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Department of History

Problems and Debates in the Social History of Modern South Asia

Course Code:
15PHIC064
Status:
Course Not Running 2012/2013
Unit value:
1
Year of study:
Year 1 or Year 2
Taught in:
Full Year

Objectives and learning outcomes of the course

The overall objective of the course is to provide an advanced historical training and enable students to develop skills appropriate to subsequent employment, or for research in modem South Asian history. At the end of the course, a student will have studied a selection of themes that have been foci of recent historical research and historiographical debates on the transformations of South Asian societies since the eighteenth century. 

A student should have further developed the abilities 

  • to critically analyse and review complex and theoretically informed works of historical scholarship
  • to locate such works in the context of major debates and theoretical currents in contemporary historiography
  • to state a historical problem in a way that permits the development of concrete research questions. 


Students who decide to take this course as a major should have acquired essential skills for producing an extended dissertation on a relevant topic.

Scope and syllabus

Students will study a selection of themes in the social history of South Asia since the eighteenth century – themes that are foci of contemporary historical research. The course intentionally transgresses the conventional state-centred periodizations of modern South Asian history to explore the dynamics of societies that were conditioned by processes of late precolonial, colonial and postcolonial state formation, but often encompassed more than one of the successive polities.

The course does not aim at presenting a historical survey of the period under discussion. Students are expected to have acquired an overview of the major political and economic developments and to consolidate this overview through individual reading. The objective is rather to develop a grasp of some of the major themes, debates and theoretical currents in recent writings on modern South Asian social history and to acquire the ability of discerning emerging areas of research.

The course will discuss a selection of ten themes. These themes may include the following: 

  • colonialism, information and knowledge; 
  • the historicity of caste; 
  • the social history of law; 
  • the city and its ‘crowd’; 
  • gender and the ‘Hindu nation’; 
  • agrarian relations and peasant rebellion; 
  • army, war and society; 
  • metamorphoses of the Indian artisan; 
  • famines, epidemics and the crises of society; 
  • labour and the history of the everyday. 

A certain thematic flexibility will be maintained to be able to respond to new developments in historiography and further the development of specific research interests.

Two sessions are assigned to each of the ten themes. The first will introduce the theme; the second will be dedicated to the critical and in-depth analysis of an influential, controversial and/or path-breaking study, usually a monograph. The course will be mainly taught as a seminar giving emphasis to student presentations. The essays are used to develop two specific skills: 

  1. writing a critical book review,
  2. stating and developing a research question.

Method of assessment

Written Exam (50%), Essay 1 3,000 words (20%), Essay 2 4,500 words (30%).

Suggested reading

  • Arnold, David 1993, Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley et al.: University of California Press.
  • Banga, Indu (ed.) 1992, Ports and Their Hinterlands in India 1700-1950, Delhi: Manohar.
  • Bayly, C. A. 1996, Empire and Information. Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (= Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society 1), Cambridge: CUP.
  • Bayly, C. A. 1993, ‘Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India’, Modern Asian Studies [MAS] 27,1, pp. 3-43.
  • Bayly, Susan 1999, Caste, Society and Politics in India. From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (= New Cambridge History of India IV.3), Cambridge: CUP.
  • Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds) 2001, Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India, Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 299-316.
  • Bose, Sugata and Jalal, Ayesha 1998, Modern South Asia, London: Routledge (several editions).
  • Breckenridge, Carol A. and van der Veer, Peter (eds) 1993, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Chakravarti, Uma 1998, Rewriting History. The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabhai, New Delhi, Kali for Women.
  • Chandavarkar, Raj 1985, ‘Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives’, Modern Asian Studies 19,3, pp.623-668.
  • Chatterjee, Partha 1993, The Nation and its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
  • Chaturvedi, Vinayak (ed.) 2000, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, London/New York: Verso.
  • Chaudhuri, Binay Bhushan (ed.), Economic History of India from Eighteenth to Twentieth Century (= History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, VIII/3), New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations.
  • Cohn, Bernard S. 1996, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge. The British in India, Delhi: OUP.
  • Dewey, Clive 1988, Arrested Development in India, Delhi, 1988.
  • Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001, Castes of Mind. Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton/Oxford: OUP.
  • Freitag, Sandria 1991, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, MAS 25,2, pp. 227-261.
  • Ghosh, Anindita (ed.), Behind the Veil: Resistance, Women, and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007.
  • Guha, Ranajit (ed.) 1985, Subaltern Studies IV. Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 276-329.
  • Hardiman, David (ed.) 1992, Peasant Resistance in India 1858-1914, New Delhi: OUP.
  • Hardiman, David 1996, Feeding the Baniya. Peasants and Usurers in Western India, New Delhi: OUP.
  • Harrison, Mark 1994, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Haynes, Douglas E. 2007, ‘The Labour Process in the Bombay Handloom Industry, 1880-1940’, Modern Asian Studies, forthcoming (published online by Cambridge University Press 3 May 2007), 45 pp.Hazareesingh, Sandip 2007, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity. Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay (1900-1925),  Hyderabad: Orient
  • Longman.  Joshi, Chitra 2003, Lost Worlds. Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories, New Delhi: Permanent Black.
  • Kidambi, Prashant 2007, The Making of an Indian Metropolis Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920, Ashgate.
  • Klein, Ira 1973, ‘Death in India 1871-1921’, Journal of Asian Studies 32, pp. 639-659.
  • Kumar, Ravinder 1968, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of the Social History of Maharashtra. London: 1968.
  • Markovits, Claude (ed.) 2002, A History of Modern India 1480-1950, London: Anthem.
  • Masselos, Jim 2007, The City in Action. Bombay Struggles for Power, New Delhi: OUP.
  • Nair, Janaki 1996, Women and Law in Colonial India. A Social History, New Delhi: Kali for Women.
  • Omissi, David (1994), The Sepoy and the Raj. The Indian Army, 1860-1940, Basingstoke/London.
  • Pandian, M.S.S. 2007, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin. Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, New Delhi, Permanent Black.
  • Rana P. Behal/Marcel van der Linden (eds), Coolies, Capital and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History (= International Review of Social History 51, supplement 14 [2006]).
  • Robb, Peter 2002, A History of India, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave.
  • Ross, Robert J. and Telkamp, Gerard J. (eds) 1985, Colonial Cities, Dordrecht.
  • Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (eds) 1988, Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, London.
  • Roy, Tirthankar 1999, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (= Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society 5), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Sarkar, Sumit 1983, Modern India, 1886-1947, Basingstoke/London: Macmillan.
  • Sarkar, Sumit 1997, Writing Social History, New Delhi: OUP.
  • Sarkar, Sumit 2002, Beyond Nationalist Frames. Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History, New Delhi: Permanent Black.
  • Singha, Radhika 1998, A Despotism of Law. Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, New Delhi: OUP.
  • Tan, Tai Yong 2005, The Garrison State: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849-1947, New Delhi: Sage, 2005.