This is an interdisciplinary honors course on India, which borrows ideas and topics from disciplines such as History, Fine Arts, Literature, International Business, Political Science, and Sociology. The aim of the course is to generate enough student interest in India, ancient as well as modern, so that they will realize why it is important for Americans to know about India, what lessons India and the United States can learn from each other, and how the past lives in the present, offering clues to what the future might hold. We will explore the viability, veracity, and desirability of a statement often heard, namely, “India and the United States are natural allies.”

In this course, we will discuss in what ways India well exemplifies the seamless continuity of the traditional into the modern. The play we are reading will illustrate this point very well in the cultural sphere. India has been a destination, a land to be discovered, for a long time from before the time of Alexander, from the time Chinese pilgrims would go to India to visit Buddhist holy sites there, from the time of Columbus and Vasco de Gama in the last decade of the fifteenth century to our own times. We will embark on our own journey to the discovery of India.