HY337      One Unit
Sources for the Subcontinent: The Culture and Politics of South Asia

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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In studying a region with high linguistic diversity and low levels of literacy, historians of modern South Asia must often look to archives beyond written texts. This course accordingly explores a range of visual, textual, and material sources in its attempt to reconstruct histories and lived experiences across the region and across time. To take but one example, our examination of the art and architecture of the Mughal Empire in the nineteenth century will inform our understanding of the Mughal-themed films that appeared in the twentieth, and our examination of these films’ popularity will, in turn, elucidate how Indian audiences imagined the Indian nation in the waning days of colonial rule. In addition to its emphasis on film, visual, and material sources, this course naturally recognizes the importance of a more traditional textual archive. At the same time, it demonstrates how even written texts raise material considerations: the Hindi-Urdu controversy, for instance, is fundamentally a textual debate but also hinges on the visual question of script. By illustrating the importance of such themes for the study of the colonial and postcolonial periods, this course hopes to bring both key historical developments and the actors behind them into sharper relief. Students will thus emerge from this course with a strong foundation in the history of the modern subcontinent while gaining a greater familiarity with methods from cultural, social, film, art, and subaltern history.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6 of the AT and the WT.

One 2,000-word formative essay due in the Autumn Term.

Bhatia, Nandi. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Chatterjee, Partha. ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’. In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, 233– 53. Edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. Delhi: Zubaan, 1989.

Chatterjee, Sudipto. The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta. London: Seagull Books, 2007.

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

Elam, J. Daniel. ‘The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 8, no. 2 (January 15, 2018): 181–203.

Hughes, Stephen Putnam. ‘The Production of the Past: Early Tamil Film History as a Living Archive’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4, no. 1 (June 11, 2013): 71–80.

Kidambi, Prashant. The Making of a Colonial Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920. London: Routledge, 2007.

Lunn, David. ‘The Eloquent Language: Hindustani in 1940s Indian Cinema’. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 6, no. 1 (September 17, 2015): 1–26.

Mann, Michael. “The Deep Digital Divide: The Telephone in British India, 1883–1933.” Historische Sozialforschung 35, no. 1 (2010): 188–208.

Orsini, Francesca. Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009.

Pinkerton, Alasdair. ‘Radio and the Raj: Broadcasting in British India (1920–1940)’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18, no. 2 (April 2008): 167–91.

Thomas, Rosie. Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.

Course participation (25%)

Essay (35%)

Essay (40%)