Courses

Spring 2020

Language Courses  |  Core Courses | Other Related Courses

Language Courses: 

HNDI 120
Elementary Hindi II
Seema Khurana, Swapna Sharma
MTWThF 10.30-11.20, MTWThF 1.30-2.20
Continuation of HNDI 110 / HNDI 510

HNDI 140/540
Intermediate Hindi II
Seema Khurana, Swapna Sharma
MTWThF 11.35-12.25
Continuation of HNDI 130. 

HNDI 142
Accelerated Hindi II
Swapna Sharma
TTh 4.00-5.15
Continuation of HNDI 132. Development of increased proficiency in the four language skills. Focus on reading and higher language functions such as narration, description, and comparison. Reading strategies for parsing paragraph-length sentences in Hindi newspapers. Discussion of political, social, and cultural dimensions of Hindi culture as well as contemporary global issues.

HNDI 159
Hindi Literature and Public Culture
Seema Khurana
TTh 4.00-5.15
An advanced language course that develops language skills through selected readings of Hindi literature and the study of popular culture. Focus on the adaptations of literary works of Prem Chand, Mannoo Bhandhari, Sarat Chandra, and Amrita Pritam in popular culture, cinema, theater, and television dramas.

HNDI 198
Advanced Tutorial
Swapna Sharma, Seema Khurana
For students with advanced Hindi language skills who wish to engage in concentrated reading and research on material not otherwise offered by the department. Work must be supervised by an adviser and must terminate in a term paper or the equivalent. Permission to enroll requires submission of a detailed project proposal and its approval by the language studies coordinator.

SKRT 120/520, LING 125/525
Introductory Sanskrit II
Aleksandar Uskokov
MTWThF 9.25-10.15
Continuation of SKRT 110, SKRT510/LING 515. Focus on the basics of Sanskrit grammar; readings from classical Sanskrit texts written in Devanagari script. After SKRT 110

SKRT 140/540, LING 148/548
Intermediate Sanskrit II
Aleksandar Uskokov
MWF 8.20-9.10
Continuation of SKRT 130/530, focusing on Sanskrit literature from the kavya genre. Readings include selections from the Jatakamala of Aryasura and the opening verses of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava. After SKRT 130/530 or equivalent.

SKRT 150/550
Advanced Sanskrit: Readings in Indian Philosophy and Aesthetics
Aleksandar Uskokov
MW 11.35-12.50
This advanced language course introduces the jargon of the philosophical disciplines (theory of knowledge, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, philosophical theology, hermeneutics) and aesthetics in the several systems of learning in ancient and classical India, across the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Additionally, the course introduces topics of philosophical significance in foundational texts such as the Upaniṣads, portions of the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas, and the Buddhist sūtra literature. Special attention is given to matters of style, scholastic techniques, and advanced morphology and syntax. The course, thus, combines advanced language instruction with learning intellectual and cultural content, and it facilitates training in primary research in one of the classical languages of South Asia. Prerequisite: SKRT 140/540 or equivalent, or instructor permission.

Core SAST Courses:

SAST 219 / ANTH 276
South Asian Social Worlds
Chandana Anusha
T 1.30-3.30
This course is an exploration of the social, political and economic realities of South Asian landscapes and lives. It traces classical and contemporary debates within the anthropological study of the region. It investigates the trajectory of South Asia through key debates within the discipline with a focus on village studies, caste, kinship, religion, and gender, to the lived experiences of colonial and postcolonial nation-building, economic development, and globalization in different parts of South Asia. The course assumes no familiarity with anthropology, South Asia, or any other discipline.

SAST 281 / PLSC 185 / ECON 325 / EP&E 321 / GLBL 322
Economies of Developing Countries: Focus on South Asia 
Zachary Barnett-Howell
TTh 2.30-3:45
Analysis of current problems of developing countries. Emphasis on the role of economic theory in informing public policies to achieve improvements in poverty and inequality, and on empirical analysis to understand markets and responses to poverty. Topics include microfinance, education, health, agriculture, intrahousehold allocations, gender, and corruption. Prerequisites: introductory microeconomics and introductory econometrics.

