hapter 5 indian sociologists - prashanth...

CHAPTER 5

INDIAN SOCIOLOGISTS

As you saw in the opening chapter ofyour first book, Introducing Sociology,the discipline is a relatively young oneeven in the European context, havingbeen established only about a centuryago. In India, interest in sociologicalways of thinking is a little more than acentury old, but formal universityteaching of sociology only began in1919 at the University of Bombay. Inthe 1920s, two other universities —those at Calcutta and Lucknow — alsobegan programmes of teaching andresearch in sociology and anthropology.Today, every major university has adepartment of sociology, socialanthropology or anthropology, andoften more than one of these disciplinesis represented.

Now-a-days sociology tends to betaken for granted in India, like mostestablished things. But this was notalways so. In the early days, it wasnot clear at all what an Indian sociologywould look like, and indeed, whetherIndia really needed something likesociology. In the first quarter of the20th century, those who becameinterested in the discipline had todecide for themselves what role it could

play in India. In this chapter, you aregoing to be introduced to some of thefounding figures of Indian sociology.These scholars have helped to shapethe discipline and adapt it to ourhistorical and social context.

The specificity of the Indian contextraised many questions. First of all, ifwestern sociology emerged as anattempt to make sense of modernity,what would its role be in a country likeIndia? India, too, was of courseexperiencing the changes broughtabout by modernity but with animportant difference — it was a colony.The first experience of modernity inIndia was closely intertwined with theexperience of colonial subjugation.Secondly, if social anthropology in thewest arose out of the curiosity felt byEuropean society about primitivecultures, what role could it have inIndia, which was an ancient andadvanced civilisation, but which alsohad ‘primitive’ societies within it?Finally, what useful role could sociologyhave in a sovereign, independent India,a nation about to begin its adventurewith planned development anddemocracy?

84 UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY

The pioneers of Indian sociologynot only had to find their own answersto questions like these, they also hadto formulate new questions forthemselves. It was only through theexperience of ‘doing’ sociology in anIndian context that the questions tookshape — they were not available‘readymade’. As is often the case, inthe beginning Indians becamesociologists and anthropologistsmostly by accident. For example, oneof the earliest and best knownpioneers of social anthropology inIndia, L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer(1861-1937), began his career as aclerk, moved on to become a schoolteacher and later a college teacher inCochin state in present day Kerala. In1902, he was asked by the Dewan ofCochin to assist with an ethnographicsurvey of the state. The Britishgovernment wanted similar surveysdone in all the princely states as wellas the presidency areas directly underits control. Ananthakrishna Iyer didthis work on a purely voluntary basis,working as a college teacher in theMaharajah’s College at Ernakulamduring the week, and functioning asthe unpaid Superintendent ofEthnography in the weekends. Hiswork was much appreciated by Britishanthropologists and administrators ofthe time, and later he was also invitedto help with a similar ethnographicsurvey in Mysore state.

Ananthakrishna Iyer was probablythe first self-taught anthropologist toreceive national and internationalrecognition as a scholar and an

academician. He was invited to lectureat the University of Madras, and wasappointed as Reader at the Universityof Calcutta, where he helped set up thefirst post-graduate anthropologydepartment in India. He remained atthe University of Calcutta from 1917to 1932. Though he had no formalqualifications in anthropology, he waselected President of the Ethnologysection of the Indian Science Congress.He was awarded an honorary doctorateby a German university during hislecture tour of European universities.He was also conferred the titles of RaoBahadur and Dewan Bahadur byCochin state.

The lawyer Sarat Chandra Roy(1871-1942) was another ‘accidentalanthropologist’ and pioneer of thediscipline in India. Before taking hislaw degree in Calcutta’s Ripon College,Roy had done graduate and post-graduate degrees in English. Soon afterhe had begun practising law, hedecided to go to Ranchi in 1898 to takeup a job as an English teacher at aChristian missionary school. Thisdecision was to change his life, for heremained in Ranchi for the next forty-four years and became the leadingauthority on the culture and society ofthe tribal peoples of the Chhotanagpurregion (present day Jharkhand). Roy’sinterest in anthropological mattersbegan when he gave up his school joband began practising law at the Ranchicourts, eventually being appointed asofficial interpreter in the court.

Roy became deeply interested intribal society as a byproduct of his

85INDIAN SOCIOLOGISTS

professional need to interpret tribalcustoms and laws to the court. Hetravelled extensively among tribalcommunities and did intensivefieldwork among them. All of this wasdone on an ‘amateur’ basis, but Roy’sdiligence and keen eye for detailresulted in valuable monographs andresearch articles. During his entirecareer, Roy published more than onehundred articles in leading Indian andBritish academic journals in additionto his famous monographs on theOraon, the Mundas and the Kharias.Roy soon became very well knownamongst anthropologists in India andBritain and was recognised as anauthority on Chhotanagpur. Hefounded the journal Man in India in1922, the earliest journal of its kind inIndia that is still published.

