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India Review
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State formation and the political economy of
India: The Rudolphian paradigm
Asha Sarangi
To cite this article: Asha Sarangi (2017) State formation and the political economy of India: The
Rudolphian paradigm, India Review, 16:3, 344-356, DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2017.1348088
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2017.1348088
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State formation and the political economy of India: The
Rudolphian paradigm
Asha Sarangi
ABSTRACT
Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph were world renowned political scien-
tists and iconic academic couple who devoted six decades of
their lives to teaching and researching India and South Asia.
The liberal-centrist Rudolphian framework is clearly evident in
their numerous works. Their writings show the innovativeness
and interpretative richness of methodological pluralism question-
ing the hegemony of western theories and categories. The
Geertzian notion of “culture bound”contextualism was central
to their ideas on concept formation and “situated knowledge”
paradigm. The phrases like “situated knowledge,”“self as other,”
“imperialism of categories,”“modernity of tradition”,“living with
difference,”and “post-modern Gandhi”provided newer concep-
tual tools and vocabularies in their writings. Writing within the
broader framework of liberal-centrism, they continued to counter
generalizations and deepen our understanding about the puzzle
of Indian democracy and nature of the Indian state.
For more than a year, since the death of Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd
Irving Rudolph on December 23, 2015 and January 16, 2016, respectively, a
number of obituaries and tributes on them have appeared in numerous
journals and newspapers. Each one of them described them as humane
scholars, intellectuals par excellence with rare combination of academic and
personal unison. Both of them taught for thirty- five years in the department
of Political Science of the University of Chicago, and retired as Professor
emeriti in 2002.
1
They were iconic intellectuals who devoted their entire life
teaching and writing about India-the country they admired deeply. They
lived an academic life full of creative curiosity, adventure, and passion. Their
death has certainly marked the end of an era in the global intellectual world
of South Asian and Indian Studies. It will be fair to say that both of them
inhabited and balanced the system (academic) world and the life world in
complete synchrony with their rational selves encompassed in an emotive-
intellectual world, the latter further sublimed through their perfect sense of
daily life discipline, aesthetics, a world of rigor and passion, and virtues of
kindness and generosity. They were serious academics, teachers, sincere
scholars, remarkable friends, colleagues, and much more. They received
Asha Sarangi is a Professor at the Centre for Political Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
INDIA REVIEW
2017, VOL. 16, NO. 3, 344–356
https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2017.1348088
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
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numerous academic awards, distinctions, fellowships, prizes in their long
academic life of six decades. The government of India recognized their
contributions by honoring them jointly with the Padma Bhushan award in
March 2014.
As prolific writers and serious researchers, they published more than a
dozen books and a hundred fifty articles on several areas of interest. In all of
their writings, one can see their concern about the democratic extent and
expansion of the Indian state, and its institutions. While reflecting on their six
decades of academic engagement, they said that “we have had long innings and
batted our fair share of runs in our long running academic test match with
India. India, and Jaipur in particular, have become central to our lives.”From
1956, when they first came to India, until their last visit in 2014, they kept in
tune with the political and economic events and discourses of independent
India through a variety of themes that they wrote and reflected about.
2
Writing
in this very journal, they identified seven broad areas of their writings such as
modes of inquiry, theory about political culture and social change, state
formation, institutional change, identity politics, interpreting lives, foreign
policy, IR and Indo-US relations, and interpreting India to the United States
and as public intellectuals.
3
In each of these areas, they wrote seminal books
and articles and evolved a conceptual vocabulary and framework of analysis
that have continued to dominate the methodological and thematic field of the
discipline of Political Science and Area Studies of South Asia in the global
academic world. Their research was deeply grounded in the history, culture
and politics of the country they studied and engaged with for six decades of
their scholarly lives. In what follows, I engage, very selectively, with their
writings on the state formation, federalism, education, and Indian State pre-
dominantly to draw attention to some of the compelling themes and argu-
ments to which they kept returning for a long period of time.
