Towards interdisciplinarity in the study of politics
The proposed workshop comes out of our experience of teaching, studying and doing/guiding research in the discipline called Political Science in India. We are a group of scholars from different parts of the country and most of us are involved in teaching political science - in Imphal, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Delhi.

Our experience of teaching, doing research and guiding it, relates both to the ways in which we ‘do’ and teach theory, as well as the ways in which we do empirical and theoretical research. A hiatus divides the discipline along the theory/empirical question. This divide, and the very rigid ways in which ‘what is theory?’ is defined, seems to stand in the way of our discipline grappling with the fascinating richness of politics in contemporary India. Many of us who have been engaged in doing and guiding research increasingly feel that much of the difficulty in enhancing our capacities of understanding political practice, has to do with the fact of our fairly limited disciplinary paraphernalia.

There are two main points that are important in this respect:

(1) We seriously think that we now need more and more interdisciplinary approaches for studying the richness of political practices in the contemporary. In order to do this, political science requires a much more productive engagement with other disciplinary energies and research being undertaken in other fields.

(2) The theory/ empirics divide needs to be thought afresh. Our “theory” must engage with and emerge from the specifics of actual political practices and our “empirical” research be framed in theory. Currently, these two aspects tend to be treated as rigid sub-disciplines, with theory as textual exegesis and “Indian politics” as a series of empirical studies of laws, political parties and so on. In the former there is rarely a whiff of actual politics, and the latter rarely examines the conceptual field on which it stands

At one level, there is the common-sense understanding within our discipline that ‘political practice’ is ‘non-theoretical’, completely bereft of any discursive-theoretical content. However, all ‘political practice’, we believe, is always constituted by some form of reflection and thought – theoretical or non-theoretical – and as we realize painfully today, at least one part of theorization must be about making sense of ‘practice’ through an understanding of the subject’s own world and her categories of thought. We feel that intellection itself must be seen as a specific kind of political practice that is in turn situated within the larger universe of social and political practices which it influences in very significant ways. Irrespective of whether it is contemporary studies or whether we are looking at more historical issues of the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries, for example, we need to pay very careful attention to the practices and social imaginaries of the social agents in question.

These raise issues, for example, of memory and memorialization as evidenced in say Mayawati’s erection of monuments that mark public space in specific ways as Dalit. While we may have legitimate normative critiques (misuse of state funds, felling of trees), we as a discipline need to come to terms with the ways in which the symbolic marking of space is as important as marking time (through production of counter-histories) in the fashioning of political identities. Addressing these issues demands that political science enter into a dialogue with history; with recent developments in critical geography (on issues of space); with architecture (on space and architectural forms); with anthropological studies and philosophical reflections (on memory and memorialization); with cultural studies (on practices of cultural resistance, semiotics); with philosophy (on questions of subjectivity and fashioning of the self) and so on.

Even when we are dealing with the relatively standard concepts and concerns of our discipline, for instance, ‘state’, ‘democracy’ or ‘development’, our investigations and theorizations need to open out to the ways in which newer intellectual and conceptual histories may reveal different trajectories and ways of conceptualizing these categories. Some recent work for instance, shows that in the Indian tradition, the conceptualization of political power was significantly different – never enjoying the ‘sovereign’ position in society. Sovereignty, in this view, always belonged to a higher Order or Law – Dharma. We are now also increasingly becoming aware of the fact that in ancient Buddhist social organization (and presumably, pre-Buddhist ones as well), some form of an elective principle was in operation. Can we then think of a different history of democracy, as well – one that goes beyond the Greek polis? It goes without saying, that an exercise of this type would have to draw from with religious studies, Indian philosophy and even Indology.

The Themes: State/Governmentality, Capital and Subjectivity

Entering into this terrain, as many of the scholars in the proposed workshop show, demands our engagement with a range of other questions that centre on the question of different histories and practices of the state and issues of cultural politics and subject formation, of economies and their cultural-political constitution, contexts and ways of knowledge production and so on. Similarly, there are issues of reconstituting ‘tradition’ to make it speak to the challenges of modern political life which articulations of notions of ‘the active life’ or the attempts to re-read the Gita in India’s early encounter with colonial modernity acquire a very significant place. Some of the scholars in the workshop will be dealing explicitly with these questions of intellectual history that are simultaneously, questions of and for political thought.

Historians in India and some political and social theorists have already begun taking these questions seriously but unfortunately, the discipline of political science has remained relatively immune to these currents.

We wish to emphasize in this workshop that it has become necessary for us to recognize that the task of doing theory is for us also inescapably ‘empirical’ and historical. We wish to underline that we need to work through different kinds of “archives” in order to be able theorize our contemporary adequately.

“Empirical” research also needs to be recast. Critical Studies in Politics must therefore try to make methodological departures. We have felt that it has become virtually impossible to understand politics today, especially but not only, in India, by simply relying on the standard questions of ‘formal’ politics. It seems to us to seriously impoverish our understanding of politics if we confine our gaze to the more evident and recognizable forms of political behaviour – for instance, voting in elections or providing governance etc. The exclusive focus of ‘political science’ on processes, institutions, norms (constitutionalism, rule of law etc) places certain kinds of demands that move our gaze away from the bewildering array of practices that we must recognize as “political” but which remain outside the gaze of our discipline.

In terms of the thematics that the different papers will cover, three broad and related rubrics seem to have emerged:

(1) State/governmentality
(2) Capital/ economy/ development
(3) Formations of subjectivity.