Courses on South Asia at Harvard: Spring 2024

Harvard offers a wide array of courses on South Asia, ranging from language to history, politics, economics, religion, and much more. Check out a selection of what is offered during Spring 2024. Please refer to the Course Catalog for the most up-to-date information. We will continue to add to this list as we hear about more courses.

Courses on South Asia

The Yoga Sutras: Text, Meaning, Purpose

Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments

Instructor: Jinah Kim

Why do Buddhists build monuments despite the core teaching of ephemerality, and what can we learn from this paradox about our own conception of time and space? Everything changes. This is, in its simplest and most fundamental formulation, one of the essential teachings of Buddhism. Buddhist communities throughout history have preached, practiced, and written about the ephemerality and illusoriness of our everyday lives and experiences. Ironically, however, many of these same communities have attempted to express these teachings in the form of monumental structures meant to stand the test of time. Some of the world’s greatest cultural heritage sites are a legacy of this seeming contradiction between the impermanence that is a central presupposition of Buddhist thought and the permanence to which these same monuments seem to aspire. If the world is characterized by emptiness and the Self is illusory, how does one account for the prodigious volume of art and architecture created by Buddhists throughout history? This Gen Ed course takes a multicultural and reflective engagement with the challenges presented by this conundrum through a study of Buddhist sites scattered throughout time and space. Pertinent topics such as cosmology, pilgrimage, materiality, relics, meditation, and world-making will be explored. Through these Buddhist monuments in South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, students will learn about the rich, diverse world of Buddhist practice and experience.

Music and Politics in Afghanistan and Central Asia

Instructor: Richard Wolf

Drawing from the recent political experiences and musicality of the Afghan artist-in-residence Dawood Pazhman, the course will explore music in Afghanistan and neighboring countries, especially with respect to state and religious control. Expert guest lectures will outline key moments in the political history of the region. Week-to-week discussion, reading and listening will delve into the texts, tunes, and motivations of public and private music making, institutions for teaching music, censorship, and other topics. Students will have the opportunity to learn to play the kashgar rubab and sing in the Dari language. No prior experience playing a stringed instrument is required.

Buddhist Philosophy

Instructor: Parimal Patil

In this course, we will discuss topics in Indian Buddhist epistemology,  ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. We will pay particular attention to the arguments that Buddhist philosophers used to defend their views and respond to their critics. In addition to understanding these arguments in their historical contexts, we will ask what we can learn from then today and, when relevant, assess how they are being used in contemporary philosophy.

Can We Still Read Religious Classics? An inquiry with Christian, Hindu, and Confucian Classics

Theory and History in the Study of South Asian Buddhisms

Instructor: Charles Hallisey

This course does three things. First, it introduces the work of Pierre Hadot and Talal Asad and explores the relevance of their work generally for the Study of Religion, and especially their ideas of spiritual exercises, disciplinary practices, and tradition. Second, it looks at the reception of the ideas and approaches of Hadot and Asad in Buddhist Studies, with respect especially to the potential of their ideas for better understandings of Buddhist life in South Asia historically. Third, it reflects on the use of Hadot and Asad in Buddhist Studies as instances of what Edward Said called “traveling theory,” especially with respect to what we can learn about what happens to ideas, given shape in one interpretive environment, when they are isolated from the interpretive context in which they originated and are then reintegrated into a new disciplinary environment.

Mahayana Buddhism

Instructor: Elon Goldstein

This course explores ideas and practices central to Mahayana Buddhism with an emphasis on ways of understanding the mind and approaches toward meditation. Mahayana is a diverse form of Buddhism found worldwide today and especially prevalent in Tibetan influenced regions, Inner Asia, and East Asia. Starting with the origins of Mahayana in South Asia, we study its expressions in a variety of cultures and time periods. We trace different Mahayana conceptions regarding the nature of our being, how and why ordinary mind operates in problematic ways, methods for spiritual transformation, and the goal of Awakening or becoming a Buddha. Related topics include the ideal of the bodhisattva, the implications of shunyata or emptiness, the relation between everyday truth and ultimate truth, and techniques for developing the heart. In English translation, we examine Mahayana Buddhist scriptures, traditional meditation manuals, and religious treatises from Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures. The final part of the course demonstrates how our study of Mahayana provides a basis for comprehending the tantric forms of Buddhism that emerged from it. All along, we discuss innovative contemporary Mahayana developments in America and across the world.

