The International Master's program in South Asian Studies consists of two different study tracks. At the beginning of your studies, you will choose one of these, depending on your interests and previous studies.
A colloquium in which students of both tracks, faculty and guest
speakers present their research offers the opportunity to acquire
presentation skills and to participate in scholarly discussion and
exchange.
Your third semester you will spend at one of our partner universities abroad which offer South Asian Studies courses. In the fourth semester you will write your M.A. thesis.
Study Track I. Classical Indology (Ancient and Medieval South Asian Studies) - Language, Literature, Religion, and Philosophy:
- Here the emphasis is on advanced training in Sanskrit (and optionally Middle-Indic) and in philology. Courses include seminars on philology and codicology, and seminars in which a variety of religious (Buddhist, Hindu, and/or Jain), philosophical, and secular texts in Sanskrit are studied in depth. The main research areas of the department include Indian Buddhism, Tantric Studies, Indian philosophy, and classical Sanskrit literature (kavya); all of these are well represented in teaching.
Study Track II. Modern South Asian Studies:
- Studies of society, culture, media and languages of the Indian Subcontinent in the 20th and 21st centuries are central to this sub-program. Accordingly, a multidisciplinary approach involving methods of social sciences and humanities, among them methods of field research, is characteristic of the teaching in this course. Ample attention is devoted to content-related and formal analysis of texts in modern languages of the Indian subcontinent, primarily Hindi and Urdu.
