Department of English

How can we untether conceptualisations of South Asia and its literatures from dominant nationalism and colonial bordering logics? To answer this question, this interdisciplinary course will study how borders are made, remade and challenged in South Asia by insistently reading together literary texts and cultural formations separated by some of the most militarised international boundaries on earth. Writing exploring the implications of South Asia’s borders as process and contestation, as constantly ‘in motion’, has recently emerged as a rich site for interrogating how ‘bordered thinking’ constricts our ideas about place, self, identity, and text in studies of the region. The course will combine literature, history and political theory to take a dynamic view of borders in South Asia, focalising physical geopolitical boundaries as constitutively connected to the symbolic divides wrought by the cultural impositions of nationalisms and internal exclusions of caste, class, gender, and tribe.

We will examine short stories, novels, films, reportage, and folk songs from the Af-Pak, Indo-Pak, and Bangladesh-India borders, and from ethno-nationalist movements operating under conditions of state violence like Kashmir and Balochistan. We will also read anti-caste, feminist, and indigenous texts that resist the social and ideological frontiers that order culture, language, nation, and community in South Asia. Texts may include Rajan Hoole’s The Broken Palmyra, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Muhammad Hanif’s The Baloch Who Is Not Missing and Others Who Are and Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night. Assignments will include class participation, presentation, weekly posts and final paper. All texts will be in English.