Studying books from different cultures, time periods and languages, the Great Books course introduces students to multiple ways of thinking and being in the world. Complex questions about sexuality, conflict, self, identity and science are navigated with reference to books, and fragments of books, from across geographies and chronologies These books and questions form the core of the course and its explorations.
Department: History| Semester: Spring 2025
The following books will be taught/read
Department: Philosophy| Semester: Spring 2025
Satirical Animals
From the birds of Aristophanes’ Cloudcuckooland to Perumal Murugan’s goat Poonachi, animals have served as a vehicle for satire across cultures and time periods, often as mirrors reflecting societal absurdities, moral failings, human grotesqueness, and political struggles. In this Great Books course, we will get acquainted with some of these satirical animals. We will encounter them as symbols, moral agents, political figures, and detached narrators. This course will, in keeping with the ethos of Foundations courses, familiarize students with methods from the different disciplines of philosophy, history, and literature: we will learn to read closely and critically, identify and respond to arguments, appropriately situate a work in its socio-historical context, and compare texts and ideas from different moments in time and space. By investigating how animals have been portrayed in fables, allegories, and novels, you will gain a deeper understanding of the power of satire in challenging conventions and provoking thought on human nature and society. And, hopefully, it goes without saying, we will also laugh — sometimes until we’re in tears.
Department: English | Semester: Spring 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. As the narrator in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things poignantly reflects, such questions are older than any conception we might have of “history,” and comprise at times unspoken and often unwritten “Love Laws” that determine who can be loved, how and how much.
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.
Department: Undergraduate Writing Programme (ICT/CT) | Semester: Monsoon 2024
Great Books FC-0601-6
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, occasionally, eat cake and meet guest speakers.)
Semester: Monsoon 2024
Books 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 books 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 books
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 books were read for the first time:
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas; B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste; James
Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; bell hooks,
All About Love: New Visions.
Department: English | Semester: Monsoon 2024
In this course, we will address the question “What is sexuality” by reading some of the many books that have shaped our current ideas of the subject. These books will range across chronologies, cultures, and disciplines, starting with classical and medieval Indic texts — the Kamasutra, Sufi poetry — to ancient Greek and Roman classics — the Symposium, the Metamorphoses. We will also read philosophical texts like the Discourse on Method, biological texts like The Origin of Species, psychoanalytical texts like The Interpretation of Dreams, and literary texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Together, these “great books” will allow us to trace threads that have gone into our current ways of thinking about sexuality.
Watch VideoDepartment: History | Semester: Monsoon 2024
The Great Books course in Monsoon 2024 will cover the following books in this order.
Faculty Name: Ananya Vajpeyi
Semester: Monsoon 2024
The Political Foundations of Modern India
This FC introduces undergraduates to key texts from the 20th century that together provide an overview of the political foundations of modern India. The texts are as follows:
BACKGROUND READINGS:
Faculty Name: Dilip Simeon
Semester: Monsoon 2024
It is a truism that words mean something, and that they count for a great deal in life. However, the relation between thought, reality and time has always been a matter of debate. The Greek word theoria meant contemplation, the act of looking, which later acquired the sense of an intelligible explanation based on observation and reasoning. Historia meant inquiry, the search for knowledge; and it evolved over time to mean investigations and accounts of past events. Philosophia meant the love of wisdom. In contrast, sophistry referred to skilful rhetoric, the art of persuasion. These words, which relate to human experience in its deepest sense, prompt my choice of great books. As to why this is so should become clear in due course. The books are:
The first three books deal (in part) with history; with what is called tradition; and the treatment of these themes in political writing and fiction. The latter three deal with philosophical issues directly. I will introduce students to these books, and specify certain chapters for required reading. Their scholarship will educate us and prompt us toward further study. Some will illuminate important historical events; others will raise issues common to human experience regardless of time and place.