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

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.