This article was downloaded by: [University of Connecticut]On: 11 October 2014, At: 08:00Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

India ReviewPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/find20

Introduction to the SpecialIssueEswaran SridharanPublished online: 04 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Eswaran Sridharan (2008) Introduction to the Special Issue,India Review, 7:4, 256-259, DOI: 10.1080/14736480802547790

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14736480802547790

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

onne

ctic

ut]

at 0

8:00

11

Oct

ober

201

4

India Review, vol. 7, no. 4, October–December, 2008, pp. 256–259Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN 1473-6489 print; 1557-3036 onlineDOI:10.1080/14736480802547790

FIND1473-64891557-3036India Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, October 2008: pp. 1–4India ReviewIntroduction to the Special IssueIntroductionIndia ReviewESWARAN SRIDHARAN

As the new editor of India Review, and founding editor Sumit Ganguly’ssuccessor, it gives me great pleasure to congratulate him on his timely andtremendous entrepreneurial achievement of founding, nurturing, andestablishing this journal as the only India-dedicated, peer-reviewed pan-social science quarterly in the United States. In this he was ahead of thecurve in anticipating the rising importance of the need to strengthenscholarly understanding of India, with a modern/contemporary focus,given the rise of India’s profile in the world in recent years due to its sus-tained high rate of economic growth, its growing integration with theworld economy, its nuclear capability, its democracy which has sustaineditself despite diverse challenges and the absence of conventional precondi-tions and continuing large-scale poverty and yawning inequalities, and itsincreasingly important location in and growing interaction with the restof Asia from West and Central Asia to Southeast and East Asia. Steppinginto his shoes is both a challenge and an opportunity. I intend to continueIndia Review’s character as a journal focused on issues central to Indianpolitics, economics and society, cutting across disciplines, and combiningtheoretical rigor with policy relevance.

This special issue on “Covering India” contains five articles bysenior scholars of India in two disciplines, political science and anthro-pology, on covering India as academics in the field over the past fivedecades. The articles take us through the trajectory of their studies ofIndia against the backdrop of the evolution of their disciplines and ofarea studies in general, of Indian studies in particular, and of India itself,including India’s relations with the United States. Several of the essaysalso mention in passing the shift in India’s relations with foreign socialscientists from initial openness to relative restrictiveness from the 1970sand allude to the impact of this on Indian studies in US academia. Onthe human interest side, the essays are peppered with vignettes andanecdotes that capture the flavor of life in India for visiting scholarsduring fieldwork stays in earlier decades going back to the late 1950s.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

onne

ctic

ut]

at 0

8:00

11

Oct

ober

201

4

Introduction 257

Importantly, they all allude, at least in passing, to the changing relationswith the growing Indian social science community and its overlap withthe US-based Indian studies community, something that is in sharpcontrast to the situation four or five decades ago.

Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph first arrived in India in 1956 and havespent 12 research years in India since then. Their article outlines the evo-lution of their research, covering issue areas and questions that rangefrom tradition and caste, institutional change including the constructionand meaning of political culture and the interpretation of social structureand social change. In parallel, they also outline their methodological evo-lution which came to understand area studies as “situated knowledge”driven by problems rather than theory, questions over methods, induc-tive rather than deductive generalization, and their broad support ofmethodological pluralism in political science, including making the casefor the validity of subjective, partial and contingent knowledge inresponse to the exclusivist claims of rational choice. Their essay alsocovers their writings as public intellectuals and their work on US foreignpolicy and Indo-US relations.

Stephen Cohen’s essay covers his research on India’s, and in passingPakistan’s, defense and foreign policies since his first visit in 1963.Initially trained in comparative politics and international relations, hisfirst puzzle being civilian control of the military, he also became in thecourse of his research an “accidental” contemporary historian of mili-tary and diplomatic affairs. This eventually led him to appreciate theimportance of domestic politics in foreign policy. His article sketchesthe evolution of his work on Indian defense and foreign policies as wellthe field in general, in both India and the United States, in the context ofIndia’s interactions, including wars, with its neighbors, nested in theglobal bipolar order, and over the past two decades how India’s post-Cold War foreign policy has evolved. He takes us on a detour throughIndia-watching from Japan and cyclone disaster relief in AndhraPradesh, though he does not dwell on his stint in the State Department.His work during this period shifted from the armed forces to nuclearpolicy. Cohen ends by advocating a focus on contemporary India inIndian studies in the United States and a shift away from language andculture studies that look to the past.

