The purpose of this class is to facilitate initial acquaintance with Indian aesthetics, classical and contemporary. We will focus on Arindam Chakrabarti’s anthology Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2016), consisting of papers by thinkers such as Chakrabarti himself, David Shulman, Mukund Lath, Sudipta Kaviraj and others. One of the questions that the anthology raises, and that we will discuss in our meetings, is the question about the (dis)connection of aesthetics and ethics. This question is highlighted in thought-provoking papers such as “Aesthetics of Theft” and “Aesthetics of Touch and Skin: An Essay in Contemporary Indian Political Phenomenology”, by Sibaji Bandopadhyay and Gopal Guru respectively.