Writing India:¹

1. We have been asked by the Editors of India Review “to reflect upon how both India and our field of study [Political Science] have evolved over the course of our careers.” We have drawn on the introductory essays in our recent three volume work, Explaining Indian Democracy: a Fifty Year Perspective (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). I. The Realm of Ideas: Inquiry and Theory; II. The Realm of Institutions: State Formation and Institutional Change; III. The Realm of the Public Sphere: Identity and Policy.

A Career Overview

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. We have been asked by the Editors of India Review “to reflect upon how both India and our field of study [Political Science] have evolved over the course of our careers.” We have drawn on the introductory essays in our recent three volume work, Explaining Indian Democracy: a Fifty Year Perspective (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). I. The Realm of Ideas: Inquiry and Theory; II. The Realm of Institutions: State Formation and Institutional Change; III. The Realm of the Public Sphere: Identity and Policy.

2. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

3. See S. M. Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review Vol. 53 (March 1959), pp. 61–105, for the hypothesis and supporting evidence that democracy should be an utter failure in India.

4. For the dichotomous “pattern variables” see Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, “Categories of the Orientation and Organization of Action,” in Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951). The variables are: 1. Affectivity – Affective Neutrality; 2. Self-orientation – Collectivity-orientation; 3.Universalism – Particularism; 4. Ascription – Achievement; 5. Specificity – Diffuseness (p. 77).

5. In “A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics” which introduced Gabriel Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), the first of seven volumes on “Studies in Political Development” sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, Gabriel Almond wrote “the concept of political system [serves] . . . to separate out analytically the structures which perform functions in all societies regardless of scale of differentiation, and culture.” Those functions are divided into “input functions,” i.e. 1. political socialization and recruitment; 2. interest articulation; 3. interest aggregation; 4. political communication; and “output functions,” i.e. 5. rule-making; 6. rule application; and 7. rule adjudication. The essay is reproduced in Gabriel Almond, Political Development: Essays in Heuristic Theory (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1970), pp. 79–151. The quote is from pages 81– 2 and the input and output functions are at p. 96.

6. For a recent critical but positive evaluation of area studies see David Szanton's essay, “Introduction: The Origin, Nature and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States,” in David Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 1–33.

7. See Susanne Hoeber Rudolph's APSA Presidential address “The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World,” Perspectives on Politics Vol. 3, No. 5 (March 2005), pp. 5–14, for an elaboration of the concept of “situated knowledge.”

8. Several of our books are about Rajasthan. We have helped to organize five international conferences on Rajasthan and a Rajasthan Studies Group list-serve and participated in the publication of six composite books on what might be called Rajasthan studies. Among these are Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Reversing the Gaze; A Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Essays on Rajputana (New Delhi: Concept, 1984); and Karine Schomer, Joan Erdman, Deryck O. Lodrick and Lloyd I. Rudolph, The Idea of Rajasthan; Explorations in Regional Identity (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994).

9. Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Revolution in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

10. “Surveys in India: Field Experience in Madras State,” Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 3 (1958), pp. 235–44.

11. “Determinants and Varieties of Agrarian Mobilization,” in Meghnad Desai, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Ashok Rudra, eds., Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 ).

12. Ours may have been the first random sample survey in India. (Eric De Costa's surveys emphasized urban responses.) Its protocols are on deposit with the archive established by Yogendra Yadav at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.

13. “Engaging Subjective Knowledge; How Amar Singh's Diary Narratives of and by the Self Explain Identity Formation,” Perspectives on Politics Vol. 1, No. 4 (December 2003), pp. 681–94; “The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World,” Perspectives on Politics Vol. 3, No. 5 (March 2005), pp. 5–14; “Perestroika and its Other,” in Monroe, ed., Perestroika!, pp. 12–20; “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Thoughts Contend,” in Monroe, ed., Perestroika!, pp. 230–6.

14. Clio: Newsletter of Politics & History Vol. 17, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 2006–7), pp. 1 and 53.

15. World Politics Vol. 13, No. 3 (April 1961), pp. 355–99.

16. See W. H. Morris-Jones, Government and Politics in India (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1964), pp. 52–61, where he spoke of the “languages of Indian politics, the modern, the traditional and the saintly,” and Myron Weiner, “Struggle Against Power; Notes on Indian Political Behavior” World Politics Vol. 8, No. 3 (April 1956), p. 395, where he spoke of how the “traditional attitudes which affect current political behavior” affect “the prospects for success of Indian democratic institutions.”

17. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 3–14.

18. “Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy,” World Politics Vol. 31, No. 2 (January 1979), pp. 195–227.

19. Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 2000), pp. 1762–99.

20. Niraja Gopal Jayal, Sudha Pai and Vishnu Mohapatra were conducting field work projects in U. P. and Orissa in collaboration with the University of Uppsala.

21. Lloyd I. Rudolph, “The Media and Cultural Politics,” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 27, No. 28 (June 1992), pp. 159–79.

22. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Occidentalism and Orientalism: Perspectives on Legal Pluralism,” in Sally Humphreys, ed., Cultures of Scholarship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 219–51.

23. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Living with Difference in India: Legal Pluralism and Legal Universalism in Historical Context,” in Gerald James Larson, ed., Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).

24. (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

25. Rosane Rocher begins her “British Orientalism in the 18th Century: The Dialectic of Knowledge and Government,” (in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) by finding that Edward Said's critique “does to orientalist scholarship what it accuses orientalist scholarship of having done to the countries east of Europe; it creates a single discourse, undifferentiated by space and time and across political, social, and intellectual identities,” p. 215.

26. William Jones, “A Discourse on the Institution of a Society for Enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia,” Asiatic Researches Vol. I (1806), pp. ix–x.

27. See Om Prakash Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past, 1784–1838 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

28. See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance; Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

29. Those contexts were: 1. the East India Company eras of Warren Hastings and the scholars of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and of William Bentinck and the Utilitarians and Evangelicals; 2. the trauma of the 1857 rebellion and its aftermath, Queen Victoria's 1858 Proclamation accepting difference; 3. the fracture of partition as it was foreshadowed in Sir Sayyad Ahmed Khan's “many nations” doctrine; 4. Mohammed Ali Jinnah's two nation doctrine; 5. the Indian National Congress' universalist one nation, equal citizenship doctrine; 6. the cohabitation in Congress' secularism doctrine between equal recognition of all religions and special privileging of minority religion, particularly Islam; and 7. the rise of the Hindu nationalist ideology in the 1980s and the BJP universalist doctrine of an homogenous Hindu nation.

30. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “The Subcontinental Empire and the Regional Kingdom in Indian State Formation,” in Paul Wallace, ed., Region and Nation in India (New Delhi: Oxford and IVH Publishing Company, 1985), pp. 40–59.

31. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Presidential Address: State Formation in Asia – Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study,” The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. XLVI, No. 4 (November 1987), pp. 731–45.

32. Paul Wallace, Region and Nation in India (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1985).

33. Lloyd I. Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen, “Historicizing the Modern State,” in Lloyd I. Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen, eds., Experiencing the State (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. vii–xxix.

34. Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 10.

35. The Hapsburg Charles V was Holy Roman Emperor from 1519 to 1556. Concurrently he was ruler of Burgundian Netherlands, King of Aragon, King of Castile, King of Naples and Sicily, and Archduke of Austria.

36. See Dimitrios Karmis and Wayne Norman, eds., Theories of Federalism: A Reader (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2005), and Joon Suk Kim, “Making States Federatively: Different Routes of State Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” PhD, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, 2004.

37. Selig Harrison, India, the Most Dangerous Decade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).

38. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Religion, States and Transnational Civil Society,” in Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori, eds., Transnational Religion and Fading States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp.1–24.

39. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Generals and Politicians in India,” Pacific Affairs Vol. XXXVII, No. 6 (Spring 1964), pp. 15–37.

40. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “New Dimensions of Indian Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 1 (January 2002), pp. 52–66.

41. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Redoing the Constitutional Design: from an interventionist to a regulatory state,” in Atul Kohli, ed., The Success of India's Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 127–62.

42. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “The Iconization of Chandrababu Naidu: Sharing Sovereignty in India's Federal Market Economy,” Economic and Political Weekly, May 5, 2001, pp. 1541–52.

43. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “The Centrist Future of Indian Politics,” Asian Survey Vol. XX, No. 6 (June 1980), pp. 575–94.

44. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Judicial Review versus Parliamentary Sovereignty: The Struggle over Stateness in India,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics Vol. XIX, No. 3 (November 1981), pp. 231–56.

45. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Rethinking Secularism: Genesis and Implications of the Textbook Controversy, 1977–79,” Pacific Affairs Vol. 56, No. 6 (Spring 1983), pp. 15–37.

46. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Demand Groups and Pluralist Representation in India,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics Vol. XXIV, No. 3 (November 1986), pp. 227–38.

47. With the emergence in the 1960s of feminist theory, the civil rights movement and third world immigration, gender, race, ethnic and minority politics became the basis for American versions of identity politics.

