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 2025. 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 Spring 2025
HDS 3556: Women, Gender, and Religious Citizenship in South Asia
Ghazal Asif
This seminar will explore how religion and gender impact citizenship. The modern secular state is conventionally seen as a vehicle for protecting or advancing the rights of gendered and religious minorities, but this conversation does not always consider how citizenship is dependent on defining such minorities to begin with. In this seminar we will consider how ritual and devotional life, as they intersect with sexuality, desire, and kinship, are translated by states as specific forms of citizenship. We will focus on Hindu and Islamic traditions in South Asia to understand how gendered forms of religious life have been received by the region’s contemporary nation-states, especially when they have tried to fix the borders between minority and majority citizens.
AT MIT! South Asian America: Transnational Media, Culture, and History
Vivek Bald
Examines the history of South Asian immigration, sojourning, and settlement from the 1880s to the present. Focuses on the US as one node in the global circulation, not only of people, but of media, culture and ideas, through a broader South Asian diaspora. Considers the concept of “global media” historically; emphasis on how ideas about, and self-representations of, South Asians have circulated via books, political pamphlets, performance, film, video/cassette tapes, and the internet. Students analyze and discuss scholarly writings, archival documents, memoirs, fiction, blogs and films, and write papers drawing on course materials, lectures, and discussions.
SAS 108: Introduction To The Hindu Calendar As A Lived Experience
Radha Blinderman
The purpose of this course is to acquaint someone completely new to the religious traditions of South Asia with Hinduism as a lived experience. It is meant to introduce students to ways of life that are informed by the most prominent sub-traditions of Hinduism today as they are reflected in the different versions of the Hindu calendar, also called Pañcāṅga or Pañjikā. Building on the history of different Hindu calendars, which consist of lunar dates (tithis), this course aims to give a broad overview of Hindu religious life as it revolves around festivals, fasts, seasonal rituals and pilgrimages that comprise each version of the calendar. […] Knowledge of Sanskrit, other South Asian languages, or prior background in South Asian religions is not required for this course.
Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary
Francis Clooney
This course explores the female divine – and supreme female beings – along with issues of gender and divinity. We read hymns praising Hindu goddesses Sri Laksmi, the great Goddess (Maha Devi), the Tamil goddess Apirami, and Bengal’s Kali, while noting too how feminine divinity is constructed in environments where gods and goddesses both flourish. The course is also comparative, exploring the piety and cult of the Virgin Mary, also through famous hymns such as the Greek Akathistos, the Latin Stabat Mater, and a Tamil hymn praising Mary as mother of Tamil Catholics. This approach is sharpened by some attention to performative, social, visual dimensions, and by attention to contemporary feminist and theological insights, and thinking a bit about the fluidity of gender identities today. Not a survey, but an in-depth introduction.
HDS 3750: The Bhagavad Gita and Its Greatest Commentary
Francis Clooney
The Bhagavad Gita is a very Hindu classic of devotion and theology. Deep and complex, it has received extensive classical and contemporary interpretation, as to what it means, and how it affects life in any time and place. The seminar reads the Gita itself, and then interprets it according to the classic commentary of Madhusudana Sarasvati (16th century), who sought to synthesize liberative knowledge, detached action, yoga, with love of Krishna – in essence melding together Nondualist and Devotional readings of the Gita. Other approaches too will be noticed. This course is meant for students interested in closely reading a great Hindu text, honoring both its past and its present. Sanskrit useful but not required; some background knowledge of Hinduism helpful.
HIND-URD 123: Bollywood and Beyond: Commercial Cinema, Language and Culture in South Asia
Richard Delacy
This course examines concepts of personhood, community and culture in South Asia as expressed in contemporary film and literature. Works in Hindi-Urdu and in translation will be examined with emphasis on language as an index of cultural difference and of broad social shifts, notably the transformation of audiences from citizens to culture-consumers. Knowledge of Hindi-Urdu is not required. However, there will be a section for students with intermediate proficiency utilizing language materials.
