International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Advance Access originally published online on August 8, 2007
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 2007 7(3):341-368; doi:10.1093/irap/lcm014
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Re-imagining IR in India
Professor at Nelson Mandela Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi
The poor conceptualization of Indian IR can be explained by local factors such as its disciplinary location and pedagogical issues but its mainly because Western IRT has acquired a Gramscian hegemony over the epistemological foundations of the disciplinary core of Indian IRT – termed as ‘traditional IR’ in this article. It discusses the ‘disciplinary gate-keeping practices’ of Western IRT and the intellectual dependency of Indian IRT, which does not acknowledge India's own history and philosophical traditions (e.g. Kautilya) as a source of IRT. Scholarly endeavors inspired by feminism, critical theory, development studies, and postcolonialism – termed as ‘new IR’ – are yet to be owned by Indian IR. This article argues for creating alternative sites of knowledge construction and explains how Indian ‘ways of knowing’, for example, a ‘non-dualistic mode of thinking’ in contrast to the modern ‘self-other binary mode’ of understanding realities can address the problematiques of contemporary IR.
There is no Indian school of IR and any assessment of Indian scholars' contribution to IR theory depends upon what counts as ‘IR theory’. The article starts with a critical overview of the state of the art of the IR discipline in India by analyzing disciplinary, pedagogical and discursive reasons to explain its poor conceptualization. This assessment is, however, predicated upon a very narrow disciplinary vision of IR, which for analytical purposes, is termed as traditional IR. The next section analyzes scholarly endeavors emanating from development studies, postcolonialism and feminism that lie outside the disciplinary core of (Indian) IR to reflect on issues being debated within the postpositivist domain of the ‘mainstream’ IR. To the extent these debates are yet to be owned by Indian IR and these intellectuals acknowledged as part of its scholarly community, it might be termed as new IR. Finally, the article argues for creating alternative sites of knowledge creation in IR by devising different set of tools and exploring a new repertoire of resources that have, thus far, been de-legitimized or rendered irrelevant for knowledge production in IR.
Re-imagining IR in India is not about creating an Indian school of IR but redefining IR itself. This problematizes the basic formulation and idiom of our query: why there is no non-western IR theory in India by highlighting its implicit binary character, which is not merely descriptive but hierarchical: the ‘dominant’ west and the ‘dominated’ non-west. From this standpoint, even if scholars were to succeed in creating an Indian school of IR, it would at best, earn a small, compartmentalized space within the master narrative of IR (read the western IR1). The challenge, therefore, is not to discover or produce non-western IR theory in India but for the Indian IR community to work towards fashioning a post-western IR.
Received for publication May 16, 2006. Accepted for publication June 27, 2007.