4
State formation, institutions, and policies
They engaged with the concept of state and state- formation in independent
India in several of their writings.
5
Using the comparative historical context of
Europe, the United States, and South Asia broadly, they emphasized the
regional diversity, federal composition, economic strength, and cultural poli-
tical economy of the Indian state and its historical stages of formation. The
idea of state authority and sovereignty has been a matter of concern in these
essays. The volume Experiencing the State edited by Lloyd Rudolph and John
Kurt Jacobson critically contextualizes the historical and political events
leading to the making of the state as an idea and an institution in Europe
and the non-European context.
6
The idea of state having shared and multiple
sovereignty, and the global and local network of institutions and power, in
their views, shows both the limits and expansion of the modern state. Indian
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state under liberalization, in their views, has entered the phase of market
federal economy and undergone significant transformation from a single
dominant to multi-party system and coalitional government leading to the
internal restructuring of various institutions and policies of the state. The
centrist framework that they used to explain the distinctive characteristics of
the Indian politics since independence helped them to show the limits of
class and labor as two dominant categories to explain state power and its
hegemonic control. In their analysis, state as a third actor performs a variety
of roles of mediating, intervening and regulating political and social conflicts
and antagonisms, and thus takes on the role of a patrimonial chief. The post
1991 state, they argued, shows a shift from an interventionist state that plans
and directs India’s economy to a regulatory state that attempts to constrain
and improve the market economy. But unlike many others, they emphasized
that poverty and landlessness on its own does not result in political mobiliza-
tion or protest. Instead, these variables need an intervening agency to
translate into the political mobilization or forms of protest.
Experiencing the State departs from conventional studies on the state.
The emphasis, in this volume, is not on the state as an idea, an abstraction
but state and stateness or its construction as encountered in everyday life,
not by naturalizing or universalizing it but by historicizing it, and going
beyond the presentist understanding of it. In other words, the category of
state itself throws, what Wittgenstein would call, a conceptual confusion.
The “situated knowledge”framework, that the Rudolphs argued for in
their work Reversing the Gaze, would help in experiencing the state in a
variety of arenas such as how state forms and manifestations are experi-
enced by citizens themselves.
7
The authors clearly state that the “idea is to
treat state as an imagined community. It matters what and who regularly
and routinely gets left out; how things, people, events, relationships are
represented. How meanings are produced within relations of power.”
8
It is
therefore not simply state as high modernism, not an a priori, abstract
neutral contextless rationality but more in terms of the increasingly ubi-
quitous surveillance and control that limits human freedom and threatens
citizens’rights. They rightly point out that the idea of the state has come
to acquire a certain degree of abstraction by universalizing and standardiz-
ing it in terms of what the state is and does. Therefore, it is important to
avoid naturalization and situate its historicization by locating states in
time, place and circumstances.
Their long engagement with the concept of state formation started with
their important essay “The Subcontinental Empire and the Regional Kingdom
in Indian State Formation”published in 1985.
9
It alerted to the need for
historical and comparative analysis about the state formation in Asia in general
and in India particularly. They argued, convincingly, that the study of com-
parative politics was un-reflexively Euro-centric, and after de-colonization, the
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study of “new”and “developing”nations began. In this article, they contrasted
the loosely structured, segmentary, power-sharing, multi-national imperial
form characteristic of Indian state formation with the centralized, monopoly
sovereignty, nation-state form in Europe. In their later writings, they mark a
shift from colonial modern state to nation-state in India. By historicizing the
modern state, the idea is to show how territorial sovereign state has undergone
significant change and has moved toward shared sovereignty of federal states
and cooperative international institutions in a global world.
