aaravan ( 2017); Hoshang  Merchant’s Curious case of Indian God and Goddesses. 

Refugees and human identity 

• Human Flow ( 2017) 

The unit brings into discussion the impact of technological innovations on constructed  identities, gender roles in the world. It also deals with the mode in which these identities in the human world are negotiated in the virtual world. 

Technology and Human interaction 

• Cyborg Manifesto ; Claudia Castanida’s “Robotic Skin: The future of Touch?”in Thinking Through the Skin 

Virtual Identities and Gender 

• Avatar, Warcraft, and Virtual identities. http://feminartsy.com/virtual-reality-gender identity-in-video-games 

Higher-order clones and human identities 

• Visual text Resident Evil/Orphan Black TV Series Excerpts from Hayles, Katherine  “How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.”

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, Identity politics, and violence against  women of colour. Stanford Law Review. 43(6) 

Christina, B. (1998). Race for Theory. Feminist Studies. 14(1), 67-79. 

Connell, R. W. (1995). History of Masculinity. Masculinities. University of California Press.

Friedman, S. S. (1998). Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies and Geopolitical Literacy.  Mapping, Feminism and Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton University Press. 

Halberstam, J. and Hang, D. L. (2005). What is Queer About Queer Studies Now. Social Text 23, 83- 84. Duke University Press. 

Hayles, K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and  Informatics. University of Chicago Press.  

Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. California: Duke University Press. Kannabiran, V. and Kalpana K. (1991). Caste and gender: Understanding dynamics of power and  violence. Economic and Political Weekly, 26(37). 

Kikon, D. W. (2017). Indigenous Migrants in the Service Sector of Metropolitan India, South Asia.  Journal of South Asian Studies. 1 - 16. 

Kang, M. (1996). Manicuring Race, Gender and Class: Service Intersection in New York City Korean  Owned Nail Salons. Race, Gender and Class Journal. 4(3). 143-154. 

Kumar, A. Menstruation, Purity and Right to Worship. Economic and Political Weekly, 41(9)

Lorde, A. (1984). Age, Race and Sex : Women Redefining Difference. Sister Outsiders: Essays and  Speech, 114-123. 

Paul, C. P. & Chung-Kon S. (2013). Playful gender swapping: user attitudes toward gender in  MMORPG, avatar customisation, Digital Creativity, 24(4), 310-326. 

Spivak, G. (1985). Three women’s Text and A critique of Imperialism. Race, Writing And Difference.  University of Chicago Press.

This course introduces to students to a range of discourse on technology and  culture within the humanities, with one unit focusing on these debates in the Indian context (20thand  21st centuries and another one focusing on the emergent field of digital humanities. It will also engage  with the contemporary context, looking at issues such as biopolitics, surveillance, cyborgs, AI etc.  Finally, students will be introduced to some creative work (literature and art) that generates  possibilities for activism and an informed engagement with our techno-cultural landscapes and  cyberscapes. Modes of instruction will include lectures, screenings, seminars, discussions, student-led  presentations, invited guest lectures, visits to relevant institutions/exhibitions in Bangalore, readings,  group-based project work etc.

Pedagogy:

1. In addition to lectures, seminars, written assignments and presentations the course will  include: 

1. Field visits to any one or two of the following sites will be included: National Centre for  Biological Research, Bangalore; Science Gallery, Bangalore; Cybercrime Police Station, Infantry  Road, Bangalore; Samsung Showroom Opera House, Brigade Road 

2. Guest Lectures/Workshops (one or two from the following): Dr. Jahnavi Phalke (Director,  Science Gallery, Bangalore); Abhishek Hazra (video and performance artist, Bangalore); T. B.  Dinesh (Technical Director, Janatsu, Bangalore) ; Sai Mulpuru (VR artist, Bangalore); Afra Shafiq  (Researcher and artist, Bangalore); Gayatri Kodikal (artist and filmmaker, Bangalore); Dr.  Padmini Ray Murray (Digital Humanities scholar).

An introduction to some of the significant theoretical frameworks through which philosophers and  social scientists have understood the intersections between technology and culture in a cultural  context. 

This unit is a hands-on workshop in digital humanities tools. 

