The Indiawallahs

Five decades on,democracy is less a hesitant experiment,more an established reality. India is still not as problematic as some countries imploding around it. Its economy has grown and so has academic interest in India (though it is not as well studied as China). If PL 480 funds once enriched libraries,Indian philanthropists and the NRI community have begun to contribute more to American academia. In 2006,Mukesh Ambani gave $8 million to Stanford University for scholarships to Indian students and a chair for the centre for South Asian studies. Nandan Nilekani donated $5million to Yale’s India Initiative,to create new faculty positions and curriculum across the arts and sciences.

The biggest changes in the study of India in America are: a) how it is being taught and b) who is studying India. The first is part of a general shift in methodology in American academia,especially in political science—from area studies to comparative politics. The early “area studies” scholars were specialists who plunged into India’s bewildering chaos,learnt its languages and history,devoted years to “making sense” of India. Current scholarship tends to discount a “narrow focus” on a particular region; the emphasis now is on broader theoretical paradigms and quantitative methods. “The new approaches view India as belonging to a larger theoretical arena: of democracy,economic growth,social hierarchy,inequalities. The most balanced assessment,combining the two approaches,is that India is unique in some respects,and quite comparable to developing countries in other respects,” says Ashutosh Varshney,professor of political science at Brown University and student of Weiner.

Second,the tribe of Indiawallahs has changed colour. Through the ’80s and ’90s,the number of students of Indian origin rose sharply in American universities and it gave India studies critical mass. “These students not only helped to fill the enrollments of classes on India,but their presence on campuses encouraged other Americans to develop an interest,” says John Echeverri-Gent,a political economist at University of Virginia. Today,many scholars of India are of Indian descent,several trained in the US by the earlier generation of scholars.

Who then are the leading scholars of India in American universities? In political science,the list includes Atul Kohli (Princeton),Pradeep Chhibber (Berkeley),Steven Wilkinson (Yale),Varshney (Brown),Aseema Sinha (Wisconsin),Kanchan Chandra (NYU),Ron Herring (Cornell),John Echeverri-Gent and others. Both political economists,Gent and Kohli have looked at how government policies have affected democracy and the poor in contemporary India. “(My interest) is in the great democratic drama of the efforts of many Indians,both within and outside of the government,to alleviate poverty,” says Gent. Kohli,author of Democracy and Discontent and The State and Poverty in India,says he has not only tried to study India as an end,“but asked questions that Indians themselves are also asking (issues of poverty,political instability,growing role of business in politics).”

From the 1984 anti-Sikh riots to the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat,communal violence has been a bloodied question mark on Indian secularism. Varshney’s Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (2002) argued that how much communities are interdependent on each other determines how soon riots can be contained. Steven Wilkinson’s Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (2004) is a measured,scholarly indictment of Indian politicians’ expedient use of religious differences to plan and trigger riots—as well as an analysis of how party politics can work as a countervailing force against violence. “States with high levels of party competition have lower levels of communal riots,because parties in those states have to appeal to minority voters and offer protection against riots to win office,” he says.

How Indian democracy deals with its million mutinies,with the explosive cocktail of religion,regional differences,caste and stark inequality,has always fascinated the world. Throughout their careers,the Rudolphs warned against “the imperialism of categories”,and pushed for an understanding of India on its own terms. In the post-9/11 world of “either you are with us or against us”,they wrote,India was an example of “living with difference”.

The first American scholar to be interested in matters of Indian military strategy started out the old-fashioned way: browsing the library at Delhi’s Sapru House,Hindi lessons at the Missionary Language School in Landour and courses in Indian philosophy and society. For research,Stephen P. Cohen had no other option but to chart his own course. As he wrote in an article for India Review in 2008,“it was the journalists,rather than academics,who understood my interest in the role of the armed forces in India and Pakistan”. By his second trip,files on his movements,research and contacts were docked on the tables of the defence ministry,copies marked to RAW and the ministry of external affairs.

Benign surveillance changed to active hostility in the 1970s as relations between the two countries worsened. The Indira Gandhi government was not amused by US President Richard Nixon’s tilt towards Pakistan during the 1971 war. American scholars working on contemporary India felt the backlash. Access to the country was denied,research trips abruptly cancelled. The result: an entire generation of scholars opted out. “Senior scholars were loath to encourage students to learn difficult languages,to invest time in writing grants and to do significant course work only to be denied a visa by the government of India,” says Sumit Ganguly (Indiana University),who was mentored by Cohen and is among the leading scholars on Indian foreign policy currently.

Cohen once had the problem of persuading his colleagues that India and South Asia mattered. Not least because of its proximity to Pakistan and Afghanistan and a nuclear programme,“today few,if any,of my colleagues need to be convinced that the region is of significance,” says Ganguly. Among the important scholars on strategic affairs in the region are Ganguly,Ashley Tellis,Raju Thomas,Paul Kapur,Michael Krepon,Scott Sagan (Stanford). Much of the talent in this field is in think-tanks: Tellis,who is with the Carnegie Endowment Institute,was closely involved with the Indo-US nuclear deal.

In economics,the first wave of scholarship happened in the 1950s and 1960s. That was the time of the emergence of development economics as a field; India was the favourite developing country and Delhi School of Economics was the “Mecca of development economists”,says Arvind Panagariya,professor of economics and Bhagwati professor of Indian political economy at Columbia University. And it drew the giants of economics to the study of India: from Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen to Arthur Lewis,JR Hicks,Ian Little and Angus Maddison. But in the 1970s,Panagariya remembers,academic interest in Indian economy plummeted. “It led me to switch my area of research from India to international trade theory,” he says.

Liberalisation,1992. And the wheel turned again. That year,Columbia University went to the NRI community to raise funds for a chair on Indian civilisation. “The conventional wisdom was that Indians donate to religion and charity,” says Oldenburg. “Instead,they told us: give us a chair on Indian economy. Look at how (finance minister) Manmohan Singh is transforming India,” he says. But the reluctance of economists to sport the Indiawallah tag took a while to shake off. Columbia raised enough money for a chair on political economy but it took them a few more years to find a candidate for it. Today,among the leading scholars on Indian economy are Abhijit Banerjee (MIT),Panagariya,Pranab Bardhan (Berkeley) Rob Jenkins (Hunter College and CCNY Graduate School); Ravi Kanbur (Cornell) and TN Srinivasan (Yale).

Have scholars on India influenced policy-making? Myron Weiner’s Child and the State in India (1991) continues to influence the debate on child labour. Kaushik Basu,who was with Cornell,and is now the chief economic adviser to the government of India,and Ashley Tellis represent one end of the spectrum. But much of the influence has been oblique,in the ways these scholars have contested and enriched the idea of India. Some ideas take a while but they do travel. Panagariya would pick the 1970 study by Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai,India: Planning for Industrialization,as an example. “That was the key to changing the mind of many policy makers and analysts (on economic reforms)”—including the finance minister who pushed through economic reforms two decades later.

For all the scholars,India continues to be a grand theatre,where the big questions the world is asking of itself can be answered. “In fields like economics and political science,India is so varied that it is the best place in the world to study many of our big questions: How do we solve ethnic and linguistic conflicts? How do we consolidate democracy? How do we educate more children and reduce poverty?” says Wilkinson.