BA (Hons) Literature

The BA (Hons) Literature programme at the School of Liberal Studies develops students’ capacity to read, interpret and critically engage with texts as a means of understanding the world. The programme takes a holistic and immersive approach, situating literary study within the lived contexts of history, culture, society and politics. Rather than treating literature as a fixed canon to be surveyed, it encourages students to engage with a wide range of human expression across languages, regions and forms — from the novel and the qissa to oral traditions and verse epics, as well as manifestos and memoirs.

Various dimensions of literary study — including narrative theory, poetics, genre history, translation studies, postcolonial criticism and oral and folk traditions — are introduced through both theoretical and experiential approaches. Students engage with a diverse range of critical frameworks, including formalism and structuralism, feminist and Dalit criticism, postcolonial and world literature theory, ecocriticism and the sociology of texts. These frameworks are applied not in isolation but in a blended and comparative manner.

The programme aims to cultivate readers and thinkers with a global outlook who remain deeply grounded in South Asian literary and cultural contexts. Students are encouraged to engage with complex questions — concerning representation and power, whose stories are told and how and the relationship between language and justice — while bringing both analytical rigour and ethical awareness to their inquiries.