THE career of Rajni Kothari not only helps to narrate the story of the founding of CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) but also of how political science in India acquired a measure of national and international visibility. Much of this story is told through a kind of personal ethnography on which we draw, Kothari’s 2002 book, Memoirs: Uneasy is the Life of the Mind. It details Kothari’s role as an institution-builder and a conceptual and methodological pioneer. We tell Rajni Kothari’s story from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s when his fierce opposition to Indira Gandhi’s emergency changed his life’s trajectory, eventuating in the formation of Lokayan, ‘a Gandhian-socialist’¹ civil society organization that strived to arouse political participation and promoted social change at the grassroots.

Our story starts with a double recognition, one by Sachin Chaudhury, the fabled founding editor of The Economic Weekly, the other by Richard Park, perhaps the first American political scientist of India and himself something of an institution-builder.

After obtaining a B.Sc. (Econ) at the London School of Economics, Kothari returned from England in the mid-1950s and in 1958 took up a post as lecturer in the political science and economics departments at the University of Baroda. He reports a ‘breakthrough’ as a result of ‘chance encounters’ during his ‘first field investigation’ at the All India Congress Committee session at Bhavnagar in Gujarat. He gained access to ‘some rather well-known individuals... and entered into extensive discussions with all types of Congressmen from different regions... discovering widespread existence of factions and groups... the play of power conflicts... and how all this was shaping the running of government at various levels’.² 

‘Spurred by the "field work" at Bhavnagar’, Kothari wrote a series of six articles in 1961 under the title ‘Form and Substance in Indian Politics’. ‘Young though I was,’ Sachin Chaudhury ‘reposed full trust in me’ by publishing the first article in a series, counting on Kothari to deliver the rest in successive weeks. ‘In a matter of a few years,’ Kothari writes, ‘I was able to launch, along with some others, what many of [my] reviewers have dubbed as a "new political science".’³ 

 

Kothari’s second recognition happened soon thereafter when his ‘Form and Substance’ series which, he tells us, ‘created quite an impact’, caught the attention of Richard Park, resident head of the Asia Foundation in India.⁴ Kothari quotes Park as describing the series as ‘a breath of fresh air in under-standing Indian politics.’ Park provided Kothari with ‘a small sum of money’, enough it seems to transform ‘a large empty hall into a workspace for half a dozen people.’⁵ This space, the then unused Indian Adult Education Association office at I.P. Estate in New Delhi, became the centre that Kothari had been thinking about, a place deliberately set up to be free of official pressures and academic bureaucracy. It was under these circumstances that in 1963 Kothari launched the CSDS.

Park’s ‘small grant’ ran for only three years. There was no assurance of continuity, much less of security or big salaries. ‘The kinds of people who joined,’ Kothari writes, ‘were least concerned about salaries and perks and security.’ They joined, he says, because they felt excited about ‘the prospect that lay ahead.’

The CSDS soon became the premier institution in India for social science research. It did so because Kothari attracted talented risk-takers to the centre, encouraged them to identify and pursue unconventional research subjects, and quickly built a high-morale community of scholars and intellectuals.⁶ 

 

Early in his career, Kothari became a bridge between American and Indian political science. He spent four months at Stanford University in 1964 at the instance of Gabriel Almond, the dominant figure in his day in comparative politics; then spent a year at the Centre for the Study of Behavioural Sciences at Palo Alto, and encountered the Survey Research Centre at Michigan, the Mecca of survey research and electoral studies both then and now. Kothari arranged for the extended collaboration of the CSDS with Philip Jacob of the University of Pennsylvania on a cross-national study of values in politics, and with Samuel Eldersveld, of the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Centre, to study Kerala’s 1965 state assembly election and India’s 1967 national election.⁷ The two projects that Kothari brought home from his Stanford visit provided a ‘comfortable financial base’ for the CSDS, including means to train teams that Kothari’s centre was then building.⁸ Kothari was not the first Indian political scientist to study electoral behaviour in India,⁹ but his energetic early involvement helped establish election studies as one of the hallmarks of Indian political science.

 

It is hard to date the behavioural turn in political science and in other social sciences in India or to capture fully why it was taken but there is no doubt that Rajni Kothari took the turn and contributed mightily to it. One reason for the turn in India seems to have been a desire to shed the colonial legacy which, in political science, was the institutional and legal scholarship that characterized academic work under the British raj. Of course, institutional political science continues to this day; there is continuity as well as change. That is why for India we speak of a ‘turn’ rather than, as was the case for the US, a behavioural ‘revolution’.

In addition to shedding the colonial legacy, another reason for the behavioural turn was the enhanced prestige that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Prime Minister for the first fourteen years of Independence, brought to science as a way of thinking and acting. For him, science was an antidote to tradition and religion. Jawaharlal Nehru’s influence on the 1950s and 1960s made those decades an era of enthusiastic modernism, of five year plans and of scientific development. The decades reflected Nehru’s effort to place science at the centre of India’s intellectual life. Behaviouralism gave political scientists reason to believe political science’s claim to be a ‘science’. They began to deprecate institutional, legalist, and normative approaches to the study of political science. It should be concerned with causality and laws, not interpretation and meaning, work with survey instruments and population samples, not case studies, and favour synchronic over diachronic analysis. At one level, behaviouralism was welcomed in the US and in India for similar reasons, its empiricism.

