Abstract
Keywords
This substantial and very informative volume is an attempt to rethink the history and current practice of sociology as a discipline in India, from its colonial-era beginnings to its contested present. Twelve chapters and a long introduction discuss the history and influence of particular departments (sociology departments in Bombay and Lucknow, and the Centre for the Study of Social Systems in Delhi); of regions within India (Bengal, Goa, Maharashtra and Karnataka); of key individuals (especially GS Ghurye, AR Desai and MN Srinavas); and some key themes: language, Hindu tradition and caste, undergraduate pedagogy, the struggles of subaltern groups and the missing sociology of science.
The authors are mostly sociologists, involved in these events themselves; some of the chapters have a polemical tone, and almost all involve critique. As we in Australia know from similar attempts in our country, most sociologists are not historians, and amateur historiography can be very problematic. The contributions in this book are definitely uneven. It is also clear that the book is written mainly for an Indian audience, presupposing a lot of local knowledge. For instance, a key argument references ‘Mandal’, unexplained, on the assumption the audience already knows what this is; which, indeed, all Indian intellectuals do, but few colleagues in other countries.
Yet the book has messages for international discussions of the nature and future of sociology, and I want to draw out some of these. Indian sociology is, after all, one of the biggest arenas in world sociology, in numbers of students, teachers and researchers, and wealth of experience. Sociology has been present in Indian universities for 90 years and has an earlier history going back to the mid-nineteenth century. The stories told in this book pose very sharply issues of global concern: knowledge formation in a colonial context; the dominance of European and North American theory; the impact of nationalism and anti-colonial struggle; and the paradox of a discipline that embedded ‘a deeply conservative understanding of Indian society’ (p. 257) in a turbulent, changing, violent and contested reality.
I will call attention to three chapters in particular. DN Dhanagare, a very senior academic, contributes a chapter on the Bombay school of sociology and its influence on universities in Maharashtra, the large central-Indian state that stretches inland from Mumbai. Dhanagare’s announced theme is ‘legacy and rigour’. What I find interesting here is, first, his vivid sketch of Ghurye’s outlook as a social scientist from the 1920s, blending an Indologist’s respect for ancient Sanskrit texts with an ethnographic research approach; second, his account of the spread of sociology teaching through the expanding university and college system of Maharashtra in the 1950s and after. Here Dhanagare speaks of ‘the periphery’ within India, a broad spread of departments and teaching programmes with little research output and, in his view, little rigour in content. That is a sentiment about the mass teaching of sociology that some other authors in this book share, but not all.
The chapter contributed by the editor, Sujata Patel, contextualizes its argument in the international debates about the coloniality of knowledge, particularly the Latin American ‘de-colonial’ school. Patel focuses on two figures, MN Srinavas and AR Desai, as exemplars of a polarity in Indian social thought. Srinavas, starting in India, moved to Britain and trained in the British school of social anthropology; then returned and installed a fieldwork oriented, structural-functionalist anthropology as the paradigm for post-independence Indian sociology. His treatments of village society and caste (including his famous concept of ‘Sanskritization’ in caste mobility) became immensely influential. Patel argues that in Srinavas’s thought they merged with a developmentalist nationalism to produce a benign picture of incremental social change. Desai’s picture was very different, starting with a Marxist critique of nationalism as the ideology of the privileged. He went on to a powerful sociological critique of the post-independence state, and very well-known studies of agrarian social movements and changing class structure in India. Yet, Patel argues, Desai’s project too was intellectually limited, and has not strongly influenced the new radicalisms in Indian sociology. A displacement of coloniality and new reflexive theories are needed.
How we might get that is shown in another chapter. Sharmila Rege, from one of the universities discussed by Dhanagare, sharply disagrees with him about the expansion of popular education, seeing not a collapse of standards, but an opportunity for sociological renewal. Her opening theme seems dull: the ‘language question’ in sociology, i.e. teaching in English or in the indigenous language. But this is not the simple contrast between elite and democratic that it seems. The definition of local language is embedded in power structures and exclusions, and for some subaltern Dalit groups, English may be the liberating choice. From this starting-point, Rege develops a fascinating critique of the privileges embedded in mainstream sociology, driving the point home in her discussion of the Mandal controversy, where an official report on persisting caste oppression that recommended affirmative action was trashed by prominent sociologists (as well as by upper-caste social movements). She develops, by the end of the chapter, a genuinely exciting agenda for the renewal of sociology and the democratization of knowledge. It is grounded in Indian experience, but relevant far beyond India; I recommend it to all readers.