Pursuit of Lakshmi, a very important work based on thick empirical
research of several years, is a detailed scholarly book on the politics of the
economic development of the Indian state as well as on various political
institutions, their growth and decline. The Indian state is characterized as
having multi-class equilibrium along with a curious combine of what they
termed as “demand and command politics.”They argued that the dominance
of state made class politics marginal. The state acts, they argued, as a third
actor in relation to both capital and labor. Their idea about state as a third
actor was challenged and interrogated widely by the scholars. They continued
to explain and further specify what they meant by state as a third actor in
various articles and essays published since the Pursuit of Lakshmi. In their
own words:
The state as a third actor in relation to capital and labor dominated the organized
economy making organized capital and labor dependent on the state and margin-
alizing class politics. Having occupied the “commanding heights”of the industrial
economy (basic and heavy industry, infrastructure) and nationalized financial
institutions (banks and insurance companies) and monopolized long term lending
institutions, the Indian State came to dominate the country’s industrial and finance
capital as well as employment in the organized sector. The consequence was that
organized capital and organized labor faced a third actor, the state whose control
of capital, market power and standing as an employer overshadowed the power of
the organized capital and labor in the conduct of policy, politics and market
relationships.
10
Their work on the Indian state and state-formation can be seen in two stages-
the first three decades (1957–86) was more about questions of caste, law, and
democratic politics whereas the latter three decades (1987–2015) is more in
terms of the ideas and politics of state and state formation process. Locating
the significant shift post 1991 from state regulated economy to a more market
centered economy, they hoped that India’s economy improved from 3.5 per-
cent Hindu rate of Growth to rates of 8–9percentandIndia’s post 1991
regulatory state did better in dealing with the recent global economic recession
than the United States or Eurpean Union regulatory states.
In their theory of the centrist character of the Indian state, criticisms were
made for ignoring the role of the class in Indian politics. To this, they
answered that India has a distinctive centrist dynamic, which due to its
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pluralist objective conditions, was not in conformity with the class politics.
Its indigenous categories of caste, ethnicity and religion were not in tune with
the class conflicts in the same manner as they unfolded in Europe.
State sovereignty and federalism
In their essays on federalism and state formation, they engaged with the idea
of shared and negotiated sovereignty as an alternative to the unified monopoly
sovereignty since the latter remained a dominant narrative in explaining the
rise of the modern state globally. For them, historicizing the concept of
sovereignty would provide better explanation for understanding the state
formation process in different parts of the world. In their views, the conven-
tional narratives about state prioritize and privilege the rise and expansion of
the absolutist state in early modern Europe and ignore the social, cultural,
and ethnically constitutive nature of the federal forms of the state in Asia and
non-Western countries. In these writings, they aim at showing the limits and
alternatives to western conceptions of state and state-sovereignty, and focus
more on the layered, divided, shared and negotiated forms of it in Asia and
particularly India after independence. While analyzing the state formation as
a federalizing process in case of India, they clearly state that “Indian history
can be read as an alternation between subcontinental empires and regional
kingdoms, where regional kingdoms are understood as the relatively more
homogeneous forms out of which the nation state might have grown, and
empires are understood as aggregations of ethnically and culturally diverse
polities.”
11
The multi-centric sharing of sovereignty in pre-British times, they
characterize, is contestations between subcontinental empires and regional
kingdoms.
12
They clearly state their objectives of this essay aimed at
“attempting to de-naturalize the master narrative of state formation in the
West. It is a teleological narrative that presents the unlimited and indivisible
monopoly sovereignty of the modern state as the natural outcome of com-
petition among state forms.”
13
Thus, they aimed at “developing an alternate
theory of state formation and sovereignty to explain state formation on the
Indian sub-continent. The theory depicted federalism as divided, shared and
negotiated sovereignty.”
14
They came to the conclusion that India witnessed
two versions of the federal process of state formation, the subcontinental
empire and regional kingdoms which resulted in the strong center-weak
states formulation. It is this model of state formation and federalism that
they pin down the reasons for the onset of liberalization and transition from
planned to federal market economy. They rightly summed up that “increas-
ingly the world of states is finding that multi-national states, such as Russia
and India, provide exemplars for what is possible.”
