Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph: In Memoriam

Abstract

Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph were globally acclaimed scholars of India at the University of Chicago where they spent nearly four decades of their lives teaching and researching on India and South Asia. Their numerous works done in this intellectual partnership of more than six decades produced paradigmatic shift both methodologically and thematically in the study of Indian society and politics, more specifically about the nature of Indian state and its democratic institutionalism. Their critical concern for India about its experiments with democratic institutions and modernity of tradition was in consonance with their convictions about the durability of Indian social ethos and structures of social and political life. They belonged to the first generation of ‘area specialists’ who returned to their subjects of inquiry regularly with a critical gaze and newer perspectives over the years. For them, the field of study became an intellectual habitus that they nurtured with great discipline, care, conscience and craft.