Architectures of Cloth

Instructor: Maria Gough, Vishal Khandelwal

This comparative seminar examines the major role of textiles in architectural theory and practice, with a primary focus on India and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Our objective is to think historically and cross-culturally about a subject–the concept of architextiles–that has resurfaced in recent decades.  Key topics include: Mughal textile architecture; typologies of the tent and other mobile structures in colonial and postcolonial India; Gottfried Semper’s theorization of textiles as the origin of architecture; the Arts and Crafts Movement within specific geographical contexts; Anni Albers’s concept of the “pliable plane”; the curtain partitions of Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe; collaborations between textile designers and architects, such as Mrinalini Mukherjee and Ranjit Singh, and Nelly Sethna and Joseph Allen Stein; Minnette de Silva’s architectural practice;  Frei Otto-inspired temporary exhibition pavilions in India; and textile design pedagogy at the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.  We will study textiles, samples, and original publications first-hand at the Harvard Art Museums and the Graduate School of Design, and make field trips to museums in New York (and possibly also London).

Difference and Democracy

Instructor: Vatsal Naresh

How do some groups acquire the label ‘minority’? What prevents different oppressed groups from collaborating in the pursuit of political power? Why do identities linger when they mark and connote deprivation, oppression, and violence? How do different forms of difference figure in hierarchical relationships to each other and preponderant groups and political institutions? How do oppressed groups innovate in resisting oppression and creating alternative political projects? This tutorial will explore interconnected forms of social difference like race, caste, indigeneity, gender, and class in the United States and South Asia (and other contexts based on student interest) by studying the formation of identities before and during democratic rule, and the interaction of groups and institutions of political power. We will read texts in social and political theory, history, and the empirical social sciences. The tutorial will empower students to analyze identity in historically specific contexts, as well as the underlying abstract concepts. The tutorial will focus on, and train students in theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methods. This is a junior tutorial.

Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning in the Global South

Instructor: Diane Davis

This course starts from the premise that urban politics and governance arrangements shape the character, form, and function of cities as well as the planning strategies used to make them more just, equitable, and sustainable. Using a focus on cities in the developing world, the course examines an array of governance structures (centralized versus decentralized institutions; local versus national states; participatory budgeting, etc.) and political conditions (democracy versus authoritarianism; neoliberal versus populist versus leftist party politics; social movements) that are relatively common to cities of the global south. The course is structured around a comparative analysis of theories and cases that give us the basis for documenting the ways that politics affect urban policy and the built environment of the city more generally. The course’s critical approach to case studies and policy prescriptions will also prepare students to formulate relevant planning strategies in the future. Among a range of policy domains, special attention is paid to transportation, housing, mega-project development, land policy, and environmental sustainability, with most examples drawn from Latin America, South and East Asia, and Africa.

Indian Ocean Islam

Instructors: Ali Asani, Teren Sevea

Does thinking oceanically influence the study of Islam? Can we remember a people’s history of the Indian Ocean world? This course considers these questions and others as it focuses on religious worlds within port cities and the networks of Indian Ocean Islam. The course examines how religion in port cities and islands was centered upon a plethora of saints, missionaries, divinities and other agents of Islam, who have been marginalized in academic literature on the Indian Ocean. It simultaneously examines how oceanic religion was intimately connected to economic, political and technological developments. Students will be introduced to scholarship on oceanic Islam and monsoon Islam, before they are introduced to a variety of sources on transregional Islamic networks and agents of Islam, including biographies, hagiographies, travelogues, novels, poems and ethnographic accounts. Students will, moreover, be encouraged to consider ways in which approaches to studying Islam could be enhanced by a focus on religious economies and networks, as well as the lives of ‘subalterns’ who crossed the porous borders of the Indian Ocean world and shaped its religious worlds. Jointly offered in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as Religion 1821 and Islamic Civilizations 136.

Advanced Indo-European

Instructor: Jay Jasanoff

The course Spring Term 2024 will be an introduction to the language of the Rigveda, with reading of selected hymns and linguistic discussion.