Both Ananthakrishna Iyer andSarat Chandra Roy were true pioneers.In the early 1900s, they beganpractising a discipline that did not yetexist in India, and which had noinstitutions to promote it. Both Iyerand Roy were born, lived and died inan India that was ruled by the British.The four Indian sociologists you aregoing to be introduced in this chapterwere born one generation later thanIyer and Roy. They came of age in thecolonial era, but their careerscontinued into the era of independence,and they helped to shape the firstformal institutions that establishedIndian sociology. G.S. Ghurye and D.P.Mukerji were born in the 1890s whileA.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas wereabout fifteen years younger, having

been born in the second decade of the20th century. Although they were alldeeply influenced by western traditionsof sociology, they were also able to offersome initial answers to the questionthat the pioneers could only begin toask : what shape should a specificallyIndian sociology take?

G.S. Ghurye can be considered thefounder of institutionalised sociologyin India. He headed India’s very firstpost-graduate teaching department ofSociology at Bombay University forthirty-five years. He guided a largenumber of research scholars, many ofwhom went on to occupy prominentpositions in the discipline. He alsofounded the Indian SociologicalSociety as well as its journalSociological Bulletin. His academicwritings were not only prolific, but verywide-ranging in the subjects theycovered. At a time when financial andinstitutional support for universityresearch was very limited, Ghuryemanaged to nurture sociology as anincreasingly Indian discipline. Ghurye’sBombay University department was thefirst to successfully implement two ofthe features which were laterenthusiastically endorsed by hissuccessors in the discipline. Thesewere the active combining of teachingand research within the sameinstitution, and the merger of socialanthropology and sociology into acomposite discipline.

Best known, perhaps, for hiswritings on caste and race, Ghurye alsowrote on a broad range of other themesincluding tribes; kinship, family and


Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1893-1983)

G. S. Ghurye was born on 12 December 1893 in Malvan,a town in the Konkan coastal region of western India. Hisfamily owned a trading business which had once beenprosperous, but was in decline.

1913: Joined Elphinstone College in Bombay withSanskrit Honours for the B.A. degree which hecompleted in 1916. Received the M.A. degree inSanskrit and English from the same college in 1918.

1919: Selected for a scholarship by the University ofBombay for training abroad in sociology. Initially went to the LondonSchool of Economics to study with L.T. Hobhouse, a prominent sociologistof the time. Later went to Cambridge to study with W.H.R. Rivers, andwas deeply influenced by his diffusionist perspective.

1923: Ph.D. submitted under A.C. Haddon after River’s sudden death in 1922.Returned to Bombay in May. Caste and Race in India, the manuscriptbased on the doctoral dissertation, was accepted for publication in a majorbook series at Cambridge.

1924: After brief stay in Calcutta, was appointed Reader and Head of theDepartment of Sociology at Bombay University in June. He remained asHead of the Department at Bombay University for the next 35 years.

1936: Ph.D. Programme was launched at the Bombay Department; the first Ph.D.in Sociology at an Indian university was awarded to G.R. Pradhan underGhurye’s supervision. The M.A. course was revised and made a full-fledged8-course programme in 1945.

1951: Ghurye established the Indian Sociological Society and became its foundingPresident. The journal of the Indian Sociological Society, Sociological Bulletinwas launched in 1952.

1959: Ghurye retired from the University, but continued to be active in academiclife, particularly in terms of publication — 17 of his 30 books were writtenafter retirement.G.S. Ghurye died in 1983, at the age of 90.

marriage; culture, civilisation and thehistoric role of cities; religion; and thesociology of conflict and integration.Among the intellectual and contextualconcerns which influenced Ghurye, themost prominent are perhapsdiffusionism, Orientalist scholarship

on Hindu religion and thought,nationalism, and the cultural aspectsof Hindu identity.

One of the major themes thatGhurye worked on was that of ‘tribal’or ‘aboriginal’ cultures. In fact, it washis writings on this subject, and


specially his debate with Verrier Elwinwhich first made him known outsidesociology and the academic world. Inthe 1930s and 1940s there was muchdebate on the place of tribal societieswithin India and how the state shouldrespond to them. Many Britishadministrator-anthropologists werespecially interested in the tribes ofIndia and believed them to be primitivepeoples with a distinctive culture farfrom mainstream Hinduism. They alsobelieved that the innocent and simpletribals would suffer exploitation andcultural degradation through contactwith Hindu culture and society. Forthis reason, they felt that the statehad a duty to protect the tribes andto help them sustain their way of lifeand culture, which were facingconstant pressure to assimilate withmainstream Hindu culture. However,nationalist Indians were equallypassionate about their belief in theunity of India and the need formodernising Indian society andculture. They believed that attemptsto preserve tribal culture weremisguided and resulted in maintainingtribals in a backward state as‘museums’ of primitive culture. Aswith many features of Hinduism itselfwhich they felt to be backward and inneed of reform, they felt that tribes,too, needed to develop. Ghuryebecame the best-known exponent ofthe nationalist view and insisted oncharacterising the tribes of India as‘backward Hindus’ rather thandistinct cultural groups. He citeddetailed evidence from a wide variety

of tribal cultures to show that they hadbeen involved in constant interactionswith Hinduism over a long period.They were thus simply further behindin the same process of assimilationthat all Indian communities had gonethrough. This particular argument —namely, that Indian tribals werehardly ever isolated primitivecommunities of the type that waswritten about in the classicalanthropological texts — was not reallydisputed. The differences were in howthe impact of mainstream culture wasevaluated. The ‘protectionists’ believedthat assimilation would result in thesevere exploitation and culturalextinction of the tribals. Ghurye andthe nationalists, on the other hand,argued that these ill-effects were notspecific to tribal cultures, but werecommon to all the backward anddowntrodden sections of Indiansociety. These were the inevitabledifficulties on the road to development.

