Stuart Corbridge
Current Engagement: Professor of Development Studies and Pro-Director of the London School of Economics; Joined LSE in 2001
Previous Engagements: Has taught at Huddersfield, London (Royal Holloway College), Syracuse, Cambridge and
Miami Universities
Area of research includes:
Participation and empowerment in eastern India
Forest policies and politics in eastern India
Traumatic spaces, including Ayodhya and Bhuj, India
History of development thinking and the (im)possibility of development studies
Stuart Corbridge
Current Engagement: Professor of Development Studies and Pro-Director of the London School of Economics; Joined LSE in 2001
Previous Engagements: Has taught at Huddersfield, London (Royal Holloway College), Syracuse, Cambridge and Miami Universities
Area of research includes:
* Participation and empowerment in eastern India
* Forest policies and politics in eastern India
* Traumatic spaces, including Ayodhya and Bhuj, India
* History of development thinking and the (im)possibility of development studies
EDU : You lived in Bihar in the 90s and since then have been returning to India every year. How has it changed over the years?
Stuart Corbridge: There are some obvious changes, especially in the capital. The price of land is absolutely astonishing. The roads have improved and some signs of electrification are there. But, my close friend Manoj’s wife Neena, who runs Equity Asia, a foundation which works with the poorest women, does not think so. She is currently working in Madhubani district with Mushahars and says there is very little change there. There is very high male migration, with some villages made up of almost 90 per cent women. It is sad and it has got worse over the past 10 years. I spent long years in villages. In 1993, I was in West Singhbhum district. I have spent time in Jharkhand and in Bihar. I have been to Rajgir, Nalanda, Vaishali, Bhagalpur and some other districts. I have also been to districts like Malda in West Bengal. At the time I lived in Jharkhand, Naxalism was not such a dreaded name. Things are of course different now.
Q: You have taught at JNU and have had close ties here. What shifts do you notice in Indian academics?
Q: What attracted you to geography and how did you make a transition to development studies?
A: I think I took up geography because I was quite stupid. At that time, my father, who is a physicist and a mathematician, questioned my choice of subject. “Will you be talking about the capital of this country and the longest river,” he asked. But I found it as a subject that allowed you to be quite expansive. I was very lucky. I had a guru at Cambridge when I was a student. He is not much older than me and he had a sort of sink or swim philosophy. He told me the people inCambridge who I could go and listen to. So I took up Marxist Economics and went for Sociology lectures by Tony Giddens who became my boss later. I also went for lectures of Polly Hill and Joan Robinson. So, I did geography which was a mixture of natural sciences, human geography and had a broad-based education and it suited me. In retrospect, sometimes I wonder had I done economics, it might have been more useful. But I think geography is a subject that synthesises things quite effectively. I took up the development aspect and my PhD was on development issues in India. The first book I wrote was also on development. Thus, it was a natural progression to development studies for me.
Q: Why India? And why Bihar Jharkhand and eastern India in particular?
A: There is a clever answer that I could give to this. Life is often very contingent, I think. In the 70s, my father was working in Iran. I used to visit him during vacations. It was here that the idea of moving East took shape, I suppose. I became interested in some of the issues in Iran at the time of the Shah in the late 70s. You could feel some of the social currents that were leading up to the movement that was ultimately led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Ben Farmer was my teacher in Cambridge. He taught a course on India that I really enjoyed. So I just enquired him, if I could do my PhD under him? My PhD journey to India was not an intellectual decision rather it was driven by circumstances. I was 21, and wasn’t sure what to do. A close friend, Steve Jones, had planned to take up his PhD research on Jharkhand. He was a little older than me. It was during the Emergency in 1976. He couldn’t get a visa, so he moved to Bangladesh. He said: ‘Look I have already started this topic, would you be interested in it?’ I was. Once I got into the field, I changed it. But I was addicted to it.
Q: We saw reports about a possible tie-up with Nalanda University. What was that about?
