Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s class of 1945-1946. M.N. Srinivas is standing extreme right (Photograph courtesy Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University; published in Uberoi, 2007)
In the second half of the XXth century, Indian sociology was dominated by the paradigm of Homo hierarchicus according to the title of Louis Dumont’s long-standing popular book published in 1966. The objective of this approach to the society of castes is to combine field survey with reading of ancient India’s classical texts. While pre-colonial India does not have the tradition of conducting studies on society (unlike China, for example), it is the guardian of brahmanical trends of thought, through its texts written in sanskrit or other Indian languages, dealing with human relations, in a more theoretical than practical way, constituent of the socio-religious world of castes (Lardinois 2007).
However, Indian sociology does not begin with Louis Dumont’s undertaking, and the steps that he advocated were not really a novel idea in the Indian academic world. While the emergence of social sciences is one of the indisputable consequences of colonisation, their development has very quickly assumed a national character. On the one hand, the British government conducted vast quantitative and qualitative surveys (censuses, inventories of castes and tribes) to know, direct and control its colonial empire, though giving room for more academic researches, like those conducted by the British anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers on the Todas, a tribe from South India. On the other hand, from the first half of the XIXth century, the new elites, at the time mostly Hindus educated in British colleges, developed a critical thinking that operated on religious, cultural, social and finally political subjects. In India like in Europe around the same period, initial researches in the domain of sociology were practical in nature, oriented by claims for societal reforms. But in India, these claims were coupled with a plan for getting liberated from the colonial heel, led by the charismatic figure of Gandhi of the National Congress Party.
It is in this context that the first sociology departments were set up from the 1910s, particularly in the universities of Bombay, Lucknow and Calcutta where Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949), Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942) or D. P. Mukherji (1894-1961) have taught for example, to name only a few (Uberoi et al. 2007). These first generations of teachers and researchers, in majority from well-educated high castes, from the same elitist universities of English culture and most of them well-versed in sanskrit, sharing the same colonial experiences, were individually or collectively confronted with the same types of questionings: how to consider the Indian social world as part of categories freed from the shackles of western colonial culture? How to connect research and social action, knowledge and reforms? How to put sociological knowledge at the disposal of economic development of a young independent nation? Some sociologists like Nirmal Kumar Bose (1901-1972) at Calcutta or G. S. Ghurye (1893-1983) at Bombay have thus proposed cultural analyses of the caste system that combined concepts of western sociology with notions borrowed from the brahmanic culture of ancient India. In these two cases, Indian sociology presented itself as a national Indian sociology, though very hindu-like in its principles.
To understand the situation of sociology in contemporary India, it must be resituated in the context of university disciplines with which they compete: anthropology, history and economics. Anthropology often taught in science departments, is reduced to its physical dimension and to material study of tribal populations of India that is in a way the distant world of the castes. By their segment-type social morphology, their pastoral economy and their animist beliefs, the tribes in fact are opposed to Hindu and Muslim populations with which they maintain relationships of all sorts, anyhow, from ancient times.
Just after independance, anthropology underwent a disciplinary redefinition at the behest of M. N. Srinivas (1916-1999) — the most eminent Indian sociologist of the second half of the XXth century who founded the department of sociology of the university of Delhi in 1959. Srinivas intended to professionalise the discipline by distinguishing it from colonial practices which had discredited it with the Indian elite, and from a quantitative conception of American sociology that he found unfit for India and, finally, from the applied character that pointed to the beginnings of the discipline. Under the name of sociology, Srinivas developed a social anthropology that he had learnt first in the universities of Mysore and Bombay, then at Oxford where he finished his studies in the years 1944-1950. Advocating participative observation as part of village monography, Srinivas favoured the study of castes, family and religion by seemingly confining sociology to rural and traditional aspects of the Indian society (Srinivas 2002). The analysis of the forces of change was then carried out by history and economics, the two earlier-most professionalised university disciplines from the 1910s. On the one hand, the Historians worked hard at analysing the genesis of the young Indian nation and supporting its formation; on the other hand, the economists participated in drawing economic and social development plans of modern India.
The Indian sociology has always had a good track record of a rare reflexiveness compared to other disciplines (Chaudhuri 2003). The model developed by Louis Dumont and David Pocock is a reference discussed by Indian anthropologists (Khare 2006) ; but it is too centred on traditional Hindu India to maintain a heuristic power in the face of contemporary societal problems. Today, the discipline redefines its approaches and its paradigms by opening itself widely to the international space of social sciences. One cannot acknowledge here works spread across several university departments and major research centres. In this regard, however, the medium of instruction and publication is a crucial stake. On the one hand, English remains the only common language of the elite Indians, which also gives them access to the world research market; on the other hand, new generations of students from culturally backward classes do not have a good command over English and expect education to be imparted in national languages, thus contributing to making research in India itself more provincial.
The Indian sociology is distinguished by its pluridisciplinary aspect and the very great diversity in its scope of research (Lardinois 1988). The vast panorama edited under the direction of Veena Das, who teaches now at the Johns Hopkins University in the United States, makes a great impact through its range and is the best introduction to social anthropology of contemporary India (Das 2003). This survey that checks any conflict of school or interpretation from surfacing, helps to make India emerge as a specific centre of thought and discourse in the international field of social sciences.
Leatherwork (here, making shoe patterns) remains
a traditional activity exercised by the Chamar (Jatavs) untouchables
in Agra, India, Uttar Pradesh State (© Dominique Lardinois, 2007)
For more information
Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (ed.), The Practice of Sociology, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2003.
Das, Veena (ed.), The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2003, 2 vol.
Khare, R. S., Caste, Hierarchy, and Individualism. Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont’s Contributions, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lardinois, Roland (textes réunis et présentés), Miroir de l’Inde. Etudes indiennes en sciences sociales, Paris, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1988.
Lardinois, Roland, L’invention de l’Inde. Entre ésotérisme et science, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2007.
Srinivas, M. N., Collected Essays, with a foreword by A. M. Shah, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Uberoi, Patricia, Nandini Sundar and Satish Deshpande, Anthropology in the West. Founders of India Sociology and Anthropology, New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2007.
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