Activity 1

Today we still seem to be involved insimilar debates. Discuss the differentsides to the question from acontemporary perspective. Forexample, many tribal movementsassert their distinctive cultural andpolitical identity — in fact, the statesof Jharkhand and Chhattisgarhwere formed in response tosuch movements. There is also amajor controversy around thedisproportionate burden that tribalcommunities have been forced tobear for the sake of developmental


projects like big dams, mines andfactories. How many such conflictsdo you know about? Find out whatthe issues are in these conflicts.What do you and your classmatesfeel should be done about theseproblems?

Ghurye on Caste and Race

G.S. Ghurye’s academic reputationwas built on the basis of his doctoraldissertation at Cambridge, which waslater published as Caste and Race inIndia (1932). Ghurye’s work attractedattention because it addressed themajor concerns of Indian anthropologyat the time. In this book, Ghuryeprovides a detailed critique of the thendominant theories about therelationship between race and caste.Herbert Risley, a British colonialofficial who was deeply interested inanthropological matters, was the mainproponent of the dominant view. Thisview held that human beings can bedivided into distinct and separateraces on the basis of their physicalcharacteristics such as thecircumference of the skull, the lengthof the nose, or the volume (size) of thecranium or the part of the skull wherethe brain is located.

Risley and others believed thatIndia was a unique ‘laboratory’ forstudying the evolution of racial typesbecause caste strictly prohibits inter-marriage among different groups, andhad done so for centuries. Risley’smain argument was that caste musthave originated in race because

different caste groups seemed tobelong to distinct racial types. Ingeneral, the higher castesapproximated Indo-Aryan racial traits,while the lower castes seemed tobelong to non-Aryan aboriginal,Mongoloid or other racial groups. Onthe basis of differences betweengroups in terms of averagemeasurements for length of nose, sizeof cranium etc., Risley and otherssuggested that the lower castes werethe original aboriginal inhabitants ofIndia. They had been subjugated byan Aryan people who had come fromelsewhere and settled in India.

Ghurye did not disagree with thebasic argument put forward by Risley butbelieved it to be only partially correct.He pointed out the problem with usingaverages alone without considering thevariation in the distribution of aparticular measurement for a givencommunity. Ghurye believed thatRisley’s thesis of the upper castes beingAryan and the lower castes beingnon-Aryan was broadly true only fornorthern India. In other parts of India,the inter-group differences in theanthropometric measurements werenot very large or systematic. Thissuggested that, in most of India exceptthe Indo-Gangetic plain, differentracial groups had been mixing witheach other for a very long time. Thus,‘racial purity’ had been preserved dueto the prohibition on inter-marriageonly in ‘Hindustan proper’ (northIndia). In the rest of the country, thepractice of endogamy (marrying onlywithin a particular caste group) may


have been introduced into groups thatwere already racially varied.

Today, the racial theory of caste isno longer believed, but in the first halfof the 20th century it was stillconsidered to be true. There areconflicting opinions among historiansabout the Aryans and their arrival inthe subcontinent. However, at thetime that Ghurye was writing thesewere among the concerns of thediscipline, which is why his writingsattracted attention.

Ghurye is also known for offeringa comprehensive definition of caste.His definition emphasises six features.

(i) Caste is an institution based onsegmental division. This meansthat caste society is divided into anumber of closed, mutually exclusivesegments or compartments. Eachcaste is one such compartment.It is closed because caste isdecided by birth — the childrenborn to parents of a particularcaste will always belong to thatcaste. On the other hand, there isno way other than birth ofacquiring caste membership. Inshort, a person’s caste is decidedby birth at birth; it can neither beavoided nor changed.

(ii) Caste society is based onhierarchical division. Each caste isstrictly unequal to every othercaste, that is, every caste is eitherhigher or lower than every otherone. In theory (though not inpractice), no two castes are everequal.

(iii) The institution of caste necessarilyinvolves restrictions on socialinteraction, specially the sharingof food. There are elaborate rulesprescribing what kind of food maybe shared between which groups.These rules are governed by ideasof purity and pollution. The samealso applies to social interaction,most dramatically in theinstitution of untouchability,where even the touch of people ofparticular castes is thought to bepolluting.

(iv) Following from the principles ofhierarchy and restricted socialinteraction, caste also involvesdifferential rights and duties fordifferent castes. These rights andduties pertain not only to religiouspractices but extend to the secularworld. As ethnographic accountsof everyday life in caste societyhave shown, interactions betweenpeople of different castes aregoverned by these rules.

(v) Caste restricts the choice ofoccupation, which, like caste itself,is decided by birth and ishereditary. At the level of society,caste functions as a rigid form ofthe division of labour with specificoccupations being allocated tospecific castes.

(vi) Caste involves strict restrictionson marriage. Caste ‘endogamy’,or marriage only within the caste,is often accompanied by rulesabout ‘exogamy’, or whom onemay not marry. This combination


Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji (1894-1961)

D.P. Mukerji was born on 5 October 1894 in a middleclass Bengali brahmin family with a long tradition ofinvolvement in higher education. Undergraduate degreein science and postgraduate degrees in History andEconomics from Calcutta University.

