Rajni Kothari: In Memoriam
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023015575207 |
| Subject Matter | Obituary |
Obituary
Rajni Kothari: In Memoriam
Professor Rajni Kothari passed away on 19 January 2015 at the age of 86. While ailing for the past few
years, almost to the end Rajni Kothari led an intellectually active life. His contribution to understanding
Indian politics can hardly be exaggerated. The first issue of this journal had a special symposium in
honour of Professor Rajni Kothari and the first copy of Studies in Indian Politics (SIP) was given to him
at the launch of the journal in August 2013. That was indeed a proud moment for all of us associated with
this journal. Today, as the SIP enters into the third year, we have fond memories from that occasion as
we write this obituary for Rajni Kothari, the person who shaped political science in India and in particular
pioneered the branch of study that is now referred to as ‘Indian politics’.
After obtaining a B.Sc. (Economics) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Rajni
Kothari began his career as a lecturer at the University of Baroda. His early writing, which was to make
a deep mark on the discipline, was published in the then Economic Weekly in April–June 1961 as a series
of articles titled ‘Form and Substance in Indian Politics’. Soon, Kothari was to invest all his organiza-
tional and intellectual energy into establishing a ‘small’ centre in Delhi (1963), Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies (CSDS), which has not only grown now into a leading centre for the study
of Indian politics and society but has also become the first stop for anyone who is interested in knowing
about diverse ways of looking at India’s contemporary reality. The birth of SIP marked a new initiative
by a research programme of the CSDS, Lokniti, to mark the Golden Jubilee of CSDS. So self-effacing
was the personality of Rajni Kothari, that though this centre was known as ‘Kothari’s centre’, he himself
abstained from the working of the centre since early 1980s.
In his long and illustrious career, Rajni Kothari contributed to the academic life in three distinct ways.
One was to build an academic institution devoted to research—and also cultivate an academic culture in
which scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds converge and ideas can be freely debated and
discussed. The other was of course his contribution to the shaping of the sub-discipline of Indian politics
in such a way that it is theoretically oriented and empirically grounded. Third, he exemplified what the
role of a public intellectual means in the Indian context. Even today, all three of these contributions could
be easily identified as valuable and worthy of imitation. In this sense, Rajni Kothari represented the
quintessential role model as an Indian intellectual for not only his own generation but also to the later
generations of academicians in India.
Institutional histories seldom make sense unless imbricated with intellectual histories of the disci-
plines and persons involved. As its name suggests, the CSDS symbolized the efforts of India’s intellec-
tual community to come to terms with both the development paradigm and the search for selfhood in the
midst of domination of institutions and categories emanating ‘elsewhere’. The ‘form and substance’ of
the intellectual interaction with global scholarship set up by Kothari had its own flavour. The ‘centre’ did
not shy away from using the words (‘Development Studies’, for instance) belonging to the newly domi-
nant paradigm without necessarily committing to that paradigm. At a stroke, therefore, it set out an
institutional platform where intellectuals/academicians from India could enter into conversation with
their Western counterpart and yet the centre also became the hub of fresh and independent thinking about
Studies in Indian Politics
3(1) 1–4
© 2015 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023015575207
http://inp.sagepub.com
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