Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006: The Realm of the Public Sphere: Identity and Policy (Volume III)

The essays in the three-volume series, Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006, span over five decades of the Rudolph’s scholarship on Indian politics. The first published essay analyses the results of one of the first random sample surveys done in India. The last argues for methodological pluralism and ‘situated knowledge’ in American political science as against the universal methodological and knowledge claims of rational choice. The essays in The Realm of The Public Sphere: Identity and Policy, like those in its companion volumes, The Realm of Ideas: Inquiry and Theory and The Realm of Institutions: State Formation and Institutional Change, contextualise and assess the democratic experience in India. The chapters in The Realm of the Public Sphere, the last of the three volumes, examine varieties of identity politics–caste, region, and student; interpret two lives, Mahatma Gandhi and the Diarist Amar Singh; analyse the formation and consequences of US policy for South Asian states: and show how the Rudolph’s interpreted Indian politics, events and personalities in American journals of opinion. This volume will appeal to not only students and researchers of politics, history and sociology, but also to the interested reader who wants to understand why and how democracy has succeeded against the odds in India.