HIAB00786U South Asian Cultures: Contestations, Negotiations, Transformations

This course offers critical engagements with the diverse forms of South Asian cultural practices. It examines culture as lived ‘everyday’ experiences intertwined with broader socio-economic and political changes, and negotiations of structures of caste, class, and gender. It does so by exploring a range of phenomena such as ethnic and religious identities, gender, public/private distinctions, food practices, cinema and sport. It draws on ethnographies of the region and its diasporas globally, as well as films and documentary footage. The course aims to illuminate critical debates about ‘modernity’ versus ‘tradition’ that characterise the contestations, negotiations, and transformations of culture in South Asia and amongst its diasporas.