The Ones Who Stayed Behind

I

This essay is inspired, or more accurately perhaps provoked, by an invitation to participate in across-cultural symposium on ‘New Trends in South Asian Studies’. The symposium’s organisers suggestedthat while "Europe has long developed research traditions and produced much scholarly work on Asia", itwas "only in the last two decades that an increased production of knowledge has emerged from studiesconducted by Asian scholars ‘at home’, to the extent that these have come to challenge past researchtrends and contributed to a renewed vision of these societies and cultures." Here, social science researchof quality is believed to be of recent provenance in south Asia. It is further claimed that south Asianscholarship has come of age only through the migration of talented individuals to the intellectual centres ofthe west. Thus "Asian scholars are increasingly holding academic positions in the most prestigiousinstitutions in the West, focusing on new questions, new objects, new approaches which – it might be argued– have contributed to defining new paradigms for research and to reconsidering the links betweendisciplines (i e, anthropology and history)".¹ 

Certainly, at the time the British left the sub-continent in 1947, there was not, in the strict sense, anestablished social science tradition in the region. The universities were few and far between. Research wasnot their aim; rather, they were supposed only to turn out lawyers and clerks and irrigation engineers. Therewere no serious scholarly journals either. Nonetheless, there were some individuals who defied theinhospitable climate of colonial rule to produce work of high quality. In Mumbai, G S Ghurye was encouraginghis students to conduct rigorous field-work while himself working on an enviable range of subjects: race,Indology, the comparison of civilisations. In Lucknow, Radhakamal Mukerjee was pioneering the discipline ofsocial ecology. In Puné, Irawati Karve was beginning the studies of caste and kinship organisation with whichshe was to make her name. Across the country, in Calcutta, Nirmal Bose was developing his idea of the ‘Hindumodel of tribal absorption’.² 

Research in the social sciences and humanities got a ferocious fillip with Independence. There were now newuniversities with new departments. New professional associations and journals were born. By the standards of apoor country, the state was generous with its funding. The quantity and, in time, the quality of researchmarkedly increased. Institutions such as the Delhi School of Economics set standards of research and teachingto match those elsewhere in the world. Scholars were encouraged and inspired by the commitment of theirpolitical leaders to the spirit of democracy. Unlike in other ex-colonies, there were no curbs on the freedomof expression and movement. Researchers could go where they wished, study what they wanted to, and say whatthey thought.

Fortunately for the new generation of South Asian scholars, there were now three acknowledged journals ofmerit: The Indian Economic and Social History Review, edited by Dharma Kumar from the Delhi School ofEconomics; Contributions to Indian Sociology, edited by T N Madan at the Institute of Economic Growth, and TheEconomic Weekly (later the Economic and Political Weekly), edited, successively, by SachinChaudhuri and Krishna Raj from Bombay. These outstanding editors published essays on all kinds of themes:economic planning, agrarian structure, foreign trade; caste, kinship, social conflict; religion, partypolitics, electoral behaviour; nationalism, environmentalism, feminism. They could call upon a bevy offirst-rate Indian scholars who would write for them or solicit essays for them. Consider some of the peopleliving and working in India in the 1960s and 1970s, the scholars whose names peeped in and out of theaforementioned journals. They included Romilla Thapar, Irfan Habib, and Ashin Dasgupta in history; S CDube, André Béteille, and M N Srinivas in sociology; Amartya Sen, K N Raj, V M Dandekar and KrishnaBharadwaj in economics; and Rajni Kothari in political science.

The list, naturally, is illustrative, not exhaustive. Other names could (and must) be added. What they willillustrate is that, speaking of India, at any rate, one could say with confidence that by the late 1960s therewas in place a vigorous tradition of research and debate in the humanities and social sciences. It is quitemistaken to suggest that "it is only in the last two decades" that work by Asian scholars at home andabroad has "come to challenge past research trends and contributed to a renewed vision of these societiesand cultures".

These words suggest an amnesia that, unfortunately, is quite widespread. The increasing visibility of southAsians in the international (especially American) academy has led to the mistaken and ahistorical claim thatthere was no tradition of serious research before the present crop of diasporic intellectuals made theirleisurely way to the west. The work done by the Indian scholars of an earlier generation, it must beunderlined, was theoretically subtle as well as empirically rich. André Béteille’s comparative studies ofinequality elegantly matched social theory with field materials. M N Srinivas provided three concepts thatgreatly aided the understanding of modern India: Sanskritisation, dominant caste, and vote bank. (Thelast of these concepts, indeed, can be used with profit to explore political processes almost anywhere in themodern world.) Radhakamal Mukerjee anticipated, by decades, the methodological alliance recently forged inAmerican university departments between ecology and the social sciences. Years before any of us, thesescholars were "focusing on new questions, new objects, new approaches which – it might be argued – havecontributed to defining new paradigms for research and to reconsidering the links between disciplines".

