RELG 034. Partitions: Religions, Politics, and Gender in South Asia Through the Novel

This discussion-focused, seminar-style course will focus on a close reading of modern and contemporary South Asian novels and short stories structured around the theme of “partition(s),” not only the historical events of the partition of Bengal (East Pakistan, eventually Bangladesh), India’s Partition in 1947, or the social catastrophe of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the 1970’s, but the long shadows of these events right up to the (social, political) present. We will focus on many “figures of partition,” personal, religious, and political, in Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Urdu, and English prose literatures of India and Pakistan. Themes will range from religion and politics, gender/power; sexuality; love within and outside of the family; women, honor, and seclusion; asceticism and eroticism; caste, class, ethnicity, and race; children and their social and political vulnerabilities; and love, politics, and inter-caste marriage in Hindu, Parsee, Sikh, Muslim, and Christian settings in South Asia.
Humanities
1 credit.
Eligible for ASIA, GLBL-Paired, PEAC, ASAM
Spring 2025. Hopkins.
Catalog chapter: Religion
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/religion

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