15
Rudolphs aimed at
explaining the nature and form of institutional behavior and changes in the
larger context of political culture and its impact on the changing forms of
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political behavior and patterns. That social and political changes in the
institutions of army, bureaucracy, law, and political parties are due to the
larger social structures they are part of is what they held onto in their centrist
Weberian framework of analysis. The big question for them was how a
society so unequal, so hierarchical, and so violent does not explode with
any successful rebellion. They were quite perceptive and intuitive in suggest-
ing that the triangular relationship between state, capital and labor has
affected both the economy and the polity of the country and the particular
regime in power. They were right to some extent to suggest that rising levels
of social mobilization and personalistic rule have contributed to declining
state capacity and autonomy, and social mobilization has led to a more
equitable distribution for the economic benefits and power.
Political culture and identity politics
The Rudolphs came to India to study the associational life that they had
learned from Alexis de Tocqueville’sDemocracy in America as graduate
students at the University of Harvard, and found it in the category of caste
and caste associations. This would also engage them for six decades of their
rich academic life with questions of civil society, political representation,
political ethnography, identity politics, and legal and pluralist conceptions of
sovereignty and the state. They studied and wrote on each of these issues
historically and contemporaneously by doing an intensive interactional qua-
litative study of the field primarily in the states of Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan.
In their iconic expression that “caste is anti-caste”is the idea of democratic
potential of caste, its political power and capacity to destroy the old regime of
caste hierarchy and varnasharm.
16
In another significant article, Organized
Chaos: Why India Works published in 1998, they hold India’s pluralist ethos
as a contributory factor to keep the federal democratic system working
despite the divisive waves of Hindu nationalism.
17
In their essay, Modern Hate published in the wake of communal frenzy
generated after the destruction of Babri Masjid, they suggest that “friendships
are as ancient as hatreds and religious language, however, is capable of many
different forms of expression, and ethnic differences were politically con-
structed and not primordial in nature.”
18
Such a formulation in 1993 had far
reaching impact on the thinking of racial and caste hatred in the United
States and India, respectively. This short essay convincingly argued against
theories of essentialism and naturalism that were fairly prevalent in various
disciplines of Social Sciences at that time. The idea was that secular nation-
alism also takes different forms and both Nehru and Gandhi used science
and religion for secular imaginaires. The essay draws attention to symbolism
and its effects on the politics of the day particularly between Hindus and
Muslims over their temples and mosques, respectively.
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Susanne’s important essay on Civil Society and the Realm of Freedom
focuses on explaining the category of civil society as a group or set of social
collectivities, a form of associational life which establishes a link between
state and market. It is a source and site of social capital generating trust,
cooperative network of social relations and legitimacy. She defines it broadly
consisting of nonstate autonomous spheres having to do with the empower-
ment of citizens, trust building associational life, and interaction with the
state.
19
She extends and complicates the western notion of civil society by
looking at the internal differentiation among the horizontal forms of orga-
nization and patterns of participation in shaping and sustaining the nonstate
space. Drawing upon theoretical presuppositions provided in the writings of
Jurgen Habermas, Robert Putnam, Alexis Tocquivelle, Weber, and
Montesquieu among others, she provides an understanding of the concept
of civil society and its richer empirical embeddedness in the Indian context.
In her views, civil society is the answer only if the social capital generating
capabilities of the associations can lead to the formation of groups which can
grow and sustain based on the habits of mutual trust and collaboration. She
takes her discussion on civil society further in another fascinating essay The
Coffee House and the Ashram Revisited: How Gandhi Democratized
Haberma’s Public Sphere.
20
The Media and Cultural Politics of Lloyd
Rudolph notes the impact of media driven cultural politics in India.