 

Behaviouralism encouraged political scientists to put aside their texts, leave their studies and libraries, and get into the ‘field’ to do hands-on research among voters and politicians. In the US, it was primarily in the cities; in India primarily in the villages. In Kothari’s words, ‘We knew very little [in the 1960s] about what ordinary people thought about with respect to socio-political, cultural and psychological subjects.’¹⁰ 

In the US, empiricism in the form of the ‘behavioural revolution’ was experienced as a paradigm shift, liberating political science from the texts of the ‘classical curriculum’, the context-less study of formal institutions, and an unreflexive normativity. In India, it was experienced as a triple liberation, not only from the ‘classical curriculum’ and institutional formalism, but also from the culturally alien literature of the Macaulay legacy in Indian higher education. By 1969 David Easton in his 1969 presidential address at the American Political Science Association called for an end to the behavioural revolution because behaviourism had succumbed to a sterile scientism and formalism that prevented professionally ambitious political scientists from addressing pressing real world problems such as war and poverty.¹¹ 

 

In India behavioural political science was addressing an important real world problem by showing that democracy in the form of universal suffrage and competitive elections could succeed in India, a country that, Seymour Martin Lipset in 1959 alleged lacked the ‘requisites of democracy’.¹² 

Behaviouralism not only opened an avenue for ‘science’ in India’s political science world, it also contributed towards liberating India’s intellectual life from its Brahmanical legacy. Behaviouralism had a counter-hierarchical thrust. Arriving on the scene at a historical moment, when India was becoming a constitutional democracy and introducing universal suffrage, behavioural political science proved attractive because its democratic characteristics subverted an elitist culture of knowledge. Behavioural political science sought and found knowledge about the many, not the few; about the sovereign people, not about sacred texts. It dignified knowledge about persons from all walks of life and stations in society, and rewarded the labour of those who went into the field to acquire that knowledge. Gopal Guru went further when he argued in ‘How Egalitarian are the Social Sciences in India’: as 50 years of ‘experience shows, social science practice has harboured a cultural hierarchy dividing it into the vast, inferior mass of academics who pursue empirical social science and the privileged few who are considered the theoretical pundits with reflective capacity which makes them intellectually superior to the former. To use a more familiar analogy, Indian social science presents a pernicious divide between theoretical brahmins and empirical shudras.¹³ 

 

In addition to helping transfer behavioural political science from the US to India, Rajni Kothari also helped to introduce modernization theory and its correlate, structural functionalism to India. Both had emanated from the work of Talcott Parsons, the Harvard sociologist who, with the University of Chicago’s Edward Shils, in 1951 published the essay ‘Toward a General Theory of Action’, in a book of the same name.¹⁴ They laid out the four functions of ‘the social system’ and the five ‘pattern variables’ that defined modernization.¹⁵ 

The basics of structural functionalism and modernization theory soon took possession of political science’s commanding heights in the US as the writings of David Easton and Gabriel Almond gained increasing influence. In 1960, Almond made the extraordinary claim that ‘the concept of the political system... separates out analytically the structures which perform political functions in all societies regardless of scale, degree of differentiation and culture’, and wrote about ‘the universality of political structure’ and ‘the universality of the political functions’.¹⁶ 

 

In his 1959 Foreword to the 1960 Almond and Coleman edited volume, The Politics of Developing Areas, Frederick Dunn, Director of Princeton University’s Centre for International Studies, held that Almond had made possible ‘for the first time, a comparative method of analysis for political systems of all kinds’, not least the political systems of those areas of the world in which dramatic social changes are taking place – Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Almond was instrumental in convincing the US Social Science Research Council to sponsor and fund the Committee on Comparative Politics that for more than a decade stood astride the research paradigm and funding for the study of comparative politics in the US, and cast a shadow over political science in India.¹⁷ 

 

As we have already noted, Rajni Kothari, along with Bashiruddin Ahmed, spent the academic year 1968-9 on the Stanford University campus at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Gabriel Almond was their sponsor and mentor. At the Centre, Kothari worked on what would become Politics in India, in his view his ‘most systematic and comprehensive piece of work, a work preposterously known as "classics" which stands apart from all the other works that I have done.’¹⁸ Its structural-functionalism orientation gained the imprimatur of Gabriel Almond who in 1970 published it in the US in his Little Brown series in comparative politics. To our knowledge Politics in India was the first work of an Indian political scientist to be given such international recognition. Politics in India not only improved Kothari’s standing as a political scientist in India but also legitimated modernization theory and structural functionalism in India.

Modernization theory and structural functionalism performed an ‘imperializing’ role in India and other ‘third world’ countries by ignoring or obliterating cultural and historical differences in the name of uniform processes which were said to be the same everywhere and always.¹⁹ In the face of deep-seated cultural and social differences and radically different historical contexts, Almond and Coleman held that the features that they found to characterize Euro-American developmental history would have to be replicated if third world countries were to become ‘developed’, modern, and democratic. They would have to become like us. Modernization theory imagined only one historical path, that trod by the West, and one goal, the modernity said to characterize the West.

