Great Books

Code: FC-0601-1 | Semester: Monsoon 2025

Texts that act as political beacons are the focus of this course. Each one is a stellar example of the genre we know as narrative non-fiction, and each one has been cited and referred to by generations of scholars, practitioners, activists, and students for whom equity and social justice are of importance. Over time, these texts have taken on a talismanic importance and yet, they age well with the times and remain supremely relevant. Is that something to celebrate in terms of the prescience of the texts themselves, or to lament in terms of how the world does not seem to become a more equitable place even over the decades since these texts were read for the first time.

The texts we will be reading: Jotirao Phyle, Slavery; B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste; Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, James Baldwin, ‘Here Be Dragons’; Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal; Susan Abulhawa, ‘Memories of an un-Palestinian story, in a can of tuna”.

Code: FC-0601-2 | Semester: Monsoon 2025

We will read select works by Nobel Laureates from around the world, works that have originated in various languages, cultures, histories, geographies, and systems of thoughts and beliefs, mediated by individual talent. We will read for themes that converge and diverge among what is now considered a canon of the 20th Century. We will, alongside the specificities of each text – which will comprise fiction, non-fiction, and poetry – also interrogate the idea of the canon, the notion of the market and literary awards, what constitutes literary excellence, and, finally, what it means to read translated texts.

Code: FC-0601-3 | Semester: Monsoon 2025

Love and other Literary Moods: A Long Conversation with – and around – Great Books

We will read select books (and extracts) from a wide range of themes and ask ourselves what makes them great. Specifically, we will examine the dominant mood the text evokes – its “rasa” – and how it acts in concert with other elements to craft the specific version of the book that goes out into the world and is recognized as “great”. Over the first eight/ nine weeks, we will closely read a wide range of texts, both fiction and non-fiction, in and out of class. In the final four weeks of the course, each student will – as a part of a group or individually – work on a project that will seek to bring in a new mood or invent a new rasa, alongside a “great” book/ short story/ cycle of poems of their choice. Audacious experiments are not only allowed but encouraged!

Through the weeks we spend together, reading and writing, we will also consciously situate ourselves in the present. We will pose to ourselves honestly – and intuitively – meta-questions, such as: WHY should we read great texts at all in the age of AI, when summaries are available in the blink of an eye and seem to give us everything we need? Is a great text one where the summary misses the mood?

Code: FC-0601-4 | Semester: Monsoon 2025

This course will be taught by Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. Seven books will be studied. Three of them will be taught by GKG and four by RM.

GKG: Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Animal Farm by George Orwell and Chemmeen by Thakazhi Sivasakara Pillai

RM: Isa Upanishad, King Oedipus by Sophocles, Babur Nama, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.

Students will be expected to read the texts. Attendance is mandatory. More than 6 absences will fetch an F.

Students will be assessed on the basis of 2 assignments: one over mid semester and another end of the semester.

Code: FC-0601-5 | Semester: Monsoon 2025

This course seeks to reflect on care and love both conceptually and experientially. What does it mean to love and care for oneself and for others? What allows us to love and care? What prevents us from caring and loving ourselves and others? What forces—personal, interpersonal, or collective and communal—regulate, prescribe and even prohibit experiences and expressions of love.

Our primary goal in the course is to work towards developing a critical and comprehensive language around understanding care and love as the basis for any and all configurations of relationalities that both make and unmake our senses of being in the world. Beginning our journey with selections from The Symposium by Plato, verses from the Gatha Sattasai, and poetry from the Akam repertoire of Sangam literature, we will make our way through more contemporary iterations and meditations on caring and loving such as, Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. All along the way we will be reflecting on and attempting to problematize “traditional” and “normative” structures within which care and love are usually understood and experienced.

Code: FC-0601-6 | Semester: Monsoon 2025

In this course we will critique the notion of “greatness” as such relative to what it suggests both about The Human and about processes of canon formation, i.e. what makes a “Great Book.” We will do so by looking at the figure of Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, for which he was tied to a mountain while an eagle ate at his liver. As an adjective, “Promethean” connotes forward-thinking, activeness, striving, defiance of whatever inexorable forces lie beyond our control, and domination. Prometheus is thus an archetype who appears again and again in literary history. But in this class we will also read texts that think about the non- or un-Promethean, texts that are decidedly not “great” insofar as they thematize the small or present us with characters who relate to the world in ways very different from all we associate with Prometheus.