• ENGAGE with the recorded past in the most inclusive, comprehensive, and rigorous manner

• DEVELOP Historical consciousness and sensibilities

• RELATE lessons from the past to present contexts and situations

• COMMUNICATE historical knowledge creatively and cogently in the most diverse of contexts

• PRACTICE history (archiving, heritage and preservation, oral histories, folklore, data visualisation, etc.)

Key history courses on offer in the curriculum will impart foundational (through core courses) and advanced (through elective courses) knowledge about India’s pasts. Courses will address the past both synoptically, i.e., by surveying different historical periods, as well as thematically, wherein specific topics in social/​cultural/​political/​economic/​ecological histories, in different spatial, temporal, and representational contexts, will be opened up for focused enquiry. Courses in the curriculum, wherever relevant, will foreground marginalized communities — their historical experiences and/​or the impact of historical processes on their life-worlds — and gesture towards historical methods that enhance our knowledge and awareness in these respects.

An important objective of our program is to develop and hone a critical historical sensibility amongst our students by teaching them to think historically, in the broadest fashion possible. Historical sensibilities involve going beyond rote learning of facts to being able to comprehend, analyse, and critically evaluate the past and its relationship to the present in India. It includes sharpening students’ abilities to understand their own selves and their relation to the world as both historically determined and agentially capacitated. It further seeks to orient students towards meta-historical concerns through engagements with historiography and philosophy of history. Further, the curriculum will strive to develop in students an appreciation of history’s deep relationship with disciplines such as economics, ecology, sociology, literature, and development studies. Our graduates will be able to bring this broad sense of history to bear upon the range of fields they may choose to enter into, from education to social work, policy making to entrepreneurship, as well as in higher education in history and allied disciplines.

One of the standout aspects of the History programme is its focus on practices of history. This includes not merely understanding the role of history in society, but also being able to contribute to the production, preservation, and conservation of historical knowledge. History is practiced in myriad forms and realms. The most obvious ones have been the lessons we can take from history into the present, from historical transformations in the past and what they tell us about the way forward in the future. However, history is also practiced in both everyday and institutional contexts, informing concerns around ​“tradition” and ​“heritage,” from urban planning to museums, from art and architecture to archives and folklore, from oral histories to family histories. Our program will focus on developing both soft and hard skills of doing history — from writing history for different kinds of audiences and participating in conversations where history appears in both primary and ancillary fashion to data visualisation, GIS mapping, and archive building

1. Reading and Writing

Reading and writing are basic skills for any undergraduate student and constitutes the very conditions of possibility for both the furthering of and flourishing in tertiary education, especially in the humanities. Supplementing the Foundations courses in this regard, courses in the History program will advance students’ reading and writing abilities significantly. A student in the program ought to be adept in written and oral communication across a range of platforms by the time of graduation. She should be able to parse out facts and rhetoric, information and embellishments, description and interpretation, etc., in any given reading. On the writing side of things, depending on the context and medium of communication, she should be able to decide upon and deploy the most effective rhetorical register; narrativize facts accordingly; be reflexive about prose style and economy, and so on.

2. Critical Thinking

Historical knowledge is inherently contestable and, indeed, contested, often publicly and sometimes violently. Some histories are claimed to be ​‘authentic,’ while the same might be decried as ​‘spurious’ by a different interest group; some histories are deemed ​‘factual’ while others are dismissed as ​‘fabricated.’ Such contestations have very real and concrete implications. It is, therefore, of great importance that students develop skills of critical thinking that enable them to assess claims and arguments and form independent opinions. The History program aims to equip them with skills for assessing the authenticity of sources, critically evaluating arguments and interpretations based on them, and coherently presenting their own conclusions, be it in academic or public contexts.

3. Ethical Responsibility and Action

India as a country and a society has a fairly poor record of preserving or conserving its past, be it in oral, material or documentary form. Our monuments lie neglected as do other architectural or material remnants from the past. Similarly, collective and individual memories of the past, especially for historically marginalized social groups, often die with the older generation as their value is not fully appreciated. Preserving documentary evidence is again not a valued collective action. 

The historical sensibility that the History program seeks to inculcate will, we believe, help students become archivally responsible citizens, aware of the importance of preserving history in its different forms. This could be through small, community-level interventions or larger ones aiming to create different kinds of archives. Their training in the program would also serve to effectively communicate the value of historical preservation as well as undertake archival initiatives themselves.