1924: Appointed Lecturer in the Department ofEconomics and Sociology at Lucknow University

1938: 41 Served as Director of Information under thefirst Congress-led government of the UnitedProvinces of British India (present day UttarPradesh).

1947: Served as a Member of the U.P. Labour Enquiry Committee.

1949: Appointed Professor (by special order of the Vice Chancellor) at LucknowUniversity.

1953: Appointed Professor of Economics at Aligarh Muslim University

1955: Presidential Address to the newly formed Indian Sociological Society

1956: Underwent major surgery for throat cancer in Switzerland Died on 5December 1961.

of rules about eligible and non-eligible groups helps reproducethe caste system.

Ghurye’s definition helped tomake the study of caste moresystematic. His conceptual definitionwas based on what the classical textsprescribed. In actual practice, manyof these features of caste werechanging, though all of them continueto exist in some form. Ethnographicfieldwork over the next severaldecades helped to provide valuableaccounts of what was happening tocaste in independent India.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s,sociology in India was equated withthe two major departments at Bombay

and Lucknow. Both began ascombined departments of sociologyand economics. While the Bombaydepartment in this period was led byG.S. Ghurye, the Lucknow departmenthad three major figures, the famous‘trinity’ of Radhakamal Mukerjee (thefounder), D.P. Mukerji, and D.N.Majumdar. Although all three werewell known and widely respected, D.P.Mukerji was perhaps the mostpopular. In fact, D.P. Mukerji — or D.P.as he was generally known — wasamong the most influential scholarsof his generation not only in sociologybut in intellectual and public lifebeyond the academy. His influenceand popularity came not so much from


his scholarly writings as from histeaching, his speaking at academicevents, and his work in the media,including newspaper articles andradio programmes. D.P. came tosociology via history and economics,and retained an active interest in awide variety of subjects ranging acrossliterature, music, film, western andIndian philosophy, Marxism, politicaleconomy, and development planning.He was strongly influenced byMarxism, though he had more faithin it as a method of social analysisthan as a political programme foraction. D.P. wrote many books inEnglish and Bengali. His Introductionto Indian Music is a pioneering work,considered a classic in its genre.

D.P. Mukerji on Tradition and Change

It was through his dissatisfactionwith Indian history and economicsthat D.P. turned to sociology. He feltvery strongly that the crucialdistinctive feature of India was itssocial system, and that, therefore, itwas important for each social scienceto be rooted in this context. Thedecisive aspect of the Indian contextwas the social aspect: history, politicsand economics in India were lessdeveloped in comparison with thewest; however, the social dimensionswere ‘over-developed’. As D.P. wrote ,“… my conviction grew that India hadhad society, and very little else. Infact, she had too much of it. Herhistory, her economics, and even herphilosophy, I realised, had alwayscentred in social groups, and at best,

in socialised persons.” (Mukherji1955:2)

Given the centrality of society inIndia, it became the first duty of anIndian sociologist to study and toknow the social traditions of India. ForD.P. this study of tradition was notoriented only towards the past, butalso included sensitivity to change.Thus, tradition was a living tradition,maintaining its links with the past, butalso adapting to the present and thusevolving over time. As he wrote, “...itis not enough for the Indian sociologistto be a sociologist. He must be anIndian first, that is, he is to share inthe folk-ways, mores, customs andtraditions, for the purpose ofunderstanding his social system andwhat lies beneath it and beyond it.”In keeping with this view, he believedthat sociologists should learn and befamiliar with both ‘high’ and ‘low’languages and cultures — not onlySanskrit, Persian or Arabic, but alsolocal dialects.

D.P. argued that Indian cultureand society are not individualistic inthe western sense. The average Indianindividual’s pattern of desires is moreor less rigidly fixed by his socio-cultural group pattern and he hardlydeviates from it. Thus, the Indiansocial system is basically orientedtowards group, sect, or caste-action,not ‘voluntaristic’ individual action.Although ‘voluntarism’ was beginningto influence the urban middle classes,its appearance ought to be itself aninteresting subject of study for theIndian sociologist. D.P. pointed out


that the root meaning of the wordtradition is to transmit. Its Sanskritequivalents are either parampara, thatis, succession; or aitihya, which comesfrom the same root as itihas or history.Traditions are thus strongly rooted ina past that is kept alive through therepeated recalling and retelling ofstories and myths. However, this linkwith the past does not rule out change,but indicates a process of adaptationto it. Internal and external sources ofchange are always present in everysociety. The most commonly citedinternal source of change in westernsocieties is the economy, but thissource has not been as effective inIndia. Class conflict, D.P. believed, hadbeen “smoothed and covered by castetraditions” in the Indian context,where new class relations had not yetemerged very sharply. Based on thisunderstanding, he concluded that oneof the first tasks for a dynamic Indiansociology would be to provide anaccount of the internal, non-economiccauses of change.

