Abstract
Paul Brass (1936–2022)
Paul R. Brass, the renowned scholar of Indian political science, died at his home in Acme, Washington State, USA, on 31 May 2022 at the age of 85 after a long illness. His wife Susan was by his side.
Paul was born on 08 November 1936, in Boston, Massachusetts, attended the Boston Latin School from 1948 to 1954 and graduated from Harvard College with a BA in Government (cum laude) in 1958. He subsequently obtained an MA and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1959 and 1964, respectively. In 1965 Paul began teaching at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He remained there until 1999, when he retired from the university while remaining highly active academically.
Paul Brass was a brilliant man. Hugely astute, curious and original, he undertook a series of pioneering analyses of India’s changing politics and political economy in the period between the early 1960s and early 2010s. He authored 16 books and dozens of research articles in a wide variety of outlets. He will be sorely missed by the many scholars whom he encouraged and assisted.
Paul’s first book Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh emerged out of his doctoral thesis (Brass 1965). It is a magisterial work, combining forensic field investigation and interpretation with Brass’s characteristic capacity to convey ideas straightforwardly and lucidly to a general audience. Factional Politics remains a key work of reference for anyone seeking to understand the machinations of the Congress Party in the first few decades after Indian Independence. His analysis of factionalism cross-cut existing debates on caste, class and ideological structures within Indian politics in turn opening them up to fresh analysis and insight. This was to become a characteristic feature of Brass’s writing: he was excellent at developing concepts that could unlock understanding of complex areas.
Brass’s next book Language, Religion and Politics in India (Brass 1974) cemented his standing as one of the leading political scientists of India of his generation. In the preface to this book, Brass explains how his interest in language and politics emerged while conducting fieldwork in Bihar. In particular, he became fascinated by the question of why support for particular linguistic initiatives sometimes morphs into broader political movements while in other instances it does not. The result of his pursuing this question, through subsequent fieldwork and analysis, is a landmark study of the relationship between language movements, political movements and religion in post-Independence India. The interactions between political engagement with religion and language politics are as pertinent now as when Brass was penning the book. It should be required reading for all those interested in these issues.
This book provided the basis for a fascinating debate in the 1970s between Paul Brass and Francis Robinson on the origins of ethnicity and nationalism, with Brass emphasising an instrumentalist perspective and Robinson arguing for a primordial perspective. An instrumentalist perspective emphasised the role of elites in manipulating ideas around religion and language to support political agendas. A primordial perspective placed greater emphasis on underlying community-based ties and sentiments. As Gurharpal Singh (2022: para. 4) argues in a testimony to Paul Brass’s work that dwells especially on the latter’s contributions to understanding Sikh politics and the Punjab, ‘Paul was well ahead of his time in explaining the dynamics of nationality formation as a result of elite choices and explaining this phenomenon in a comparative, Indian and global context’ (see also Brass 1991). For Brass, scholars should explain religious communal violence not with primary reference to the bubbling over of local animosities but through considering in detail the political sociology of local processes of violence.
Among the many ideas that emerged out of Brass’s instrumentalist approach was his now oft-quoted concept of ‘institutionalised riot systems’. This was developed in his remarkable book The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in India (Brass 2003). Drawing on 40 years of research in the city of Aligarh in western Uttar Pradesh, Brass identified institutionalised riot systems in the city consisting of networks of specialists in political practice skilled in propagating and interpreting acts of religious violence. In the model of the institutionalised riot system, a first preparatory phase involves so-called ‘fire tenders’ within local society ensuring a continued level of Hindu–Muslim tension, for example through their highlighting contentious issues or events; a second activation phase involves local people inciting violence; and a final phase entails many sections of society, especially the media and politicians, disseminating interpretations of what had taken place. For Thomas Blom Hansen (2006: 103), Brass’s book ‘represents, thus far, the most systematic exploration of “riot production” in India’.