SAST 309 / ANTH 316
An Anthropology of the Violent
Adeem Suhail
Th 1.30-3.20
Violence has always been a central concern of social scientific inquiry. Anthropologists have been especially concerned with interrogating the ubiquity of violence at diverse scales, locations, forms and intensities. A growing body of literature is now directly studying groups and figures associated with the acts and perpetrators of violence. Indeed, even when anthropologists have stressed the systemic, structural or spectral nature of violence, accompanying the event or sequence of violence are its agents and conduits. While scholars may not yet have a consensus on what violence means, we appear to have a fairly consistent sense of who to look for when speaking about it. Focusing primarily on South Asia, this course studies the construction of what it is that stands in for violence. Each case we study will accompany texts theorizing the form, scale, and site of violence. From this perspective, we may begin to answer the questions: What is violence? Who gets to name violence? How do certain figures, groups, populations become victims, other perpetrators of violence? What are the tools that anthropology offers us in understanding them? And finally, what constitutes the violence of naming, of simplistic classifications, frivolous associations and how do we account for it?”

SAST 366 / RLST 183
The Bhagavad Gita
Hugh Flick
W 1.30-3.20
An examination of the Bhagavad Gita in its historical and religious context. Exploration of the major interpretations of this important religious text. All readings in translation.

SAST 374 / HSAR 383
Sacred Space in South Asia
Subhashini Kaligotla
MW 11.35-12.25
“Sacred” space in the Indian subcontinent was at the epicenter of human experience. This course presents Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jain monuments and the gamut of social meanings and activities associated with them. Moving from the ritual spaces of the Indus Valley Culture to nineteenth-century colonial India, we learn how the organization and imagery of these spaces supported devotional activity and piety. We learn too how temples, monasteries, and shrines supported the pursuit of pleasure, amusement, sociability, and other worldly interests. We also explore the symbiotic relationship between Indian kingship and religion, and the complex ways in which politics and court culture shaped sacred environments. The course concludes with European imaginings of Indian religion and religious places.

SAST 384 / ARCH 324 / URBN 324
The City Before and After the Tubewell
Anthony Acciavatti
M 11.35-1.25
What do such disparate cities as New Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, and Phoenix all have in common? In short, each city relies on a fantastic technology that few people know anything about but has transformed the shape and life of cities and their hinterlands: the tubewell. Technologies for drawing up groundwater, tubewells are used in places where municipal water supply is non-existent, unreliable, or often polluted. A minor technology with a global reach, the tubewell is to the city what the elevator was to the skyscraper in the booming American metropolis of the early twentieth century. In this course we look at how tubewells and other decentralized technologies have radically transformed urban and agricultural spaces across the globe since the nineteenth century to the present. We watch how people exult before these technologies; we witness how governments and philanthropies as well as farmers and townspeople appropriate them for radically different ends. And we consider why.

SAST 455 / PLSC 456
Elections in the Developing World
Sarah Khan
MW 11.35-12.50
This course introduces students to electoral politics in the developing world. How do different countries organize elections and choose electoral laws? Why are some elections more competitive than others? What drives people to stand for office and turnout to vote? Do people vote based on their class, ethnicity, or other concerns altogether? What makes an election “free and fair” and when are elections violent? How does the outcome of an election shape the political and economic situation of a country? These are some of the questions we explore drawing on lessons primarily from the recent elections in India, with focus on additional cases from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

SAST 471 / HSAR 447
Epic India: The Rama Story in Visual Art
Subhashini Kaligotla
Th 9.25-11.15
The epic story of Rama (Ramayana) is one of the most influential tales of the Indian subcontinent. It has been told and experienced in a stunning range of media across time and space: from epic verse and lyric poetry to painting, film, graphic novels, and puppet theater. While Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana of ca. 500 BCE is acknowledged as the first, writers have recounted the tale in the polyglot array of Indic languages, from Kashmiri to Telugu, and infused it with the values and interests of their own time and place. The story’s flexibility and capaciousness has encouraged social contestation and given voice to the concerns of disenfranchised social groups, including women and Dalits. This seminar examines a generous array of South Asia’s visual Ramayana traditions from the ancient to the modern, encompassing temple relief sculpture, painted courtly manuscripts, and comic book and filmic Ramayanas. Reading a selection of primary texts alongside we consider this tale’s immense capacity to represent the gamut of human experience, both private and public, and its continued resonance for artists, writers, performers, and their publics. Prerequisite: At least one introductory course in Art History.