D.P. believed that there were threeprinciples of change recognised inIndian traditions, namely; shruti, smritiand anubhava. Of these, the last —anubhava or personal experience — isthe revolutionary principle. However, inthe Indian context personal experiencesoon flowered into collective experience.This meant that the most importantprinciple of change in Indian societywas generalised anubhava, or thecollective experience of groups. Thehigh traditions were centred in smritiand sruti, but they were periodically

challenged by the collective experienceof groups and sects, as for example inthe bhakti movement. D.P. emphasisedthat this was true not only of Hindubut also of Muslim culture in India. InIndian Islam, the Sufis have stressedlove and experience rather than holytexts, and have been important inbringing about change. Thus, for D.P.,the Indian context is not one wherediscursive reason (buddhi-vichar) is thedominant force for change; anubhavaand prem (experience and love) havebeen historically superior as agents ofchange.

Conflict and rebellion in the Indiancontext have tended to work throughcollective experiences. But theresilience of tradition ensures that thepressure of conflict produces changein the tradition without breaking it.So we have repeated cycles ofdominant orthodoxy being challengedby popular revolts which succeed intransforming orthodoxy, but areeventually reabsorbed into thistransformed tradition. This processof change — of rebellion containedwithin the limits of an overarchingtradition — is typical of a caste society,where the formation of classes andclass consciousness has beeninhibited. D.P.’s views on tradition andchange led him to criticise allinstances of unthinking borrowingfrom western intellectual traditions,including in such contexts asdevelopment planning. Tradition wasneither to be worshipped nor ignored,just as modernity was needed but notto be blindly adopted. D.P. was


simultaneously a proud but criticalinheritor of tradition, as well as anadmiring critic of the modernity thathe acknowledged as having shaped hisown intellectual perspective.

Activity 2

Discuss what is meant by a ‘livingtradition’. According to D.P. Mukerji,this is a tradition which maintainslinks with the past by retainingsomething from it, and at the sametime incorporates new things. A livingtradition thus includes some oldelements but also some new ones.You can get a better and moreconcrete sense of what this means ifyou try to find out from differentgenerations of people in yourneighbourhood or family about whatis changed and what is unchangedabout specific practices. Here is a listof subjects you can try; you could alsotry other subjects of your own choice.

Games played by children ofyour age group (boys/girls)

Ways in which a popular festivalis celebrated

Typical dress/clothing worn bywomen and men

… Plus other such subjects ofyour choice …

For each of these, you need tofind out: What aspects haveremained unchanged since as farback as you know or can find out?What aspects have changed? Whatwas different and same about thepractice/event (i) 10 years ago; (ii)20 years ago; (iii) 40 years ago;(iv) 60 or more years ago

Discuss your findings with thewhole class.

A.R. Desai is one of the rare Indiansociologists who was directly involvedin politics as a formal member ofpolitical parties. Desai was a life-longMarxist and became involved in Marxistpolitics during his undergraduate daysat Baroda, though he later resigned hismembership of the Communist Partyof India. For most of his career he wasassociated with various kinds of non-mainstream Marxist political groups.Desai’s father was a middle level civilservant in the Baroda state, but wasalso a well-known novelist, withsympathy for both socialism andIndian nationalism of the Gandhianvariety. Having lost his mother earlyin life, Desai was brought up by hisfather and lived a migratory lifebecause of the frequent transfers ofhis father to different posts in theBaroda state.

After his undergraduate studies inBaroda, Desai eventually joined theBombay department of sociology tostudy under Ghurye. He wrote hisdoctoral dissertation on the socialaspects of Indian nationalism and wasawarded the degree in 1946. Histhesis was published in 1948 as TheSocial Background of IndianNationalism, which is probably hisbest known work. In this book, Desaioffered a Marxist analysis of Indiannationalism, which gave prominenceto economic processes and divisions,while taking account of the specificconditions of British colonialism.Although it had its critics, this bookproved to be very popular and wentthrough numerous reprints. Among


the other themes that Desai workedon were peasant movements and ruralsociology, modernisation, urbanissues, political sociology, forms of thestate and human rights. BecauseMarxism was not very prominent orinfluential within Indian sociology,A.R. Desai was perhaps better knownoutside the discipline than within it.Although he received many honoursand was elected President of theIndian Sociological Society, Desairemained a somewhat unusual figurein Indian sociology.

A.R. Desai on the State

The modern capitalist state was oneof the significant themes that

Akshay Ramanlal Desai (1915-1994)

A. R. Desai was born in 1915. Early education in Baroda, then in Surat and Bombay.

1934-39: Member of Communist Party of India; involved with Trotskyite groups.

1946: Ph.D. submitted at Bombay under the supervision of G.S. Ghurye.

1948: Desai’s Ph.D. dissertation is published as the book: Social Backgroundof Indian Nationalism.

1951: Joins the faculty of the Department of Sociology at Bombay University

1953-1981: Member of Revolutionary Socialist Party.

1961: Rural Transition in India is published.

1967: Appointed Professor and Head of Department.

1975: State and Society in India: Essays in Dissent is published.

1976: Retired from Department of Sociology.

1979: Peasant Struggles in India is published.