A direct acknowledgement of the robustness of Indian scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s is how highly thiswork was regarded in the metropolitan centres of intellectual power. In the early 1960s, Romilla Thapar wasinvited to write the Penguin History of India. A decade later, Dharma Kumar was asked to edit the CambridgeEconomic History of India. Two women scholars based in India were chosen over a host of likely foreigncontenders by these generally conservative publishing houses. More noteworthy still were the invitations toIndian sociologists to undertake projects that were not about India at all. Thus M N Srinivas was invited toedit the posthumously collected papers of A R Radcliffe-Brown, and André Béteille was asked by Penguin toedit an authoritative cross-cultural collection on social inequality.³ 

A second indicator of the ‘state of the field’ was that the best foreign scholars of south Asia wishedto publish their best work in Indian journals. That was where the most vigorous and productive debates were.This is where you wished to be noticed if you lived in Paris or New York but worked on caste, or peasants, orde-industrialisation, or religious violence.

Since the 1980s, however, there has arisen a parallel discourse on south Asia. This is conducted in NorthAmerican journals. The actors may be mostly of south Asian origin, and the subjects may nominally be southAsian. But the place of publication and, more importantly, the style of analysis and presentation are drivenby the preoccupations of the American academy.

Thus, in 2003, one can speak meaningfully of two quite distinct discourses: one conducted within India, oneconducted outside but apparently on India. These discourses have different inflections, different theoreticalorientations, different purposes. Also, for the most part, different and largely overlapping casts ofcharacters. Thus Indians living and working in India write primarily in Indian journals, while non-residentIndians and (increasingly) foreign scholars write primarily in journals published in north America.

The separation of the two discourses comes home most powerfully when one reads dissertations produced inAmerica, which often tend to be ignorant of relevant Indian literature in the field, while quoting to excessworks of social theory which seem to have little bearing on the dissertation’s themes.

One more pointer to this separation: the journals a scholar might choose to publish his or her work in. Iknow from experience how hard it is to persuade a young scholar based in North America to publish in one ofthe quality Indian journals I have mentioned. Of 10 individuals one asks, at best two or three might considerit, and then not for the ‘meat’ of their work, which is reserved for publication in American journals, butfor its incidental by-products. On would think that for a diasporic scholar working on topics such asagriculture and pastoralism the Economic and Political Weekly is the logical place to publish, for the journalis read by thousands of scholars, social workers, activists, journalists and bureaucrats. To publish in itspages is to actively contribute to a rich and sophisticated public debate. When such a scholar chooses anAmerican journal in preference to the EPW, it is not difficult to conclude that for him (or her)‘India’ is merely a resource on the road to scholarly advancement.

There is some traffic of ideas, but only a little. The Indian journals can be read by those in the west whoare interested. However, the prohibitive cost of foreign journals means that, at least outside Delhi, noIndian student can get to read them. As for the aspiring scholar, he or she has to very quickly decide wherehis or her primary audience must lie. For the two discourses are driven by very different agendas. One isresponding to the history and social debates of the sub-continent, the other to debates current in theAmerican academy. The point will become clearer if one tries to compile an alphabetical lists of key words.The list, for the Indian case, might begin with ‘adivasi, backward caste, communalism, decentralisation...’.The list, for the North American or diasporic scenario, might begin with ‘aporia, bricolage, culturalstudies, deconstruction...’ Likewise, a list of key texts and authors in India might begin with ‘Ambedkar,Béteille, (the) Constitution, Dharampal...’, whereas the diasporic list might begin with ‘Althusser,Bourdieu, Certeau, Derrida....’. The point cannot be over-stressed: that one discourse is located firmly inthe cultural and political mileu of the sub-continent, whereas the other discourse is deliberately distancingitself from that milieu.

II

As I see it, scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences basically has three kinds of motivations.One might be driven by the criteria of ‘relevance’, by the desire to influence policy by one’s work orat least correct the injustices of history by one’s writing. One might be excited by an intellectual puzzle,seeking through research and analysis to explain a complicated social process. Or one might merely befollowing an intellectual fashion.

The first two agendas take their cues from the wider world. They are both productive of serious andrigorous empirical research. The last trend is a response to the printed word. It is dictated by the journalsor thinkers that are currently influential. Here, research takes second place to what passes for ‘theory’.