Selected Chapters - A Companion to Digital Studies (2004) – Blackwell Publishing  Chapter 1: Introduction to Digital Humanities 

Chapter 8: Literary Studies 

Chapter 26: Digital Media and the Analysis of Film 

Lisa Spiro – “This is why we fight; defining the values of digital humanities” – Debates in the Digital  Humanities – 2012

In this unit, students engage with two aspects primarily; the first is to study the implications of technology in the area of literature, creative arts and cinema. The second is to analyze/read/watch narratives that demonstrate how different cultural forms narrate technological modernity. Selected chapter/s from Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology Selected short stories by Anil Menon/Manjula Padmanabhan 

Selected sections from Kavita Phillip & Beatrize da Costa eds. (2008) Tactical Biopolitics: Art,  Activism and Technoscience. MIT Press. 

Rohini Devasher’s astronomy based video art

Cyborg Manifesto – Donna Haraway (1985) – Socialist Review 

Martin Heidegger (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt.  Garland Publishing Inc. 

Asha Achuthan (n.d.) Re-wiring Bodies. CIS, Bangalore. 

Claude Alvares (1979) ‘Indian Technology and Culture: 1498-1757.’ Allied Publishers, pp 46- 74. 

David Arnold (2013) ‘India’s Technological Imaginary’ in Everyday Technology: Machines and the  Making of India’s Modernity. University of Chicago Press. 

Robert Geraci, ‘Navigating Science and Technology in Bangalore’, in Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism and Transhumanism in South Indian Science. Lexington Books, pp 13- 34. 

The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars 

Doing Digital Humanities; Practice, Training, Research (2016) – Routledge 

R. Sawhney (2015) ’Introduction,’ Studies in South Asian Film and Media: special issue on science  fiction, vol 6, no 2. 

Rokeya Sakahawat Hossain (1905) Sultana’s Dream 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html Afra Shafiq - https://www.entersultanasreality.com/

This course is built around the premise of negotiating power through spatialities in the  context of postcoloniality. While studies in postcolonialism often foreground the temporal  vectors, increasingly, postcolonial studies is now being reconfigured in new and emerging  contemporary contexts through a critical reading of spaces. Illustrative texts and readings  would be undertaken for discussion in the course in an attempt to create new directions in  engaging with the postcolonial geographies. 

Course objectives: 

1. Introduce students to significant debates and theorists within spatial studies in the context of postcoloniality 

2. Enable students to engage with these debates in postcolonial contexts through a nuanced  sense of both space and time 

3. Familiarise students to core methodologies of postcoloniality as well as spatial studies  and the present through a Cultural Studies approach

Pedagogy: Apart from lectures and discussions, students would also be encouraged to gain knowledge experientially by engaging with cultural artefacts as a way of locating and  comprehending spatiality. A selection of texts from these courses will be taken up by the  instructor and mentioned in the course plan.

This module will introduce coloniality, modernity as well as spatiality thereby linking the  postcolonial question with time, space and discourses that emanate thereof. Readings  around theorisations of space and human geography, as well as basic postcolonial concepts  will be included here. 

Doreen Massey: “On Space and the City”  

Edward Soja: “History: Geography: Modernity”  

Henri Lefebvre: From State, Space, World Michel  

Foucault: Heterotopia 

Arjun Appadurai: From Modernity at Large Pramod  

Nayar: from Colonial Voices 

David Mackay “Agents of the Empire” 

Concepts from Beginning Postcolonialism by McLeod

1. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place 

2. Speaking the Unspeakable: London, Cambridge and the Caribbean by Paul Sharrad in De Scribing Empire 

3. The Cybermohalla Project 

4. Selections from Trickster City by Sweta Sarda 

5. The Slave of MS H.6 by Amitav Ghosh 

6. Selections from Janaki Nair’s Promise of Metropolis 

7. Selections from Priya Jaikumar’s Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space

1. Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island 

2. Shubhangi Swaroop, Latitudes of Longing 

3. J M Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 

4. Kipling, “The Bridge-Builders”

Course Description:

The influence and presence of the past is felt everywhere and every day in our lives. Movies, newspapers or the internet bombard us and expose us to the past – both familiar and unfamiliar. However, the barrage of information and the forces of globalization have led to increasing questions on the relevance and the value of the past – indeed a denial even. And what these vestiges of the past, if not material culture? Material Culture is less a subject of study and more a way of encountering the world. We are social beings, but our social relations are mediatedand activatedby and through things. We use objects to build our identities, our relationships and our means of survival and pleasure. This course will engage the students with the myriad ways in which the past, though no longer present – is a presence in our lives today – through Material Culture. If we have to investigate human past and understand history – we cannot hope to even try without grasping material culture. 

