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Sociology in India: Trajectories and challengesSujata Patel

Contributions to Indian Sociology 2011 45: 427DO I: 10.1177/006996671104500305

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Sociology in India:Trajectories and challenges

Sujata Patel

A.R. Vasavi's article will evoke strong feelings of empathy among readersof Contributions and from practitioners of the discipline. Her concernsabout the state of the discipline in India and its 'downslide' have beenthe focus of extensive discussion in various forums and journal issuessince the late 1960s; some of these papers and themes (unfortunately notall significant ones) are noted in the text and the references. From thebeginning, the article distances itself from the old debate initiated byLouis Dumont in Contributions a few decades ago on the sociology ofIndia. Instead, it focuses on a set of questions related to the contemporarystate of the discipline. Interestingly, by integrating the theoretical andmethodological with pedagogical issues, the article suggests the need toassess the trajectories of the discipline not only in terms of its theoreticalmoorings but also in the institutional structures that organise its trans-mission. After highlighting some of the problems the article ends with aplea to pluralise sociology in India.

There is a long tradition in India of analysing the problems and themesailing the discipline! and these discussions lead us to divide the historyof the discipline in India into three phases: colonial, nationalist and nowglobal or 'post' nationalist. This history has highlighted four tension pointsin the growth of the discipline. The first relates to the disciplinary pointof reference: is it affiliated to theoretical traditions of social anthropology

I Patricia Uberoi (2000: 14) has argued that no other discipline in India has shownsuch reflexivity.

Sujata Patel is at the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad.Email: [email protected].

Contributions to Indian Sociology 45, 3 (2011): 427-435SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New DelhifSingaporefWashington DC001: 10.1177/006996671104500305

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428 / SUJATA PATEL

or sociology or is it an interdisciplinary social science that has a socio-logical perspective? The second pertains to its theoretical direction: willit follow sociological traditions constructed in Europe and North Americaor will it create its own indigenous perspectives? The third focuses on itsprofessional orientation: is it an academic discipline whose main role isrestricted to teaching and research within academic institutions or is it adiscipline committed to public, policy and/or social movement concerns?And finally, its geographical compass: is it concerned with relating toglobal and national issues and processes or the former together with re-gional and local ones?

If this history is to be taken into account, then sociology in India wasalways plural or diverse, incorporating varied theoretical and methodo-logical models and traditions of scholarship (Patel 2011a; Uberoi et al.2007). Also, it is important to recognise that globally such diversity hasbeen sociology's founding element even though political projects of colo-nial and nationalist states have institutionalised and legitimated singularhomogenised models (Patel 2010). In any case, pluralism and diversityhas little to do with rigour and the construction of new theoretical modelswhich is the issue that Vasavi's article is alluding to. It seems that thepluralism that the article is advocating refers to the theoretical modelsneeded to address the challenges facing the discipline as it takes up theproject to refashion itself in terms of the tumultuous changes taking placein contemporary India. Obviously, in order to confront these challenges,sociology in India has to analyse its own past and make a historicallysound and rigorous assessment of its own contradictory growth patterns.Having one dominant model does not allow for contestations amongparadigms. Contemporary sociology is about diversity and eclecticism(Giddens and Turner 1987).

The article correctly identifies the key historical moment from whichto start the discussion on the state of the discipline. This is the periodbetween the 1950s to the late 1970s. But how does one understand andanalyse the nationalist period? My argument is that any assessment ofthe growth of the discipline and its challenges has to engage with theway the nation-state has organised knowledge production ideologicallyand institutionally. We have to discuss the political projects of construct-ing a 'society' and examine how the contradictions emerging from theseprocesses are organising the limitations outlined by the article as beingthe discipline's present practices.

