WHEN I began studying Indian politics in 1972, my mentor in London, W.H. Morris-Jones, gave me one special word of advice. ‘You must hang about the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, because there you will learn.’ I have faithfully followed his advice for forty years – not out of deference to a guru, but because he was right. There I have learned.

He added a few specific comments. The Centre was different from most other Indian institutions. There would be times when the group at the Centre would seem a little disorganized, but don’t be fooled. You must understand that this is a virtue, not a vice. It is the result of their allergy to hierarchy. They are a genuine community of scholars, and the apparent organizational untidiness allows a diversity of disciplines and views – which I would find there – to flourish.

The Fellows at the Centre take turns being Director, so that no one has to take time away from research for very long, and so that no single person or orthodoxy becomes dominant and constraining. They feel free to disagree among themselves, and I should expect them to disagree with me. But those debates occur within a spirit of collegiality and tolerance so that they encourage challenging argument and independent thought without creating damaging divisions. They prize iconoclasm. (None of these things has changed over the intervening four decades.)

He added that many of the best scholars at the Centre do not have degrees from universities in the West. But I should not assume, as some foreign (and indeed, Indian) researchers do, that this is a disadvantage. Some of the very best minds at the Centre did their doctoral studies at what can only be described as obscure Indian universities. But their immense achievements bear witness to the strength of swadeshi education, and to the authenticity that it lends to their work. (This remains as true of the new generation at the Centre as it was of the founding group that he knew.)

Finally, Morris-Jones said that I should listen carefully to the jokes that people at the Centre tell and laugh at. Those jokes, some of which Fellows tell against themselves – or affectionately against each other – often reveal important insights. There have been plenty of examples to validate his comment. Consider two.

 

In 1996, in the days before electronic voting machines, I sat late into the night at the Centre, watching televised Lok Sabha election results as the defeat of the Congress Party slowly emerged. When the trend had become clear, Rajni Kothari (who had introduced us to the old ‘Congress system’) dryly said, ‘It looks like this time we will have "an opposition government" – a distinctly Indian concept.’

And when Morris-Jones died, at the urging of Fellows at the Centre, I told one of his jokes that they especially liked at the memorial meeting in London to celebrate his life. He had been invited to give a lecture at an Indian university. As he drove through the main gate of the campus, he saw student protesters holding up a sign that said ‘Death to the Vice Chancellor’. Morris-Jones then said, ‘I thought they were putting it a little strongly.’ He paused while people laughed, allowing them to think that this was the end of the joke. But then he added the real punch line: ‘...until I met the Vice Chancellor.’ This appealed to the Centre’s collective distaste for overweening authority.

 

To say that the Centre is a multidisciplinary institution does not, at first glance, make it appear especially distinctive. Many other fine Indian research centres also fit that description. But two things make the Centre unusual in this respect. First, the disciplines constantly speak to each other – quite literally, on a daily basis, at their shared lunches. More crucially, many individual Fellows locate themselves on the cusps between different disciplines. We see Fellows straddling the divides between politics and society (and more specifically, between politics and civil society, as well as politics and caste); between science and society, science and culture, and science and politics; between political philosophy/theory and empirical political analyses; between psychology and politics; between culture and politics, and culture and society. The list is longer than that, but it should be apparent that at the Centre, interdisciplinarity is something that happens not just between individuals, but within them.

When we read studies that colleagues at the Centre have produced over the years, it quickly becomes obvious that two different things are going on. They write superb objective analyses, but they also seek to have a civilizing impact – to encourage enlightened thinking and to warn against ideas, actions and trends that may prove dangerous. Sometimes they stick entirely to the first of these activities, but objective analyses are often developed in order to facilitate enlightenment.

The use of a strong word like ‘enlightenment’ may seem risky to some readers, and I recognize the danger. But I cannot think of an occasion on which a study from the Centre went wrong and encouraged destructive thinking. It follows that I share their views, so readers should be on their guard and feel free to dissent. Colleagues at the Centre actually welcome that. Ashis Nandy once complained to me that the reviews of one of his books were all positive – no interesting attacks had been mounted against him. (He may also be disappointed if this collection of papers on the Centre’s first fifty years does not contain some scorching criticism, but I leave that task to other contributors.)