Susan Wadley and R. S. Khare, as anthropologists working on Indiasince the 1960s, cover India in ways different from political scientists.Wadley’s article focuses on Karimpur village, near Delhi, which she

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

onne

ctic

ut]

at 0

8:00

11

Oct

ober

201

4

258 India Review

studied from the 1960s till date, going back into its history to the 1920s.In the context of the evolution of her intellectual career and largersocio-economic and cultural changes in India, she examines three shiftsin approaches to the study of rural India that occurred in anthropologyand sociology between the 1960s and the 1990s. These were the impactof the feminist movement and the recognition that village women hadboth subjectivity and voice, the influence of the Subaltern Studies groupon how the subaltern male, by class and caste, was viewed, and the newunderstandings of culture as something not monolithic but constantlybeing created and re-created. The combined effects of these shifts over-turned the view of the Indian peasant as irrational, custom-bound andfatalist that prevailed until the 1960s in anthropology as well as in thewritings of Gandhi. Her account of the changes in occupational andsocial structure, economic development, gender relations and women’slives in Karimpur since the 1960s is situated in these shifts in approachwithin the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and ends withobservations on the impacts of globalization on culture.

R. S. Khare’s essay traces the intellectual career of an Indian anthro-pologist who completed his doctorate in Lucknow in the early 1960sand moved to teach in the United States shortly thereafter. His essayengages with the professional and personal identity issues of an anthro-pologist studying his “own culture” from without, and is structuredaround three concerns: intra-disciplinary shifts, changes in contempo-rary India and, related to these, academic and personal identity issues.Beginning with an account of his early training at Lucknow and thenhis initial exposure to Chicago anthropology in the 1960s, he elaborateson the three major influences on his work: Srinivas’ Sanskritization andother processes of social change in modern India, the Chicago triad ofMarriott, Singer and Cohn, and Dumont’s theory of caste, which hecame to critique. The later parts of the essay explore the dilemmas ofself-critical post-colonial anthropology, moral-political sensitivity andsocial responsibility, and of the need to be aware of the questions posedby an Indian investigator’s identity such as on studying Dalits and sepa-rating Hinduism/Hindu culture from Hindutva formulations. He endswith observations on globalization and culture in twenty-first centuryIndia. His prolonged stay in the United States gradually led to a “thirdposition” transcending either/or Indian/American identity dilemmas inwhich he likes to see himself as “standing at the margins of both . . . yet,paradoxically, not culturally alien . . . to either.”

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

onne

ctic

ut]

at 0

8:00

11

Oct

ober

201

4

Introduction 259

Peter van der Veer, as a Dutch anthropologist of religion beginninghis fieldwork in the 1970s, found anthropological studies of Hinduismdominated by Louis Dumont’s theory of caste, which contrasted theprinciples underlying Indian society sharply with those of Europeanmodernity. He also writes how he had minimal contact with Indiananthropologists at that time. While Dumont’s influence has faded, andwhile ethnography has not developed very much in India, history,particularly subaltern studies, and inter-disciplinary cultural studies,have taken off since the 1980s. He argues that the effect of the “separa-tion of ‘classical’ anthropology from this approach . . . has been that astrange division between Traditional Rural India, studied by anthro-pologists, and a Modern Urban India, studied by cultural studiesscholars, has occurred.” For the anthropology of religion in India themost significant development is not anything internal to the disciplinebut the growth of religious nationalism in India since the 1980s. Whatare needed are studies that connect the anthropology of religion withthe anthropology of violence and studies that analyze the inability ofthe legal system and the police to function effectively. The later partof the essay seeks to go outside of the India–West comparison tocompare religion, rationalism, scientism and the secular state in Indiaand China.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

onne

ctic

ut]

at 0

8:00

11

Oct

ober

201

4