Chapter 10

INDIAN SOCIOLOGISTS
 In India, interest in sociological ways of thinking is a little more than a century old, but formal
university teaching of sociology only began in 1919 at the University of Bombay.
 Today, every major university has a department of sociology, social anthropology or anthropology,
and often more than one of these disciplines is represented.

In this chapter, you are going to be introduced to some of the founding figures of Indian sociology. These
scholars have helped to shape the discipline and adapt it to our historical and social context.

In the beginning Indians became sociologists and anthropologists mostly by

accident.
 For example, one of the earliest and best known pioneers of social anthropology in India,
 L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937), began his career as a clerk,
 He was asked by the Dewan of Cochin to assist with an ethnographic survey of the state.
 First self-taught anthropologist to receive national and international recognition as a scholar
and an academician.
 Reader at the University of Calcutta
 He helped set up the first post-graduate anthropology department in India.
 He was also conferred the titles of Rao Bahadur and Dewan Bahadur by Cochin state.
 Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942) was another ‘accidental anthropologist’ and pioneer
of the discipline in India.
 English teacher at a Christian missionary school.
 Roy became deeply interested in tribal society
 He founded the journal Man in India in 1922

G.S. Ghurye
 The founder of institutionalised sociology in India.
 Founded the Indian Sociological Society as well as its journal Sociological Bulletin.
 Best known, perhaps, for his writings on caste and race, Ghurye also wrote on a broad range of
other themes including tribes; kinship, family and marriage; culture, civilisation and the historic role
of cities; religion; and the sociology of conflict and integration.
 Among the intellectual and contextual concerns which influenced Ghurye, the most prominent are
perhaps diffusionism, Orientalist scholarship on Hindu religion and thought, nationalism, and the
cultural aspects of Hindu identity.
 One of the major themes that Ghurye worked on was that of ‘tribal’ or ‘aboriginal’ cultures.

In the 1930s and 1940s there was much debate on the place of tribal
societies within India and how the state should respond to them.
 Many British administrator-anthropologists (Verrier Elwin) were specially interested in the tribes
of India and believed them to be primitive peoples with a distinctive culture far from mainstream
Hinduism.
 They also believed that the innocent and simple tribals would suffer exploitation and cultural
degradation through contact with Hindu culture and society.
 For this reason, they felt that the state had a duty to protect the tribes and to help them
sustain their way of life and culture, which were facing constant pressure to assimilate with
mainstream Hindu culture.

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  Nationalist Indians believed that- Many features of Hinduism itself which they felt to be backward
and in need of reform, they felt that tribes, too, needed to develop.
 Ghurye became the best-known exponent of the nationalist view and insisted on characterising
the tribes of India as ‘backward Hindus’ rather than distinct cultural groups.
 He cited detailed evidence from a wide variety of tribal cultures to show that they had been
involved in constant interactions with Hinduism over a long period.
 This particular argument — namely, that Indian tribals were hardly ever isolated primitive
communities of the type that was written about in the classical anthropological texts — was not
really disputed.

 The ‘protectionists’ believed that assimilation would result in the severe exploitation and
cultural extinction of the tribals.
 Ghurye and the nationalists, on the other hand, argued that these ill-effects were not specific
to tribal cultures, but were common to all the backward and downtrodden sections of Indian
society

Ghurye on Caste and Race

 Caste and Race in India (1932).
 In this book, Ghurye provides a detailed critique of the then dominant theories about the
relationship between race and caste.
 Herbert Risley, a British colonial official who was deeply interested in
anthropological matters, was the main proponent of the dominant view.
 This view held that human beings can be divided into distinct and separate races on the basis
of their physical characteristics such as the circumference of the skull, the length of the nose,
or the volume (size) of the cranium or the part of the skull where the brain is located.
 Risley and others believed that India was a unique ‘laboratory’ for studying the evolution of
racial types because caste strictly prohibits intermarriage among different groups, and had
done so for centuries.
 Risley’s main argument was that caste must have originated in race because different caste
groups seemed to belong to distinct racial types.
 In general, the higher castes approximated Indo-Aryan racial traits, while the lower castes
seemed to belong to non-Aryan aboriginal, Mongoloid or other racial groups.
 Risley and others suggested that the lower castes were the original aboriginal inhabitants of
India. They had been subjugated by an Aryan people who had come from elsewhere and settled
in India.
 Ghurye did not disagree with the basic argument put forward by Risley
but believed it to be only partially correct.
 Ghurye believed that Risley’s thesis of the upper castes being Aryan and the lower castes being
non-Aryan was broadly true only for northern India. In other parts of India, the inter-group
differences were not very large.
 In most of India except the Indo-Gangetic plain, different racial groups had been mixing with
each other for a very long time.
 Thus, ‘racial purity’ had been preserved due to the prohibition on inter-marriage only in North
India. In the rest of the country, the practice of endogamy may have been introduced into
groups that were already racially varied.

