Ancient India

This course explores the ideas, events, and processes that shaped the Hindu-Buddhist world in India from earliest times (2500 B.C.) until the decline of the Mughals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Topics will include the Harappan Civilization, the coming of the Aryans, the Vedic period, Buddhism and Jainism, classical Indian empires of the Guptas and the Cholas, the history of the formation of modern Hinduism in the Bhakti movement, the coming of the Muslims, the Mughal empire, and Indo-Islamic syncretism. The challenge will be to grasp a richly complex living tradition through a whole range of cultural products - literary, social, and philosophical texts; art; and ethnography.