It will introduce the students to think materially, relate to their memories of their own past and make them aware of the multiple perspectives which will enable them to read, write and reflect on the past; or in other words, make history. Hence, we will examine anthropological approaches to material culture and consumption: the practices, relations, and rituals through which things -- from food and clothing to shell valuables or money – become meaningful. Readings will include classic works of anthropology and social theory as well as recent ethnographies of western capitalist, colonial/postcolonial and postsocialist settings. Some questions we will explore include: how is the value or significance of objects created in different social contexts, from ritualized gift exchange to shopping malls? Should we understand commodities and other items of material culture as fulfillments of human needs, or perhaps as symbols that ‘say’ something about their users (and if so, what)? What kind of light can they shed on matters of social structure and inequality, national or class identity, values and morality, or processes of change at particular historical moments?

Pedagogy: In addition to lectures, seminars, written assignments and presentations the course will  include: 

1. Lectures which will complement readings, with focus on individual aspects of special interest.
2. High onus being kept on offering multiple and alternative interpretations, and exposing students to  key issues of scholarly debate. 
3. Documentaries, films, objects and docu-dramas will be viewed, providing visual material with  commentary, enriching and deepening readings and lectures. 
4. There will also be intensive focus on Group work/projects, small group discussion, and mock  problem-solving and enquiry-based learning exercises, and case study analysis. 
5. Low-stakes writing assignments and presentations, student seminars and workshops will be a  regular feature in various courses.
6. Independent study, along with peer-mentoring and peer-assisted study schemes.
7. Research-based projects and assignments, giving space to explore the outcome of the course of  study and the real impact it has in the world.

a)   Mind in Matter – Theories of Things, History from Things

b)   Why We Need Things: Interrogating Evidence and Material Culture Studies

c).Why Collect Things: Archaeology, Anthropology and Material Culture Studies

a)    Voice and the Subject: Consumerism in a Material World – Commodifying Things and the Politics of Display.

b)   Narratives and Counter-narratives: Material Empires and the Other’s Object.

c)    Colonizing Knowledges: Racializing the ‘Other’; Latent and Manifest Orientalism.

a)    Engendering Things: Sexism, Patriarchy, and the codification of material cultural practice

b)   Contemptible Collectibles:Materialism; Museums and Collections

c)    The Public Life of Things: Politicization of Material Culture.

a)    Memory and the Production of Self – Bodily Adornment, Theorizing Taste and the Class Experience

b)   Comedy of Values: Advertising and Consumer Society – Objects Recontextualized; The Dialectics of Shopping

c)    The Unequal Lives of Persons and Things: Waste and Want; Things as Extensions of Persons. 

The Death of Things: Dilemmas of Classification and the Problem of Agency and Ownership

Gerritsen, Anne and Giorgio Riello (eds.). 2015. Writing Material Culture History, London:  Bloomsbury. 

Hurcombe, Linda M. 2007. Archaeological Artefacts as Material, New York: Routledge.

Jones, Andrew (ed.) 2007. Memory and Material Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Schiffer, Michael B. and Richard A. Gould (eds.). 1981. Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology  of Us, New York: Academic Press. 

Thapar, Romila. 2005. Somanatha: The Many Voices of History, New Delhi: Verso.

Thapar, Romila. 2014. The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History, New  Delhi: Aleph. 

Tilley, Christopher et.al. (eds.). 2006. Handbook of Material Culture, London: Sage Publications.

Varma, Supriya. 2003. Ayodhya: Archaeology, History and Politics. Ababhash, July-Sept., Kolkata,  pp. 53-63. 

Woodward, Ian. 2007. Understanding Material Culture, Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

Fritsch, Juliette. 2004. Museum Gallery Interpretation and Material Culture, New York and London:  Routledge. 