Contributions to Indian Sociology 45, 3 (2011): 427--435


Sociology in India /429

The article emphasises only one element that constitutes the set ofnationalist practices: that of scholarship and the role played by somescholars. But there is more to it than that. There is a need to assess howinstitutional developments have interfaced with scholarship to createspecific processes that have affected the nature of scholarship in the dis-

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cipline in India. Sociologists in India organised themselves to fit thestate's project of constructing a new discipline of 'Indian' sociology inthe context of the growth of higher education and the academia. Whilethe state demanded that social scientists develop and organise systematicknowledge about contemporary Indian society as it responded to plannedsocial change, sociologists (as against economists and political scientists)understood their role as creating a sociological language that could com-prehend the uniqueness of Indian nation, its culture and its civilisation.'Sociologists ofIndia analysed their society (India) in indigenous/nationaland on 'one's own' terms. This project allowed for the search and insti-tutionalisation of a particularistic problematique: an assessment of thechanges occurring within India's characteristic institutions: caste, kinship,family, and religion.'

The organisation of sociology around the concepts of nation andnation-state is not new; contemporary sociologists attest to its long historyincluding its moorings within classical European theory (Beck 2000;Giddens 1991). What is distinctively different in the Indian case is thefact that this project was highly self conscious (unlike that of Europeansociology) and that it was juxtaposed against colonial and now neo-colonial tutelage. A self-conscious nationalist orientation, committed todiscuss, debate and represent social changes occurring within one nationand territory-India-is unusual.

If so, what was unique about the language of sociology in India in the1950s and 1960s? I would argue that it was the consolidation of onetheoretical model-that of the 'field view'-to assess contemporaryIndia. This perspective combined the method of participant observation

2 See Oommen (2007) who even today argues that Indian society has to be perceivedthrough a civilisational lens.

3 Though there are significant theoretical differences between R.K. Mukherjee,D.P. Mukerji, and M.N. Srinivas and now T.N. Madan, I have argued that the structuringof an 'indigenous' sociological language has been the project of all of them (see Patel2006 and 2011).

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with the study of the systems of caste, religion and family within micro-settlements, such as villages. This consolidation occurred as a conse-quence of the institutionalisation of modem knowledge systems initiatedby the Indian nation-state through organisations such as the UniversityGrants Commission, the Indian Council of Social Science Research(which planned bibliographic surveys) and the Indian SociologicalSociety that organised the profession (Patel 2002, 2006). It is not thatthere were no other theoretical models available and competing with theperspective of the 'field view' in the 1950s and 1960s. A.R. Vasavi men-tions the name of R.K. Mukerjee and D.P. Mukerji but, interestingly, notA.R. Desai. These sociologists studied modem macro-processes andexamined sociabilities" and hierarchies being structured through the inter-face between old and new institutions in and through a combination ofhistorical, quantitative and qualitative methods. But what was institution-alised was the Srinivasian model.'

From as early as the 1980s, contemporary scholars had outlined thelimitations inherent in making participant observation and the 'field view'of society the main models for doing sociology in India. Satish Saberwal(1983), T.K. Oommen (1983/2007) and D.N. Dhanagare (1980), none ofwhom are referred to by the author, were some of the first to highlightthe limitations of an exclusive reliance on participant observation to studysocial change in India." All three argued that the study of macro-processeswas being ignored in the assessment of the complex processes of conflictand consensus at work in modem India.

Saberwal (1983) also highlighted another problem of this new homo-genised model. It related to the way the method of participant observationwas conceptualised and institutionalised across departments as sociologystarted being taught increasingly across the country. In 1947, sociologywas taught in three main Universities (Bombay, Calcutta and Lucknow)with Poona, Mysore and Hyderabad having small centres. By 1977, therewere 50 universities departments enrolling 6,548 Masters-level students

4 Sociabilities are dispositions and qualities of being sociable. This is a non-foundationalconcept and alludes to the 'fact' that all human beings are constructed as being social inthe material conditions and discourses of being social.

5 See Chaudhuri (2011) for the way in which Jawaharlal Nehru University's departmentcountered this trend.

6 This is not to suggest that ethnography cannot be used creatively in assessing con-temporary processes. See Burawoy et al. (2000).


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and 415 doctoral students (Saberwal 1983: 303). By 2000, the numbershad galloped upwards with the expansion of undergraduate teaching. Asa result, 100,000 graduates, 6,000 post-graduate and 200 doctoral studentsgot degrees in sociology every year (UGC 2(01).

