Abstract
Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph died within 1 month of each other; until literally weeks before their deaths, they were working on publishing one last thing—letters sent home from India on their lengthy trips there. The first trip was in 1956–1957, when they divided their time between Jaipur and the then Madras state, and the last was in 2014, when they were awarded the Padma Bhushan. They have left a very large legacy of books, scholarly articles and essays for a wider public, and, as important, a cohort of students (they formally advised 300 or so PhD students, perhaps a third of whom studied in India) and many more who were their honorary students.
1
They welcomed interacting with other scholars to whom they gave their time and careful attention. Most were influenced by the Rudolphs’ perspective on Indian politics, but they never formed a ‘school’ of ‘Rudolphians’. Rather, they learned the craft of doing research, the necessity of constantly taking seriously others’ ideas and approaches from every discipline and the value of a commitment to what the Rudolphs, describing ‘area studies’, called ‘situated knowledge’:
knowledge that is located and marked by time and place and circumstance,…unlike the objective knowledge on offer by those who adhere to a universal social science epistemology based on...a science which purports to be true everywhere and always. Unlike such theory-driven social science knowledge, area studies knowledge tends to be problem-driven and more prone to inductive generalization than to deductive reasoning.
2
The Rudolphs served as role models for how to collaborate and for how to manage family and career with joy and devotion to both. 3 Susanne, in addition, was a pioneer, as one of the first women to be elected president of the Association of Asian Studies, and then, 17 years later, one of the first woman presidents of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The Rudolphs met and married when they were post-graduate students at Harvard in the early 1950s, receiving their PhDs in 1955–1956. 4 After their first research trip to India, they taught at Harvard until 1964 (with another research trip in 1962–1963), and then shifted to the University of Chicago, where they were until their retirement in 2002. They continued to spend an academic year in India, every fourth year or so, going to the Mussoorie hills in the summer, fully laden with books and office supplies, so that they could continue working (with time out for hikes, among other pleasures). After 1999–2000, they made shorter trips every year, maintaining a flat in Jaipur. Their affair with India was not confined to scholarship: they joined Jaipur high society; they also travelled with R. Venkataraman, as he campaigned in 1957 in the countryside, and later continued to meet him as a friend, as he rose in power and position. They also met myriad scholars, bureaucrats and artists; in later years, they were sure to attend the Jaipur literary festival. They published many articles in Indian journals (most often in the Economic and Political Weekly) and popular magazines. Several of their edited volumes were published only in India. 5
The Rudolphs worked slowly and carefully, with some subjects tackled throughout their career. Their article ‘Rajputana under British Paramountcy: The Failure of Indirect Rule’ appeared 9 years after their fieldwork. Mentioned in at least five footnotes in The Modernity of Tradition was a book ‘forth-coming’ from the Harvard University Press, From Princes to Politicians: The Political in Social Change. However, on a field trip in 1970–1971, they ‘discovered’ a treasure, a diary of extraordinary length and continuity, kept by Amar Singh, a Rajput nobleman. They set about editing it into an insiders’ authentic view of the topic, ending 29 years later with the publication of Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India (Rudolph & Rudolph, with Mohan Singh Kanota, 2000). Another of their major works, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State, began with a request for a contribution to the New York Council of Foreign Relations’ ‘1980s project’, in 1976, but, as the Rudolphs say in their preface, ‘repeatedly, events have pulled the rug out from under our scholarly feet’ (Rudolph & Rudolph, 1987, p. xv). Their first article on Gandhi (by Susanne) was published in 1961; their last publication, more than half a century later, was ‘Gandhi and the Debate about Civilization’ (Rudolph, 1961; Rudolph & Rudolph, 2015).
Throughout their career, Lloyd and Susanne—I do not remember ever addressing them as ‘Professor’—considered their students as colleagues, not just in classes and special seminar series (a long-running one was on ‘South Asia Political Economy’), but in dinners and festive occasions as well. As described by their colleague Richard Taub, professor emeritus of Sociology:
Susanne and Lloyd created in their house in Chicago a golden bubble of the Indian world to which they invited all the students interested in India as well as young faculty. Not only scholars, but politicians, reporters, civil servants, writers and other forms of celebrity paraded through that living room and were the subjects around whom discourse would transpire stoked by Susanne’s Indian food. To mix metaphors a little, their home was a first-rate salon in which no-holds-barred conversations took place and all, no matter what their rank, participated. I recall one guest remarking that he could not tell who were students and who were faculty. (Personal Communication, 2016)
Groups of their students contributed to edited volumes (Education and Politics in India (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972), The Regional Imperative (Rudolph and Rudolph 1980)) and often appeared in footnotes, and were offered welcome, advice and critique throughout their careers. For me, as important as the direct transfer of knowledge about Indian politics, often teased out by Socratic questions, was the learning of the scholarly craft through example and extensive practice, encouraged by the Rudolphs’ almost invariably constructive critique; I think my experience was typical.
