HIST210: History of Empires in South Asia

This course is designed to teach the methods and theories of anthropology primarily through the examination of ethnography. The course proceeds as a history of the discipline, illustrating the ways in which anthropological thought, and method, changed over time. The goal is designed to help students understand how to 'do ethnography' as well as how to 'write ethnography' by seeing how scholars have approached both the doing and the writing of ethnography in the past.

The first half of this course offers a survey of the art and architecture of major Islamic dynasties, emphasizing similarities and differences across the breadth of their historical, geographic, and cultural contexts. The religion of Islam and its fundamental concepts and terminology are presented, along with major artworks and monuments. Building upon this foundation, the remainder of the semester explores art historical topics (such as calligraphy, portraiture, and landscape gardens) across dynasties. Throughout the semester, we will draw upon visual and textual primary source material through in-class examinations of short texts and artworks featured on the Metropolitan Museum of Art web site. At the end of the semester, we will visit the Met to see many of these works in person and discuss contemporary practices of displaying Islamic art to the public. Through this course, students will attain confidence in recognizing, describing, and interpreting Islamic art and architecture with a trained eye and a critical mind.

Course description: The aim of the course is to introduce the Vijayanagara-Nāyaka art and architecture in the scheme of art historical development in the later medieval Indian history. Its historical span covers the rise of the Vijayanagara in the mid-fourteenth century CE to the decline of the Nāyaka kingdoms in the mid-eighteenth century CE. The territorial extent falls south of the Kṛṣṇā River to Kaṉyākumari in the Deep South. This part of southern peninsula is the area where the Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Tulu and Malayalam are spoken. The Nāyakas were the successors of the Vijayanagara rulers, and may be called Vijayanagara-Nāyaka. To be brief, the art of the Nāyaka period is an elaboration of the earlier Vijayanagara tradition. The regional expression within dynastic production in South India reaches to the confinements where there are no further follow-ups as well as innovative vocabulary. The aim is to study the art and architecture of the Vijayanagara-Nāyaka period through the lens of religious developments, cult orientations, regional myths, and politics of patronage along with recent trends of anthropology of regional cultures within its historical geography. This period has long attracted historians who have studied the politics, agrarian society and flourishing foreign trade. The courtly literature of the age offers a glimpse of the kind of life and ideals adumbrated by the Vijayanagara-Nāyaka rulers. These enquiries may be of help to better understand the historical, religious and cultural context of the buildings and their associated sculptures and paintings in order to open further areas for exploration.

2003

Archaeological evidence for selected empires of the Old World and New World will be used to illuminate cross-cultural similarities and differences in the strategies complex pre-modern societies used to expand into empires. We will discuss the ways in which such societies produced, acquired, accumulated, and distributed wealth. There will be a focus on the expansion of early empires, on their interactions with peripheral polities, and on the imperial strategies of expanding empires in dealing with the capture and consolidation of new territories.

This course aims at providing students with an introductory understanding of India’s remarkable political and social transformations since its independence in 1947. The country’s 70 years journey amidst adverse economic conditions has indeed constituted a unique moment in the adventure of a political idea: democracy.