Saberwal (1983: 307-08) argued that the problems being encounteredby the discipline were related to the institutionalisation and reproductionof the participant observation perspective in populist terms within theteaching and learning processes across departments in these new uni-versities. Most teachers, who were hurriedly recruited into these newinstitutions, did not have sufficient training to ground participant obser-vation as a scientific methodological tool. Its transmission convertedparticipant observation into mere description. This changed sociologyfrom a scientific and professional discipline to a 'soft' subject to be studiedbecause everyone could understand it and deploy it. Commonsensicalunderstandings and professional practices collapsed into each other.

Three other institutional developments need to be noted, all of whichrelate to the new state universities being established across India. Thefirst is their low funding base and thus lack of equal access to physicaland intellectual infrastructure. Second, their openness to regional politicalpressures which has been inevitably translated into a demand for the useof regional languages as a medium of instruction in state universitiesand the demand to incorporate regional themes in the syllabi. The thirdhas been the induction of a new group of first-generation students fromthe Other Backward Classes (OBC) category through the reservationsystem.' Some interlocutors have perceived some of these trends as athreat to the discipline (Madan 1974).

These processes have had an impact on the practices being institu-tionalised in these universities (Jayaram 2011) and have led many toargue that there exists a hierarchical divide between elite departments incentral universities teaching sociology in English and state universitiesusing non-English language resources, which has deepened the binaryof 'nation versus region'. This is one of the moot causes of the 'frag-mentation' of the sociological language. And yet, there is also a positiveaspect to this development: wherever these issues have been recognisedas germane and fundamental to the reconstitution of the discipline, these

7 Reservations for OBe students had been implemented a decade earlier in state uni-versities, and are now being introduced in the central universities.


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drawbacks have been converted into challenges that allow the disciplineto create new theoretical models. A.R. Vasavi mentions some of theseexperiments." However, there is a need to document the many more thatare structuring the discipline in new ways and are being written about inregional language texts. It is here that one can see how the interface withvarious 'publics' and social movements has helped revive the discipline.

These institutional changes have affected all disciplines including thephysical and biological sciences." So what is the problem regardingsociology per se? As noted above, I do not see the 'fragmentation' of thediscipline as being necessarily negative. The discipline has moved forwardin many new ways and there is little imperative today to create a singlemodel for organising it. The demise of the 'centre'-in terms of a singularmodel of theory that alone could explain contemporary India, togetherwith teaching and learning practices within a single department beingregarded as the only representative of 'correct' practices within thediscipline-is timely and will help the discipline in India to grow. Thusit is important that one moves away from false binaries, such as identifyingthe period of the 1960s with good scholarship and a clear identity, andthe post-1990s with bad scholarship and fragmented identity. Such ananalysis cannot lead us to clarify the issues. Below, I outline the twoissues that are critical. Both of them relate to the way 'methodologicalnationalism' has structured sociology in India and the way contemporarysociologists are engaging with it.

First, though there is little self-conscious debate on how colonial mod-ernity (Patel 2011b) has shaped sociological language in India, there isrecognition today of the need to distance oneself from the mainstreamsociological language of the 1950s and 1960s which understood samajor community as purely social and as civilisational traditions (definedin terms of upper-caste patriarchal assessments of a reconstructed past)and conceptualised it as being outside the mechanics of power/state andmarket (Chatterjee 1997; Sarkar 1997). Slowly and surely, sociologicallanguage in India is moving away from its earlier moorings to analyse

8 Also see the essays in Chaudhuri (2010). Of particular significance have been theinnovations in creating new curricula, initiating new pedagogic techniques and organisingnovel interdisciplinary programmes (Chaudhuri 2003).

9 The drop in the number of students doing fundamental sciences has led the govern-ment to set up five centres of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research. Un-fortunately an idea to initiate such institutes in social sciences did not bear fruit.




inequalities and exclusions inherited from pre-colonial and colonial timesand which are being reorganised by the project of modernity of the post-independent state and its elite, through an interdisciplinary language.

