Indian Sociologists

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XI (Understanding Society), Chapter 5.

What should a sociology of India look like?

Imagine being a young scholar in the 1920s. Sociology was born in Europe to explain modernity. But India was experiencing modernity as a colony. Europe's anthropology grew from curiosity about "primitive" cultures far away, yet India was an ancient civilisation that also had tribal societies within it. And once the country became independent, what use would sociology be to a nation beginning planned development and democracy? There were no ready made answers. The pioneers had to invent the questions as they went. This chapter is about the people who did so, and about the different ways they made sociology Indian.

How sociology arrived in India

Interest in sociological thinking in India is a little more than a century old. Formal university teaching began in 1919 at the University of Bombay, and in the 1920s the universities of Calcutta and Lucknow started programmes in sociology and anthropology. Today every major university has a department of sociology, social anthropology or anthropology.

Two early figures became scholars almost by accident. Both were born, lived and died under British rule, and both began a discipline that did not yet exist in India and had no institutions behind it.

The four founders were born one generation later. G.S. Ghurye and D.P. Mukerji were born in the 1890s, A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas about fifteen years later, in the second decade of the twentieth century. All were deeply influenced by western sociology, yet each offered answers on what an Indian sociology could be.

G.S. Ghurye (1893 to 1983): the founder of institutional sociology

Ghurye headed India's very first postgraduate sociology department. He guided many research scholars and nurtured sociology as an increasingly Indian discipline when funding for research was scarce. His department was the first to put into practice two features later endorsed by his successors: combining teaching and research in the same institution, and merging social anthropology and sociology into a composite discipline. He wrote on caste and race, tribes, kinship, family and marriage, culture and civilisation and the role of cities, religion, and the sociology of conflict and integration. His main influences were diffusionism, Orientalist scholarship, nationalism and the cultural aspects of Hindu identity.

Ghurye on caste and race. His reputation rests on his Cambridge dissertation, later published as Caste and Race in India. It critiqued the then dominant view, associated with Herbert Risley, a British colonial official.

The textbook adds that the racial theory of caste is no longer believed today, though in the first half of the twentieth century it was still considered true. Historians hold conflicting opinions about the Aryans and their arrival in the subcontinent.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Ghurye partly accepted Risley's argument, limiting it to northern India, and the racial theory of caste is no longer believed. In reality: ideas of fixed biological races measured by skull and nose have been set aside by modern genetics and anthropology, and "caste" is now studied as a social institution. Why it matters: if a question asks what Ghurye did, answer "critique and limit", not "reject entirely", and do not present the racial theory as accepted science.

Ghurye's definition of caste. He gave a comprehensive definition emphasising six features. It is based on what classical texts prescribed. In practice many features have been changing, though all continue to exist in some form.

A memory hook: S-H-R-D-O-M: Segmental, Hierarchy, Restrictions on interaction, Differential rights and duties, Occupation, Marriage.

Pause and predict: a person from one caste tries to join another by declaring it. Which of Ghurye's features does this violate?

Check your answer: The first, segmental division. Membership is decided at birth and can be neither avoided nor changed. Because it also breaks the rules of endogamy and of hereditary occupation, the example touches several features at once.

Ghurye and the tribal debate. In the 1930s and 1940s there was a debate about the place of tribal societies and how the state should respond to them. Ghurye's writing on this, and his debate with Verrier Elwin, first made him known beyond academic circles.

Two views. For the exam: protectionists, including many British administrator anthropologists, saw tribes as distinct, simple peoples whom the state must protect from exploitation and cultural loss through assimilation with mainstream culture. Another reading: nationalist thinkers such as Ghurye held that preserving tribal culture kept tribes as "museums" of primitive life, and described them as "backward Hindus" who were further behind in a process of assimilation that all communities had gone through. Both sides agreed that tribal groups were never truly isolated. They differed on how to judge the effects of contact: protectionists feared exploitation and cultural extinction, while Ghurye argued that such ill effects were common to all downtrodden sections and were difficulties on the road to development. The textbook notes that similar debates continue today, over tribal assertion of identity, the formation of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, and the burden of large projects.

D.P. Mukerji (1894 to 1961): tradition and change

Between the 1920s and 1950s, Indian sociology was largely identified with the departments at Bombay and Lucknow. Lucknow's famous "trinity" was Radhakamal Mukerjee (the founder), D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar. D.P. came to sociology through history and economics, and his interests spanned literature, music, film, philosophy, Marxism and development planning. He wrote in English and Bengali; his Introduction to Indian Music is a pioneering work. He had more faith in Marxism as a method of social analysis than as a political programme.

Why society mattered most. Dissatisfied with Indian history and economics, D.P. felt that India's distinctive feature was its social system. In his words, India had had society and very little else, and in India the social dimensions were "over developed" compared with history, politics and economics. So the first duty of an Indian sociologist was to study the social traditions of India, and to be an Indian first, sharing in the folk ways, customs and traditions in order to understand the system. He wanted sociologists to know both "high" and "low" languages and cultures: Sanskrit, Persian or Arabic, but also local dialects.

