Modern India

The programme provides high quality postgraduate teaching and research training in the study of Modern India. The study of modern India provides an intellectual laboratory through which to focus global theoretical and policy questions. Students will be encouraged to use the Indian experience to question assumptions within established disciplinary fields and to challenge settled global consensuses, while simultaneously deploying larger perspectives to analyse India in ways that enable them to differentiate between what is universal and what is specific and contingent to the modern Indian experience.

The programme will explore the specific characteristics of modern India by connecting theory and practice at a concrete level. The themes students can study include India’s democratic politics, contemporary history, environmental contexts and entrepreneurial forms, security issues and dilemmas of secularism, urban and public health problems, varieties of cultural production and consumption, economic growth and diverse social change, the role of India's media and consequences of India's science and technology policy choices.

The programme is built around two core courses, which aim to develop students' awareness of, on the one hand, the working of political power and the changing social and economic order in India, and, on the other, the deep historical forces that shaped the Indian subcontinent both before and after independence and partition in 1947:

• Modern India I. Political Power and Social Order in Historical Perspective
• Modern India II. State, Society, and Economy since 1947.

Students take additional options from one of six thematic strands, but also have access to a range of external modules offered by departments across the Schools of Arts & Humanities and Social Science & Public Policy.

The MA is based in the newly established King’s India Institute and benefits from a growing and dynamic staff strongly committed to research and teaching. Students also benefit from the expertise of Associates of the King’s India Institute, who are based in a number of disciplinary departments across the College.