21
Education and textbook controversy
The Rudolphs wrote a few critical essays on the Janata regime (1977–80) and
their analysis remains relevant even after forty years particularly during the
present times dominated by the rise of the right wing political regime in
India. It is worth rereading some of their writings reflecting on the issues and
subjects of controversy of this period. The essay, Cultural Policy, The
Textbook Controversy and Indian Identity, written thirty-five years ago, has
relevance for the present times as well. They term the year 1977 characteristic
of “India’s party system to be transformed from one party dominance to two-
party competition”and the inability of the Janata Party to resolve the
question of secularism satisfactorily. For them, the idea of the cultural policy
is not outside of the realms of economic, foreign and state policy. They argue
that “cultural policy encompasses efforts by states to articulate and define
national identity and a public philosophy. It answers questions such as what
does it mean to be an Indian or un-Indian, how should Indian live, what
should they value and how can they realize the things they value, meaning
and value of history, the past; what ought to be common or shared, the
present; and goals and how to reach them, the future.”
22
It is in this regard
that cultural policy is intertwined with substantive policies and procedures
related to the resource allocation, rights, and identities of the people and the
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territorial integrity of the country. The cultural policy, they argue, can be
discriminatory (ban on cow slaughter, prohibition), regulatory (re-writing or
banning text-books) or constitutive (issues of citizenship on the basis of
religion- debate on Uniform Civil Code). The cultural policy, they strongly
suggest, can be identified as state policy. Public philosophy raises questions
about the political and social order. What are its principles and how should
they be realized in practice? What are India’s publicly shared values and how
are they to be expressed in institutional arrangements? They consider that
India’s national identity and public philosophy are inter-related. The essay
clearly dwells upon the implications contingent upon the relationship
between academic scholarship and its ideological commitments and dispen-
sations. This kind of cultural policy of Morarji Desai government in their
views proved to be counter-productive and led to its loss of support from
other factions within the Janata government particularly from leaders such as
Charan Singh and Raj Narain.
23
What happened forty years ago has come back with more vehement attack
on the institutions of higher education along with the changes proposed and
implemented in the curricula and pedagogical methods of teaching in the
schools. The Janata government under the leadership of Morarji Desai “was
urged in a confidential memorandum not only to proscribe certain textbooks
but also to appoint a committee to look into the infiltration by persons of
‘Communist’persuasion of academic positions, research grants, publication
subsidies and teaching positions.”
24
Their analysis of 1977 Janata government
and its regressive cultural policy is an apt case to allude to what is happening
now. In their words, “Janata was driven by two contradictory impulses, the
first statesmanly, the second partisan …the former restoring the Constitution
and reconstituting the party system in a two-party mode whereas the partisan
objective was to exploit the powers of incumbency in order to consolidate and
expand its party advantage.”
25
Thesecondstrategyprovedtobeself-destruc-
tive for Janata government. They are right when they say that the motive and
strength of “the communalist attack was not wholly ideological. It also
involved access to resources, organizations and career opportunities for ‘outs’
who had been in the political and academic wilderness for a generation or
more. The textbook controversy raised two complementary issues in making
cultural policy: the role of partisan or personal interests in the allocation of
scholarly resources and authority; and the political consequences of historical
interpretations for Indian identity and public philosophy. Neither is easily
resolved.”
26
Their work on the university education is a master piece for our
times. Essays on universities such as Baroda, Madras, and Bombay showed
how and why in the 1960s, students more than workers shaped the national
policy agenda, and youth to be treated as a political class and its significance
for the politics and the political change of the day.
27
The state control and
invasion over university autonomy in India in the last one and half year and
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the increasing authoritarianism of state bureaucracy over freedom of speech
and expression would have made them worried and concerned about the
democratic potential of the Indian state if they were alive.
28
Methodological pluralism: The Rudolphian paradigm
The liberal-centrist Rudolphian framework is clearly evident in their numerous
works particularly on areas of political culture and social change, state forma-
tion, institutional change, and identity politics, among others.
