MA English

Drawing on various disciplinary perspectives, namely sociology, philosophy, political science and history, the course introduces the students to concepts, theories and empirical evidences addressing the question: what is specific to social—in parallel to economic or political—condition of living? The course also explores critiques of Eurocentric understanding of ‘social’ and ‘society’ those have emerged from global South and Latin America. In the process, it examines dynamics of societies with very different developmental trajectories under ‘aegis’ of colonial modernity. 

This course explores how identities of ethnicity, caste, religion, sex, etc. thematise themselves within a quest for equal citizenship. Within the certitudes of modern Western political theory, these markers of identity were supposed to remain confined to the ‘private’. For particular identities to feature in transactions between the state and the citizen would be seen as the remnants of a different time. But who had access to the status of the ‘universal’? Did not the rights-bearing citizen have a pre-given identity—‘white, male, middle class’? If the universals were masked particulars, then the particulars had to come up with a critique of the so-called universals. As M. S. S. Pandian wrote, ‘one step outside modernity’ was to be ‘one step ahead of modernity’. We study the politics of identity through a focus on caste in modern India. We combine a study of the original writings of Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar with secondary literature on the subject. With Sumit Sarkar and Nancy Fraser, we complicate our understanding of a politics of recognition by comparing it with a politics of redistribution—in the process, cross-examining the binary.

This course introduces students to the historical evolution of the language of cinema, its material pre-conditions, and ideological moorings. The course uses select canonical texts and cutting edge scholarship to combine a historical overview with methodological finesse. The students will be exposed to an array of film genres, and a range of methodologies for studying films, such as formal, phenomenological, and ethnographic methods, and the myriad possibilities within these. The course aims to equip students with a theoretical understanding of film as a medium and a cultural artefact, the implications of the film form, and its potentialities for analysis of culture in general.  

The course introduces and discusses various philosophical approaches/ methods to research in Humanities and Social Sciences. By taking the philosophical method of hermeneutics, phenomenology, Frankfurt school, and deconstructive reading, the course is divided into four modules—the hermeneutical method, the phenomenological method, critical method, and deconstructive method. To introduce students to research methods in human and social sciences, the course will explicate the application of theory to practice by taking the philosophical approaches of these various methods and applying them to textual interpretation and by employing philosophical phenomenology and critical method to the understanding of social phenomena. Sample Texts: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960), Truth and Method, trans Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. London and New York: Continuum, (reprint) 2006;  Clark Moustakas: Phenomenological Research Methods. California: Sage Publications, 1994.

Given the rich and diverse intellectual climate in India, it is important to locate the discipline of Sociology within the Indian context. Drawing from the works of eminent scholars this course will adopt a sociological lens to analyze Indian society. In particular, the course will engage in discussion on caste, family and relationship structures, and law to understand how these social institutions are crucial for the development of Indian society. Various forms of online material will be used to explain the core concepts of this course. In this course, students will be introduced to a range of data collection and fieldwork methods, such as ethnography, online interviews, in-depth and face-to-face interviews. Additionally, in this course, students will also be taught how to do a close reading of a text, write reflection papers as well as analyze the intersections between caste, class, ethnicity, and gender in contemporary Indian society. Some of the main texts of this course are as follows: M.N. Srinivas, (1976). The remembered village; Patricia Uberoi, (2009). Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India; Pratiksha Baxi (2010). Justice is a secret: Compromise in rape trials, Contributions to Indian Sociology.

Both Time and Narrative being broad constructs that are likely to travel in multiple directions, this course has been designed with a specific focus: Literary Modernism. Modernism as an aesthetic movement is as remarkable for its global resonances as for its various avatars, whether high-modern, inter-modern, post-modern (or even anti-modern for that matter). Decisively shaped by the two world wars, these interests in embracing or questioning the notion of ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound’s words that became emblematic of this artistic turn) have sustained across different historical-cultural contexts. More importantly, they have had a significant impact on how we, as a contemporary audience, think about the relationship between text and context. This course encourages a critical engagement with three specific facets: the narrative question–how form/style/genre interplay with content/story; the time question–how experienced and perceived time gets differentiated from clock time; the brow question–how aesthetic hierarchies have influenced modernism. 

