>“The Rudolphs” is how we thought of them, vivid though each Rudolph was. I didn’t get the chance to take a co-taught course; indeed I only took two, one from each, in the mid-1960s. But in the wonderful hours and days I’ve been in their company, their ability to perform with counterpoint as well as harmony was one of the most important things I hoped I could learn from them. (Veena Talwar Oldenburg and my co-authorship consists of one minor essay for the Asia Society, written almost 40 years ago; we gave up trying.) Almost all their books and essays have both names attached, and even Susanne’s American Political Science Association (APSA) presidential address has a footnote in the published version: “Lloyd Rudolph’s commentary contributed substantially to the substance and style of this article.” No doubt each of the ostensibly single-authored works had the same note, if only implied.
Philip Oldenburg The co-authors I certainly don’t know whether their genius was in never allowing differences to escalate, or in thinking so much in synch that differences never arose in the first place. Yet, their styles were clearly different, with Susanne more controlled and concise, and Lloyd prone to going off on a seeming tangent, with ideas spawning related thoughts, rough-hewn. I always thought Lloyd more familiarly Indic, thinking like the Panchatantra , with each statement or example producing a “that reminds me of” clause or sub-clause. I don’t think anyone knew — probably including Lloyd and Susanne themselves — just who first thought of an innovative and powerful conceptualisation; who contributed most to refining it and applying it; who most effectively worked through its implications. Even in a formal presentation, often done by alternation, Lloyd might seem more scattered, Susanne more commanding, yet their mutual respect reinforced the conviction that this was a singular point of view, co-authored in a very deep sense.
How they managed to draft and refine their articles and books remains something of a mystery, as they did it behind doors closed to outsiders, even when we were there in the same house. I only got the chance to intrude once, as editor of an India Briefing volume with a piece by Lloyd Solus, when I had the chance to repay in kind the careful attention to detail that I had benefitted from as I wrote thesis drafts and a contribution to The Regional Imperative. Not that I found much to suggest. By the time the Rudolphs’ thoughts were in print, they were in good logical order, precise yet retaining the whiff of contingency. They also demonstrated the value of treating scholarship as a craft to be mastered, with products shaped and honed with a professional eye.
They insisted, from their first joint work, on the importance of “situated knowledge” (“knowledge that is located and marked by time and place and circumstance”), as opposed to understanding deduced-from, rarely-questioned, grand theoretical constructions. In Writing India: A Career Overview (India Review 7, 4 [2008]), they begin — as they do with the first essay in their three-volume collection Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006 — with their article on doing survey research in Madras in 1956. Dutifully attempting to use their toolkit of survey research methods and concepts, they discover that India’s reality destroys things like the assumptions of the individual respondent (their assistants had to use elaborate workarounds to isolate a “respondent” from husband, family, and respected elders). But it is telling that they made the 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 .
Fifty years later, they 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 (2005). Susanne, in her APSA presidential address (2004), begins with the description of that first survey research experience in South India in 1956, and addresses the “imperialism of categories” and the value of situated knowledge for the discipline and for American policy. She ends by wondering, pessimistically, whether Americans will nonetheless continue with “a liberal absolutism indifferent to difference.” It’s not as if the Rudolphs weren’t 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 U.S. foreign policy establishment and in the princely states of Rajasthan.
Mentioned in at least five footnotes in The Modernity of Tradition (1967) was a book “forthcoming” from the Harvard University Press, From Princes to Politicians: The Political in Social Change . We apprentice scholars waited for its promised completion during the Rudolphs’ trip to Rajasthan in 1970-71, but instead they came back with a phantasmagoric tale of a humongous diary, which would soon be edited into an insiders’ authentic view of the topic. That took 29 years, ending with the publication of Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary, a Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India , edited with the diarist’s nephew, Mohan Singh; “a reflexive ‘native’s’ narrative about the self, the [colonial] master, and the relationship between them.” But 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. For me, that remains a seminal concept, which should be extrapolated and reshaped to apply to Indian political family firms, misnamed (in my view) “dynasties”.
Unlocking our understanding 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, “operationalised”, (an ugly word, but indispensable), woven together into more and more insights, firmly resting on detailed empirical knowledge, they constitute an Archimedean fulcrum, with which to leverage advance in theory in the discipline. What this meant for me, as someone whose taste runs to political anthropology, was a licence to start close to the ground, observing patterns, checking interpretations with my “subjects”, as equals, insisting that one cannot explain things like the resilience and deepening of Indian democracy without cultivating Verstehen. And if theory could be built on that foundation — probably by someone else — so much the better. If the work that I have crafted is worthy, it is most certainly due to in significant measure to the benevolent gaze, and judiciously applied pushes, quite apart from a very large body of pure knowledge, that Lloyd and Susanne have given me over 50 years. May their life and work inspire others.
(Philip Oldenburg has taught political science at Columbia University and has served there as Director and Associate Director of the Southern Asian Institute.)