Second, this process has occurred as sociologists have engaged withthe growth of social movement within the country that allowed the dis-cipline to interface with what the article calls 'public sociology' (whichhas always been a site of engagement since its inception) and which hasassumed new dimensions in terms of uneven patterns of global integrationstructuring contemporary sociabilities in India. The fit between nationand territory is slowly being interrogated just as, in the late 1970s, com-mentators questioned the fit between caste and village. Sociologists havebecome conscious of the need to comprehend the varied expressions ofthe diversities that structure the subcontinent, now no longer perceivedas being within the territory of the nation-state, against the attempt tostandardise and homogenise a patriarchal, class- and caste-based orienta-tion to modernity. The growth of social movements has led many to askhow nation and nation-state fit together and do innovative studies on thelinks and interfaces between 'Indian' and 'South Asian' and global iden-tities across the world.

It seems to me that there are two broad processes that are arrangingthe discipline today. The first relates to the morass that structures thetransmission and learning, curricula, syllabi and pedagogy within thehigher education system. The second is the recognition that there is aneed to unravel the debate regarding local-regional-national and globalprocesses. This debate has led academics to ask the following sets ofquestions, engaging with which can push the discussions to a new level:What is the object of sociological investigations? Should sociologistsstudy the varied nations and the excluded within the territory defined bythe Indian nation-state, or also assess the sociabilities ofthe subcontinent'smany 'communities' spread across the world, or both? If the former, canthe discipline retain a particularistic orientation (practicing a sociologyof India) without subsuming it within an indigenous culturist frame? Ifthe second, how can it create a language that can assess the forced andvoluntary mobilities of the many out-migrants from the region and nation-state, now placed in varied class-positions across the world and relatethese with those within the territory? Should we see these in binary termsor understand the intersections of both aspects?


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In this context, what relationship should it evolve with the new inter-nationalism of sociology? Do these give new pathways for those prac-ticing sociology in India or do these merely repeat in new ways colonialpractices of rule? Or, to put it differently, should sociologists in Indiause an extended version of theories and methodologies being practicedin the global North and participate in the practices being organised bythe problematique of 'cosmopolitan' and 'global' sociology, or retain'nationalist' moorings, now re-framed and endogenously reconstitutedin the subcontinent and the global South? Or is there a third way to relatewith these questions?

An answer to these questions requires that we retrace our steps anddevelop a critical language to study the history of the discipline. Thisarticle has initiated this debate and will remain critical for any furtherdiscussion on this matter.

REFERENCES

Beck, Ulrich. 2000. The Comparative Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age ofModernity. British Journal of Sociology. 15 (1): 79-105.

Burawoy, Michael, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, Zsuzsa Gille, Teresa Gowan, LynneHaney, Maren Klawiter, Steven H. Lopez, Sean O'Riain and Millie Thayer. 2000.Global Ethnography: Forces. Connections. and Imaginations in a Post Modern World.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1997. Our Modernity. RotterdamIDakar: Sephis Codes ria Publication.Chaudhuri , Maitrayee (ed.) 2003. The Practice of Sociology. Delhi: Orient Longman.--. 2010. Sociology in India: Intellectual and Institutional Practices. Jaipur: Rawat.--. 2011. Looking Back: The Practice of Sociology in CSSS/JNU. In Sujata Patel

(ed.) Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations and Practices, pp. 158-87.New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Dhanagare, D.N. 1980. Search for Identity in Studying our Society. Seminar. 254: 23-26.Giddens, Anthony. 1991. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University

Press.Giddens, Anthony and J. Turner (eds). 1987. Social Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity.Jayaram, N. 2011. Sociology in Karnataka: The Formation and Decline of a Discipline.

In Sujata Patel (ed.) Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations and Practices,pp. 188-210. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Madan, T.N. 1974. The Teaching of Sociology in India: Some Comments. SociologicalBulletin. 23 (1): 113-19.

Oommen, T.K. (1983/2007). Sociology in India. A Plea for Contexualisation, SociologicalBulletin. 32 (2): 11-36. Reprinted in T.K.Oommen, Knowledge and Society: SituatingSociology and Social Anthropology, pp. 21-44. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.


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Sociology in India. Trajectories and Challenges.

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