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Ashoka University’s undergraduate course curriculum is taught across three semesters: Spring, Summer and Monsoon (Fall). Courses are broadly divided into three categories – Foundation Courses (core curriculum), Major & Minor Courses and Co-Curricular Courses.
You may search courses offered at Ashoka here. Please use the drop down menu to choose the specific semester and subject to see the full list of courses under each department. Foundation courses are offered in all semesters and do not have prerequisites. Offerings in other categories differ in each semester. Some higher level major/minor courses may have prerequisites.
To view Summer Semester Courses-2024: Click here
A large number of “great" novels, across canons and languages, center “the marriage plot” in their telling. Using Vikram Seth's classic novel A Suitable Boy as an anchor text, and drawing from a wide range of readings that both challenge and exemplify this theory, we learn to examine this premise critically. What else spills out from under the orderly structure of the marriage plots, what unhappy endings haunt the ostensible happy endings? How do radical novelists upend the idea of the novel as a suitable genre - to continue our play on the title of the anchor text - while keeping its specific pleasure intact? How do radical readers work with these texts in times of repression, revolution, or pandemic? And, finally, what happens when the genre must be smashed wide open to create new spaces for marginal voices?
We will spend the semester reading together, writing consistently, and asking serious questions.
(We will also, occassionally, eat cake and meet guest speakers.)
TEXTS WE WILL READ TOGETHER - IN FULL OR IN PARTS:
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth; Nashtanir - a novella by Rabindranath Tagore (in translation from Bengali); Chander and Sudha by Dharamveer Bharati (translated by Poonam Saxena); The Bride by Harimohan Jha (Translated from Maithili by Lalit Kumar); Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; Bridget Jones' Diary by Helen Fielding; The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi; The Possessed: Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman; Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li.
I Want to Destroy Myself: a Memoir by Mallika Amar Shaikh (translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto); On Balance by Leila Seth; Afterward by Rachel Cusk; Splinters by Leslie Jamison
