The Rhythm of Monsoon: Cultural and Material Worlds of Pre-Modern Indian Ocean

How can a porcelain bowl, a Sufi poem, or a port map help us understand the making of the early modern world? This course explores the Indian Ocean as a vibrant arena of cultural encounter, economic exchange, and intellectual movement from roughly 1300 to 1800. Driven by the rhythm of the monsoon, merchants, pilgrims, scholars, and soldiers circulated between different corners of the Indian Ocean World, carrying with them objects, stories, ideas, and forms of power. Throughout the quarter, students will interpret a wide range of primary sources - including travel narratives, visual art, maps, ceramics, epics, and legal texts - to understand how people and objects made meaning across religious, linguistic, and political boundaries. Through both interpretive and comparative methods, the course invites students to consider how cultural forms were produced, exchanged, and contested, and how mobile objects and ideas shaped political and social orders.