1986: Agrarian Struggles in India after Independence is published.Died on 12 November 1994.

interested A.R. Desai. As always, hisapproach to this issue was from aMarxist perspective. In an essay called“The myth of the welfare state”, Desaiprovides a detailed critique of thisnotion and points to it manyshortcomings. After considering theprominent definitions available in thesociological literature, Desai identifiesthe following unique features of thewelfare state:

(i) A welfare state is a positive state.This means that, unlike the ‘laissezfaire’ of classical liberal politicaltheory, the welfare state does notseek to do only the minimumnecessary to maintain law andorder. The welfare state is an


interventionist state and activelyuses its considerable powers todesign and implement social policiesfor the betterment of society.

(ii) The welfare state is a democraticstate. Democracy was consideredan essential condition for theemergence of the welfare state.Formal democratic institutions,specially multi-party elections,were thought to be a definingfeature of the welfare state. Thisis why liberal thinkers excludedsocialist and communist statesfrom this definition.

(iii) A welfare state involves a mixedeconomy. A ‘mixed economy’ meansan economy where both privatecapitalist enterprises and stateor publicly owned enterprisesco-exist. A welfare state does notseek to eliminate the capitalistmarket, nor does it prevent publicinvestment in industry and otherfields. By and large, the statesector concentrates on basic goodsand social infrastructure, whileprivate industry dominates theconsumer goods sector.

Desai then goes on to suggest sometest criteria against which theperformance of the welfare state canbe measured. These are:(i) Does the welfare state ensure

freedom from poverty, socialdiscrimination and security for allits citizens?

(ii) Does the welfare state removeinequalities of income throughmeasures to redistribute income

from the rich to the poor, and bypreventing the concentration ofwealth?

(iii) Does the welfare state transformthe economy in such a way thatthe capitalist profit motive is madesubservient to the real needs of thecommunity?

iv) Does the welfare state ensurestable development free from thecycle of economic booms anddepressions?

(v) Does it provide employment for all?

Using these criteria, Desaiexamines the performance of thosestates that are most often described aswelfare states, such as Britain, the USAand much of Europe, and finds theirclaims to be greatly exaggerated. Thus,most modern capitalist states, even inthe most developed countries, fail toprovide minimum levels of economicand social security to all their citizens.They are unable to reduce economicinequality and often seem to encourageit. The so-called welfare states have alsobeen unsuccessful at enabling stabledevelopment free from marketfluctuations. The presence of excesseconomic capacity and high levels ofunemployment are yet another failure.Based on these arguments, Desaiconcludes that the notion of the welfarestate is something of a myth.

A.R. Desai also wrote on theMarxist theory of the state. In thesewritings we can see that Desai doesnot take a one-sided view but openlycriticises the shortcomings ofCommunist states. He cites many


Marxist thinkers to emphasise theimportance of democracy even undercommunism, arguing strongly thatpolitical liberties and the rule of lawmust be upheld in all genuinelysocialist states.

Activity 3

A.R. Desai criticises the welfare statefrom a Marxist and socialist point ofview — that is he would like the stateto do more for its citizens than isbeing done by western capitalistwelfare states. There are also verystrong opposing viewpoints todaywhich say that the state should doless — it should leave most things tothe free market. Discuss theseviewpoints in class. Be sure to givea fair hearing to both sides.

Make a list of all the things thatare done by the state or governmentin your neighbourhood, starting withyour school. Ask: people to find outif this list has grown longer or shorterin recent years — is the state doingmore things now than before, or less?What do you feel would happen if thestate were to stop doing these things?Would you and your neighbourhood/school be worse off, better off, orremain unaffected? Would rich,middle class, and poor people havethe same opinion, or be affected inthe same way, if the state were tostop some of its activities?

Make a list of state — providedservices and facilities in yourneighbourhood, and see how opinionsmight differ across class groups onwhether these should continue or bestopped. (For example: roads, watersupply, electricity supply, street

lights, schools, sanitation, policeservices, hospitals, bus, train and airtransport… Think of others that arerelevant in your context.)

Probably the best known Indiansociologist of the post-independenceera, M.N. Srinivas earned two doctoraldegrees, one from Bombay universityand one from Oxford. Srinivas was astudent of Ghurye’s at Bombay.Srinivas’ intellectual orientation wastransformed by the years he spent atthe department of social anthropologyin Oxford. British social anthropologywas at that time the dominant forcein western anthropology, and Srinivasalso shared in the excitement of beingat the ‘centre’ of the discipline.Srinivas’ doctoral dissertation waspublished as Religion and Societyamong the Coorgs of South India. Thisbook established Srinivas’ internationalreputation with its detailed ethnographicapplication of the structural — functionalperspective dominant in British socialanthropology. Srinivas was appointedto a newly created lectureship in Indiansociology at Oxford, but resigned in1951 to return to India as the head ofa newly created department ofsociology at the Maharaja SayajiraoUniversity at Baroda. In 1959, hemoved to Delhi to set up anotherdepartment at the Delhi School ofEconomics, which soon becameknown as one of the leading centresof sociology in India.

Srinivas often complained thatmost of his energies were taken up ininstitution building, leaving him with


little time for his own research. Despitethese difficulties, Srinivas produced asignificant body of work on themessuch as caste, modernisation andother processes of social change,village society, and many other issues.Srinivas helped to establish Indiansociology on the world map throughhis international contacts andassociations. He had strongconnections in British socialanthropology as well as Americananthropology, particularly at the

University of Chicago, which was thena powerful centre in worldanthropology. Like G.S. Ghurye andthe Lucknow scholars, Srinivassucceeded in training a newgeneration of sociologists who were tobecome leaders of the discipline in thefollowing decades.