 

Rajni Kothari, the social scientist of the 1950s and 1960s who founded and shaped CSDS, is not the Rajni Kothari of the 1980s and beyond. That Rajni Kothari had to flee the country as a result of his vigorous opposition to Indira Gandhi’s mid-1970s Emergency. In the 1980s he founded and shaped Lokayan, a civil society organization and movement. Its aim was to establish a grassroots model of mass politics in which the people are more important than the state. In his acceptance speech for ‘The Right Living Award’ in 1985, Rajni Kothari told his audience that ‘Lokayan is an attempt to build bridges across both the world of action and the world of knowledge.’ It asks intellectuals to move ‘away from specialized knowledge to… social knowledge’, a form of knowledge that goes beyond explaining the world to changing it.²⁰ 

 

Footnotes:

1. This is how Gail Omvedt characterized Kothari’s Lokayan in Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 1993, p. 193.

2. Rajni Kothari, Memoirs: Uneasy is the Life of the Mind. Rupa, New Delhi, 2002, pp. 30-31.

3. Kothari, pp. 30-1.

4. In 1967 US media revealed that CIA was funding a number of organizations, including the Asia Foundation. For documents and texts corroborating this news see U. S. State Department, Johnson Administration, Foreign Relations 1964-1968, Vol X, National Security Policy. Washington, D.C. 2002. It remains unclear whether or not Richard Park was aware of the Asia Foundation’s source of funds. We can assume that Rajni Kothari was not.

5. Uma Shankar Phadnis told Kothari about ‘a place called the Indian Adult Education Association [IAEA], located on Indraprastha Estate, which had all the space in the world but did not know what to do with it and where I could… consider setting up the centre I had in mind.’ Kothari, pp. 37-38. CSDS later shifted to Delhi to its present location near the University of Delhi at 29 Rajpur Road.

6. The talented risk-takers became leading scholars. They included Kothari’s friends, Gopal Krishna, who helped convert the IAEA’s large space , Bashiruddin Ahmed, D.L. Sheth, Ramashray Roy, Ashis Nandy, Ghanshyam Shah, Anil Bhat, Rishikesh Maru, and H.R. Chaturvedi. Maru and Chaturvedi ‘are no more’, but those who have left the Centre, all ‘are today [2002] known figures and either heads of institutions and senior professors at major places of learning. Kothari, pp. 38-39.

7. Samuel Eldersveld’s interest in Indian politics was an exception to the determined parochialism of most American behaviourists, starting with those at the Survey Research Centre, whose focus was resolutely on American electoral behaviour.

8. Kothari, pp. 215-16.

9. The first study we have been able to locate was of the first general election; see S.V. Kogekar and Richard L. Park, Reports on the Indian General Election, 1951-1952. Popular Book Depot, Bombay, 1956.

10. Kothari, p. 216.

11. David Easton, ‘The New Revolution in Political Science’, The American Political Science Review, LXIII (4), 1969, pp. 1051-61.

12. See Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review 53(1), 1959, where he argued that democracy should be a failure in India because it stood at or near the bottom on measures of the requisites of democracy such as per capita income, literacy, industrialization and urbanization, yet it was and has continued to be a democracy.

13. Economic and Political Weekly, 14 December 2002, p. 5003.

14. Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action. Harper Torchbooks/Harper and Row, New York, 1962.

15. Social systems are anthropomorphized: they have ‘needs’ related to survival, system maintenance, and viability.

The four functions specified are adaptability, goal attainment, integration, and pattern maintenance.

The pattern variables that are said to define actor orientation and to distinguish tradition and modernity are: affectivity and affective neutrality; particularism and universalism; diffuseness and specificity; ascription and achievement; and expressiveness and instrumentality.

For a critique of the dichotomous view of tradition and modernity and a view of social change based on adaptation, see the ‘Introduction’ to Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967 and subsequent editions.

16. Gabriel Almond, ‘Introduction: A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics’, in Gabriel Almond and James S. Coleman (eds.), The Politics of Developing Areas. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1960, pp. 3-64.

17. A lot of this research appeared in the eight volumes sponsored by he SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics. The last volume edited and contributed to by Leonard Binder, Crises and Sequences in Political Development, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1971, repudiated the structural-functional paradigm in the name of contingent change and cultural and historical specificity.

18. Kothari, p. 69. That Kothari in this book was in the grip of Almond’s structural-functionalism can be seen from a claim in Memoirs that he had modified Almond and Coleman’s concept of the ‘politics of aggregation’ with the conceptualization of ‘intermediate aggregation (Kothari, p. 68).

19. See Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World’, in Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty Year Perspective, 1956-2006. Vol I. The Realm of Ideas: Inquiry and Theory. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2008, pp. 100-118.

20. For the text of Rajni Kothari’s ‘The Right Livelihood Award’ , 9 December 1985, see http://www.rightlivelihood.org/lokayan_ speech.html