Poised to begin your life as a undergraduate student, you already come with diverse understandings of India. These have been formed through your life experiences, family influences, school education, media exposure, and, of course, your own thoughts. You and your classmates, therefore, possess a gamut of opinions regarding the nation of which you are citizens; of the nation that is the ‘motherland’; and the nation that is local and lived--the one that is ‘home.’ In the first three weeks of the course, we shall engage with this already-existing understanding of India as the initial springboard for the historically, politically and ecologically informed understanding that we seek to gain by the end of the course. However, any project of ‘understanding’ can commence only if there is some provisional definition of the object of enquiry in place. Hence, we begin our two semesters-long journey of understanding India by raising the elementary question: "What is India?" and attempt to work out a provisional definition of it. We will carry this definition into the subsequent units of the course and, in the process, view it from different dimensions, analyze it critically and nuance it further. 

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In this opening unit, our preliminary task of responding to the question 'What is India?' will proceed along three tracks, each addressed over a week: the personal, the political, and the local. Apart from reflecting on what 'India' means to you personally and exploring what binds us to it in political terms, this unit will also introduce you to field-based qualitative research in the social sciences. This will occur in the context of engaging with India at the level of its locality--the place where our individual bodies are physically situated and the spaces that they navigate daily, which, for you, will be the Azim Premji University campus and its neighborhood for the better part of the next three years.

 

Indeed, one of the most exciting and revealing activities that you will do in this unit is the Neighborhood Observation Project. It will require you to venture out of the campus into the neighborhood and explore the area through the lens of certain pre-assigned themes. Even if at a rudimentary level, the project will require you to methodically observe the surroundings and describe sensory data; interview people in the locality; identify and classify land-use, habitats, and flora and fauna; interpret and analyze census figures for the locality; and create maps, so as to be able to describe and analyze the place of our everyday lives. You will then present your findings before the class. This activity will also serve as the graded assessment for Unit 1.