In memoriam

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph 1930-2015

Susanne Rudolph, distinguished professor emerita of political science at the University of Chicago, died on 23 December 2015, in Oakland, CA. Although I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago for eight years, completing my PhD at almost the same time as Susanne Rudolph took retirement along with her husband and fellow-professor Lloyd Rudolph, I did not enrol for any classes with them in the political science department. I got to know them personally only after they retired and moved to California, and I began writing my first book, a process in which they participated and helped in many ways.

Many of Lloyd and Sue’s students have written and will continue to write about their work as political scientists and experts on India: I will not do that here for two reasons. One, although I have read and learned from much of their scholarly work, others are more competent to comment on how the Rudolphs shaped the discipline of political science, both as scholars and equally as leaders of the profession in the American academy. Second, it is difficult to separate Sue’s academic contribution from that of her partner Lloyd, and not really fair to even try to do so, given how hard they worked to do research, publish, speak, travel and teach jointly for six decades of their coupled career. Rather, I want to pay tribute to Sue in two respects, one professional and one personal.

When news came of her death, I had an email exchange with my former advisor, Sheldon Pollock, who moved from the University of Chicago to Columbia University soon after the Rudolphs retired. He wrote: ‘I had a deep affection and respect for Susanne, above all for her sense of the collective project… Do those days now seem like an era past and never to return!’ His words took me back to Chicago as it was in the mid-1990s until about 2004-2005 as an institutional space and an intellectual ethos for the study of South Asia unparalleled anywhere in the world. During the years when I was a graduate student, the Rudolphs not only taught their consistently popular courses; they also headed the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), and led the effort to knit all South Asianists, across the humanities, social sciences and area studies, faculty and students alike, into a genuinely interactive and collegial community. They were spectacularly successful in doing so.

The fact that they acted as a couple and a team, and that they belonged to an older generation, I think (in retrospect) helped to make South Asia scholars at Chicago feel almost like a family unit – and this despite several cross-cutting ideological disagreements between departments, massive conflicting egos of several of the faculty who were also superstars in their own spheres, and the inevitable exigencies of research funding that both fuels and exhausts academic life at top universities in the United States. The Rudolphs, with their unimpeachable professionalism, charm and humour, canny ability to identify viable areas of research and to secure funding from a variety of sources, and their soothing, reassuring parental presence at the head of what was otherwise a group of far too many brilliant and neurotic people on far too small and competitive a campus, made it all work.

Of course, the credit for this golden age of sorts must be shared by many others, but I do believe it would not have been possible for South Asian Studies at Chicago to have been what it was in that period without the Rudolphs playing such a crucial role. Their sense of what my supervisor Shelly Pollock called ‘the collective project’ – and perhaps Sue’s fidelity to this idea more than Lloyd’s, even if we have no way of knowing about internal differences between them – was and remains a rarity in academic life, one without which institutions, research programmes and individual careers suffer tremendously.

As to the rest of what Shelly wrote – ‘an era past and never to return’ – that too is true, but not only because of the passing of a generation and the dispersal of a particular group of scholars from an almost miraculous and necessarily transient convergence. A whole host of factors, from 9/11 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; from the calamitous crash in the American economy in 2008 to the difficult years of recession that have yet to end completely; from the crisis in liberal arts pedagogy to the collapse of the job market in the humanities; from the breakdown of the tenure system to the desperation of the ‘Occupy’ movements – the decade between 2003 and 2013 has taken a heavy toll on American universities, even wealthy and stable ones like Chicago, and the effects may be irreversible.

For the Rudolphs, prior to these turbulent times (which might yet prove to be the endgame of the liberal academy, to borrow another of Shelly’s favourite phrases, ‘one minute before midnight’), the collectivity in question included social scientists and humanists, Americans and Indians, teachers and students, women and men – all of the parts needed for a whole, a knitting together exemplified so beautifully in their own practice and life. I remember them vividly at our quarterly South Asia receptions – affable and elegant, accessible and yet somehow stately. They lent both warmth and dignity to our gatherings, enabling many of us, especially those struggling to write dissertations, to step out of our misery for the length of an evening and inhabit the ineffable glamour of academic life that eluded us on most days.

The other aspect of Sue’s life and times with Lloyd that I want to recall here with appreciation was their ability to balance the personal and the professional. I was lucky to meet up with them in Cambridge, MA and in New Delhi (where I lived at different points in time), and to visit and sometimes stay at their lovely homes in Berkeley, Vermont, and Jaipur. I saw them not just with their colleagues and students, but also with their children and grandchildren, in domestic and informal settings, in both countries that they loved equally, with and without their institutional hats on.