Gosden, Chris and Chantal Knowles (eds.) 2001. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and  Colonial Change, Oxford, New York: Berg. 

Hallam, Elizabeth and Jenny Hockey. 2001. Death, Memory and Material Culture, Oxford and New  York: Berg. 

Jamir, T and M Hazarika (eds). 2014. Fifty years after Daojali-Hading: Emerging Perspectives in the  Archaeology of Northeast India, New Delhi: Research India Press. 

Jones, Andrew. 2007. Memory and Material Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Knappett, Carl, 2009. An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and  Society, Oxford: Berg. 

Korasick, John E. 2005. Collecting Africa: African Material Culture Displays and the American Image of Africa, 1885-1930, PhD Thesis submitted to Saint Louis University. 

Miller, Daniel. 2001. Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Perspective, Routledge.

Pratap, A. 2014. Indian Archaeology and Postmodernism: Fashion or Necessity? Ancient Asia, 5: 2, pp.  1-4. 

Ratnagar, S. 2016. Harappan Archaeology: Early State Perspectives, Delhi: Primus.

Riggs, E P and Z R Jat. 2016. The 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan: Migration, Material  Landscapes, and the Making of Nations, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 3 (2).

Scapp, Ron and Seitz, Brian (eds.). 2013. Living with Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and  Material Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Schug, Gwen Robbins & S. R. Walimbe (eds). 2016. A Companion to South Asia in the Past, New  Delhi: Wiley Blackwell. 

Simte, Lamminthang L. 2015. Rocks, Relics and Paths: Tracing Places in the Early Historic  Landscapes of the Southern Vindhyas. Unpublished PhD Thesis submitted to Centre for Historical  Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. 

Simte, Lamminthang L. and Prerana Srimaal. 2018. Timeless Aesthetics? Rock art Studies as Sites of  Contestation' in the Southern Vindhyan Landscape. South Asian Cultural Studies (SACS) Journal,  Special Issue on Imaging South Asian culture in non-English: Reconstructing popular textual and visual  representations, pp. 34-43. 

Srimaal, Prerana and Lamminthang L. Simte. 2017. Values, Valorisation, and the 'Package': The  Conservation of Early Buddhist Heritage-Sites of Central India, in, Sanjay Garg (ed.), Archaeology of  Buddhism: Recent Discoveries in South Asia, New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 501-514.

Staniforth, Mark. 2002. Material Culture and Consumer Society: Dependent Colonies in Colonial  Australia, New York: Springer-Science+Business Media. 

Stocking, George W. Jr. 1985. Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. London:  The University of Wisconsin Press. 

Swann, Marjorie. 2001. Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England,  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Turnau, Irena. 1991. History of Dress in Central and Eastern Europe from Sixteenth to the eighteenth  Century. Warszawa. 

Urgo, Joseph R., and Ann J. Abadie (eds.) 2007. Faulkner and Material Culture, Jackson: University  of Mississippi Press. 

Varma, Supriya and Jaya Menon. 2017. Households at Work: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of  Variation in Ceramic Production in North India, Ethnoarchaeology, 9:1, pp. 3-29, DOI:  10.1080/19442890.2017.1278862. 

Weatherill, Lorna. 1998. Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760, London  and New York: Routledge.

Cultural Anthropology is the study of human social life in the broadest possible  way. Traditionally, Anthropologists have studied "tribes" to understand how contemporary humans  create what is known as "culture" to give meaning to and make sense of the world they live in. The  modern-day tribe can be an online group of bike enthusiasts, gourmet food chefs, a saree group or  cat lovers who dress their cats. Anthropologists are interested in all types of societies, and the whole  range of human experiences. We study social norms, values, practices to understand the diversity  and the unity - the unique that sets us apart and the commonality that binds us together. This course  provides an active introduction to anthropological practice with a “hands-on” ethnographic exercise  where students will be creating their account of a specific topic. By learning about the ethnographic  methods, students will acquire the critical tools necessary for researching the social and cultural  aspects of their society the anthropological way.

