ALL3638: Islam and Modernity in South Asia

This course explores the multiple genealogical trajectories of Islamic thought in South Asia through the varied lens of its literary traditions. For centuries, literature has remained an important site for the expression of Islamic identity and its interaction with the larger history of the subcontinent. Muslim writers have traversed diverse domains of human experience through multiple genres: while poetry has been a widely celebrated genre for the expression of private love, drama has emerged as a crucial site for public politics and activism. In this course, students will read texts that have circulated across South Asia and interpret them in relation to enduring questions about power, justice, identity, community and love (both human and divine) in Islam. Reading a wide array of works from diverse temporal and spatial locations, this course examines how the aesthetic and discursive world of South Asia provides a terrain on which the Islamic "socius" of the region has come to define itself in a unique manner. In addition, we also investigate how these literary cultures-at different historical junctures-articulated a secular ethos to define Hindu-Muslim relations in the subcontinent. We further discuss questions of genres-epic, romance, drama, novel and lyric-as a way of thinking about the circulation of literary forms across languages, cultures and national spaces in the past and the present.