M.N. Srinivas on the Village

The Indian village and village societyremained a life-long focus of interestfor Srinivas. Although he had made

Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (1916-1999)

M.N. Srinivas was Born 16 November 1916. in an Iyengarbrahmin family in Mysore. It’s father was a landownerand worked for the Mysore power and light department.His early education was at Mysore University, and helater went to Bombay to do an MA under G.S. Ghurye

1942: M.A. thesis on Marriage and Family Among theCoorgs published as book.

1944: Ph.D. thesis (in 2 volumes) submitted to BombayUniversity under the supervision of G.S. Ghurye.

1945: Leaves for Oxford; studies first under Radcliffe-Brown and then under Evans-Pritchard.

1947: Awarded D.Phil. degree in Social Anthropologyfrom Oxford; returns to India.

1948: Appointed Lecturer in Indian Sociology at Oxford; spends 1948 doingfieldwork in Rampura.

1951: Resigns from Oxford to take up Professorship at Maharaja Sayaji RaoUniversity in Baroda to found its sociology department.

1959: Takes up Professorship at the Delhi School of Economics to set up thesociology department there.

1971: Leaves Delhi University to co-found the Institute of Social and EconomicChange at Bangalore.

Died 30 November 1999.


short visits to villages to conductsurveys and interviews, it was notuntil he did field work for a year at avillage near Mysore that he reallyacquired first hand knowledge ofvillage society. The experience of fieldwork proved to be decisive for hiscareer and his intellectual path.Srinivas helped encourage andcoordinate a major collective effort atproducing detailed ethnographicaccounts of village society during the1950s and 1960s. Along with otherscholars like S.C. Dube and D.N.Majumdar, Srinivas was instrumentalin making village studies thedominant field in Indian sociologyduring this time.

Srinivas’ writings on the villagewere of two broad types. There wasfirst of all ethnographic accounts offieldwork done in villages ordiscussions of such accounts. Asecond kind of writing includedhistorical and conceptual discussionsabout the Indian village as a unit ofsocial analysis. In the latter kind ofwriting, Srinivas was involved in adebate about the usefulness of thevillage as a concept. Arguing againstvillage studies, some socialanthropologists like Louis Dumontthought that social institutions likecaste were more important thansomething like a village, which wasafter all only a collection of peopleliving in a particular place. Villagesmay live or die, and people may movefrom one village to another, but theirsocial institutions, like caste orreligion, follow them and go with them

wherever they go. For this reason,Dumont believed that it would bemisleading to give much importanceto the village as a category. As againstthis view, Srinivas believed that thevillage was a relevant social entity.Historical evidence showed thatvillages had served as a unifyingidentity and that village unity wasquite significant in rural social life.Srinivas also criticised the Britishadministrator anthropologists whohad put forward a picture of the Indianvillage as unchanging, self-sufficient,“little republics”. Using historical andsociological evidence, Srinivas showedthat the village had, in fact, experiencedconsiderable change. Moreover, villageswere never self-sufficient, and had beeninvolved in various kinds of economic,social and political relationships at theregional level.

The village as a site of researchoffered many advantages to Indiansociology. It provided an opportunityto illustrate the importance ofethnographic research methods. Itoffered eye-witness accounts of therapid social change that was takingplace in the Indian countryside as thenewly independent nation began aprogramme of planned development.These vivid descriptions of village Indiawere greatly appreciated at the timeas urban Indians as well as policymakers were able to form impressionsof what was going on in the heartlandof India. Village studies thus provideda new role for a discipline like sociologyin the context of an independentnation. Rather than being restricted


to the study of ‘primitive’ peoples, itcould also be made relevant to amodernising society.

Activity 4

Suppose you had friends fromanother planet or civilisation whowere visiting the Earth for the firsttime and had never heard ofsomething called a ‘village’. What arethe five clues you would give themto identify a village if they ever cameacross one?

Do this in small groups and thencompare the five clues given bydifferent groups. Which featuresappear most often? Do the mostcommon features help you to makea sort of definition of a village? (Tocheck whether your definition is agood one, ask yourself the question:Could there be a village where all ormost features mentioned in yourdefinition are absent?)

Activity 5

In the 1950s, there was great interestamong urban Indians in the villagestudies that sociologists began doingat that time. Do you feel urban peopleare interested in the village today?How often are villages mentioned inthe T.V., in newspapers and films? Ifyou live in a city, does your familystill have contacts with relatives in thevillage? Did it have such contacts inyour parents’ generation or yourgrandparents’ generation? Do youknow of anybody from a city who hasmoved to a village? Do you know ofpeople who would like to go back? Ifyou do, what reasons do these people

give for wanting to leave the city andlive in the village? If you don’t knowof any such people, why do you thinkpeople don’t want to live in a village?If you know of people living in a villagewho would like to live in a town orcity, what reasons do they give forwanting to leave the village?