None of these agendas are the privilege of any particular geographical location. Specific research projectsmay partake of more than one agenda. Over the course of their careers individuals may shift from one style ofresearch to another. Yet I would suggest that there are discernible orientations, clear choices made byscholars and, in the aggregate, by communities. Indian scholars are more likely to be moved by ‘socialrelevance’ in choosing their topic of study and strategies of research. European scholars are by temperamentand training more inclined to seek out, and answer, an intellectual puzzle. And scholars based in America arejust a little more likely to be driven by fashion.

I have myself been lucky to have known two scholars who have devoted more than a decade of their lives to asingle project. Nicholas Boyle, of Cambridge, had, as a very young man, planned a definitive life of Goethe;Hans Medick, of Gottingen, had, in middle-age – when other historians consider writing a ‘soft’ volumeon historiography – begun a long-range study of a single Swabian village. The two volumes Boyle has nowpublished have assured his work the status of a great modern biography. Medick’s study of Laichingen, whenpublished, was immediately acclaimed as a classic work of social history. The years of toil and struggle paidoff: yet can one easily imagine their undertaking the task had they been located in an American academy? Wouldnot considerations of tenure, citation indices, student assessments and the like have put paid to any suchambitions?

As it happens, there are a few American scholars who have bucked the trend. One such is Robert P Goldman ofthe University of California at Berkeley. He has made it his life’s work to study and translate theRamayana. He is a scholar of depth and subtlety who is truly in command of his subject. But the subject, alas,is not currently fashionable. Indeed, it can too easily be cast as an ‘Orientalist’ project, anunpolitical and hence anti-political work of the kind white males tend to take up.

Another American scholar I greatly admire is Richard Eaton. His book The Rise of Islam on the BengalFrontier is a classic. It starts with a puzzle: how did Islam most flourish in a part of the sub-continentdistant from the centres of Muslim rule? Why did Bengalis convert en masse when the rajputs and jats, so closeto Delhi, did not? Eaton learnt some new languages to find out. Still, the answer required him to detour intogeography, agriculture, anthropology, religious history, and architecture. His book thus became a ‘total’history. Yet it is presented in prose so transparent that it effectively masks the years of dogged anddifficult research which lie beneath it. The illustrations, gathered from the author’s fieldwork, are anadded treat.

A third American scholar I might mention here is Thomas Trautmann. He is a superb intellectual craftsmanwhose chosen field is the history of ideas. I have read with delight Trautmann’s extraordinary ‘biographyof a book’, on the making of Lewis Henry Morgan’s book on kinship. I have been educated and entertained byhis recent essays on the idea of race and the study of Indian languages. His little essay ‘Elephants and theMauryas’ is one of my all-time favourite pieces of historical reconstruction.

I have singled out a series of white men, so let me complicate the picture by introducing a littlediversity. A fourth American whose work has both captivated and influenced me is Eleanor Zelliot, the doyenneof historians of untouchability, that senstitive student of contemporary Maharashtra who is widely admired bythe scholars and activists of Maharashtra. The last name on this necessarily abbreviated list is that of AnnGrodzins Gold. Gold is the author of an acclaimed study of Rajasthani pilgrims. I have just read her mostrecent book, which is an ethno-history of the changing physical and moral ecology of Rajasthan. This is amodel of empathetic and in-depth ethnography, its results communicated with an uncommon grace.⁴ 

Where do Goldman and Eaton and Trautmann and Zelliot and Gold figure in the canon of south Asian Studies?Judging from the country where they work in, the United States of America, not very high. Were they to enter aseminar room at the Association of Asian Studies meetings there would not be the buzz that would certainlyaccompany the entrance of diasporic scholars ten times as glamorous but not half as accomplished. I venture tosuggest that there are two reasons for this state of affairs: the style of their research, which is classicalrather than contemporary, and the colour of their skin. For the demographic changes in the American academyand the rise of ‘identity politics’ have successfully marginalised the white scholar of south Asia. Thecareful empirical work and command of languages that was their hallmark now tends to be dismissed as‘irrelevant’ (or worse). The need to appear politically correct or to be in with the latest trends becomesparamount. These trends can have a painful effect on emigré scholars too. At least two Indian historians ofmy acquaintance have abandoned empirical research after moving to permanent jobs in US universities. They eachwrote a fine work of social history, based on research in a dozen different archives. They have now taken towriting essays based on books ordered from the library. These essays are supposed to be exercises in‘theory’. For the most part, however, they are merely extended literature reviews, parasitic assessmentsof other people’s works according to the winds of theoretical fashion and the canons of politicalcorrectness.