HY4C2      One Unit
Defining the Nation: South Asian History within a Global Perspective

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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Conceived in the crucible of colonial rule, the nation states of modern South Asia have often been defined by their relationships with other powers and regions. This course pursues this theme through the numerous actors, primarily though not exclusively South Asian, who have sought to articulate how India (and, later, Pakistan and Bangladesh) fit into the wider world. Key topics like the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 may initially appear local but are in fact decidedly international; such examples reveal, further, the enduring power of narratives that contrast a nascent nation with an oppressor state. But as the fraught relationship between India and Pakistan—two ostensible equals—attests, nations in South Asia have not only defined themselves in opposition to their subjugators. Nor are these ‘others’ necessarily antagonistic, for ‘Defining the Nation’ also considers how figures like the Ottoman sultan helped Indians articulate everyday concerns and how events in places like Ireland, China, and Russia equipped them with inspirational (or sometimes cautionary) tales to steer their own ambitions. In untangling these interregional interconnections, the course will also attend to internal and regional nationalisms that have been constructed around language, religion, and caste, all the while highlighting the rich textual, visual, and material archives that characterise the history of the region and its nations.

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

Essay (3000 words)

One 2,500-word essay due in the Autumn Term.

Asani, Ali. ‘From Satpanthi to Ismaili Muslim: The Articulation of Ismaili Khoja Identity in South Asia’. In Farhad Daftary, ed. A Modern History of the Ismailis: Continuity and Change in a Muslim Community. London: Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011.

Desphande, Prachi. Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Fisher, Michael H. A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals. Riverdale, Md.: Riverdale: 1987.

McGarr, Paul M. The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Minualt, Gail. ‘Urdu Political Poetry during the Khilafat Movement’. Modern Asian Studies 8, no. 4 (1974): 459–71.

O’Malley, Kate. Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2017.

Raghavan, Srinath. 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Stark, Ulrike. Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007.

Taylor, Miles. Queen Victoria and India. New Haven, NH: Yale University Press, 2018.

Valentine, Simon Ross. Islam and the Ahmadiyya Jamaʿat: History, Belief, Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Course participation (25%)

Essay (35%, 3000 words)

Essay (40%, 5000 words)