Peaceful Division

"We are 'jointly and mutually responsible,'" says Lloyd Rudolph about Government 119, The Government and Politics of Modern India, which he and his wife, Susanne, are teaching next year. "My work has been chiefly with party structure and Sue is interested in nationalism and imperialism; so we have come to a peaceful division of most of the course."

"Yes," added Mrs. Rudolph, "but we are still lobbying each other in areas we're both working on."

"We may even do four or five lectures together. We may be able to explain some problems better with dialogue," said Lloyd.

Government 119 has resulted from several years of joint scholarship by the Rudolphs. They met in graduate school in 1951, when Lloyd was a tutor and Sue had just graduated from Sarah Lawrence. "We met over Aristotle," said Sue. "I needed some wise advice for a paper. Lloyd has been giving me wise advice ever since. We lived through each other's theses and have collaborated on four articles."

Last year, they travelled to India on a Ford Grant to evaluate the success of parliamentary democracy there. "We drove overland from London," said Lloyd. "It took about a month, but you have a better perspective on India after seeing the Middle East."

"By the time you've passed through those backward countries, India seems like an over-developed area," said Sue. "We drove in a British jeep, which looks like a Brinks armored truck and slept in the back and did our own cooking."

"We decided to study India's politics at the state level rather than beginning at New Delhi," said Lloyd. "In India, the states produce the national leaders. With a federal system composed of states the size of Germany and France, they don't recruit out of parliament as the British do. In fact, one of India's difficulties is finding state leaders capable of being national figures. We couldn't do all fourteen states, so we picked Rajastan in the North and Madras in the South."

"Actually, our choices balance each other quite well," said Sue. "Rajastan is part of the old prince-ruled India, and Madras was 'British India' and is more modern. In Rajastan, we lived with the Thakur of Bissau, a nobleman of old Jaipur state and a member of the Rajput warrior caste, and we shot quail and partridge on weekends. Then we moved to the south, where they are more non-violent. Instead of shooting on weekends, we went birdwatching with our Brahmin editor friends."

"We did a case study of a crucial piece of legislation in each state," said Lloyd. "Land reform is very controversial there and seemed the obvious choice. We also did an opinion survey, which probed the relationship between communication and political development. This involved interviewing a great many villagers. Of course, we couldn't do the interviews ourselves, so we had a team of ten University M.A.'s doing it. One of our problems was that the village women had no idea what an opinion poll was. 'Why do you want to ask me?' they said. 'The headman knows more than I do.'"

"But do you know how they solved that?" said Mrs. Rudolph. "They opened every interview with an old Tamil proverb that goes, 'If you want to know if the rice is done, take out one spoonful and taste it.' There you have the theory of random sampling in a nutshell!"

The Rudolphs feel that India is the logical place for their joint study. "I'm in India by marriage," says Lloyd, whose field is comparative government. Both he and Mrs. Rudolph believe the study of political development should be given as much attention as economic development now receives.

"In some ways, India is very much like America at the time of the Revolutionary War," says Lloyd. "I did my thesis on England and America during that period, studying the emergence of the politics of opinion. People in comparative government often mistake Europe for the world. And area scholars often ignore the wider issues. In India, you can see the classic problems of Western institutions unfolding in a non-Western culture. So, you might say, I was fortunate in marrying my wife."

Mrs. Rudolph laughed. "Yes," she said, "methodologically, our marriage has been quite successful."