Pedagogy: Interactive lectures, use of visual tools, such as graphic organisers, mind maps and  videos, effective questioning will help in delivering conceptual and theoretical information while  assessing their understanding and their ability to discuss these ideas in class. The students will apply  these principles while conducting their ethnographic mini-project. The ethnographic project is based  on their interest and takes into their divergent thinking. The CIAs focus on students being able to research and present their findings in a concise format. The asynchronous classes will be used to  reinforce the learning through research-based short activities which they have to finish within the  day.

Is studying other humans a valuable endeavour? What is Anthropology? What is Culture? The  Historical Evolution of Anthropology and the Schools of Thought. 

What is a "rite of passage"? Why do rituals become such an essential part of everyday human life,  especially during times of change or transition? What role does religion play in human society?  Exploring if Atheism, Veganism, or Minimalism can be considered a religion? 

Marriage extends our circle of kin; the institution of family plays a pivotal role in sustaining these  extended networks of kin. What kind of cultural values and norms honour kinship in that society?  How do the institutions of kinship, marriage and family fulfil the particular society’s cultural  needs?

What are norms? How does deviance help in clarifying the collective cultural values and cultural  morality of a society? Does deviance unify society? Exploring the structuralist (Durkheim) and  functionalist (Merton) perspective on deviance. 

What is ethnography? How to be an ethnographer in one’s own society? Exploring the process and  methods of fieldwork; Cultural-relativism and other guiding ethical principles of anthropology;  Taking Field Notes; Reflexivity.

Davies, C. A. (2008). Reflexive ethnography: A guide to researching selves and others. Routledge.Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. University of  Chicago Press. 

Jha, M. (1995). An Introduction to Anthropological Thought. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House  Pvt. Ltd. 

Miller, B. D. (2017). Cultural anthropology. London: Pearson. 

Taylor, S. (Ed.). (2001). Ethnographic research: A reader. Sage. 

Wolfinger, N. H. (2002). On writing fieldnotes: collection strategies and background expectancies.  Qualitative research, 2(1), 85-93.

Barnard, A. (2016). Social Anthropology Investigating Human Social Life. United Kingdom:  Studymates Limited. 

Bernard, H. R. (1988). Research methods in cultural anthropology (p. 117). Newbury Park, CA:  Sage. 

Bernard, H. R., & Gravlee, C. C. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of methods in cultural anthropology.  Rowman & Littlefield. 

Bowie, F. (2006). The anthropology of religion. The Blackwell companion to the study of religion, 3- 24. 

Clifford, J. (1994). Diasporas. Cultural anthropology, 9(3), 302-338. 

Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.  Univ of California Press. 

Crang, M., & Cook, I. (2007). Doing ethnographies. Sage. 

Fabian, J. (2014). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. Columbia University  Press. 

Fife, W. (2005). Doing fieldwork: Ethnographic methods for research in developing countries and beyond. Springer. 

Fox, R. (1983). Kinship and marriage: An anthropological perspective (Vol. 50). Cambridge  university press. 

Freilich, M., Raybeck, D., & Savishinsky, J. S. (Eds.). (1991). Deviance: anthropological perspectives. Bergin & Garvey. 

Friedman, J. (2002). From roots to routes: Tropes for trippers. Anthropological Theory, 2(1), 21-36. Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (1992). Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference.  Cultural anthropology, 7(1), 6-23. 

Hall, S. (2017). Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Noida: Orient Blackswan Private  Limited. 

Marcus, G. E. (2008). The end (s) of ethnography: Social/cultural anthropology's signature form of  producing knowledge in transition. Cultural Anthropology, 23(1), 1-14.

Rapport, N. (2014). Social and cultural anthropology: The key concepts. Routledge.  Rosaldo, R. (1988). Ideology, place, and people without culture. Cultural Anthropology, 3(1), 77-87. Spiro, M. E. (1986). Cultural relativism and the future of anthropology. Cultural Anthropology, 1(3),  259-286. 

Turner, T. (1993). Anthropology and multiculturalism: what is anthropology that multiculturalists  should be mindful of it?. Cultural anthropology, 8(4), 411-429.  

Walton, D. (2012). Doing Cultural Theory. Sage Publication.

