God... Please do trust the 1.6 easiness score of this class! This quarter has already been hard, and this class made my day even harder. Our TA is a nice guy and he does have some cool opinion, but he really scored us to harsh. I follow every instruction he gave me based on the first paper but still got a B for my second paper. If you need a pretty good GPA, please do not attend this class!

Prof. Lal presents a very biased view of Indian history - he often states his own opinions as facts, and does not respond well to students questioning his statements. If you want to gain an objective overview of India, don't take this class with Professor Lal.

tl;dr: not an easy A, but not difficult either. Attend lecture and you'll be fine.

Full Disclosure: I'm from India, so I learnt Indian history in high school. Having said that, I found this class really interesting.

The final grade was 20% participation in the discussion section, 30% from the take home midterm exam and 50% from the final.

Some of the other reviews of this course seem to complain about the reading workload (~150 pages per week), but you don't really need to do the reading. I personally found that attending class was far more rewarding. He tells you the stuff that is important/ unimportant, and if you pay enough attention, you can easily predict the questions that will come on the exams.

Professor Lal's lecturing style itself is quite engaging, but he gets distracted a lot and tends to go off on tangents quite often. Also, he sometimes doesn't explain certain terms that people who aren't Indian may not intuitively understand. He also liberally mixes in his opinions with facts.

We had a take-home midterm over the weekend in week 6, 2 essays, each 2-3 pages double spaced. The exam itself wasn't difficult, and he asked the most obvious questions in it. It's important to cite the reading material (he scans it to the class website) if you want an A instead of a B. About a week before the midterm, he went over a "hypothetical midterm question", which was on the actual midterm, so once again, attend lecture.

The final was answering 4 out of 9 essay questions. The questions on the final were NOT ID questions, since the material was so vast. Instead, the questions were about the major themes he covered in the course. In section, the wonderful TA Vipin literally listed out 5 major themes that he thought were important, and all 5 were on the final.

Professor Lal himself is a cool guy, and some of his ideas are pretty radical. As a Professor, he was very kind and even offered to have lunch with us after class one day. He has office hours twice a week and lets you pick his brain.

This isn't really a throwaway easy GE, but if you attend lecture and put in a weekend of effort for the midterm and a few more days of studying for the final, you'll get that A pretty easily.

Prof. Lal definitely knows what he is talking about and is an expert on Indian history and culture, however he talks really quickly and the lectures can get quite disorganized because he literally just says whatever he thinks. He also fails to elaborate on or define many Indian terms which makes the lectures that much more difficult to understand if you don't have previous knowledge of Hindi or the course material. It's just so much material to learn in such a short time that it gets really overwhelming. There also aren't very many dates or times which makes a lot of what you learn seem very circumstantial. Ultimately, it's an interesting course however there is just too much you are expected to know that isn't explained well enough. Also, Dan Newman as a ta is absolutely no help.

HARD AS F***

I was taking Korean history (K50)at the same time, and Korean history was easy as hell in comparison.

I took it just to fulfill my study GE, it was one of my biggest mistakes in my 3 years of college life...the midterm is 2 essay questions (take home)...TA was a harsh grader bitch....the final has 4 essay questions (8 prompts given before exam)+ 10 IDs.

Requires EXTENSIVE reading....it was a nightmare, really.....

Lecture was really hard to understand (probably because English isn't my first language + he loves using words that no one really uses in real life just to show off)

I did it P/NP and luckily I passed

This is highly UNRECOMMENDED, AVOID at all cost!

I took this class after reading the previous evals, thinking it would be great and interesting. Well, I don't have much to say on how interesting it is but I can say that I switched the grading to P/NP and I can't even imagine how other people with letter grading feel. Lectures are super boring and he does talk fast and sometimes it's difficult to figure out what's important and what's just random. Midterm was take home, two essays which weren't all that bad. Essay is 10 IDs, and he DOESN'T give you the terms ahead of time, and a bunch of essays (he gives you 9, 5 of which are on the final, 4 of which you have to do). Unless you're super desperate to fulfill this GE, I don't rec taking this class.

