HISA 2003

I really liked Professor Neeti Nair. Although her lectures were a bit dry, the readings she assigns outside the textbook are fantastic and the class itself is structured well. There is one midterm with 10 IDs (which she gives a list of IDs prior to the exam), and one essay, one book review (honestly finished the book in day, it's quite interesting and it's not a tough read) and two essays for the final. Participation is also makes up a bit of of the grade. I honestly thought she is a fair grader, but be warned that she does emphasis writing, including making sure your essays are top notch, with good grammar and structure. Nair is very approachable outside of class with questions pertaining to the class and the assignments. She is very knowledgeable and really passionate about the subject! I got an A just by doing well on the writing assignments as well as the midterm. I would definitely take another class with her and also recommend this class!

This course wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad either. To start off, let me talk about the professor. Professor Nair is very intelligent and definitely knows what she is talking about, however her lectures can tend to be all over the place. She can also tend to be a little rude or "savage" at times, but that's just part of her charm as far as I am concerned. It threw me off at the beginning of the semester but grew on me. However, I've heard of other people having negative experiences with her, so I'd definitely take that into account. That being said, the lectures and the topics of the course are definitely interesting, and while I did find myself falling asleep occasionally I also on other occasions found myself asking over 5 questions during a single class. Again, it's really all over the place and depends. Overall, she isn't a "fun" or "dramatic" or "funny" professor, but she knows what she's talking about and you'll come out of the class learning something or the other almost everyday.

I didn't read a single thing for the course, and while that really screwed me over at the end of the semester when having to write the essays for the final (more on this later), I also didn't need to read all that much for those essays either. She assigns 2-3 primary/secondary sources for every class plus sections from the textbook (Rant on the textbook: it's very dense and the prose is unnecessarily formal and complex and sounds as if it was written by a nineteenth century writer, and most of the time you really don't even need it—I only used it to look up the terms for the midterm and three of the chapters for my final essays.) and you don't even really need to do any of them to get by. Doing the readings might help, as I was occasionally lost during class, but really you can get away without doing them because I got an A in this class.

In terms of the actual grades, here is the breakdown (copy-pasted from the syllabus itself):

Class attendance and participation—15 %, Mid-term exam—25 %, 5-page book review—20 %, Final essays—40 %

I will break these down. Class attendance and participation is simple and pretty self-explanatory, but also I must've missed 1/4 of the classes and I still got an A, so as long as you participate prolifically while you are attending, you can afford to miss a few classes. The mid-term is fairly simple—term IDs and some handwritten essays. For the term IDs, it's always good to know specific dates, but you can get away with being a bit more vague like with decades, and of course always always write significance, and for the essays, you get to know the questions beforehand so you can think of how to answer them and basically memorize your responses ahead of time. The book report is a very interesting assignment for this class. You'll get to read a book about Indian history from a particular unique perspective and compare the narrative in the book to what you've learned in the course so far (or what's in the textbook, or what's in some of the other readings you've been assigned). We read Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla, but I don't know if she'll be changing the book every year. Finally, the essays are framed as an "open book exam". They are five pages long each (not including title or works cited—also, the book review is 5 pages too), and address themes and concepts from after the midterm. You get to write based off of sources assigned throughout the year, so it's very useful to go back and look at those (or read them for the first time if that is the case, as it was with me).

Overall, the workload isn't too difficult, the professor is decent but nothing special, and honestly for me this was an easy A, as you can tell by the grade distribution. I think Professor Nair was a pretty easy grader to be honest. I put no work into my final essays or my book report and got an A on the latter and probably an A on the former considering I got an A in the class and the essays are 40%. Overall, I would recommend taking this class if you're really interested in Indian history, because otherwise you'll find it dry and you won't really enjoy it. I am interested, and I was falling asleep in some classes and missing others. If you're not interested, there are plenty of other great classes that aren't too difficult that are probably more interesting and accessible to the average person.

Neeti Nair is not a good lecturer or professor. Firstly, she assigns WAY TOO MANY readings in which the majority of them do not correlate with what she says in lecture. Additionally, she grades based on your writing style and rhetoric more than the actual content of your paper. If she doesn't like it, you won't get higher than a B. She also does not provide any rubric or reason for your grade on the paper. She is a biased grader. Her lectures are useless and repeat herself a lot. "Her comments" explain your grade, apparently. There are no slides or anything to reference for the lecture. She is not a nice person either. I went to her OH to ask about my paper's grade and left crying afterward because she was screaming at me and claiming how could I even write this. She also writes rude comments like, "Did you even read the book?" when clearly you read the book and had proper citations about it. She is extremely rude and insulting. HIGHLY DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS COURSE UNLESS YOU CAN WRITE REALLY WELL. Don't be tricked by the GPA or grade distributions shown. I learned nothing about modern Indian history.