Indian Sociological Thinkers

M.N. Srinivas village studies

M.N. Srinivas is the sociologist most closely associated with the village study in Indian sociology. The method on which his principal work rested was fieldwork, meaning prolonged residence in a village and direct observation of its social life. It was not conjectural reconstruction, archival research or content analysis of texts. His study of Rampura, a village in Mysore, is the classic example of this approach, and it is the study students should recall first when a question asks about village studies.

The title of his account of Rampura, The Remembered Village, reflects how the book was produced rather than a theory of memory. Srinivas lost his field notes in a fire, so the book had to be written from memory. Students should therefore not read the title as a reference to collective memory or to a difficult fieldwork experience.

• fieldwork — sustained first-hand observation of a community, used as the core method of social anthropology and village sociology. Example: a researcher lives in a village for a year and records kinship, ritual and economic life.
• village study — the examination of a village as a unit that reveals caste, kinship and social change.

In the 1950s, the first generation of postcolonial Indian sociologists and social anthropologists treated the village as the chief unit of inquiry. They believed it revealed the structure of Indian society, the caste system and the patterns of social change.

Ambedkar on fraternity and dalit thought

For Ambedkar, fraternity is not a sentiment but a social condition that depends on mobility and communication. He described the ideal society through the concept of social endosmosis. Such a society has channels through which change in one part reaches the others, many interests that are consciously shared, and free and varied points of contact among associations. Caste, in this view, blocks these channels and so prevents fraternity.

Ambedkar also analysed how caste was formed. In his account, the transition from an open-door class system to a closed-door caste system happened when some groups closed the door and others found it closed against them. Classes became castes through imitation and excommunication. The creation of castes meant the superposition of endogamy on exogamy. He rejected the view that function alone was the foundation of the caste system, because its hereditary and endogamous character was decisive.

Later scholarship that draws on dalit thought has developed these concerns in several directions. Sharmila Rege's work on dalit feminism holds that non-dalit feminists cannot speak for dalit women but can reinvent themselves as dalit feminists. Joan P. Mencher argued that caste has functioned as an effective system of economic exploitation from the viewpoint of the lowest strata. Dipankar Gupta criticised Louis Dumont's theory of pure hierarchy for lacking empirical support in Hindu India. André Béteille noted that Indians increasingly idealise equality rather than hierarchy.

• endogamy / exogamy — marriage within a group versus marriage outside it. Example: a caste that forbids marriage outside itself is endogamous.

B.S. Cohn approaches to Indian civilization

Bernard S. Cohn examined how colonial rule produced knowledge about India. He identified several approaches through which Indian civilisation was studied and classified: the Orientalist approach, based on classical texts and language study; the missionary approach, based on the writings and observations of Christian missionaries; and the administrative approach, based on surveys, censuses and official records. Historiographical is a general term for the writing of history and is not one of Cohn's approaches, so it is the approach that does not belong to his list.

Cohn also classified rural settlements by their spatial layout. The types are nucleated, where houses are grouped closely together; dispersed, where homesteads are scattered; and hamleted, where a main village has dependent hamlets. Agnated, by contrast, is a term for patrilineal descent and kinship, so it is not a settlement type.

• Orientalism — the study of Indian civilisation through classical languages and texts. Example: a scholar edits Sanskrit law books to define 'true' Hindu custom.

G.S. Ghurye on tribal integration

G.S. Ghurye argued that tribal groups should not be treated as aborigines outside Indian society. He described them as backward Hindus, that is, as imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu society. On this basis he opposed Verrier Elwin's proposal to preserve the tribal way of life through isolation. Ghurye's position was that tribes should be integrated into the wider Hindu social order rather than kept apart from it.

• backward Hindus — Ghurye's term for tribal groups seen as part of the Hindu social order but at a lower stage of integration. Example: a tribe that worships local deities alongside Hindu gods is read as a partly integrated group rather than a separate people.

Marxist sociology of Indian society

A.R. Desai is the leading sociologist who applied a Marxist framework to Indian society and history. He used historical materialism to analyse class relations, the colonial economy and the state, as in his study of the social background of Indian nationalism. Other sociologists of India had different orientations. Yogendra Singh studied social change and modernisation, Leela Dube worked on kinship, gender and family, and A.K. Saran is not identified with a Marxist approach.

• historical materialism — the Marxist method that explains social structure and change through the mode of production and class relations. Example: an analysis that explains nationalist politics by the interests of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie.

Chatterjee on nationalism and modernity

Partha Chatterjee, in The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), argued that the postcolonial state acquired its representativeness in two ways. It was connected to the people not only through the procedural forms of representative government but also by directing a programme of economic development on behalf of the nation. Procedural government alone was regarded as insufficient to drive development, so development became a constituent part of the self-definition of the postcolonial state.

Nationalist argument before independence presented colonial rule as economic exploitation that impeded India's development. Liberty was therefore understood as the reverse of colonial domination. Chatterjee does not present colonialism as having shown the benefits of free trade, and he does not argue that procedural government would inevitably decay into corruption.

• developmentalism — the ideology that the state derives legitimacy from delivering economic growth on the nation's behalf. Example: a state that justifies planning by promising to end poverty, not only by holding elections.

Ethnographic Survey of India (1901)

The Ethnographic Survey of India was carried out as part of the Census of 1901. It documented the castes, tribes and races of the population in a systematic way. Its purpose was administrative: it dealt with the racial and cultural questions that the colonial government faced in classifying and governing a highly diverse society. It was not a body for making legislation for Indian subjects, it did not undertake to protect the beliefs and usages of Indians, and it was not an executive welfare or development programme.