Lloyd I. Rudolph

Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy

Webers understanding of bureaucracy, despite substantial qualification and revision, remains the dominant paradigm for the study of administration and formal organizations. We continue the process of revision by accepting his ideal-typical concepts of bureaucratic and patrimonial administration, but subject them to theoretical and historical reinterpretation and application. Our reading of historical change as it relates to bureaucracy leads us to question Webers interpretations. His conceptualization of bureaucracy in terms of rational-legal-authority and formal rationality fails to take account of the existence and use of power within and outside of organizations, and of the persistence of patrimonial features. The use of power produces conflict and pathologies. When these serve the legitimate values and interests of participants and actors in the organizational environment, they can have benign consequences. The persistence of patrimonial features, rather than signalling the survival of dysfunctional atavisms, can promote administrative effectiveness by mitigating conflict and promoting organizational loyalty, discipline, and efficiency.

Barristers and Brahmans in India: Legal Cultures and Social Change

“You have given India,” Secretary of State Sir Samuel Hoare once told his officers, “justice such as the East has never known before.” For most Englishmen, having established therule of law” on the Indian subcontinent was probably the proudest achievement of the British raj . They believed that they had substituted legal security for disorder, predictability for uncertainty, and impartiality for whim and nepotism.

The Modernity of Tradition: The Democratic Incarnation of Caste in India.

Marxs century-old socio-political analysis of peasant nations and of Indias traditional village and caste society, because it captures so much of contemporary social and political analysis, provides a convenient framework for critical discussion and evaluation of the relationship between traditional society and modern politics in India. Peasant nations such as mid-nineteenth century France, Marx observed in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , are formed “by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes.” Objectively, peasants form a class; the mode of life, interests and culture which flow from their productive circumstances separate peasants from other classes and place their class in opposition to other classes. But subjectively and practically, peasants form a vast mass, “the members of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one another.”

Federalism as State Formation in India: A Theory of Shared and Negotiated Sovereignty

In the master narrative of the formation of the modern state, its unified, monopoly sovereignty is presented as universal, the natural culmination of a teleological process. We challenge the naturalness and universality of that claim by historicizing the sovereignty concept. We do so by examining the history of state formation in late medieval and early modern Europe. When, why and how were sovereignty concepts constructed and contested are questions that engage the politics of category formation. After historicizing the sovereignty concept, we turn to the study of federalism in India as state formation process rather than studying it constitutionally or comparatively.

Engaging Subjective Knowledge: How Amar Singh's Diary Narratives of and by the Self Explain Identity Formation

What should count as knowledge in political science? We have tried here to show that subjectivity is valid and useful, that firstperson accounts of experience—‘telling what I know,” narratives of and by the self, partial and contingent truths, and self-asother ethnography—contribute to knowledge. The move to subjective knowledge does not require the abandonment of objectivity. Self-consciousness and reflexivity simply make it possible to render the familiar unfamiliar, to gain a certain detachment, to achieve “objective subjectivity.” Subjective knowledge helps to explain identity and category formation and the politics of recognition. Accessibility to the politics of those taken to be outside the public sphere, those whose behavior is not easily observed or counted by objective political science—colonized persons, subalterns, and marginalized minorities—depends on their ability to articulate their identities, purposes, and interests. Such forms of identity politics have become of increasing interest to political scientists concerned with subaltern agency, multiculturalism, and ethnic conflict and peace.

Self as Other: Amar Singh's Diary as Reflexive ‘Native’ Ethnography

Amar Singh at twenty began writing on a daily basis. His diary extends over 44 years, from 1898 to 1942. Its last entry is dated 1 November 1942. He died that night. These days, the 89 quarto-size bound volumes averaging 800 manuscript pages can be found at Kanota Fort, ten miles east of Jaipur off the Agra road, where Mohan Singh, his nephew and heir, keeps them in glass-fronted Victorian cabinets in one of the several rooms Amar Singh called his library. In the essay that follows1 I try to show why and how Amar Singh, a diarist writing reflexively about himself, constructed a ‘self as other’ethnography of turn-of-the-century princely and British India. Through the medium of his diary he becomes a participant, an observer, an informant, a narrator, and an author. I set the stage for Amar Singhʼns self-as-other ethnography by examining the separation and alienation in anthropological discourse of self and other. Common to ethnography since Malinowskiʼns invented participant-observer field work, the separation was questioned, then challenged by postcolonial Indian and by postmodern Western anthropologists. I then show how Amar Singh, a self-conscious and critical ‘native’ self, constitutes the other in constituting himself. It is a story about how a native came to represent, speak for, and know himself.

Rajni Kothari’s Career in Political Science

Lloyd I. Rudolph is Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago, Chicago. E-mail: lrudolph@uchicago.edu Susanne Hoeber Rudolph is Professor Emerita, University of Chicago, Chicago. E-mail: srudolph@midway.uchicago.edu Studies in Indian Politics 1(1) 1–5

Becoming a diarist: Amar Singh's construction of an Indian personal document

wrote continuously for forty-four years, from 28 March 1898, when he was nineteen going on twenty, until 1 November 1942, the day before his death at sixty-four. The diary fills 90 volumes averaging 800 pages each. He missed one day when he lay unconscious after falling from a horse. Clearly, writing mattered; it was a life-long commitment, central to his being and sense of self. It was a passion and a source of private recognition, but not a vocation, not a profession or public calling.’ He wrote primarily for himself, initially for self-improvement and to master his liminal location be-

Economics' Fall from Grace

otlongago,manypoliticalscientistssufferedfromeconomicsenvy.Somestilldo.Theyvieweconomicsasthequeenofthesocialsciences,claiming that it is “scientific,” like physics.Physicistsandothernaturalscientistsspendmost of their time trying to explain phenomena, butnon-behavioralmicro-economistsspendmostoftheirtimeonmathematicalproofsandeconometrictestsof

The Many Seats at the Round Table of Knowledge: Lloyd I. Rudolph Remarks on Receiving the Grain of Sand Award

The many years Susanne Rudolph and I spent editing and interpreting Amar Singhs diary for our book, Reversing the Gaze , led us to reflect on the multiplicity of forms of knowledge, starting with Amar Singhs first-person, subjective knowledge and extending to the situational truths of Gandhis satyagrahas .