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POLITICAL SCIENCE. VOLUME 3, INDIA POLITICAL THOUGHT. ICSSR Research Surveys and Explorations. Edited by Pradip Kumar Datta and Sanjay Palshikar; general editor, Achin Vanaik. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-808222-4.
Achin Vanaik, in his general introduction to the four volumes, argues that Indian political science has been theoretically innovative not by setting up entirely new concepts but rather by "redefining ... 'older' Western-derived concepts so as to make them more capable of grasping the Indian experience" (xiii). And he suggests that the task of exploring such innovation is taken up particularly in this volume on Indian Political Thought. As the editors of the volume say, studies of Indian Political Thought (they enter into an engaging discussion of the distinction between Thought and Theory), have generally been based on an author-centred approach: study of the work of great individual thinkers. They themselves, however, have taken a thematic approach, and have chosen a small number of themes that, they believe, enable exploration of "the new areas of research attendant on new definitions of the political, for instance, the shiftin one of the grounds of political studies in India,...