Interpreting Politics

In careers that spanned six decades, Padma Bhushan award winners Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph elaborated seminal insights about Indian politics. The Rudolphs’ rigorous and remarkably empathetic study of India coupled with their extensive reading of social science theory served as the basis for their development of a broader interpretive mode of political analysis centered on the complex processes by which people construct meaning and motivation for political action. The eminent contributors to this volume pay tribute to the Rudolphs’ scholarship by examining its contributions 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 analyze vital topics including how ‘situated knowledge’ shapes discourse, moral imagination, political strategies, and institutional change. They apply this interpretive approach to Indian politics to illuminate how the interaction of caste, class, gender, and religion has structured political mobilization, how changing social and political relations have affected education policy and civil–military relations, and how political leadership is forging the future of Indian politics.