Oriental Reversal

Four decades ago, when Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph first came to India, 'decolonisation' was in the air - Nehru at the ramparts, Gandhi still in every heart, India raw and brave from colonialism. Lloyd and Susanne, in their 20s, caught the spirit. Kennedy had set up the Peace Corps, the American young were craving for a life of challenge to establish that peace was the moral equivalent of war. Lloyd and Susanne finished their doctorates from Harvard University, jumped into their Landrover and drove all the way from London to Delhi.

There were no paved roads after Belgrade and they expected a swathe of stunted civilisations. But as they rattled over the Khyber Pass, they found "an organised landscape"! "The old dak bungalows," smiles Susanne, 70, "the complicated deliberations of the panchayats. India dispelled all cynicism."

India was still not a fashionable subject on Ivy League campuses. "It was okay for Susanne to be interested in India," recalls Lloyd, 72, "because she was a woman. But for me with a doctorate in political science, people asked why I didn't carry on with European or American studies." But the Rudolphs have been hooked for the last 40 years. Not only to India but to Rajasthan, the subject of two of their several books on India. Rajput courtly life, the voices from the zenana, the ancient lineages of the families, the associational politics of panchayats, the process of accommodation to the modern order, were, for the Rudolphs, striking examples of political theory. And in their marriage, the beginning of an exciting intellectual partnership.

"Our common interest meant that our breakfast table was never quiet. We never ran out of conversation," says Susanne. Now they are both professors of political science at the University of Chicago but spend a year in India after every three-year period of teaching.

The genesis of their new book, Reversing The Gaze, Amar Singh's Diary, A Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India, which they've written and edited along with Mohan Singh Kanota, was in 1956. That year they were guests at the house of Thakur Raghubir Singh of Bissau. And they partied every evening. "We arrived in the middle of the Jagir Resumption Movement," grins Lloyd, "when the state was nationalising princely lands. Every evening at the Bissau haveli, the princes and jagirdars would gather to drink, joke and tease each other about how they would co-exist with the new government."

The sardars were rugged aristocrats. Taunting each other with dohas, drinking whisky and gossiping about each others' families. "Senior old lineages," explains Susanne, "trying to survive in the new India." At Bissau, Susanne and Lloyd, then in their twenties, met the colourful Colonel Kesri Singh, raconteur and wit who wore long capes and smoked elegant cigarettes. Kesri Singh introduced the Rudolphs to his older brother Amar Singh's diaries.

Amar Singh, who died in 1942, was a Rajput from the house of Kanota. In 1898 when he was a young man, he began to write a diary. He wrote voluminously, every day, filling 89 volumes of about 800 pages each, which the Rudolphs write, "even by the standards of 17th and 18th century Europe...is one of the longest diaries ever written". The diary is a story of Amar Singh's perceptions of the British Raj in the years 1898 to the year he died. About life in a Rajput haveli. Of Amar Singh's own struggle, all his life, to construct a hybrid self, part Rajput nobleman and part Edwardian officer and gentleman.

Threatened by the boredom of princely state and Raj philistinism, Amar Singh wrote his diary to keep himself amused and read books to stay intellectually alive. Hybridity is all the rage today. To be a citizen of the world a la Salman Rushdie is tres chic. But for Amar Singh, straddling Rajput custom and British example, identity was a daily battle because a hybrid identity was still not socially acceptable.

Editing and selecting extracts from this "remarkably fluid and revealing diary" which shows Amar Singh swinging wildly to the English side and then swinging wildly back to the Indian side, was, for the Rudolphs, a case study of an imperial subject.

For Amar Singh, British conquest was not a simple case of rebellion versus oppression, but often involved emotional agonies. Amar Singh in jodhpurs and safa, wrote movingly of the "Damned Etiquette" of Rajput life to "The Results Of Sodomy - Second Term In The Imperial Cadet Corps". And of daily negotiations: "When I eat English food I use my knife and fork but when I eat Indian food I eat with my hands." For the Rudolphs, Amar Singh's diary of the Raj is as perceptive as any account of India written by a British visitor.

Does the foreign scholar on India inevitably become an Orientalist? "It is, to some extent, inescapable," says Susanne, but Orientalism has its positive as well as its negative aspects. When the Rudolphs first arrived a number of doors opened for them because they were Americans, although in the Rajasthan Vidhan Sabha they were sometimes called CIA agents. They spun through Thanjavur in the general elections of 1956 with former president R. Venkataraman in the back seat of their Landrover. They chatted with Nehru, Y.B. Chavan and Atal Behari Vajpayee - "a young man then". Along with their circle of friends, historian Romila Thapar and anthropologist T.. Madan among them, the Rudolphs continue to watch India. Says political anthropologist Shail Mayaram: "The Rudolphs' love for India has grown from their intellectual partnership. She is organised, rigorous. He is adventurous and lively."

At a time when most scholars worked on UP because it was the centre of British influence and the records were in English, the Rudolphs, extraordinarily, concentrated on Rajasthan. Prithvi Singh, Amar Singh's descendant, says the couple are well respected in Rajput circles: "They are like family elders."

And so the 'Chicago Rajputs' fly quietly back and forth between Rajput politics and their three children in the US, walking without caps under the Indian sun, driving through the streets of Jaipur and (when Outlook met them,) sliding expertly down the Jantar Mantar. "We wanted to prove that Americans could study India differently from the British. We were bored with old Europe. Bored with old America. And we loved," they say, sipping heartily, "the chai."