HDS 3563: Tibetan Buddhisms
Janet Gyatso
This course will study the variety of Buddhisms in Tibet, along with their connection to indigenous religions on the plateau. We will take up this vast topic through four main lenses. One will be facilitated by reading autobiographies and biographies of individual lives, written by women and men from various social positions and historical contexts, as a way to study how ritual practices and philosophical doctrines impact human relations, especially teacher-student, and lay-monastic, in Tibetan Buddhist worlds. The autobiographers range from the current Dalai Lama to an impoverished hermitess of the 17th century, a cave-dwelling visionary, a powerful aristocrat, a philosopher/monk, and others. Secondly, we will have the fortune to have a visiting lecturer for 3 classes, Dr. Tashi Dekyi, originally from Khams, who studies indigenous values and ways that the land itself is an agent in moral person-building in Tibet. This perspective will impact the way we study all of our readings for the semester. Thirdly, the course as a whole will take an eco-feminist perspective on the range of Buddhisms in Tibet, including an introductory study of tantric Buddhism, in anticipation of another course, on Buddhist tantra, to be taught in fall 2025. And finally we will pay attention throughout to religio-medical understandings of the human body in Tibetan Buddhism, including yogic practices and death practices. No previous background in Buddhism is required; both advanced and introductory students will be accommodated.
HAA 187K: Architecture, Urbanism, and Design in a Global South Asia: 18th century to the present
Vishal Khandelwal
This seminar explores architecture, urbanism, and design in colonial and postcolonial South Asia through the region’s interactions and exchanges with other parts of the world. Extending from early European presence in the subcontinent to the formalization of the British empire and its subsequent end that eventually led to the formation of current-day South Asian nation-states, the seminar analyzes urban, rural, and architectural spaces including the bungalow, the single-family apartment, and the village dwelling alongside other buildings and environments of residence, education, governance, and entertainment. Topics include: indigenous and foreign building technologies; the aesthetic and intellectual contexts of architectural representations; Gandhian ideals and their architectural expression; architecture, urbanism, and colonial and postcolonial identity; and architecture and the archive. The seminar emphasizes multiple artistic and architectural media employed within diverse approaches to writing architectural and urban histories of the region. And with a keen eye informed by recent methodologies in global art and architectural history, it encourages the questioning of a global approach towards refining the same for students’ research and learning interests. Open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students.
ENGLISH 285SA: South Asian Poetry
Vidyan Ravinthiran
Originally, this course centred poets resident in, and writing from, post-Independence India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It will now also examine South Asian-American and British-South Asian writers. In terms of poets living in the Global South, it will concentrate on those who make a decisive break with the wannabe-colonial, archaically emulous stuff which came before them—doing this with the aid of European modernism, and US poetry’s turn to open forms and a streetwise vernacular: writers like Nissim Ezekiel, Srinivas Rayaprol, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, Dom Moraes, Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawalla and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—poets whose politics is inextricable from the aesthetic richness of their work. Moving to the US and UK, we’ll ask if a lineage can be mapped out, connecting practitioners of lyric—Sujata Bhatt, Agha Shahid Ali, and A.K. Ramanujan are examples—with the explicitly racialized, post-lyric, experimental work (encompassing prose poetry) of 21st century authors like Bhanu Kapil and Divya Victor.
HDS 3175: Indian Ocean Islam
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.
IGA 315: Global Ethnic Politics
Roya Talibova
This course explores the history and dynamics of ethnic politics on a global scale. From the historical legacies of colonialism to contemporary conflicts and struggles for self-determination, the course seeks to answer fundamental questions regarding identity politics and its political ramifications across different parts of the world. The topics will cover definitions of identity, race, and ethnicity, colonization, nationhood and nationalism, legacies of slavery, ethnic political mobilization, ethnic conflicts, ethnic voting, and consequences of politicized identity for democracy, governance, and economic development. The course will draw from a wide range of source materials, including scholarship in comparative politics, international relations, economics, sociology, and anthropology, as well as long-form journalism and film. We will cover various regions of the world, combining social science theory with empirical evidence to analyze historical and contemporary cases from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Europe.
GOV 94JW: Democracy in Practice in the Global South
Julie Weaver
This seminar explores how democracies operate on the ground in low- and middle-income countries today. What is the reality of how democracy works in practice versus how it is conceived and designed? What are developing countries’ major democratic challenges and successes? How does a country’s income level impact, and in turn is impacted by, democratic participation? Main themes to be covered include overarching issues like representation, institutions and state strength, as well as more specific areas of democratic practice such as participatory democracy, civil society, corruption, and managing diversity.
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.