The Department of History at the University of Chicago has had a long and distinguished tradition of active interest in South Asian history both for the colonial and the precolonial periods, that is to say, from about 1600 to the present. , Dipesh Chakrabarty, Muzaffar Alam, and Rochona Majumdar are the faculty members directly associated with the History program. Depending on their interests, students may also benefit from the teaching and research interests of particular faculty members in related departments such as South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC), Anthropology, Political Science, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC), Cinema and Media Studies program, and the History of Religions program in the Divinity School.
The South Asian history field encourages research in a wide variety of topics ranging from political and cultural history of Mughal India to political and cultural questions of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Current faculty research cover such diverse themes as cultural practices and artifacts of Mughal India, South Asian Islam, identity-practices through and around South Asian rituals and the media, Hindu thought, popular culture and the media, cinema studies, colonial rule and its cultural and political consequences, gender and subaltern history, nationalist thought, questions and politics of modernity, historiogaphy, and postcolonial theory.
Increasingly, scholars in South Asian history are working out of multiple archives and historical sources in more than one South Asian language. Depending on their area of specialization, students are strongly encouraged to learn South Asian languages other than English though this is by no means a compulsory requirement. Through SALC, students can continue their language training at Chicago in several South Asian languages including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Marathi. NELC offers courses in Persian and Arabic.