This course introduces students to a range of theoretical apparatus to  understand visuality and visual culture. The approaches draw upon a mix of cultural studies,  philosophy, anthropology, sociology, film studies and popular culture. It provides a broad overview  of visual culture and problematizes ways of seeing and being seen. It engages with the visual as a  site of power, politics and resistance, for example, as in the case of surveillance in the hyper technological societies we inhabit. The larger objective of the course is to enable students to grapple  with complex ideas on their own, and to tussle with concepts, to produce primary research that is  insightful. This research will take the form of student-managed and designed publications. 

Pedagogy: All the classes will be interactive and discussion based. Field Visit: NGMA/ Chitrakala Parishad/ any other relevant exhibition site

What is visuality? How do we acquire ‘ways of seeing’? Who has the right to look and show?  What makes images political? How can we map the sub-discipline of Visual Culture? This unit  will help students understand the field of visual culture studies and the politics and operational  dynamics of a ‘visual’ culture. 

CORE TEXTS 

W J T Mitchell: “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture E. Shohat & R  

Stam,:“Narrativizing Visual Culture 

Nicholas Mirzoeff: “The Right to Look” Franco Berardi: “The Image Dispositif” Irit Rogof:  “Studying Visual Culture” 

RECOMMENDED TEXTS 

W J T Mitchell: “There are No Visual Media”  

John Berger: Ways of Seeing

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright: “Images, Power and Politics”

This unit looks at some of the basic apparatus/concepts we can use to understand images and  visuality. How does representation work? How can we understand spectacle? What is the  philosophy of the image? 

CORE TEXTS: 

Susana Berger, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to Early Enlightenment. 

Selected excerpts from Aristotle, The Complete Works 

Jonathan Crary: Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture 

RECOMMENDED TEXTS 

Roland Barthes: “Rhetoric of the Image” from Image, Music, Text Marita Sturken: “The Wall, the  Screen and the Image” 

Chapters from Part III ‘Visual Colonialism/ Visual Transculture’ & Part IV ‘The Gaze, the Body,  Sexuality’ in The Visual Culture Reader

This unit broadly recognises that we inhabit a visual technocracy and attempts to read the visual as  mediated and enhanced by technology. It attempts to understand the politics of visual technocracy,  both together and by themselves. This unit will make use of the methodologies of Unit I and II to  understand the ‘everyday’ we inhabit. 

CORE TEXTS 

Walter Benjamin: “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility”. Papastergiadis  et al: “Screen Cultures and Public Spaces” 

Selected chapters from Punathambekar & Mohan: Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from  South Asia. 

John Fiske: “Videotech”, The VCR 

Anne Friedberg: “The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze” The Visual Culture Reader Chapters from Part  I ‘Global/Digital’ in The Visual Culture Reader

As given in the units

Leonard Diepeveen: “Art Museums as Organizers of Culture” James Clifford: “On Collecting Art and  Culture” 

Sameena Siddiqui: “Civic Archives: Beedi Product Labels” Christopher Pinney: Photos of the Gods Kajri Jain: “Reconfiguring India's Nationalism, One Grand Statue at a Time” 

Carson, Fiona and Claire Pajaczkowska, editors. Feminist Visual Culture. Edinburg University Press. Fuery, Patrick and Kelli Fuery. Visual Cultures and Critical Theory. Arnold, 2003. Gruber, Christiane  and Sune Haugbole, editors. Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East. 

Pinney, Christopher. Photography and Anthropology. Reaktion Books, 2011. Pinney, Christopher and  Nicholas Thomas, editors. Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment. Berg,  2001. 

Rampley, Matthew, ed. Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts. Edinburgh UP,  2005.

Nation becomes one of the primary elements through whichidentities are formulated. The modernnation-state  plays a significantrole in definingand legitimizing theexistence of humans throughtherights that are conferred by beingpart of anation-state. Historically therehave been multipleengagements to understandthe notion of nation-stateand its formationinthe modern world. The course revisits some of these discourses to locate the relevanceof nation-stateinthe contemporaryera- where more and morepeople are becoming stateless due to various factors. The course brings into discussion someof significant events inthecontemporary worldlikeforced migrationand refugeecrisis andthereby examines therelationship between the nation-state, borders, refugees, andcitizenship.