A: Nalanda is an extraordinary place. I was there last six to seven years ago. It was excavated a little bit further down. I know that Amartya Sen is involved in the project. One of my colleagues, Sir Meghnad Desai, is also involved in this big international project. I just thought it would be a fantastic public space to give a series of lectures. Just keep it as it is. Just have some hi-tech in one part of it. I don’t know what the plan is, may be build some things nearby. I think a lot of international academics would be interested to come, that’s what I thought. I would be interested as an individual. I have personal ties with JNU. When I was a student, on the third night of my stay in India, I went to a party in JNU. It was the old campus on the north side. I taught at JNU two years ago. So, JNU personally has always been like a second home intellectually. JNU has a fit with LSE, and so has Indian Institute of Management. We have a sort of a department link with TISS in Mumbai for developmental studies in social policy. LSE as a school hasn’t linked with any institution in India yet. We are still looking at things.India is very important to LSE obviously.
Q: How do you view the Foreign University Bill and coming to India?
A: We are monitoring it. We don’t have an office here yet. We are wondering whether to have an office in Delhi or Mumbai. We have a lot of alumni in both cities. We also have a lot of them in Chennai and- Bangalore, Kolkata. But the two big alumni groups are in Delhi and Mumbai. We are watching the big American universities doing it as well. They have the attitude and a lot more money than LSE. LSE hasn’t opened campuses abroad, not like New York University, I think what we would like is a tie-up with an Indian institution. But the situation in India is very fluid at this moment. You have established universities, and now we are beginning to see private universities. I think foreign universities will now watch India carefully for five to 10 years, to see what happens.
Q: What brings you to India year after year?
A: There are two reasons. Firstly, my intellectual work is based in India. I have got a book coming out in October with two colleagues. It has a very bland title, India Today: Economics, Politics, Society. But it’s an attempt to look at India in a comparative perspective. Each chapter ends with a question. When and why did India take off? Does caste still exist in India? Is government responsive to citizens?
Also, my job at LSE; I am the Pro-Director with the responsibility for research and external relations. So yes, we have five institutional partnerships—Columbia University in New York, Sciences Po in Paris, National University, Singapore and Peking University where I teach in summer and Cape Town. We still don’t have a partnership in Brazil and India. India is especially important. LSE has 9,000 students. Of those, about 900 are from China and Hong Kong, around 500-600 from the US and around 500 from India. India is thus the third most important supplier of students from outside the EU. It is very important that we recruit good students here and have research links. Increasingly, more and more of my colleagues are working in India. Not in the way I worked: they are not going to come and live here, but they are interested in intellectual issues here. How do you negotiate the problems of federalism? Why are poor women more likely to vote than rich men? Those sorts of things interest social sciences generally.
Q: What is LSE doing differently to make it such an attractive academic destination?
A: I have been lucky to work in the US, in Cambridge and in India at JNU. LSE is obviously distinctive because we don’t have natural science, humanities; or languages. So it is broad-based social sciences. You can go from mathematics to statistics to history. Mainly it is economics, political science, geography, development anthropology, sociology, and such fields. That is unusual. Secondly, the campus itself is very compact right in the middle of London. There’s a buzz about it. We have, I think, the best public event series, certainly in Europe. If you come to LSE between 6.30 and to 8 pm, there are fantastic talks—two or three every night by political leaders, academics and on the like. It reverberates with intellectual vitality and the motto of the school is very unusual. Loosely translated from Latin, what we say to our students is that the purpose of an LSE education is to understand the causes of things. I think, it is a nice motto. There can be nothing better than training students to think critically about what they are observing and also understanding the cause of things. The other attractive thing about LSE is that it tries to engage students in not just understanding the cause of things but also in public policy. If you look at the history of LSE, it was Beveridge, the director of LSE, who thought of the welfare state in Britain. More recently, Tony Giddens talked about the third way.
And then, LSE students get quite good jobs. It is fascinating that if you are in the LSE campus it doesn’t feel like an archetypal British university. It is a global university.
