Teaching the State in Political Theory: Notes Towards an Alternative Framework

‘But what about the four elements?’ For the past few years that I have been teaching the introductory course on political theory at the master’s level, at least a few students have worriedly posed this question while we were on the topic of the state. While this response reflects the hold of the standard guide-book level one-true definition of the state on a typical political science student in India, it also is an indication that some of my experiments with in teaching political theory were in the required direction. Their limitations need to be acknowledged at the outset. They are limitations of my own capacities, as reflected in varying success levels, and of those imposed by an institutional structure that does not allow for much autonomy or innovation in course structures and evaluation formats as is the case with most higher education institutions in the country. The standard definition of the state (as an institution characterized by sovereignty, population, territory and government), and of other concepts as (un)digested by students at the undergraduate level, is integral to creating an allergy towards theory, a feature one is most likely to find among students entering a postgraduate political science course, with the exception of those with undergraduate degrees from a few select universities and colleges. While the University Grants Commission (UGC) developed a master syllabus for undergraduate programmes as part of its push towards the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) in 2015, these have not been adopted outside of the central university network.2 Even as this model syllabus does retain the problems discussed in the following sections, the prior education in theory among a majority of students necessitates a curriculum design for the postgraduate courses that can both debrief and introduce the subject before venturing into any in-depth examination of the field. With the new National Education Policy (NEP) incorporating CBCS and expanding its scope to facilitate inter-university transfer of credits, it is important to address concerns about the implications of uniformity