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Definition of caste: Ghurye
 Caste is an institution based on segmental division.
 This means that caste society is divided into a number of closed, mutually exclusive segments
or compartments.
 It is closed because caste is decided by birth
 There is no way other than birth of acquiring caste membership.
 In short, a person’s caste is decided by birth at birth; it can neither be avoided nor changed.
 Caste society is based on hierarchical division.
 Each caste is strictly unequal to every other caste, that is, every caste is either higher or
lower than every other one.
 No two castes are ever equal.
 The institution of caste necessarily involves restrictions on social interaction, specially the sharing
of food.
 There are elaborate rules prescribing what kind of food may be shared between which
groups.
 These rules are governed by ideas of purity and pollution.
 Caste also involves differential rights and duties for different castes.
 These rights and duties pertain not only to religious practices but extend to the secular
world.
 As ethnographic accounts of everyday life in caste society have shown, interactions between
people of different castes are governed by these rules.
 Caste restricts the choice of occupation
 Caste functions as a rigid form of the division of labour with specific occupations being
allocated to specific castes.
 Caste involves strict restrictions on marriage.
 Endogamous marriage

D.P. Mukerji
 He was strongly influenced by Marxism
 His Introduction to Indian Music is a pioneering work, considered a classic in its genre.

D.P. Mukerji on Tradition and Change

 He felt very strongly that the crucial distinctive feature of India was its social system.
 Given the centrality of society in India, it became the first duty of an Indian sociologist to study and
to know the social traditions of India.
 This study of tradition was not oriented only towards the past, but also included sensitivity to
change. Thus, tradition was a living tradition, maintaining its links with the past, but also
adapting to the present and thus evolving over time.
 It is not enough for the Indian sociologist to be a sociologist. He must be an Indian first, that is, he is
to share in the folk-ways, mores, customs and traditions, for the purpose of understanding his
social system and what lies beneath it and beyond it.”
 he believed that sociologists should learn and be familiar with both ‘high’ and ‘low’ languages and
cultures — not only Sanskrit, Persian or Arabic, but also local dialects.
 D.P. argued that Indian culture and society are not individualistic in the western sense.
 The Indian social system is basically oriented towards group, sect, or caste-action, not
‘voluntaristic’ individual action.
 The root meaning of the word tradition is to transmit.

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  Traditions are thus strongly rooted in a past that is kept alive through the repeated recalling and
retelling of stories and myths.
 Internal and external sources of change are always present in every society. The most commonly
cited internal source of change in western societies is the economy.
 One of the first tasks for a dynamic Indian sociology would be to provide an account of the internal,
non-economic causes of change.

Three principles of change recognised in Indian traditions.

 namely; shruti, smriti and anubhava. — anubhava or personal experience — is
the revolutionary principle.
 However, in the Indian context personal experience soon flowered into collective experience. This
meant that the most important principle of change in Indian society was generalised anubhava, or
the collective experience of groups.
 The high traditions were centred in smriti and sruti, but they were periodically challenged by
the collective experience of groups.
 Eg: the bhakti movement. D.P. emphasised that this was true not only of Hindu but also of
Muslim culture in India. In Indian Islam, the Sufis have stressed love and experience rather
than holy texts, and have been important in bringing about change.
 In Indian context, dominant force for change is anubhava and prem (experience and love)

A.R. Desai
 Desai was a life-long Marxist
 The Social Background of Indian Nationalism -1948
A.R. Desai on the State
 “The myth of the welfare state”
 following unique features of the welfare state:
1. A welfare state is a positive state.
 It is an interventionist state and actively uses its considerable powers to design and
implement social policies for the betterment of society.
2. The welfare state is a democratic state.
 Formal democratic institutions, specially multi-party elections, were thought to be a defining
feature of the welfare state.
3. A welfare state involves a mixed economy.
 Economy where both private capitalist enterprises and state or publicly owned enterprises
co-exist.

 Test criteria against which the performance of the welfare state can be
measured.
1. Does the welfare state ensure freedom from poverty, social discrimination and security for all
its citizens?
2. Does the welfare state remove inequalities of income through measures to redistribute income
from the rich to the poor, and by preventing the concentration of wealth?
3. Does the welfare state transform the economy in such a way that the capitalist profit motive is
made subservient to the real needs of the community?
4. Does the welfare state ensure stable development free from the cycle of economic booms and
depressions?
5. Does it provide employment for all?

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  Using these criteria, Desai examines the performance of those states that are most often
described as welfare states, such as Britain, the USA and much of Europe, and finds their
claims to be greatly exaggerated.
 Thus, most modern capitalist states, even in the most developed countries, fail to provide
minimum levels of economic and social security to all their citizens.
 They are unable to reduce economic inequality and often seem to encourage it.
 The so-called welfare states have also been unsuccessful at enabling stable development free
from market fluctuations.
 The presence of excess economic capacity and high levels of unemployment are yet another
failure.
 Based on these arguments, Desai concludes that the notion of the welfare state is
something of a myth.

M.N. Srinivas
 Srinivas was a student of Ghurye’s at Bombay.
 Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India.

M.N. Srinivas on the Village

 Srinivas’ writings on the village were of two broad types.
 Ethnographic accounts of fieldwork done in villages or discussions of such accounts.
 Kind of writing included historical and conceptual discussions about the Indian village as a unit
of social analysis.
 Louis Dumont Vs MN Srinivas
 Social institutions like caste were more important than something like a village, which was after
all only a collection of people living in a particular place.
 Villages may live or die, and people may move from one village to another, but their social
institutions, like caste or religion, follow them and go with them wherever they go.
 For this reason, Dumont believed that it would be misleading to give much importance to the
village as a category.
 As against this view, Srinivas believed that the village was a relevant social entity.
 Historical evidence showed that villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity
was quite significant in rural social life.
 Srinivas also criticised the British administrator anthropologists who had put forward a picture
of the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient, “little republics”.
 Using historical and sociological evidence, Srinivas showed that the village had, in fact,
experienced considerable change. Moreover, villages were never self-sufficient, and had been
involved in various kinds of economic, social and political relationships at the regional level.

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