• SAS Core Requirement: AHp, AHo

South Asia as a region includes the Republic of India; the two modern nations that were formerly part of British India: Pakistan and Bangladesh; Sri Lanka; Nepal; and the Maldives. A single course could never hope to cover the literatures of all of these nations, and this course will concentrate only on India, with some attention to Pakistan. We will analyze the relationships between the human and the divine, men and women, and tradition and modernity; and caste and communal relationships as they are articulated in texts translated from several South Asian languages from ancient times to the present.

Fulfills SAS Core Requirement AHp.

Course Cross-listing: 013:231:01

Required Texts:

Works will be chosen from among the following: excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita, The Ramayana, and the Mahabharata ; The Little Clay Cart; love poetry of the Tamil poets; poems of Ghalib; the bhakti (devotional) poetry of Kabir and Mirabai; stories of Rabindranath Tagore, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Mahasweta Devi, and Qurratulain Hyder; and the recent films In Custody and Earth. All texts will be available on Sakai.