48. Pacific Affairs Vol. 33, No. 1 (March 1960), pp. 5–22.

49. “The Modernity of Tradition: The Democratic Incarnation of Caste in India,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 59, No. 1 (December 1965), pp. 975–89.

50. “The country stations and districts, as contra-distinguished from ‘the Presidency’,” Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1994), p. 570.

51. “The imperialism of categories” is a phrase we first used in the Introduction of The Modernity of Tradition [1967]. Susanne Rudolph used “the imperialism of categories” as the title of her American Political Science Association Presidential address.

52. “Urban Life and Populist Radicalism: Dravidian Politics in Madras,” The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 20, No. 3 (May 1961), pp. 283–297; “Regional Patterns of Education: Rimland and Heartland in Indian Education,” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 4, No. 26 (28 June 1969), pp. 1039–49.

53. “Student Politics and National Politics in India,” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 6, No. 31 (31 July 1971), pp. 1655–68.

54. “Engaging Subjective Knowledge; How Amar Singh's Diary Narratives of and by the Self Explain Identity Formation,” Perspectives on Politics Vol. 1, No. 4 (December 2003), pp. 681–94.

55. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography; The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Boston: Beacon, 1993); Mohandas K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1929); Amar Singh, Reversing the Gaze; The Amar Singh Diary, a Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).

56. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946).

57. World Politics Vol.13, No.3 (April 1961), pp.385-99 and Vol. 16, No.1 (October 1963), pp. 98–119.

58. In 1967 we carried the process forward in Part II of The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), and in 1983 we published Gandhi: the Traditional Roots of Charisma separately as a book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

59. Mohandas K. Ghandi, in Anthony J. Parel, ed., Hind Swaraj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

60. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

61. The Indian Economic and Social History Review Vol. 25, No. 2 (1988), pp. 113–32.

62. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph with Mohan Singh Kanota, Reversing the Gaze; Amar Singh's Diary, A Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, and Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2001).

63. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Setting the Table: Amar Singh aboard the SS Mohawk,” Setting the Table Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 158–77.

64. Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Self as Other: Amar Singh's Diary as Reflexive ‘Native’ Ethnography,” Modern Asian Studies Vol. 31, No. 1 (1997), pp. 143–75.

65. We have published two books on US foreign policy toward India and Susanne Rudolph has co-edited and contributed to a book that attempts to re-orient the study of International Relations. The books about Indo-US relations are: The Regional Imperative: The Administration of U.S, Foreign Policy Toward South Asian States Under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980) E-Books on India @ WWW.IdeaIndia.com, 2007, and Making US Foreign Policy Toward South Asia (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 2008, and Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori have co-edited Transnational Religion and Fading States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).

66. In John P. Lewis and V. Kallab, eds., US Foreign Policy and the Third World: Agenda 1983 (New York: Praeger, 1983).

67. The six “power” variables are: GNP; Population; Armed Forces; Military Expenditures, Installed Energy; and World Trade (Exports and Imports).

68. Michael C. Desch explains how US hegemony in the Americas has produced regional stability and enabled the US to become a world power in When the Third World Matters: Latin America and the United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

69. Economic and Political Weekly February 25, 2006, pp. 703–9.

70. We borrow the term, “offshore balancing” from Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer but use it in the ordinary language sense of an outsider adding its weight to an indigenous regional balance. See Stephen M. Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) and Taming American Power: the global response to US primacy (New York: Norton, 2005) and John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001).

71. Lloyd I. Rudolph, “The Great Game in Asia: Revisited and Revised,” Crossroads: An International Socio-Political Journal Vol. 16 (1985), pp. 1–46.

72. In Marshall L. Bouton and Philip Oldenburg, eds., India Briefing, 1989 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 1–34.

73. In Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori, eds., Traditional Religion and Fading States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 243–61.

74. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs No. 72 (Summer 1993), pp. 22–49. See also The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon Schuster, 1996).

75. The Nation, January 30, 1967, pp. 138–43.

76. The New Republic, March 22, 1993, pp. 24–9.

77. The New Republic, March 16, 1998, pp. 19–20.

78. Yale Review, Spring 1971, pp. 468–80.

79. University of Chicago Magazine (Summer 1977), pp. 9–22.

80. Lloyd I. Rudolph, “The East Psychoanalyzed,” New York Times Book Review, February 9, 1986.

81. Lucian W. Pye and Mary W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

82. Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated by Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), p. 269.

83. Pye, Asian Power, pp. 326–7.

84. Polo (September 1992), pp. 33–6.

85. See the Boston Review Vol. XIX, No 5 (October/November, 1994), special issue for Martha Nussbaum's essay, “Patriotism or Cosmopolitanism?”