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 Fall 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 Fall 2024
ID205: Societal Response to Disaster
Satchit Balsari and Jennifer Leaning
The course offers a deep dive into disaster response with a particular focus on South Asia, exploring critical events such as Cyclone Bhola in Bangladesh, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and insights from the Mittal South Asia Institute’s Kumbh Mela project, alongside lessons from ongoing heatwaves and the pandemic in India. This class is designed for public health and medical practitioners, disaster responders, and others responsible for crisis intervention. Anchored in a series of global case studies and research led by course faculty, students will learn from major disasters in recent decades – hurricanes, wildfires, nuclear accidents, stampedes, and intensifying heat waves. The course examines the emerging application of novel data streams to identify, prepare, and protect vulnerable communities. Through this course, students will acquire the analytic tools needed to plan an equitable and just response as the world faces rising extreme weather events in our changing climate.
Email TA Kartikeya Bhatotia for more information: kartikeyabhatotia@fas.harvard.edu
SAS 170: Translating India: History, Theory, Craft
Martha Selby
This seminar will introduce students to the art of literary translation through a wide variety of approaches. Over the course of the semester, we will read various tracts, articles, and books on the theory and craft of translation from a wide range of Euro-American and South Asian stances and viewpoints. We will analyze editions of various classics from India that have been translated into English repeatedly, paying particular attention to the political nature of the act and art of translation in its colonial and post-colonial contexts. This seminar will also have a practical component, and one session each week will allow students to present translations-in-progress to their peers for comment and critique.
SAS 171: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in South Asian Cultures
Martha Selby
This course will provide you with a comprehensive historical overview of gender issues as they are represented in the great textual traditions of South Asia (these categories include Vedic materials, medical literature, treatises on law and sexual behavior, and texts that outline the great debates over questions of gender identity and salvation preserved for us in certain Jaina and Buddhist materials). To make these classical texts more relevant, readings in recent anthropological studies of religion, performance, and kinship will also be included to enable you to trace recurring themes, images, and symbols. You will thereby gain a sense of continuity of traditions and attitudes as well as generative innovations and contemporary variants and divergences within them.
FYSEMR 37Y: Muslim Voices in Contemporary World Literatures
Ali Asani
What do Muslims think of acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam, the mixing of religion with politics, the rights of women, the “West”? This seminar investigates the viewpoints of prominent Muslim writers on these and other “hot button” issues as reflected in novels, short stories and poetry from different parts of the world. Explores a range of issues facing Muslim communities in various parts of the world by examining the impact of colonialism, nationalism, globalization and politicization of Islam on the search for a modern Islamic identity. Readings of Muslim authors from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Europe and America.
HDS 3391: Introduction to Hindu Spiritual Care
Francis Clooney
Team-taught by Swami Tyagananda, Director, Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in Boston, Harvard’s Hindu Chaplain, and a noted teacher and author, and HDS’s Francis X. Clooney who, as a Christian, has studied Hinduism for fifty years. This course explores starting points, attitudes, and specific forms of spiritual care distinctive to Hindu traditions, in light of general qualities and norms expected for ministry and spiritual care today in any tradition. Attention paid first to starting points in Hindu scripture and practice, and to classic texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana. Subsequent classes focus on cases: e.g., hospital chaplaincy and care for the dying; campus ministry; counseling of individuals facing life issues; guidance for couples preparing to marry and planning a family; responses to the suffering, death, and disruption caused by natural and social evils. Visiting lecturers, experienced in Hindu spiritual care, enrich the course throughout.
HDS 3625: Being Muslim in South Asia: Religion, Culture and Identity
Ali Asani
South Asia is home to the largest population of Muslims in the world. And yet, within South Asia, Muslims are a minority. What is Islam and what does it mean to be Muslim in South Asia? After briefly examining the historical development of Islamic institutions in the subcontinent, this course will focus on how ideas about Islam are shaped by evolving literary, linguistic, social and political landscapes. Special attention will be given to the effects of colonial and nationalist ideologies on Muslim experiences in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as the disputed territory of Kashmir. We will also explore the impact of reform and revivalist movements and state-enforced policies of “Islamization” and “Hinduization” on women and minorities.
HDS 3751: Who Needs God? Rethinking God in Light of Hindu and Christian Theologies
Francis Clooney
This course reflects on God reconsidered in light of modern and postmodern doubts about the very idea of “God,” in cultures where belief in God, and even understanding of God, is waning. What does needing God mean, for whom? The questions are raised in light of Hindu and Christian scriptures, from philosophical and theological perspectives, and with reference to spiritual paths to union with God in these great traditions. What is missing, if God is missing? Readings include: selected scriptural texts; St. Bonaventure’s Christian Journey of the Mind to God, Sri Sankara’s great Goddess hymn, Ocean of Beauty; the 19th century mystics Ramakrishna and Térèse of Lisieux; 20th century prophets of compassion and justice, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Dorothy Day. Comparing Hindu and Christian traditions on God challenge 21st century ideas of God, religion, self, but the course strongly welcomes insights from other traditions ancient and modern.
MUSIC 157RW: South Indian Classical Music
Richard Wolf
Analysis of south Indian classical composition and improvisational forms as performed today, as well as in the context of historical forms. Students will learn how to listen to and analyze the music through singing, reciting rhythm mnemonics, and learning to play the vina (a kind of lute). Students who so wish will also have the opportunity to play this music on instruments with which they are already familiar.
