These essays reflect the works of the authors over a period of 50 years since their first visit to India in 1956. They re-emphasize the importance of area studies challenging American parochialism in the social sciences. They challenge the use of statistics to identify universal patterns that underlie economic and political systems. 9/11 reinforced the authors' methods and modes of inquiry. It challenged America's parochialism. It reminded America that it was a part of a diverse world and that they did not have the means to grasp its complexities.
The essays in the three-volume series, Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006, span over five decades of the Rudolphs' scholarship on politics in India. This work brings out the distinctiveness of Indian democratic experience through a contextual political analysis. The Realm of Ideas, the first of the three volumes, explores how modes of inquiry, kinds of knowledge, construction of categories, and historical context shape political analysis and explanation. The scholars argue for methodological pluralism and 'situated knowledge'. They also critique key concepts such as political culture, modernization, civil society, and orientalism and apply them to questions of social change.
In careers that spanned six decades, Padma Bhushan award winners Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph elaborated seminal insights about Indian politics. The Rudolphs’ rigorous and remarkably empathetic study of India coupled with their extensive reading of social science theory served as the basis for their development of a broader interpretive mode of political analysis centered on the complex processes by which people construct meaning and motivation for political action. The eminent contributors to this volume pay tribute to the Rudolphs’ scholarship by examining its contributions to their own cutting-edge research as they advance the frontiers of the study of Indian politics and social science writ large. Their engaging essays analyze vital topics including how ‘situated knowledge’ shapes discourse, moral imagination, political strategies, and institutional change. They apply this interpretive approach to Indian politics to illuminate how the interaction of caste, class, gender, and religion has structured political mobilization, how changing social and political relations have affected education policy and civil–military relations, and how political leadership is forging the future of Indian politics.
The essays in the three-volume series, Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006, span over five decades of the Rudolphs' scholarship on politics in India. This work brings out the distinctiveness of Indian democratic experience through a contextual political analysis. The Realm of Institutions, the second of the three volumes, presents the Rudolphs' work on state formation and institutional change. By comparison with the Eurocentrism and essentialism of most work on state formation, these essays contrast state formation processes in Asia and India with those in the West. The authors address topics such as changing forms of representation, contestations over civil-military relations and sovereignty, transformations of the federal system and changes in the legitimacy and effectiveness of political institutions.
This volume reconsiders India's 20th century though a specific focus on the concepts, conjunctures and currency of its distinct political imaginaries. Spanning the divide between independence and partition, it highlights recent historical debates that have sought to move away from a nation-centred mode of political history to a broader history of politics that considers the complex contexts within which different political imaginaries emerged in 20th century India. Representing the first attempt to grasp the shifting modes and meanings of the 'political' in India, this book explores forms of mass protest, radical women's politics, civil rights, democracy, national wealth and mobilization against the indentured-labor system, amongst other themes. In linking 'the political' to shifts in historical temporality, Political Imaginaries in 20th century India extends beyond the interdisciplinary arena of South Asian studies to cognate late colonial and post-colonial formations in the twentieth century and contribute to the 'political turn' in scholarship.
India’s growing economic and socio-political importance on the global stage has triggered an increased interest in the country. This Handbook is a reference guide, which surveys the current state of Indian politics and provides a basic understanding of the ways in which the world’s largest democracy functions. The Handbook is structured around four main topics: political change, political economy, the diversity of regional development, and the changing role of India in the world. Chapters examine how and why democracy in India put down firm roots, but also why the quality of governance offered by India’s democracy continues to be low. The acceleration of economic growth since the mid-1980s is discussed, and the Handbook goes on to look at the political and economic changes in selected states, and how progress across Indian states continues to be uneven. It concludes by touching on the issue of India’s international relations, both in South Asia and the wider world. The Handbook offers an invigorating initiation into the seemingly daunting and complex terrain of Indian politics. It is an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, policy analysts, graduate and undergraduate students studying Indian politics.
A highly original and readily accessible examination of the cultural dimension of international politics, this book provides a sophisticated and nuanced account of the relevance of cultural categories for the analysis of world politics. The book’s analytical focus is on plural and pluralist civilizations. Civilizations exist in the plural within one civilization of modernity; and they are internally pluralist rather than unitary. The existence of plural and pluralist civilizations is reflected in transcivilizational engagements, intercivilizational encounters and, only occasionally, in civilizational clashes. Drawing on the work of Eisenstadt, Collins and Elias, Katzenstein’s introduction provides a cogent and detailed alternative to Huntington’s. This perspective is then developed and explored through six outstanding case studies written by leading experts in their fields. Combining contemporary and historical perspectives while addressing the civilizational politics of America, Europe, China, Japan, India and Islam, the book draws these discussions together in Patrick Jackson’s theoretically informed, thematic conclusion. Featuring an exceptional line-up and representing a diversity of theoretical views within one integrative perspective, this work will be of interest to all scholars and students of international relations, sociology and political science.
When the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed power in India in 1998 as the largest party of the National Democratic Alliance, it soon became evident that it prioritized educational reforms. Under BJP rule, a reorganization of the National Council of Educational Research and Training occurred, and in 2002 four new history textbooks were published. This book examines the new textbooks which were introduced, considering them to be integral to the BJP’s political agenda. It analyses the ways in which their narrative and explanatory frameworks defined and invoked Hindu identity. Employing the concept of decontextualization, the author argues that notions of Hindu cultural similarity were conveyed, particularly as the textbooks paid scarce attention to social, geographical and temporal contexts in their approaches to Indian history. The book shows that intrinsic to the textbooks’ emphasis on similarity is a systematic backgrounding of any references to internal lines of division within the Hindu community. Through a comparison with earlier textbooks, it sheds light on the contested nature of history writing in India, especially in terms of nation building and identity construction. This issue is also highly relevant in India today due to the electoral success of the BJP in 2014, and the efforts of the Hindu nationalist organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad to construct a coherent Hinduism. Arguing that the textbooks operate according to the BJP’s ideology of Hindu cultural nationalism, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian studies, contemporary history, the uses of history, identity politics and Hindu nationalism.
Offering the first long-duration analysis of the relationship between the state and religion in South Asia, this book looks at the nature and origins of Indian secularism. It interrogates the proposition that communalism in India is wholly a product of colonial policy and modernisation, questions whether the Indian state has generally been a benign, or disruptive, influence on public religious life, and evaluates the claim that the region has spawned a culture of practical toleration. The book is structured around six key arenas of interaction between state and religion: cow worship and sacrifice, control of temples and shrines, religious festivals and processions, proselytising and conversion, communal riots, and religious teaching/doctrine and family law. It offers a challenging argument about the role of the state in religious life in a historical continuum, and identifies points of similarity and contrast between periods and regimes. The book makes a significant contribution to the literature on South Asian History and Religion.