Conclusion

These four Indian sociologists helpedto give a distinctive character to thediscipline in the context of a newlyindependent modernising country.They are offered here as examples ofthe diverse ways in which sociologywas ‘Indianised’. Thus, Ghurye beganwith the questions defined by westernanthropologists, but brought to themhis intimate knowledge of classicaltexts and his sense of educated Indianopinion. Coming from a very differentbackground, a thoroughly westernisedmodern intellectual like D.P. Mukerjirediscovered the importance of Indiantradition without being blind to itsshortcomings. Like Mukerji, A.R.Desai was also strongly influenced byMarxism and offered a critical view ofthe Indian state at a time when suchcriticism was rare. Trained in thedominant centres of western socialanthropology, M.N. Srinivas adaptedhis training to the Indian context andhelped design a new agenda forsociology in the late 20th century.

It is a sign of the health andstrength of a discipline whensucceeding generations learn from


GLOSSARY

Administrator–anthropologists: The term refers to British administrativeofficials who were part of the British Indian government in the 19th andearly 20th centuries, and who took great interest in conductinganthropological research, specially surveys and censuses. Some of thembecame well known anthropologists after retirement. Prominent namesinclude: Edgar Thurston, William Crooke, Herbert Risley and J.H. Hutton.

Anthropometry: The branch of anthropology that studied human racialtypes by measuring the human body, particularly the volume of the cranium(skull), the circumference of the head, and the length of the nose.

Assimilation: A process by which one culture (usually the larger or moredominant one) gradually absorbs another; the assimilated culture mergesinto the assimilating culture, so that it is no longer alive or visible at theend of the process.

Endogamy: A social institution that defines the boundary of a social orkin group within which marriage relations are permissible; marriage outsidethis defined groups are prohibited. The most common example is casteendogamy, where marriage may only take place with a member of thesame caste.

Exogamy: A social institution that defines the boundary of a social or kingroup with which or within which marriage relations are prohibited;marriages must be contracted outside these prohibited groups. Commonexamples include prohibition of marriage with blood relatives (sapindexogamy), members of the same lineage (sagotra exogamy), or residents ofthe same village or region (village/region exogamy).

Laissez-faire: A French phrase (literally ‘let be’ or ‘leave alone’) that standsfor a political and economic doctrine that advocates minimum stateintervention in the economy and economic relations; usually associatedwith belief in the regulative powers and efficiency of the free market.

and eventually go beyond theirpredecessors. This has also beenhappening in Indian sociology.Succeeding generations havesubjected the work of these pioneers

to constructive criticism in order totake the discipline further. The signsof this process of learning andcritique are visible not only in thisbook but all over Indian sociology.


EXERCISES

1. How did Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy come to practicesocial anthropology?

2. What were the main arguments on either side of the debate about howto relate to tribal communities?

3. Outline the positions of Herbert Risley and G.S. Ghurye on therelationship between race and caste in India.

4. Summarise the social anthropological definition of caste.

5. What does D.P. Mukerji mean by a ‘living tradition’? Why did he insistthat Indian sociologists be rooted in this tradition?

6. What are the specificities of Indian culture and society, and how dothey affect the pattern of change?

7. What is a welfare state? Why is A.R. Desai critical of the claims madeon its behalf?

8. What arguments were given for and against the village as a subject ofsociological research by M.N. Srinivas and Louis Dumont?

9. What is the significance of village studies in the history of Indiansociology? What role did M.N. Srinivas play in promoting village studies?

REFERENCES

DESAI, A.R. 1975. State and Society in India: Essays in Dissent. PopularPrakashan, Bombay.

DESHPANDE, SATISH. ‘Fashioning a Postcolonial Discipline: M.N. Srinivasand Indian Sociology’ in Uberoi, Sundar and Deshpande (eds) (in press).

GHURYE, G.S. 1969. Caste and Race in India, Fifth Edition, PopularPrakashan, Bombay.

PRAMANICK, S.K. 1994. Sociology of G.S. Ghurye, Rawat Publications, Jaipur,and New Delhi.

MUKERJI, D.P. 1946. Views and Counterviews. The Universal Publishers,Lucknow.

MUKERJI, D.P. 1955. ‘Indian Tradition and Social Change’, PresidentialAddress to the All India Sociological Conference at Dehradun,


Reproduced in T.K. Oommen and Partha N. Mukherji (eds) 1986.Indian Sociology: Reflections and Introspections, Popular Prakashan,Bombay.

MADAN, T.N. 1994. Pathways: Approaches to the Study of Society in India.Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

PATEL, SUJATA. ‘Towards a Praxiological Understanding of Indian Society:The Sociology of A.R. Desai’, in Uberoi, Sundar and Deshpande (eds)(in press).

SRINIVAS, M.N. 1955. India’s Villages. Development Department,Government of West Bengal. West Bengal Government Press, Calcutta.

SRINIVAS, M.N. 1987. ‘The Indian Village: Myth and Reality’ in the DominantCaste and other Essays. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

UBEROI, PATRICIA, NANDINI SUNDAR AND SATISH DESHPANDE (eds) (in press).Disciplinary Biographies: Essays in the History of Indian Sociology andSocial Anthropology. Permanent Black, New Delhi.

UPADHYA, CAROL. ‘The Idea of Indian Society: G.S. Ghurye and the Makingof Indian Sociology’, in Uberoi, Sundar and Deshpande (eds) (in press).

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