This course is an introduction to the ethical thinking of the twentieth-century continental philosophy—Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Feminist theory. Their ethical ideas can be situated within the ethical turn of the 20th-century continental philosophy, which offers a relook at the existential problem of human relationships in the texts of philosophy. The focus of the course will be on the ethics of care, the ethics ‘towards-the-other’, and the idea of radical hospitality and responsibility ‘towards-the-other’ in Levinas and Derrida. The problem of human relationships between the ‘other’ and the ‘I’ and the question of who is the ‘other’ will be examined in this course through the works of Levinas and Derrida. Sample Texts: 

Emmanuel Levinas, (1961) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff publishers, 1979; Jacques Derrida, (1997) Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

This cross-listed interdisciplinary course aims to present some of the key themes and debates within gender, sexuality, society, and the larger national internationalist orders. It will seek to show how these thematics resonate within literary, social and historiographic fields. There will be a sense of the global history of these debates, as well as applications within the Indian context. Topics discussed include themes of science, history, pleasure, empire and popular culture. There will be the discussion of normative forms of relation such as the heterosexual family with its ideas of masculinity and gender roles. In select assignments, and the term paper, students may, if they prefer, write the assignment/paper using sources entirely from their discipline of English or Sociology—they are also given options to mix the disciplines, with due consultations.

Moving away from the conventional literary approaches such as character analysis, stylistic analysis, thematic analysis; and socio historical approaches such as seeing the novel as reflection of society and analyse them to understand social and political issues, this course asks what is the social, the historical, and the political of the ‘literary’? It does so by employing new methods of analysis on the novel. The course looks at the formative moments of the novel, especially in the Indian context, where it began to form in the nineteenth century. Many novels written during that time do not have the character it assumed later. Engaging with this aspect in a productive way, the course attempts to develop useful ideas about colonial modernity, and see what happens when we place them in contemporary times. Some of the nineteenth century novels that the course uses are Malayalam novel Indulekha written by O. Chandumenon (1899), Kannada Novel Indira Bai (1899) authored by Gulvadi Venkata Rao.

This course studies the emergence and formation of literary sensibilities that came to define modern Indian prose in the second half of the 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th century. Primarily in English, Bengali and Marathi, and then in several other Indian languages simultaneously, these pioneering writers sought to articulate both formalistic and thematic concerns through questions of identity. For instance, the question of how to sculpt the novel form to represent a regional or indigenous (Indian) social/political/historical milieu was closely connected to the question of what themes or characters would best represent this milieu. Needless to say, these expressions were deeply mired in the social reform rhetoric, the early imaginings of an Indian nation, schisms etched between languages and regions, visible and invisible revolutions in family spaces, the tradition-modernity divide, women’s rights, caste politics, and battles over cultural domains.  The central learning objective of the course is to be familiarized with key texts and writers that have contributed to our current formulations of modern Indian prose.

The phrase ‘World Literature’ variously refers to concept, archive, as well as method. This course introduces its students to the historical and intellectual conditions of these various usages. The course familiarises the students with the alignment of literary studies towards the planetary in the beginning of this millennium, and covers the major theorists and texts of this alignment. The course introduces students to an approach to literature that is unfettered by methodological nationalism, and equips them to develop a tool-kit to analyse literature in a world of global media and movement. 

Speculative Indias. What is it to speculate? This course looks at various modes of ‘speculation’ across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Examining fiction and non-fiction texts, images, graphic narratives and poems, the course explores interdisciplinary theories of ‘speculation’ within the context of the post-millennial, Indian socio-cultural specifically. Taking in ideas of mythology, speculative fiction, cultural citizenship, near-future urban living, precarity and human rights, the course emphasises critical reading, writing and invites students to consider countercultural ideas of India and Indianness embedded in the post-millennial and future moment.