RELI 20573 Defining the Nation: China and India in Crisis
This course examines two key events from the religious and cultural histories of China and India: the sixteenth-century Confucian debate over the legitimate successor to the Ming Dynasty's Wanli Emperor, and the division, or Partition, of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into India and Pakistan. Both events represented a crisis in governance in which debate of the nation's future was informed by religious teachings. To investigate these two events, the course will use games from Reacting to the Past (RTTP), an interdisciplinary and highly engaging method of inquiry that requires students to study a variety of sources, debate, write, and work as a part of a group pursuing a set of shared goals.