MUSIC 190RW: Topics in World Music
Richard Wolf
Music in Islamic Contexts: South and Central Asia/Iran. This course focuses on the arts of sound practiced by Muslims in South and Central Asia (including Iran), and on procedures of recitation that grow from pre-Islamic roots among Arabic-speaking peoples. The purposes are two-fold: one is to understand from a musically informed perspective a set of interrelated musical practices that cut across these areas. The second is to understand how different ideologies, philosophies and texts – associated with Islam locally, nationally, and internationally – shape local understandings and constructions of sound. This year we will also draw from the musical expertise of our artist in residence from Afghanistan for hands-on music-making.
HIST 1036: Modern South Asia
Sugata Bose
This course provides the historical depth in which to understand modern and contemporary South Asia in broad Indian Ocean and global contexts. It explores the history, culture, and political economy of the subcontinent which provides a fascinating laboratory to study such themes as colonialism, nationalism, partition, the modern state, democracy development, religious identities, and relations between Asia and the West.
HISTSCI 2635: Science as Development-Aid in Latin America and South Asia
Gabriela Soto Laveaga
In the early years of the Cold War, President Harry Truman’s administration created the Point Four program, a technical assistance plan for then-called “third world” countries. Focusing on agriculture, health, and industry, exported science and technology would help, the program claimed, to alleviate poverty, hunger, and inequality across the world. The history of mid-twentieth “science as aid” to alleviate the globe’s major social ills is more complicated and it helped to shape our current understanding of aid to other countries. This seminar explores what exported science and technology looked like on the ground, especially the impact of its unintended consequences on countries’ domestic innovation.
GOV 94CT: The Governance and International Politics of World Regions
Timothy Colton
This class investigates patterns of interaction, integration, and identity construction in contemporary world regions; political, economic, and cultural explanations for why outcomes vary across regions; and regions as competitive arenas and proving grounds for established and rising powers. In addition to general and theoretical questions, the course will consider the experience of specific regions, including Europe, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, South America, the Caribbean, and post-Soviet Eurasia.
ESPP 171: Solid Waste In Developing Countries
Ken Thomas
This course will examine major issues of solid waste (i.e. production, management, storage, treatment, disposal, infrastructure costs and financing, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales across municipal, industrial, electronic, biological/medical, and radioactive waste. Specific solid waste issues will be highlighted through in-depth case studies from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Middle East, and Small Island Developing States. Analysis of the environmental commitment and regulations, appropriate technology availability and reliability, and key geopolitical factors that affect the amount of solid waste to be handled and how it is disposed of will be explored in all cases. To understand fundamentals in the developing world context, the course will compare how solid waste is managed in the developed and developing world at the local, state, and federal levels. Fundamentals cut across solid waste-related policies, transport, sources, collection, disposal/treatment, recycling, and material recovery. The course will emphasize – both quantitatively and qualitatively – the real-world challenges and systemic issues of the developing world that make solid waste planning and management complicated.
HAA 182G: Art and Embodiment in Buddhism
What is a sacred image? Does it embody a presence or merely serve as a visual reminder? Does it need to look like its subject? How is it manufactured, used, repaired, and discarded? How do sacred images differ from tourist art or works in a museum?This course investigates answers to such questions for Asian Buddhist traditions, foregrounding an interdisciplinary examination of visual art, material culture, literary text, and ritual performance. At the intersection of these realms, visual representations take on complex significance as both results of and tools for specific practices and goals. Understanding the central role of art objects in daily Buddhist life, conceptions of “art” and “object” are fundamentally transformed. These items are not passive representations but active mechanisms in the complex world of lived religion.Organized thematically, this course highlights embodiment, resemblance, replication, substitution, artistic technique, materiality, ephemerality, ritual language, consecration and deconsecration, performance, and spatial and temporal context. The course addresses regions from across Buddhist Asia, highlighting India, Nepal, and Tibet but also featuring Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, Korea, and Japan.
GOV 94FA: Democracy and Representation in India
Feyaad Allie
This course examines India’s democratic trajectory since independence. What is the state of India’s democracy today? How has democratic governance in India expanded and contracted over time? What does political representation look like in India and how does it vary by identity groups? (How) do Indian voters hold politicians accountable? We will explore these questions, drawing primarily on academic articles and book chapters. Topics we will cover include elections, parties, institutions, voter behavior, and representation. The capstone assignment for the course will involve an individually written research paper delving into a key topic covered in the course.
HDS 3184: Mind, Spirituality, and Mental Health in Hinduism I
Swayam Bagaria
This two semester course will interrogate the various ways in which discussions on Hinduism have been included or have illuminated issues in the contemporary psychological sciences. We will read how different intellectual approaches ranging from psychoanalysis, folk psychology, cognitive anthropology, global mental health, and psychedelic sciences engage the archives of Hinduism as well as how ideas and practices from Hinduism are employed to provide an alternative to the therapeutic and treatment registers found in these approaches. The first part of the course in the Fall semester will emphasize the more philosophical, theological and moral psychological framework on these issues.
Languages
Harvard offers courses in many languages related to South Asia, including, Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Tibetan (Classical), Tibetan (Colloquial), and Tamil.
Are you a Harvard faculty member with a course you’d like included in our list? Tell us about it! Email mittalsai@fas.harvard.edu.