I first read Paul Brass in the mid-1990s, not his work on language or communalism, but like many other students, through his The Politics of India since Independence (Brass 1994). This book is beautifully clear, incisive, and important. Brass may not have wholly predicted the direction that Indian politics was to take in the 21st century, but he offered readers of the book a substantive and conceptual framework for understanding India’s post-Independence politics.
Among the many other contributions that Paul made to international scholarship on India, two more stand out. The first was his book Theft of an Idol (Brass 1997). This was a significant new intellectual departure for Paul and for Indian political science: a book constructed around ‘events’ rather than chronologies or institutions. Brass spent time in North India collecting stories of specific significant events in the lives of local settings, such as the theft of an idol from a temple. He then went about trying to understand what happened from a social science perspective. Most importantly for his analysis, he also analysed how different sections of society interpreted contentious events and thus the meaning that these events acquired in local society. The result is a path-breaking book that uses specific events and the stories accompanying events as lenses through which to apprehend North Indian society. This book sits alongside the equally brilliant and somewhat comparable Event, Metaphor, Memory by Shahid Amin (1995) and Critical Events by Veena Das (1995) as three of the most inventive social science studies of India over the last few decades.
Paul Brass’s final major work was a rich compendium of analysis and evidence related to the life and work of notable Indian politician Charan Singh (Brass 2011, 2012, 2019). Charan Singh’s family provided Brass with a vast archive of material on his life, interactions, and work. Paul worked assiduously over many years to bring this evidence together in three volumes covering Charan Singh’s life. The result is a series of books the like of which is unlikely to be repeated in political writing on India. Brass manages to capture the complex nature of Singh’s character, the difficult decisions he had to make as a member of Congress Party and subsequently as an opponent of Congress, and some of the key questions around how to interpret Singh’s legacy. In the process, Brass illuminates a wide range of issues regarding the political economy of Indian agriculture, corruption, clientelism, the operation of diverse Indian institutions, and the nature of the state. Some have maintained that Brass may be overly kind to Charan Singh (a view that Charan Singh himself held on the basis of reading Brass’s book Factional Politics). But Brass also offers a range of critical perspectives on Singh’s political life.
I did not know Paul personally very well. We overlapped at the University of Washington—he was still a regular at many seminars and events when I worked there in the 2000s. We organised a paper session on corruption together at the Madison South Asia Conference in that decade (see Jeffrey 2010), together with Stanley Kochanek, another superb writer on India who recently passed away.
But Paul left a very lasting impression. There are three things I will remember, and in this regard, my memories tie in with the recently published accounts of Steven Wilkinson (2022) 1 , Gurharpal Singh (2022) and Gilles Verniers (2022) 2 on Paul’s life.
The first is his originality. Paul was a sceptic in the sense that he doubted what he saw or read, including some of the orthodoxies of his own discipline of political science. His work was very clearly ‘inter-disciplinary’. He was also not afraid to take intellectual risks, developing new concepts and ideas. Paul was often a tough interlocutor in seminars—I remember having my heart in my throat when I had to contest his time keeping during a conference—but this was more than balanced by his sense of humour, inquisitiveness, and determination to challenge received wisdom.
A second abiding memory I have of Paul was of his love of being in India. Paul Brass had a passion for fieldwork and used a wide variety of methods and strategies to investigate the issues that concerned him. I was lucky enough to spend a short amount of time in India with Paul at one stage and his commitment to field-based research was obvious.
A third abiding memory I have of Paul was his generosity to younger scholars. This, again, is something that many scholars have said in the weeks following his passing away. Once you told Paul about your interests in India, he would typically fall into excited discussion: ‘Have you spoken to X? Have you ever seen Y? Have you read Z?’ He would offer up his notes on topics, invite you to visit him, provide advice on papers and ideas, and introduce you to friends. This was done I think in part out of simple kindness. I think it also reflected Paul’s deep affection for academia, academics, and the curiosity and fervour that underpins scholarly practice.
I regret not knowing Paul Brass a lot better. He was a superb man. He lives on in the work and passion of those who he has helped and in his remarkable writing.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Gilles Verniers and Steven Wilkinson for offering comments on an earlier draft of this obituary. Any errors that remain are my own.