History of the Indian Subcontinent: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Democracy, c.1857 to Today

Catalog description

Faced with unrivaled questions of diversity, poverty, and scale, South Asia has been a crucial laboratory in the making of political modernity. India, with a population numbering over a billion, is the world's largest democracy. Pakistan was the world's first Muslim "homeland" and "nation." Beginning with an examination of the colonial period, this course reconsiders partition, and then follows the postcolonial trajectories of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. We explore innovative and divergent imaginations of the future, and of democracy in particular. We encounter Hindu nationalists, communists, socialists, liberals, anarchists, Islamists, and Muslim nationalists, revolutionaries, and the inescapable Mahatma Gandhi.