29
The Rudolphian
framework has aimed at building bridges between given theories and theoretical
paradigms and existing empirical realities, and in the process reshaping and
refining both of them without being burdened by either of them. This allowed
them to question the hegemony of western theories and the imperialism of their
categories. Truly inclusive inter-disciplinarian while incorporating the works of
anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, and social psychologists,
they conversed with a large number of social science and literary interpreters
and analysts on/of India in their long academic life. This enabled them to be in
tune with the newer sensibilities of the field. They used “culture bound”cate-
gories not alien to the context they were studying and writing on. Susanne
Rudolph’s celebrated essay of “Imperialism of Categories”warned against the
hegemonic hold of the western constructs about the non-western world, and the
politics of concept formation and its uses. The fifty-one essays arranged in three
volumes of Explaining Indian Democracy are within “area-studies specific”and
“situated knowledge”paradigm.
30
They argued for methodological pluralism (MP) against methodological
individualism (MI), as was evident in Susanne Rudolph’s active involvement
in the Perestroika movement in the American Political Science Association
challenging the formal modelling, rational choice theory and large statisti-
cally driven researches in the discipline. For them, theories must be empiri-
cally tested and grounded, not imported and transplanted. The categories like
tradition and modernity, state and civil society, capital and labor, urban and
rural that they used are not dichotomous but diachronic and adaptive, not in
opposition but in-continuum, and mutually reproducible. Their continued
research and interest on Caste, Rajasthan and Gandhi was primarily to
explain the traditional forms of authority, leadership and patterns of consent
and dissent. In many ways, they brought the study on Gandhi to the fore-
front in research and teaching courses on India in the United States and
particularly at the University of Chicago.
They struck an innovative bond between interpretive modes and thick
description of the empirical depth in their framework of analysis over wide
ranging themes and issues of their concerns and interests. Through the “logic
of constructivism,”they argued, one could avoid rigid binaries of subject and
object, and move towards the paradigm of “situated knowledge.”This, of
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course, would need methodological pluralism, which would unpack and
expand the given frontiers of knowledge formation. They deployed larger
historical comparative context and embedded their newer analytical cate-
gories within rich and sensitive ethnographical details. The phrases such as
“situated knowledge.”“self as other,”“imperialism of categories,”“modernity
of tradition,”“living with difference,”and “post-modern Gandhi”used in
their numerous writings provided newer conceptual tools and vocabularies to
understand their thick interpretative analysis on various subjects of their
research. These were not just binaries but mutually interactive, diachronic,
and co-habitative categories of analysis in their works. Writing within the
broader framework of liberal-centrism, they continued to counter general-
izations and deepen our understanding about the puzzle of Indian democracy
and the nature of the Indian state.
Unique lives and works
They were gifted with incredible human sensibilities and values. Both of
them were uniquely prompt in responding to their students queries or
reading through their theses without any delay even during their year-
long stay in India. It further reflected in their generosity of writing
intellectual and affectionately worded recommendation letters but with
precisions and objectivity needed for such letters. They never compro-
mised with their honesty and integrity in their protestant ethic towards
their students and colleagues all over the world. Each of their writing has
extensive footnotes and endnotes explaining and expanding the ideas and
themes further. They were undogmatic and stimulating teachers working
as a team, and therefore, a large number of graduate students at the
University of Chicago had both of them as their thesis advisors.
31
The
Rudolphs had a style of their own in teaching, in writing their books, in
doing the research on a variety of themes and returning to their research
with newer insights and perspectives, getting involved in the local culture
and scholarly activities of the places they lived. Therefore, the Rudolph
effect was immense.
Having given us such sophisticated but critical canvas of thinking through
the complexities of the world around us, it would be imperative for the future
scholars of India to engage with their writings that show new and substantive
categories of analyses, critical interpretative modes of inquiry, concepts
formation and direction for research, and alternative ways of understanding
for the younger generation.
