SEEKING to understand the nature and dynamics of Indian society and polity, especially their complexity and interconnections; helping India’s liberal democracy to work and succeed by scrutinizing citizens’ behaviour closely and doing so with a missionary zeal; vigorously exploring alternative ideas on culture and social change while challenging many established notions, CSDS has established its global reputation as an Indian landmark, a sarai where you pause and reflect. (No wonder, Sarai, CSDS’s programme on urban culture is one of its proud wings today.) CSDS’s Golden Jubilee is indeed a moment of celebration. Its accomplishments are a great tribute to its visionary founder Rajni Kothari who after crossing 80 is himself a part of this happy celebration.

My fifty years in Delhi since I came from Odisha to join MA in political science at Delhi University, happen to coincide with the history of CSDS. I had the privilege to see the emergence and flowering of this lively centre all these years from a close periphery. Personally and institutionally, I was a part of many programmes ranging from election studies by CSDS to curriculum reforms in political science at Delhi University and, above all, in building the Institute of Chinese Studies, besides joining hands with friends at CSDS in numerous civil liberty and peace efforts. Therefore, forgive me if some of these reflections are very personal.

My connection with CSDS started when I joined the Institute of Political Theory and Behaviour which Rajni Kothari organized with support from UGC in December 1965-January 1966. He had invited Robert Dahl, R. Bhaskaran and V.K.N. Menon as faculty members of that six week intensive interaction. As a young lecturer I was with some twenty-five others, including B.S. Baviskar and Ghanshyam Shah as participants in that unique programme. Interestingly enough, though Dahl introduced us to ‘empirical theory’, Bhaskaran was sceptical of it and emphasized the significance of normative theory. Having been a student of Professor Randhir Singh, the Marxist philosopher and then a colleague of his at Delhi College (now renamed as Zakir Husain College) and as the youngest member of this group I had great fun in engaging with Dahl about the value and limits of behaviourism. In a way that encounter largely contributed to the shaping of my theoretical and methodological understanding for the rest of my life.

 

Kothari invited me to lead the Odisha part of the 1967 election study being carried out by CSDS. It was a great experience to spend time in the field, of course with a team of investigators carrying out structured interviews. (That was my first visit to Kalahandi where I have returned frequently to study poverty and land issues till now. This project gave me such a reputation that whenever state level studies were organized by scholars such as Iqbal Narain, Francine Frankel or G. Ram Reddy, I was commissioned for the Odisha part. Actually I owe it to CSDS for maintaining my systematic research interest in Odisha even after specializing on China. This process resulted in the founding of Odisha Gabeshana Chakra in Odisha, now an active research group.) The late Bashiruddin Ahmed, the warm-hearted gentle soul, the most competent electoral analyst of his time, provided the expert leadership to our project under the overall guidance of Kothari. I was also involved in the 1971 elections study. Now it might seem odd, but at that stage Ashis Nandy’s skills in survey method were a great source of learning for the project participants.

In those years, the theoretical framework and methodological plans were made by a team led by Samuel Elderveld at the University of Michigan, the questionnaires were shipped from India to the Survey Research Centre at Michigan and findings would emerge from the tabulations made there. That is when I began to wonder whether we were performing the role of ‘çompradore academics’, doing the second order work of application of theories formulated in US and Europe.

I had many debates with Kothari on this issue and it was a great learning process for me. Kothari, Ashis Nandy and their colleagues have proved over the years how the structural constraints of the global knowledge system dominated by the West can be overcome and what is involved in the search to decolonize knowledge. Over the past decades, they also demonstrated the complexity and difficulties involved in participating in the struggle over terms of discourse. As for election studies, the current team at CSDS led by Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar has built upon the forty-five year old tradition with a stable network of scholars from all over the country under the name of Lokniti, the Institute of Comparative Democracy, and has evolved its own ways of capturing the trends in voting behaviour in India, demonstrating enormous confidence in their methods and having serious impact on public discourse.

 

Delhi University and CSDS are separated by the Kamla Nehru Ridge, a small hill over which we often walked. Their interaction was bound to be close, but always full of challenges and controversies. When we began to take small initiatives to reform the political science curriculum and launched the journal Teaching Politics, the CSDS faculty extended full support to us. That was when CSDS was known for its focus on political sociology and our Teaching Politics group led by Randhir Singh proclaimed a clear commitment to the political economy perspective. Gradually, when we started doing reviews of the discipline and formulated details of the courses on Indian politics, comparative politics and political theory, we found the need to merge the two streams in what we called ‘new political economy’.

 

This process acquired momentum when Rajni Kothari was professor in the department of political science during 1978-1982. A thorough revision of political science courses at both the MA and BA levels was undertaken by a new group of teachers, coming not only from the department but also the colleges, under the inspiration of a dream team of political scientists – Randhir Singh, Rajni Kothari and K.P. Karunakaran. I had the good fortune of enjoying the trust of all of them to reconcile various positions and with that support, steer it through the general body of some five hundred teachers of political science. The transition from institutionalism to new political economy, identifying the dimensions of power and freedom in all spheres of life and society, and re-examining dominant theories from the vantage point of people of the Third World, now defined our approach to the study of politics. This process of redesigning courses on politics caught on throughout the country.

