Prof. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Prof. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph are Professors Emeritus of the University of Chicago, one of America's leading research universities. Susanne Rudolph is a past president of the Association for Asia Studies and of the American Political Science Association. The Rudolphs have been contributing to knowledge about India in general and Rajasthan in particular since 1956 when they arrived in Jaipur after an overland journey by Land Rover from London. The journey took six weeks and took the Rudolphs across Europe into turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and over the Khyber Pass into the Indian subcontinent. Research in India and Rajasthan in subsequent years resulted in two of the Rudolphs early books, The Modernity of Tradition (1967 and 1983) and Essays on Rajputana (1984).
Lloyd, Susanne and the King - Arvind Singhji Mewar
By 1968 it became clear that scholars studying Rajasthan in the US, Europe and Japan would benefit from improved knowledge about each other’s work and research interests, As a result the Rudolphs launched the Rajasthan Studies Group, an informal network that facilitated the exchange of information, analysis and interpretation. In 1982 the Rajasthan Studies Group was formally constituted as an affiliating organization of the Association of Asian Studies. Over the next few years the Rudolphs with Karine Schomer of the University of California, Berkeley began planning for an international conference on Rajasthan studies.
The result was the first international seminar on Rajasthan studies in 1987 and the launching if the Institute of Rajasthan Studies. The Rudolphs secured substantial funding for the first conference from the Ford Foundation and the National Science foundation and Professor Chandra and Dr. Joshi secured financial support from the Indian Council of Social Science Research. The first conference was the source of most of the papers published in the two-volume work, the idea of Rajasthan. The second international conference, held in Udaipur, was funded in part by the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation Udaipur. Subsequently there have been three more international conferences for a total of five. In addition to the two volumes work that emerged from the first international conference, four edited volumes were published based on papers presented at the subsequent international conferences.
Starting with their first research year in 1956-57, the Rudolphs have returned to India every fourth year through 1999-2000 to conduct research. Of their thirteen books, three have dealt with Rajasthan. Subsequent to 2000, they have returned on an annual basis for the months of January through March to their residence at Jaipur. One result of those years of research in Rajasthan is their recent innovative volume (with the late Thakur Mohan Singh of Kanota), Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary, A Colonial Subject’s Narrataive of Imperial India (oxford 2001, 2002, 2005). Another is the co-edited path breaking two volume work – The Idea of Rajasthan. Currently they are at work on Col James Tod that will include several of their essays on Tod’s East India Company letters in Selections from the Ochterlony Paper (1818-1825) in the national Archives of India, N. K. Sinha and A.K. Dasgupta, editors; and annotated versions of hitherto unpublished Tod letters, manuscripts and financial records.
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Good post.
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