Even until a few months before Sue’s passing, the Rudolphs were mentally and physically active, working (together, naturally) on new books, and as gregarious and sociable as their health allowed. My own memories are too numerous to recount. They drove me from the bus station to their gorgeous house in Barnard, VT; they made lunch for me and refused to let me lay the table before or wash the dishes after; they read and commented on drafts of my book chapters; they wrote recommendation letters for me; they even followed carefully the bewildering variety of responses – favourable or otherwise – to my book on the Internet. Sometimes they would alert me to a review that I had not seen, or send me articles they felt might help improve my arguments for future use.

Until early 2013, they turned up at sessions of the Jaipur Literature Festival to hear and applaud speakers they knew, and invited everyone home for a drink or a meal later in the evening. They adopted my spouse with as much enthusiasm as they had adopted me – and I know this to have been the case for many of their graduate students and direct advisees over the years. They kept in touch on email and on Facebook, and never missed an opportunity to meet up in person at whatever the happenstance crossroads of all of our itinerant trajectories. I often chided my own parents – of the same generation as them – for not being as agile or as tech-savvy as the Rudolphs, despite being slightly younger.

From everything they told me, Sue had made a longer, harder journey in every sense, to get to where they both were together and as a unit. She had fled with her family from Nazi Germany as a girl in 1939 and come to America. She was among the earliest women scholars to go to college (Sarah Lawrence, 1951), to earn a PhD from Harvard (in 1955), to become a professor at the University of Chicago, and to be a president of both the American Political Science Association and the Association of Asian Studies. What it must have taken, from her as a person and from the Rudolphs’ marriage, for Sue to achieve all of this in an era of even greater gender bias, sexism and misogyny than exist in the academy today, can only be imagined and admired.

Lloyd once told me that as an attractive doctoral student at Harvard, and one of hardly any young women, Sue was courted by a number of their peers, who went on later to become celebrated political scientists, policy wonks, Senators, Congressmen, lawyers, ambassadors and public intellectuals. But it was Lloyd she fell for, and clearly, it was the right choice for them both.

Sue and Lloyd had three children together (Jenny, Amelia and Matthew), which too must inevitably have meant more effort for her than for him, given they continued to teach, write, travel and spend long periods of time in India with their kids in tow. But if one of them did more than the other, they never betrayed an unequal distribution of labour, responsibility, or credit in the slightest way. Even in the last few years, when Sue’s health deteriorated and Parkinson’s disease set in, Lloyd supported her in the most graceful manner possible, without ever letting it seem that she needed help moving around, and without altering in any perceptible way their seamless parity in all aspects of work and play. Whatever the understanding within the privacy of their relationship, they stuck by it through thick and thin.

More than their obvious affection for and loyalty to one another, their mutual respect was absolutely breathtaking. Many couples can have loving marriages; many can have successful professional collaborations, and surely it’s rare for a couple to have both. In the fall of 2013, I met Granville ‘Red’ and Nancy Austin, contemporaries of Lloyd and Sue and comparable to them in many ways – for their scholarship; their wide-ranging foreign travels and sojourns and yet fundamentally American sensibilities; their deep commitment to India; their four children; but, most of all, their long and close marriage. Even though sadly I got to know them only at the very end of their lives, I grew extremely fond of the Austins. On hindsight, I suspect I took to the Austins at least in part because they reminded me so much of the Rudolphs. Yet, it is safe to say that despite having been at close quarters with extraordinary dyads of a certain generation, both Indian and American, I have never encountered any two people living and working together who accorded one another such unwavering respect as Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph. The ethics of their partnership, which seemed to have been both egalitarian and complementary, was truly exemplary.

The University of Chicago has as its motto the Latin phrase: Crescat scientia vita excolatur, which translates, at least in spirit, if not literally, to: ‘Let knowledge increase and with it, our life be made ever more excellent.’ Sue, with Lloyd, made that dream come true, of an ever-growing wealth of knowledge and along with it the ever-increasing perfection of human and intellectual life. Knowing full well how unlikely one is to achieve any such a thing, it is nevertheless deeply gratifying to have seen and shared a little in what the Rudolphs made of their time together on this earth.

As this obituary was being readied for press, we received word from the family that Lloyd Rudolph passed away peacefully in his sleep on the night of 16-17 January 2016. After a life-long partnership, perhaps Lloyd and his beloved ‘Susanna’ elected to continue their togetherness into the world beyond. May they rest in peace, or find new adventures, but always together and never apart.

Ananya Vajpeyi