Our successors have carried forward this process to new heights. When we felt constrained by the structure of the department to pursue new political economy and then creative theory in the Marxist tradition, we launched the Developing Countries Research Centre as an interdisciplinary programme of Delhi University. Friends at CSDS extended full support to this initiative and frequently participated in its annual Grassroots Politics Colloquium. We had debates as to whether the scholarship that had emerged in the wake of a search for alternatives had the political character of ‘capitalism’s permissible dissidence’ – a statement that made me unpopular with many friends in the CSDS. But then, I have often admitted that many of us were drawn into playing the role of functional radicals working within the system despite our assertions to the contrary. The battle over terms of discourse and politics of scholarship goes on and we remain good friends – debating these issues, affirming our common values and respecting political differences.

 

It is the development of the China field which records the most critical contribution of CSDS during the past four decades. Kothari’s offer to this small group of friends to meet at 29 Rajpur Road rather than look for a venue every Wednesday to discuss China, changed the history of what was then called the China Study Group. Four of us had sat on the lawns of Sapru House in August 1969 and decided to meet every week thereafter. At that time China Report was being published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 12 Hailey Road and was edited by C.R.M. Rao. After its funding from Asia Foundation was discontinued – because of its alleged CIA links – the then bimonthly magazine faced a crisis. The China Group agreed to support its continuation if it became a scholarly journal and an open forum rather than an anti-China front.

After a period of support from the Government of India, the CSDS agreed to house it along with its editor, the late C.R.M. Rao. Rao, the good liberal, who was also managing editor of the journal, Radical Humanist, quickly accepted the new framework where many of us from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University with left, right and centrist views, found a role to play. From 1978 onwards, the China Study Group regularly met at CSDS, first in Rao’s room and then in Giri Deshingkar’s.

 

The late Giri Deshingkar was the firm link between the China Group and the CSDS. In 1976, Giri began close interaction with the Centre to join Kothari to jointly lead the United Nations University Project on Peace and Global Transformation. He then quit DU’s Department of Chinese and Japanese Studies to join CSDS where he became its director during an eventful phase of its evolution. Giri was a China area expert par excellence, who knew classical and modern Chinese, had done research on Qing dynasty history of China at Yale and wrote on every aspect of the country until the younger lot arrived on the scene. In later years he confined his interest to military and security aspects of China and India.

While the China programme in DU and JNU continued to operate, the coordinated research and discussion initiative came from the China Group which met at CSDS. Its reputation continued to grow. The late Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea’s sustained efforts to reshape the public discourse on India-China relations, Giri’s insistence on putting every contemporary development in a longer historical perspective, Tan Chung’s persistent effort to challenge Fairbank’s thesis on Sino-centrism and evolve a new understanding of China-India cultural interactions over centuries, G.P. Deshpande’s analysis of the course of the Cultural Revolution, the new scholarship on the Chinese Revolution, and Mao Zedong and the International Communist movement, were highlights of the work done by this group. Kothari in his excitement often referred to this group as the China Tribe!

In 1990, the China Study Group reconstituted itself as the Institute of Chinese Studies and decided to continue its association with CSDS as one of its programmes. For the next twenty years the ICS continued to grow with many research and collaboration projects. There were many books and monographs that resulted from these activities. Meantime, the publication of China Report was entrusted to Sage while the editorial responsibility continued with the ICS. The CSDS extended full support and cooperation to all its activities without ever interfering in its decision making process. The Ministry of External Affairs provided an annual core grant to support secretarial and seminar expenses, while the honorary fellows coming from various universities and research institutes conducted the programmes.

When the new building of CSDS came up in 2000, the Ministry f External Affairs (MEA) entered into a lease agreement with CSDS to enable the ICS to occupy one floor for its activities. These years saw the development of ICS into India’s leading centre of research on China. The China scholars will always be grateful for the contribution of CSDS to this process.

 

To develop further as an active research centre with a full-time faculty and added programmes in the new context of the expanding interest on China, the ICS was registered as a society in 2010 and in mid-2012 moved to its new premises. The China groups’ interaction with the CSDS faculty presented unique opportunities, both to jointly develop comparative perspectives on not only India-China studies, but also theoretical and historical investigation in the social sciences in their common search for alternatives in the changing global context. The ICS and CSDS jointly organize the Deshingkar memorial lecture every year to mark this valued history.

Among the most exciting ventures for some of us with friends in CSDS have been in the arena of civil liberties and the peace movement. In the aftermath of the JP movement, the CSDS had launched the Lokayan programme to establish dialogues on social change with grassroots movements all over India. D.L. Sheth was a leading figure in this effort who engaged in deep reflection on these movements. Many of us were regular participants in these dialogues and linked ourselves with many new social groups in various parts of India. The CSDS friends were part of the PUCL (People’s Union for Civil Liberties), while many of us chose to remain with the PUDR (People’s Union for Democratic Rights) in 1980. Our differences were mainly over the issue of linkage of civil liberty groups with revolutionary movements and taking up social and economic rights in addition to civil rights, besides the issue of having one all-India organization by dissolving the regional groups.

But when Rajni Kothari took over as President of PUCL, he took concrete steps to virtually eliminate these differences and practically adopted the PUDR perspective for PUCL, as was the case of many PUCL activists in different parts of India. PUDR and PUCL jointly undertook the historic investigation into the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 in Delhi and produced the famous report, Who are the Guilty? I have memories of some chilling experiences in Sultanpuri working for peace together with Ashis Nandy and Veena Das in the aftermath of the riots. As during the Emergency and other periods of state repression, in the post-riot days, CSDS provided the space to work for democracy, civil liberties and peace. It has indeed been a unique sarai that has attracted national and global attention.

Let the sarai remember its milestones and erect new ones when it turns hundred.