Not at all an easy GE. Lectures were extremely hard to follow, amount of assigned reading was absolutely ridiculous. Final is worth 50% of final grade and is incredibly difficult. Basically, do not take this class unless you... nope, just don't take it. There is no reason why you'd want to.

I took history 9A with Lal in Fall 2023. This was the first survey history class I took at UCLA and I really enjoyed it.

Because the course covers upwards of 4000 years of Indian history, there were so many concepts that are likely to be unfamiliar to someone who is not of South Asian descent. Nonetheless, Lal broke down all of the time periods quite well, only emphasizing the most important details and not getting too caught up in names/dates/battles/etc. Many of the readings were narrative histories, so they were easy to follow and yet not crucially important. Prof Lal covered all of the main topics in class and though I came to class having done all the readings, I would say that the lectures were more than enough to get a grasp of the main themes. You should, however, do the readings because they come in handy when writing the midterm and final exams.

Discussion sections were a good way to delve deeper into a few select topics. For example, we read some poetry during one of the weeks and spent time analyzing it during discussion. My TA made us write one paragraph reflections on the weekly readings, and his grading of the essays was fair.

For anyone who has not taken a course on South Asia, I would definitely recommend this one. As kids in the US, we often only learn American, European, ancient Egyptian, and maybe some Chinese history, but this class showed me how much we really missed out on. Again, over 4000 years of history is not easy to cover in just 10 weeks, but Lal made it engaging, fun, and super interactive. I also ended up taking two upper divs with Lal later on, so taking this intro level class really helped me understand his teaching style and get more interested in India.

Dr. Lal is a very knowledgeable and earnest teacher. Sometimes his lectures could get a bit rambling, but overall I feel as if I learned a lot in the time allotted. I had no previous knowledge of Indian history nor culture, but I feel as though I was given ample opportunity to be able to absorb and understand it. Dr. Lal's illustrated book on an introduction to Hinduism was the most helpful aspect of this course, in my opinion. Don't take this unless you're willing to show up to every lecture and put the work in.

This review is slightly biased as I am an Indian and I previously learnt Indian history. If you are up for the challenge/are in Indian/are a history major/like history and have previous knowledge of it, I'd recommend taking this class. If not, STAY AWAY lol. There have been many times in his class where I've wondered if I would have survived if I was not an Indian and frankly the answer is NO WAY. He teaches the class as if the information is common knowledge and everyone knows it. Its quite fast paced too so there's no time to actually dwell on what you've learnt. Having said this, Professor Lal is an excellent professor , and is extremely nice.

Be sure to attend discussion sections because that's when you can openly talk about what you have learnt in class with a smaller group and really formulate your ideas about topics that were taught in the lecture. The final had many questions that were covered in discussion SO DON'T SKIP IT.

Midterm is a take home essay which is extremely easy. I would recommend doing some light reading/scan through the assigned texts because quotations are required. There are also occasional homework assignments, but these are super easy. For this quarter, they let us choose the topics we wanted to write about (based on a certain period that we were learning about at the time). You are allowed to rewrite both the midterm+ homework assignments as many times as you want until your grade is bumped up (this is assuming you get the same/similar TA as I had). Make sure you take advantage of this because the final is 50% of your grade.

Regarding the reading, it's quite frankly a joke - there are hundreds of pages assigned a week. Your head will explode if you try to do all of it. I didn't understand a word of most of the books, and again I have significant knowledge about Indian history which should say something haha. Skim through books from Keay, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Gandhis book, and Professor Lal's books. The other books are pointless and are a complete waste of time. You have to do a little bit of reading because you have to use quotations in your papers, but don't try to read everything; its impossible.

So overall I'd say its a good class but be careful. Don't jump into this class thinking its easy or else you'll be screwed. If you work hard and put in the effort though, it should be an easy A.