Theunitbrings intodiscussionsome ofthe major theorists on nation and nationalism.It exploresthe question ofbelongingness to an identity,a territory, an ethnic group, and shared belief systems.

.Nation and State

Refer to Ernest Renan’s “What isa nation?”; Ernest Gellner’s Nation and nationalism. .Nation as Imagined

Refer to Anderson, Benedict, ImaginedCommunities:Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism;ParthaChatterjee’s, The Nationand itsFragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.

.Nation and Narration

Refer to Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and theMarginsofthe ModernNation; Nation and Narrationby Homi Bhabha

.Nation- stateand Citizenship

Refer toGopal guru on Nationalism;‘CitizenSubject’ byEtienne Baliberand“Ethical Uncertainties of nationalism” byDan Smith’s Citizenship,deportation andthe boundaries of belonging, Citizenship Studies, byBridget Anderson,MatthewJ. Gibney & EmanuelaPaoletti.

Theunit explores multiple discourses onnationalismthat emerge fromvarious parts of theworld and howthese discourses are formulated andreformulatedbased on socio-political factors ofa particular period.It also traces how the nationalist discourses are largelyformulated through the imagination of the‘other.’

.Contemporary discourses on nationalism

Refer toIs Nationalismonthe Rise? Assessing Global Trends by Florian Bieber.

.Ethno nationalism-whitenationalism- Mexican wall, Trump’s populism andBrexit

Refer to“Trump’spopulism: Mobilization of nationalistcleavage and thefuture of USDemocracy by Bart Bonikowski '';Racism, Crisis, Brexit bySatnamVirdee & Brendan McGeever;BrexitBeyond Borders: Beginning of the EU Collapse andReturnto NationalismbyLeonardo Scuira.

.Tracing the notionof nationalismin India

Refer toGandian, Nehruvian and Ambedkar's Idea on thenation of India’/ ‘Bharat’-absence of certaincommunities (Savarkar andBharat) /constructionof theotherRabindranath, Tagore.

Theunitexplores someof the borderingpracticesandits impactson refugees. It also brings into discussion the implicationof suchborderingpractices on refugee livesandcrises.

.Bordersand cartography

Refer to“Step Across This Line” bySalman Rushdie; “Sponge Borders”by Guido Cimadomoand Pilar MartínezPonce.

.Bordering practices and thepolitics of power/visibility-legalexcerpts oncitizenship

Refer to“Mapsas social constructions: Power, communicationand visualization by Crampton, Jeremy; “Borders, boundaries and Citizenship” by SeylaBenhabib,)

.Refugees and Representation

Refer to“Moving images:Themediarepresentation of refugees” by Terence Wright;“Framing Frontiers: TheSuspended Steptowards Visual Constructionof Geopolitical Borders bySaayan Chattopadhyay

.RefugeeCamp and detention centers

Refer to“Whatis a Camp?”inMeans Without Ends bySimonTurner, “What Isa RefugeeCamp? Explorations of theLimits andEffects ofthe Camp by Jessica Anderson ; “Cultures ofDisbelief”to discuss the narratives on the collective negationof the existence ofcamps.

Refugeecrises and the Legality

Refer “AThousand Little Guantanamos’: WesternStates and Measures toPrevent the Arrivalof Refugees”.

Theunitexplores someof the questionsthat theprocessof migration posesto the larger understandingof nation-state, as well astothat of politicaland culturalidentity thatnationalist discourses attempts to assert.

.Migration -legal policies - immigrants, diasporaand refugees

Refer toHuman Flow (2017); UN 1951 Refugee Convention; TheAge of Migrationby Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas and Mark J. Miller ;“WhyMigrationPolicies Failby StephenCastles.

.Migrant/immigrantexperience - Refugeesexperiences

Refer toSudani from Nigeria(2018) / Paradeshi (2007), Aadujeevithamby Benyamin.Transnationalismand Globalised world

Refer toVertovec, “Transnationalism, Migrant Transnationalism and Transformation”;Ludger Pries, “The approach of transnationalsocial spaces: Responding tonewconfigurations of thesocial andthe spatial.”

.Internalmigrationand ethnocentrism- urbanisation- city and labour Refer toMigrant labourers andCOVID 19