Brahmins and Balance of Power: Re-Reading A.P. Rana's Imperatives of Non-Alignment

In this article, I revisit a modern classic, a book that is often cited but rarely analyzed: A.P. Rana's Imperatives of Non-Alignment. Appearing in 1976, the book was a culmination of decade-long work and claimed to be the first attempt at IR theory from India. Rana was indeed from the first generation of scholars who engaged deeply with International Relation (IR) theory, and the book drew on a range of, sometimes contradictory, theoretical perspectives from Systems Theory to Realism to English School to Hindu Social Theory. In this intervention, I analyze this book and the corpus of Rana's writings with an attempt to contribute to two themes within IR. First, I show how caste plays a prominent role in Rana's thinking about Indian strategies of foreign policy behavior. His analysis makes a case for seeing nonalignment as a historical continuation of a Brahminical mode of balancing. Consequently, this article is also an effort to place caste as a central category of IR theorization from India. Secondly, I discuss the specific ways in which Rana's realism adapted to its Cold War context and advanced a redemptive vision of realism.