The Cultural Reinvention of South Asia

Catalog description

This course seeks to give students an introduction to the history, composition and consecutive artistic influence of the two great Indian epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata. The continuous retelling of the two tales through art, fiction and various contemporary media i.e. TV dramas, graphic novels and Bollywood films will be looked at in detail. Due to the length of the Mahabharata, the class will rely on a prose version of the work as well selected cantos and other scholarly texts in order to grasp the key message of the themes examined in the epic. This class will also watch TV series adaptations of the epics.