Study Love in Kolkata

Kolkata’s Presidency University will be offering ‘love’ as a subject from January next year.

Shakespeare’s Romeo had it that “Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.”

One Indian university is hoping to upturn this aphorism by making love a part of its curriculum for the first time.

Kolkata’s highly-regarded Presidency University will offer a course on the nuances of love and its interplay with society and culture.

The program will be run through the department of sociology, said Souvik Mondal, an assistant professor in that department. The elective subject will be open to all first-year students but is particularly aimed at those studying for undergraduate degrees in more technical subjects such as math and physics.

“They are going to learn about love in a classroom setup, that is something very new for them,” said Mr. Mondal. “If you are teaching something like ‘post-structuralism of sociological theory’ in the very first year, that won’t intrigue them,” he added.

Very few universities offer love as subject in their curriculums, though in the U.S., theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst offers a subject titled the ‘Sociology of Love’ and the University of British Columbia also has as a subject called ‘Love, Sex, and Mating in Cross-Cultural Perspective.’

Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, two of the biggest universities in India’s capital city, don’t offer love as a subject in their sociology syllabus.

The course at Presidency will start in January next year, and enable students, who often concentrate on love outside the classroom, to examine the phenomenon from an academic standpoint.

It will teach different forms of love, whether with siblings or animals or objects, said Mr. Mondal. The influence society has on the expression of love in a particular country will also be addressed, he added.

“We are going to talk about love in ancient and medieval period,” the professor added.

Love will be taught under Presidency’s general education program, which was introduced earlier this year and allows students to take three elective subjects for the first two years of their undergraduate degree outside their major.

This year, the sociology department is offering a subject called ‘why study society,’ which covers the basics of sociology.

Love falls under sociology of emotion, which uses sociological techniques to analyze human emotions, academics say.

Though the structure of the curriculum is not finalized yet, Mr. Mondal and his colleagues plan use movies and popular culture to teach how the expression of love has evolved.

Students have welcomed the university’s decision to introduce the subject, according to Mr. Mondal. Many have enrolled in ‘Why study society’ program, which will help them once they move to the next semester and study love, he added.

“I didn’t expect this much [appreciation] from the students,” said Mr. Mondal.

• By Saptarishi Dutta