32
In more than one way, their writings open up
the frontiers of new research over the idea of the state contextualized within
the rights and entitlements based discourses and regimes, on the increasing
violent intervention of the market along with the state over democratic
politics, and interface between political economy and cultural politics.
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The Rudolphs’effect came in many ways. They combined work and leisure in
perfect harmony. Their complementarity with and toward each other was always
admired and much respected to an extent they were role models as an academic
couple. A very few people can combine this sort of unity in life and work. They
respected views of others and others too reciprocated the same. They had been
insider–outsider and not just looking from a distance and analyzing their object
of study. They encouraged and became intellectual mentors for several genera-
tion of scholars who continued to admire and enjoy their intellectual guidance,
personal warmth, exceptional generosity, and extra-ordinary attentiveness.
We are living in difficult and troubled times both in India and the United
States, and their timely interventions on a variety of themes that they would have
informed and educated us about are sorely missed. The best way to describe
them would be as self-reflexive political scientists on India, scholar adventurers,
iconic teachers, organic intellectuals, careful researchers, and political ethnogra-
phers but most of all exceptional Rudolphs with their intellectual devotion to
India. As they said, “we felt part of India, and India felt part of us.”
33
Acknowledgments
I owe a special thanks and gratitude to E. Sridharan who encouraged me to write this piece.
He was kind and patient in allowing me extra time to write it. However, I alone am
responsible for any errors persisting in this essay.
Notes
1. To celebrate their unique intellectual partnership and scholarly contribution to the area
studies, a Festschrift Conference was organized in their honor at the University of
Chicago on April 10–12, 2003 on the theme of Area Studies Redux: Theory and Practice
in the Study of South Asia. The conference was intended to engage with their work in
an innovative way and the idea was to further the area studies framework of analysis
through their students and colleagues. The conference clearly showed the depth of
respect and affection that both had come to acquire among their students, colleagues,
and scholars internationally.
2. The enthusiasm, passion, and curiosity with which the journey unfolded has been
beautifully captured in their book Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph,
Destination India: From London Overland to India (New Delhi, India: Oxford
University Press, 2014). See my review Asha Sarangi, “An Academic Journey to
India,”The Book Review XL, no. 3 (March 2016): 25–26.
3. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Writing India: A Career Overview”
India Review 7, no 4 (October-December 2008): 266–94.
4. They were exemplars whose lives showed the perfect harmony between intellectual and
human personal world with remarkable personae that each of them had. I have tried to
capture a part of it in Asha Sarangi, “Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph: In Memoriam,”
Studies in Indian Politics 4, no. 2: 274–79 and Asha Sarangi, “Susanne Rudolph: A
Beautiful Life of the Mind,”Indian Express, January 2, 2016.
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5. Among the most original contributions on this subject are their essays such as Lloyd I.
Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “The Subcontinental Empire and the Regional
Kingdom in I`ndian State Formation”in Region and Nation in India, edited by Paul
Wallace (New Delhi, India: Oxford and IBH Publishing Company, 1985); Susanne
Rudolph, “Presidential Address: State Formation in Asia-Prolegomenon to a
Comparative Study,”Journal of Asian Studies XLVI, no 4 (November 1987): 731–746;
Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: Political Economy of an
Indian State (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
6. Lloyd Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen, eds,, Experiencing the State (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
7. Susanne Rudolph and Lloyd Rudolph Rudolph with Mohan Singh Kanota, Reversing
the Gaze; The Amar Singh Diary, A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India (New
Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. Rudolph and Jacobsen, Experiencing the State, xii.
9. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “The Subcontinental Empire and the Regional
Kingdom in Indian State Formation,”in Region and Nation in India, ed. Paul Wallace
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).
10. Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 23.
11. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “Federalism as State Formation in India: A
Theory of Shared and Negotiated Sovereignty,”International Political Science Review
31, no. 5 (2010): 1–21.
12. Rudolph and Rudolph, “Federalism as State Formation,”7.
13. Rudolph and Rudolph, “Federalism as State Formation,”12.
14. Rudolph and Rudolph, “Federalism as State Formation,”12.
15. Rudolph and Rudolph, “Federalism as State Formation,”13.
16. Their first article on Caste Association was published in 1960 in the reputed journal of
Pacific Affairs. This article has been acknowledged as the most read article published in
this journal. To celebrate its long fifty years of academic life, the journal had a
symposium on it with Rudolphs revisiting it along with two critical essays as responses
to it. See Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “Caste Association to Identity Politics:
From Self-help and Democratic Representation to Goonda Raj and Beyond,”Pacific
Affairs 85, no. 2 (June 2012): 371–375.
17. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “Organized Chaos: Why India Works,”The New
Republic, March 16, 1998, 19–20.
18. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get
Invented,”The New Republic, March 22, 1993, Cover article.
19. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Civil Society and the Realm of Freedom,”Economic and
Political Weekly 35, no. 20 (May 13–19, 2000): 1762–1763.
20. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, Post-modern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi
in the World and at Home (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006).
21. Lloyd Rudolph, “The Media and Cultural Politics,”Economic and Political Weekly 27,
no. 28 (June 1992): 159–79.
22. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “Cultural Policy, The Textbook Controversy and
Indian Identity,”in The State of the South Asia: Problems of National Integration,eds.
Jayaratnam A.Wilson and Dennis Dalton (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1982), 131–133.
23. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “Cultural Policy, the Textbook Controversy and
Indian Identity,”in The States of South Asia: Problems of National Integration, edited
by A.J. Wilson and Dennis Dalton (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1982), 131–154.
The essay focuses on the withdrawal of history text books being taught in the schools of
Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). These textbooks were published by the
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NCERT and authored by celebrated historians such as Bipan Chandra, Romilla Thapar,
Harbans Mukhia, R.S.Sharma, Barun De, and others.
24. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, “Rethinking Secularism: Genesis and
Implications of the Textbook Controversy, 1977–9”in Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph,
Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty Year Perspective, 1956–2006, Vol II, The Realm of
Institutions: State Formation and Institutional Change (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 229.
25. Rudolph and Rudolph, “Rethinking Secularism: Genesis and Implications of the
Textbook Controversy, 1977–9,”230.
26. Rudolph and Rudolph, “Rethinking Secularism: Genesis and Implications of the
Textbook Controversy, 1977–9,”230.
27. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, eds., Education and Politics in India:
Studies in Organization, Society and Policy (New Delhi, India: OUP, 1972).
28. In his personal communication with me, Lloyd Rudolph expressed his unease when he
said “not the India we knew of”after Modi’s government was sworn in 2014. They
would have certainly been extremely unhappy with Ronald Trump’s victory as the
U.S. president.
29. The predominant works in each of these areas are-The Modernity of Tradition: Political
Development in India, Cultural Policy in India, Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh Diary,
A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political
Economy of the Indian State, Experiencing the State and Explaining Indian Democracy:
A Fifty-Year Perspective (three volumes) among others.
30. Susanne H. Rudolph, “The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a
Globalizing World,”Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 5 (March 2005): 5–14. Vol I: The
Realm of Ideas: Inquiry and Theory; Vol II: The Realm of Institutions: State Formation
and Institutional Change; Vol III: The Realm of Public Sphere: Identity and Policy.
31. They were on about three hundred dissertation committees supervising such large
number of Ph.D theses at the University of Chicago.
32. They were working on three book length projects until the very few last days of their
lives. One of them was published posthumously. See, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph,
Romanticism’s Child: An Intellectual History of James Tod’s Influence on Indian History
and Historiography (Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2017).
33. Personal communication with the author.
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