 

There is, of course, a danger that efforts to make a civilizing impact will undermine the objectivity of analyses. But scholars at the Centre have been remarkably successful at avoiding this – a delicate task. They do not shrink from acknowledging – and even from highlighting – trends which are inconvenient to their arguments. When they are wrestling with the evidence, and debating with themselves as much as with others, they often make this plain. This is one reason that their writings do not bore us. At times the complexities that emerge are quite challenging to readers, but the hard work that is needed to understand them usually pays dividends.

Time and again over the years, Fellows at the Centre have surprised and (yes) enlightened me by explaining that arguments that I was making have extra dimensions which I had overlooked. They have often shown me that while my argument is accurate up to a point, the trends that I am describing also cut two (or more) ways – so that they produce not only the outcomes that I am discussing, but something like their opposites at the same time. This has changed the way that I analyse things. I now habitually look for ironic, counterintuitive implications – asking myself what colleagues at the Centre would say if I presented a one-dimensional analysis of any given trend.

 

Very occasionally, I have anticipated their subtleties, but this has happened rarely enough to make the memories of those moments stick in my mind. In 1983, when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister, I gave a talk at the Centre, beginning with a statement of the obvious – that she had radically centralized power in her own hands. One of the Fellows jumped in to say, ‘No, no, Mrs. Gandhi is not that powerful.’ With great relief, I was then able to say that I was about to make exactly that point. She had, ironically, weakened herself by cutting off the flow of reliable information from below, because her subordinates were so frightened of her that they told her what they thought she wanted to hear. The fact that after nearly thirty years I can still recall that discussion – an unusual moment of triumph, when I showed that I could mount an argument that met their high standards – reminds me that Morris-Jones was right about the importance of visiting the Centre, because ‘there you will learn’.

Interruptions by Fellows at the Centre, like the one described just above, are invariably made in an amiable spirit. So when you are on the receiving end, you do not suffer intimidation. I have never been ‘talked down to’ on my visits there. They take pleasure in sharing ideas, but not in demonstrating superior understanding – even when that is in fact being demonstrated. They also take visible pleasure in learning from a visitor. They listen carefully, in case s/he has something new to say. I can again recall occasions when, as a Karnataka specialist, I was able to explain that one or another parliamentary constituency in that state was typical or atypical in its social composition – or that Lingayats were a broadly inclusive sect that had resulted from a reform movement in the twelfth century, so that (unlike Karnataka’s Vokkaligas) they include groups with diverse traditional occupations. Their obvious enjoyment at such moments makes me think of a line from Chaucer to describe a typical Fellow of the Centre: ‘Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.’

 

One quite startling event in January of this year offered evidence of how the Centre’s tradition of collegiality has proved infectious within Indian social science, which in its own right has long been quite congenial by international standards. Rajeev Bhargava (the current Director of the Centre), and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (the President of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi) had each received awards for their achievements from different agencies in India. A dinner was arranged to celebrate the two awards. It was attended by a diversity of distinguished social scientists from diverse institutions and diverse schools of thought, from across India. By good fortune, I happened to be in Delhi and was invited to attend. These two Centres complement each other, but they are also formidable rivals – and yet the entire occasion was marked by a remarkable spirit of generosity and fraternal solidarity. It is difficult to imagine such an event and such a spirit in Britain, Europe, the U.S., or any of the numerous developing countries where I have studied.

After half a century, the Centre is a place not just of accomplishments but of promise. We cannot always say that of institutions which have reached middle age. It has long been quick to identify and analyse crucial themes which become fashionable years later – not only within India but internationally. The extraordinarily early work on (and with) civil society in the Lokayan project which led to analyses of the ‘non-party political process’ provide one example. Another was their very early focus on democratic decentralization. I later became a specialist on that latter topic, and when people ask me how I had the foresight to fasten onto that theme as early as 1991, I tell them that I got the idea from colleagues at the Centre who beat me to it by many years.

 

In more recent times we have seen the Centre develop formidable analyses of culture, society and politics in urban centres; of the changing shape and roles of caste amid economic transformation; of election results and popular opinion, using immensely sophisticated polling techniques; of relations between central and state governments as power has been radically redistributed away from the once dominant Prime Minister’s Office since 1989; and so on. Several of these efforts have entailed outreach to otherwise rather isolated people widely dispersed across India – through Lokayan, and more recently Lokniti and the National Election Study – and indeed, across South Asia through (for example) the ‘State of Democracy in South Asia’ project.

These undertakings have brought new generations of scholars into the Centre and into its ever-widening networks – and that has kept it agile and (at age fifty) ‘young’. When I send research students to India today, I give them the same advice that I received four decades ago: hang about the Centre, because there you will learn.