Living tradition. The root meaning of tradition is to transmit; Sanskrit equivalents are parampara (succession) and aitihya (from the root of itihas, history). Tradition keeps the past alive by retelling stories and myths, but it is not frozen. It links to the past while adapting to the present. D.P. rejected both worship and neglect of tradition, and both unthinking borrowing from the west and blind adoption of modernity, including in development planning.

D.P. added that in India anubhava and prem (experience and love) have been stronger agents of change than discursive reason (buddhi vichar). Rebellion within a tradition, contained by it, is typical of a caste society where class formation and class consciousness have been held back.

Pause and predict: a family keeps the same festival recipes but now shares the preparation over a video call with relatives abroad. Is the tradition dead or living, in D.P.'s terms?

Check your answer: Living. It keeps something from the past and also takes in something new. A tradition that only repeated the past, or that dropped it entirely, would not fit his meaning.

A.R. Desai (1915 to 1994): the state seen through Marxism

Desai was one of the rare Indian sociologists directly involved in politics, and a life long Marxist. His best known book gave a Marxist analysis of Indian nationalism, stressing economic processes and divisions while accounting for the specific conditions of British colonialism. Though it had critics, it was popular and went through many reprints. His other themes included peasant movements, rural sociology, modernisation, urban issues, forms of the state and human rights. Because Marxism was not prominent in Indian sociology, he was better known outside the discipline than within it, though he was elected President of the Indian Sociological Society.

Desai on the welfare state. In an essay called "The myth of the welfare state", Desai examined the features of the welfare state:

He then proposed five test questions for performance: does it ensure freedom from poverty, discrimination and insecurity; does it redistribute income and prevent concentration of wealth; does it make the profit motive serve the real needs of the community; does it ensure stable development without booms and depressions; and does it provide employment for all? Applying them to the states usually called welfare states, such as Britain, the USA and much of Europe, he found their claims greatly exaggerated: they fail to ensure minimum security for all, do not reduce inequality and have not ended market fluctuations or unemployment. His conclusion was that the welfare state is something of a myth.

Desai did not take a one sided view. In his writing on the Marxist theory of the state, he criticised the shortcomings of Communist states too, arguing that political liberties and the rule of law must be upheld in any genuinely socialist state.

Two views. For the exam: Desai criticises the welfare state from a Marxist and socialist standpoint, wanting the state to do more than western capitalist welfare states do. Another reading: there are strong opposing viewpoints today that say the state should do less and leave most things to the free market. The textbook asks you to give both a fair hearing, for example by listing what the state does in your neighbourhood, from schools and roads to water and hospitals, and asking how different classes would be affected if it stopped.

M.N. Srinivas (1916 to 1999): the village as a window on India

Srinivas, probably the best known Indian sociologist of the post independence era, earned two doctorates, from Bombay and Oxford. His book Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India established his reputation through a detailed application of the structural functional perspective dominant in British social anthropology. He spent much of his energy building institutions, and he trained a new generation of sociologists. His links with British social anthropology and with American anthropology at the University of Chicago put Indian sociology on the world map. His themes included caste, modernisation, social change and village society.

The village. A year of fieldwork in a village near Mysore proved decisive. With scholars like S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar, Srinivas made village studies the dominant field of Indian sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. His writing was of two types: ethnographic accounts, and historical and conceptual discussion of the village as a unit of analysis.

Srinivas also challenged British administrator anthropologists who portrayed the Indian village as unchanging, self sufficient "little republics". He showed that villages had changed considerably and were never self sufficient: they were tied into regional economic, social and political relationships.

Village studies suited the new nation. They showed the value of ethnographic methods, gave eye witness accounts of rapid change in the countryside as planned development began, and let urban Indians and policy makers see what was happening in rural India. They also gave sociology a new role: it was no longer restricted to the study of "primitive" peoples but could be relevant to a modernising society.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Srinivas defended the village as a unit of study against Dumont, and used fieldwork to show that villages change and are linked to wider regions. In reality: Srinivas is also known for the concept of Sanskritisation and, from his Rampura fieldwork, for the book The Remembered Village. Why it matters: Sanskritisation appears in your Class XII syllabus, so link the name to it, but in this chapter answer from the village debate.

Pause and predict: a student claims, "Srinivas argued that the Indian village is a self sufficient, unchanging little republic." What is wrong?

Check your answer: It reverses his position. Srinivas criticised that picture, which came from British administrator anthropologists. He showed that villages had changed and were never self sufficient.

The four founders side by side

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Introducing Western Sociologists gives the Marx and Durkheim ideas that Mukerji, Desai and Srinivas adapted.
• Related: Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society uses Srinivas's term dominant castes, and Social Structure, Stratification and Social Processes in Society quotes his view on conflict.
• Class XII link: Introducing Indian Society, Social Institutions: Continuity and Change and Cultural Change develop caste, tribe, village and Sanskritisation.