SAST 486
Directed Study
Staff
TBA
A one-credit, single-term course on topics not covered in regular offerings. To apply for admission, a student should present a course description and syllabus to the director of undergraduate studies, along with written approval from the faculty member who will direct the study.

SAST 492
Senior Essay
Staff
TBA
A yearlong research project completed under faculty supervision and resulting in a substantial paper.

SAST 656 / HSAR 538
Visual Culture in Modern South Asia
Staff
F 9.25-11.15
Are there “ways of seeing” that are specific to modern South Asia? What are the ways in which colonial modernity conditioned visual culture in the region? Is there a traffic in ideas and practice between South Asia and other parts of the world? What are the objects and sites through which unfolding stories of visual forms may be tracked vis-à-vis South Asia? How did the people from the region and beyond visually represent themselves and their land and how did those representations circulate to help forge communities? Is visual culture in South Asia community-specific? These are a few of the questions that have generated discussions and debates among scholars and practitioners for at least a century and a half. In the past three decades scholars of South Asia have become ever more attentive to visual culture for analyzing modern South Asian experiences. Focusing on museum practices, discourses on artistic productions, fine art objects, popular prints, photography, and moving images, this course addresses these concerns while also looking at specific objects and their multilayered histories. For final evaluation students develop their own projects in consultation with the instructor.

Other Related Courses:

ANTH 339 / ANTH 539 
Urban Ethnography of Asia 
Erik Harms
T 9.25-11.15
Introduction to the anthropological study of contemporary Asian cities. Focus on new ethnographies about cities in East, Southeast, and South Asia. Topics include rural-urban migration, redevelopment, evictions, social movements, land grabbing, master-planned developments, heritage preservation, utopian aspirations, social housing, slums and precariousness, and spatial cleansing.

AMST 719
Interrogating the Crisis of Islam
Zareena Grewal 
M 1.30-3.20
In official and unofficial discourses in the United States, diagnoses of Islam’s various “crises” are ubiquitous, and Muslim “hearts and minds” are viewed as the “other” front in the War on Terror. Since 9/11, the U.S. State Department has made the reform of Islam an explicit national interest, pouring billions of dollars into USAID projects in Muslim-majority countries, initiating curriculum development programs for madrasas in South Asia, and establishing the Arabic Radio Sawa and the satellite TV station Al-Hurra to propagate the U.S. administration’s political views as well as what it terms a “liberal” strain of Islam. Muslim Americans are also consumed by debates about the “crisis” of Islam, a crisis of religious authority in which the nature and rapidity of change in the measures of authority are felt to be too difficult to assimilate. This course maps out the various and deeply politically charged contemporary debates about the “crisis of Islam” and the question of Islamic reform through an examination of official U.S. policy, transnational pulp Islamic literature, fatwas and essays authored by internationally renowned Muslim jurists and scholars, and historical and ethnographic works that take up the category of crisis as an interpretive device.

ARCH 341 / ARCH 4216 / GLBL 253 / LAST 318 / F&ES 782 / URBN 341
Globalization Space
Keller Easterling
MW 10.30-11.20
Infrastructure space as a primary medium of change in global polity. Networks of trade, energy, communication, transportation, spatial products, finance, management, and labor, as well as new strains of political opportunity that reside within their spatial disposition. Case studies include free zones and automated ports around the world, satellite urbanism in South Asia, high-speed rail in Japan and the Middle East, agripoles in southern Spain, fiber optic submarine cable in East Africa, spatial products of tourism in North Korea, and management platforms of the International Organization for Standardization.

F&ES 839 
Social Science of Conservation and Development
Carol Carpenter
T 9.00-11.50
This course is designed to provide a fundamental understanding of the social aspects involved in implementing conservation and sustainable development projects. Social science makes two contributions to the practice of conservation and development. First, it provides ways of thinking about, researching, and working with social groupings—including rural households and communities, but also development and conservation institutions, states, and NGOs. This aspect includes relations between groups at all these levels, and especially the role of politics and power in these relations. Second, social science tackles the analysis of the knowledge systems that implicitly shape conservation and development policy and impinge on practice. The emphasis throughout is on how these things shape the practice of sustainable development and conservation. Case studies used in the course have been balanced as much as possible between Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America; most are rural and Third World. The course includes readings from all noneconomic social sciences. The goal is to stimulate students to apply informed and critical thinking (which means not criticizing others, but questioning our own underlying assumptions) to whatever roles they may come to play in conservation and sustainable development, in order to move toward more environmentally and socially sustainable projects and policies. The course is also designed to help students shape future research by learning to ask questions that build on, but are unanswered by, the social science theory of conservation and development.

