Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (1930–2015), Lloyd I. Rudolph (1927–2016): A Personal Tribute
| Author | Philip Oldenburg |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/2321023016634971 |
| Subject Matter | Obituary |
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (1930–2015),
Studies in Indian Politics
4(1) 138–142
Lloyd I. Rudolph (1927–2016):
© 2016 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
A Personal Tribute
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023016634971
http://inp.sagepub.com
Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph died within 1 month of each other; until literally weeks before their deaths,
they were working on publishing one last thing—letters sent home from India on their lengthy trips
there. The first trip was in 1956–1957, when they divided their time between Jaipur and the then Madras
state, and the last was in 2014, when they were awarded the Padma Bhushan. They have left a very large
legacy of books, scholarly articles and essays for a wider public, and, as important, a cohort of students
(they formally advised 300 or so PhD students, perhaps a third of whom studied in India) and many more
who were their honorary students.1 They welcomed interacting with other scholars to whom they gave
their time and careful attention. Most were influenced by the Rudolphs’ perspective on Indian politics,
but they never formed a ‘school’ of ‘Rudolphians’. Rather, they learned the craft of doing research, the
necessity of constantly taking seriously others’ ideas and approaches from every discipline and the value
of a commitment to what the Rudolphs, describing ‘area studies’, called ‘situated knowledge’:
knowledge that is located and marked by time and place and circumstance,…unlike the objective knowledge
on offer by those who adhere to a universal social science epistemology based on...a science which purports to
be true everywhere and always. Unlike such theory-driven social science knowledge, area studies knowledge
tends to be problem-driven and more prone to inductive generalization than to deductive reasoning.2
The Rudolphs served as role models for how to collaborate and for how to manage family and career
with joy and devotion to both.3 Susanne, in addition, was a pioneer, as one of the first women to be
elected president of the Association of Asian Studies, and then, 17 years later, one of the first woman
presidents of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The Rudolphs met and married when
they were post-graduate students at Harvard in the early 1950s, receiving their PhDs in 1955–1956.4
1 See Monroe (2008), and the inappropriately titled op-ed by Oldenburg (2015).
2 As quoted in Harris (2009, p. 487). He remarks, justly, noting their career of studying India’s political and social institutions,
‘The Rudolphs are an institution in themselves.’ The quotation is from their honest and lucid account of their own work, ‘Writing
India: A Career Overview’ (Rudolph & Rudolph, 2008, p. 268); in summary: ‘our writing about India has addressed the following
topics which we discuss below: modes of inquiry; theorizing politics and society; Occidentalism and Orientalism; processes of
state formation; processes of institutional change; identity politics; making U.S. foreign policy; writing as public intellectuals.’
The 2003 conference marking their retirement from the University of Chicago was titled Area Studies Redux: Situating Knowledge
in a Globalizing World.
3 See Rockwell, 2016; Oldenburg, 2016. Some paragraphs of the latter essay are used in this one.
4 Lloyd’s thesis was titled The Meaning of Party: From the Politics of Status to the Politics of Opinion in Eighteenth Century
England and America (1956), and Susanne’s Congress in Power: A...
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