Interpreting Politics - Situated Knowledge, India, and the Rudolph Legacy

This book investigates how people construct meaning and motivation for political action. Building on Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph's seminal scholarship of India, it develops the concept of situated knowledge to argue that people's capacity to empathize and dehumanize as well as their engagement in ongoing discourses and ideational power shape their political action. The volume illuminates contemporary Indian politics by showing how political leadership can transform people's understandings and cause dramatic political transformation.

List of contents

• LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES ix


• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xi


• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii


• FOREWORD: Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph: Partners in Political Science and Indian Studies xv


• Francis W. Hoeber
  


• I Introduction


• 1. Politics as Interpretation


• John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq
  


• II Interpretative Approaches to Political Analysis


• 2. Situated Knowledge, the Construction of Meaning, and Political Action: A Framework for Interpretative Political Analysis


• John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq


• 3. Interpretivism in Motion: Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth 'New' Institutionalism


• Vivien A. Schmidt


• 4. A Different Way of Seeing Things: The Intellectual Legacy of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph


• Kristen Renwick Monroe
  


• III Caste, Class, and the 'Lived Experience' of Political Mobilization


• 5. Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs? The Impact of Class Differentiation in Rural India


• Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan A.


• 6. Does Class Matter in Politics? Rethinking 'Conditions and Reasons'


• Rina Agarwala and Ronald Herring


• 7. Interpreting the Political Economy of the Indian State: Culture, Inequality, and the Conceptual Possibilities of In Pursuit of Lakshmi


• Leela Fernandes
  


• IV The State, Leadership, and Political Change


• 8. From Gandhi to Modi: Enlisting the Rudolphs to Understand Charismatic Leadership


• Amrita Basu


• 9. In Pursuit of Saraswati: The Politics of Autonomy in the Indian University


• Niraja Gopal Jayal


• 10. Civil-Military Relations and Democratic Stability


• Steven I. Wilkinson


• 11. Centrism, Political Leadership, and the Future of Indian Politics


• John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq
  


• INDEX


• EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

About the author

John Echeverri-Gent is associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is author of The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States and co-editor of Economic Reform in Three Giants: U.S. Foreign Policy and the USSR, China, and India. His many articles in comparative public policy and the political economy of development have appeared in Perspectives on Politics; PS: Political Science and Politics; World Development; Policy Studies Journal; Asian Survey; Contemporary South Asia; India Review; and Political Science Quarterly. He is a member of the editorial board of Political Science Quarterly. He has served as consultant to the World Bank and USAID.

Kamal Sadiq (PhD, University of Chicago) is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries (2009, repr. 2010). His articles have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Perspectives, PS: Political Science & Politics, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, and select edited books. He served as chair of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies (ENMISA) section of the International Studies Association (2013-15) and as co-president of the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2015-17). He serves on the editorial board of the journal Citizenship Studies.

Summary

In careers that spanned six decades, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph's rigorous and remarkably empathetic scholarship produced seminal insights about India's politics. With a profound grasp of social science theory and Indian politics, they developed an interpretive mode of political analysis centred on the complex processes by which people construct meaning and motivation for political action.

This volume's eminent authors pay tribute to the Rudolphs' scholarship by examining its contribution 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 analyse how 'situated knowledge' shapes discourse, moral imagination, political strategies, and institutional change. They illuminate how the interaction of caste, class, gender, and religion structures political mobilization; how changing social and political relations affect education policy and civil-military relations; and how political leadership is forging the future of politics in India.

Additional text

An invaluable demonstration of how humanistic social science can provide potent insights into the most challenging developments in India and the world today.

Product details

• Authors: John Echeverri-Gent
• Assisted by: Gent (Editor), Sadiq (Editor), John Echeverri-Gent (Editor), John Echeverri Gent (Editor), Kamal Sadiq (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.03.2021
• EAN: 9780190125011
• ISBN: 978-0-19-012501-1
• No. of pages: 403
• Dimensions: 147 mm x 221 mm x 32 mm
• Weight: 570 g
• Illustrations: Figures 12, Tables 10
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education