No prerequisites. This is a requirement for the combined F&ES/Anthropology doctoral degree program and a prerequisite for some advanced F&ES courses. Open to advanced undergraduates. Three hours lecture/seminar.

GLBL 930
GSE India: Global Social Entrepreneurship
Tony Sheldon
W 2.40-5.40
Launched in 2008 at the Yale School of Management, the Global Social Entrepreneurship (GSE) course links teams of Yale students with social enterprises based in India. GSE is committed to channeling the skills of Yale students to help Indian organizations expand their reach and impact on “bottom of the pyramid” communities. Yale students’ partner with mission-driven social entrepreneurs (SEs) to focus on a specific management challenge that the student/SE teams work together to address during the term. GSE has worked with thirty leading and emerging Indian social enterprises engaged in economic development, sustainable energy, women’s empowerment, education, environmental conservation, and affordable housing. The course covers both theoretical and practical issues, including case studies and discussions on social enterprise, developing a theory of change and related social metrics, financing social businesses, the role of civil society in India, framing a consulting engagement, managing team dynamics, etc. Enrollment is by application only. Also, MGT 529.

AFAM 752 / HSHM 761 / HIST 937
Medicine and Empire
Carolyn Roberts
M 9.25-11.15
A reading course that explores medicine in the context of early modern empires with a focus on Africa, India, and the Americas. Topics include race, gender, and the body; medicine and the environment; itineraries of scientific knowledge; enslaved, indigenous, and creole medical and botanical knowledge and practice; colonial contests over medical authority and power; indigenous and enslaved epistemologies of the natural world; medicine and religion.

EALL 308 / PHIL 341 / HUMS 305 / EALL 608
Sages of the Ancient World 
Michael Hunter
TTh 11.35-12.50
Comparative survey of ancient discourses about wisdom from China, India, the Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Topics include teaching, scheming, and dying.

ECON 470 / GLBL 233 / EP&E 232 / GLBL 633 / MGT 607
Strategies for Economic Development
Rakesh Mohan
M 3.30-5.20
How strategies for economic development have changed over time and how dominant strands in development theory and practice have evolved. Students trace the influence of the evolution in thinking on actual changes that have taken place in successful development strategies, as practiced in fast growing developing countries, and as illustrated in case studies of fast growth periods in Japan, South Korea, Brazil, China, and India. Prerequisites: introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics.

EPE&E 315 / PLSC 317
Constitutionalism
Giulia Oskian
TTh 1.30-2.20
An introduction to the political philosophy of constitutionalism combined with a trans-historical and comparative study of constitution-making processes including the US, France, Mexico, Germany, Italy, and India.

HIST 233 / RLST 159 
Eastern Christianities
Daniel Eastman
MW 9.00-10.15

Selective introduction to Christian traditions outside the ambit of western Christianity, with a focus on the pre-modern period prior to contact with European colonizing and missional efforts. Students are introduced to the literatures and material cultures of Christian traditions in Africa and Asia, including Egypt, Ethiopia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, India, and China.

HIST 239 
Britain’s Empire since 1763
Stuart Semmel
TTh 11.35-12.50
The varieties of rule in different parts of Britain’s vast empire, from India to Africa to the West Indies. Ways in which events in one region could redirect policy in distant ones; how British observers sought to reconcile empire’s often authoritarian nature with liberalism and an expanding democracy at home; the interaction of economic, cultural, political, and environmental factors in shaping British imperial development.

HIST 351 / RLST 155 / MMES 193 / RLST 535
The Golden Age of Islam
Gerhard Bowering
TTh 2.30-3.45
The development of Islamic civilization in the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Iran, and India from Muhammad through the Mongol invasions to the rise of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires (600–1500 C.E.). Emphasis on the intellectual and religious history of Islam in the age of the caliphates and during the rule of regional dynasties.