Abstract
With the demise of Paul R. Brass, the world has lost an eminent scholar of Indian politics. Brass, along with others, such as Myron Weiner and Suzanne and Lloyd Rudolph, belonged to the first generation of American political scientists who, beginning from 1961, studied Indian politics to understand India as a new nation emerging from colonialism. Born on 8 November 1936, Brass was professor emeritus of political science and international relations at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, where he taught since 1965. A prolific scholar, he produced over 15 books and innumerable journal and newspaper articles on Indian politics, on issues ranging from political parties, state politics, language and ethnic politics to communal violence. He learnt Hindi, visited India often, stayed for long periods, conducted many field studies and was a keen India watcher.
On one of his visits in the 1980s to the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Brass told me, a young faculty member who admired his work, that he was an ‘accidental’ scholar of Indian politics. After completing his MA in political science at the University of Chicago in 1959, he was keen to specialise in British politics. The fellowship he managed to secure, however, was to study Indian politics. He also obtained a grant to study Hindi. This led him to commence on a PhD on Indian politics at Chicago University, where the subject was of interest to many scholars interested in the new nations of Asia and Africa.
At the time, theorists of modernisation and development viewed the post-colonial new nations of Asia and Africa as countries that would, over a period of time, mirror the democratic and industrial nations of the West. Brass was quick to understand the need to examine the actual workings of Indian politics. He thought that India would follow not the unilinear path of development of western societies but its own path based on its specific historical and cultural systems and values. Moreover, while most foreign scholars concentrated on international relations, Nehru’s policies of non-alignment and national politics in India, Brass realised the importance of examining politics in Indian states and their contribution towards shaping national politics. His research particularly focussed on Uttar Pradesh. His numerous ethnographic studies yielded rich insights on the workings of states at a time when the formation of linguistic states was beginning to create in such states separate political arenas based on identity and history.
Brass mapped the development of Indian politics from the early 1960s to the 2000s. Over the years, his analysis of important shifts in Indian politics was widely acknowledged as monumental and went on to benefit a whole generation of scholars interested in this academic field. His initial field trips to Uttar Pradesh—particularly to Meerut, a place he wrote about in many of his works—yielded a PhD and two path-breaking books in the mid-1960s, which analysed the Congress party’s transformation from a national movement to a ruling party, its inner workings, factionalism at the district and state level in UP, and its relations with other parties. Based on this early scholarship, Brass devoted most of his academic life to understanding the rapidly changing politics of this important state. His earliest piece on this issue is the well-known essay, ‘Uttar Pradesh’, in the volume State Politics in India (1968) edited by Myron Weiner. Brass undertook fieldwork in rural India, as he believed that the village and the district were the levels at which a scholar could study existing power structures and the role played by various castes/classes, all of which contributed to the emerging, distinct political and sociocultural arenas of each state.
A number of books and journal articles followed, throughout the 1980s, on political parties, elections, federal relations and caste-based politics in Uttar Pradesh. These works deepened our understanding of the emerging trends in, and the political terrain of, North India. In the late 1980s, Brass co-edited (with Francis Robinson) The Indian National Congress and Indian Society, which provided a history of the political journey of the Congress party from 1885 to 1985 and gave invaluable insights into the workings of India’s Grand Old Party since its inception. Equally important were the three volumes on the political life of an Indian politician Charan Singh, which span Singh’s entire political career from the 1930s to the late1970s, from the colonial period until the end of his prime ministership. While the volumes depict the life of an able politician-cum-administrator, they also trace politics at the district and state levels, and the agrarian history of the state to which Singh, through his writings and policies, made seminal contributions. In The Politics of India Since Independence (1990), which studied the major political and social changes in the country, Brass gifted an invaluable handbook to all researchers attempting to study post-independence India. His Language, Religion, and Politics in North India (1974) and Ethnicity and Nationalism (1991) are recognised as classic studies both of the politics of language and religion in India and of ethnic and nationalist movements in general. Ethnicity and Nationalism provided an alternative view of how the process of modernisation has unfolded in India, in contrast to the West, and how it transformed the role of caste, language and religion in politics.
In the 1990s, unhappy with and critical of the rising communal violence and riots in Uttar Pradesh, Brass shifted his attention to the examination of collective violence and riots. While he had written articles on Hindu–Muslim riots in the colonial period in North India, he now devoted his attention to the phenomenon in post-independence India, once again focussing on Uttar Pradesh. Some of his best-known works are Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (1997), The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (2003) and Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India (2006). One of Brass’s key theoretical contribution—based on extensive fieldwork in Meerut, a site of much communal violence, and the use of the perspective of constructivism—is the construction of a framework of an ‘institutionalised riot system’. Brass based this on the argument that riots are created rather than spontaneous and that the events that precede a riot often hold the key to finding the reasons underlying it. Many scholars have found this invaluable to the understanding of riots in India.
In more recent years, Brass, who was never afraid to voice his opinion, stated that a number of the changes that had taken place did not bode well for India. Among these were the rising criminalisation of politics and corruption, which had affected governance; the decline of institutions, particularly the parliament and the judiciary; and the religious fundamentalism promoted by the ruling dispensation, which he felt would destroy the cultural diversity of the country. At the same time, he pointed out that the rise of the lower castes—the dalits and the backward castes—was a positive step. He hoped this would endure and introduce change in Indian society.
Paul Brass will be remembered for his original contributions to the study of Indian politics. He will be missed by the global academic community.