II
Although the Rudolphs had separate interests and expertise, reflected to some extent in the courses they taught on their own (they also taught courses together), almost all their books and essays have both names attached. Susanne’s APSA Presidential Address has a footnote in the published version: ‘Lloyd Rudolph’s commentary contributed substantially to the substance and style of this article’ (Rudolph, 2005, p. 12). No doubt each of the ostensibly single-authored works had the same note, if only implied. Although they were fully capable of dealing with the reigning practices in political science, from survey research to post-modernism, they seemed to prefer an area studies approach, ‘problem-driven’ research and analysis, something ‘more prone to inductive generalization than to deductive reasoning’. In ‘Writing India: A Career Overview’ (Rudolph & Rudolph, 2008a), they begin—as they do with the first essay in their three-volume collection Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-year Perspective, 1956–2000 (Rudolph & Rudolph, 2008b)—with their article on doing survey research in Madras in 1956. Dutifully attempting to use their toolkit of survey research methods and concepts then, they discovered that India’s reality destroyed things, such as the assumptions of the individual respondent (their assistants had to use elaborate workarounds to isolate a ‘respondent’ from husband, family and respected elders). However, they made a significant effort to survey individuals, because they wanted to discover ‘how many individuals had passed through the process of differentiation that would make it possible to view them as the unit or source of opinion’. We see here one piece that would contribute to The Modernity of Tradition (Rudolph & Rudolph, 1967).
Fifty years later, the Rudolphs were an integral part of the ‘Perestroika’ movement within the APSA, arguing against the methodological straitjacket that they felt had damaged the discipline; Susanne wrote one chapter, and Lloyd two, with two more by their students, in the volume on the movement—Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (Monroe, 2005). Susanne, in her APSA Presidential Address, began with the description of that first survey research experience in South India in 1956, and addressed the ‘imperialism of categories’ and the value of situated knowledge for the discipline and for American policy. She ended by wondering, pessimistically, whether Americans will nonetheless continue with ‘a liberal absolutism indifferent to difference?’ (Rudolph, 2005, p. 12).
It is not as if the Rudolphs were not masters of theory when it was necessary, as is clear from their ‘revisionist’ work on Weber in a prize-winning paper published in World Politics, in which their insights drew on research on bureaucracy in the US foreign policy establishment and in the princely states of Rajasthan, using the Amar Singh diary (Rudolph & Rudolph, 1979, p. 199). Reversing the Gaze is ‘a reflexive “native’s” narrative about the self, the [colonial] master, and the relationship between them’ (Rudolph and Rudolph, with Mohan Singh Kanota, 2000). However, from that ultimate in ‘situated knowledge’ emerged general concepts, most significantly the seemingly self-contradictory (if one relies on Max Weber) ‘bureaucratic lineage’—managing agencies of a sort, for the governing of a princely state, but staffed by families drawing on early generations’ expertise and training. 6 Additional important concepts, applied to India, continued to help unlock our understanding: the ‘weak–strong state’, ‘bullock capitalists’, ‘command polity’ versus ‘demand polity’, (selecting from In Pursuit of Lakshmi) and many more. Discussed, ‘operationalized’ (an ugly word, but indispensable), woven together into more and more insights and firmly resting on detailed empirical knowledge, they constitute an Archimedean fulcrum, with which to leverage advance in theory in the discipline.
Others will be able to analyze better the Rudolphs’ contribution to our general understanding of Indian politics—drawing on the Rudolphs’ interpretation of their own work, over the years (e.g., Rudolph, 1974; Rudolph & Rudolph, 2008a). My own understanding comes from following them in their chosen path of starting with ‘situated knowledge’, whether that is immersion in a particular place, or an event such as an election or the Emergency of 1975–1977; or a deep study of an important political figure (for them, most importantly, Gandhi); or a particularly significant manuscript; or the nuts and bolts of foreign policy making; or the need to take a position on the politics of hate (Rudolph & Rudolph, 1993). They would then consider whether particular concepts, more general analytic principles and theories within political science help, and also whether deliberately looking at how anthropologists or historians or scholars of other disciplines, and those concerned with other world regions, would help frame the question. They did not shy away from using quantitative tools, nor ‘models’, nor the arcane language of ‘postmodernism’ and the like. The result was a more rounded picture, always in three dimensions, as suits India, of which one always needs to ask, ‘is this locale, this time, these people, representative of the whole?’ They did not shy away from grand comparisons (e.g., Rudolph, 1987), but they never felt compelled to make them, or to conform to one school or the other. In their writing as in their conversation, with each other and with their friends and colleagues, there was almost always a willingness to indulge in creative play—to take an idea that had been put forward, and ‘run with it’, to different parts of the country, or the world, to different times, including the future. Their creativity was thus never held in check by ‘the discipline’, though they were incredibly disciplined in their work habits, if on occasion a bit unable to keep to a schedule. It was this spark of creativity, and their willingness to listen with respect and deep understanding to others of whatever age or ‘home place’, that made them such great scholars, such fine teachers and mentors and such warm and open friends.