Social Science in India: (Re) Searching for a Vision
[Citation: Gaurang R. Sahay, Social Science in India: (Re) Searching for a Vision (2011, Unpublished)]
The
story of social sciences has two different parts which are located
differently at highly unequal levels. In the West, social sciences
freely emerged within the Western context of modernity, whereas in
India and most of the non-Western countries, they were brought from
outside and institutionalized as an important constituent of western
colonial enterprise. That is why, social sciences in India before
Independence, particularly during the nineteenth century, acted, by
and large, as an instrument of colonial rule. Their main purpose was
to generate data about the economic, social and cultural life of the
native population for colonial administration. During the freedom
struggle, the nature and position of social sciences led by scholars
like Radhakamal Mukherjee, D. P. Mukherjee, D. N. Majumdar, Iravati
Karve, G. S. Ghurye and N. K. Bose changed a bit owing to their
critical reflections on the colonial rule and indigenous culture and
society. This period proved quite creative in the academia and
outside though there was no fund available for research. After
Independence, they went through a sea-change in terms of objective,
content and priority. They became part and parcel of the
modernization/development project of the governments. In this
context, they have contributed immensely to the nation-building and
to the growth of knowledge about every aspect of our society and
culture. All this is a welcoming development and hugely good for both
society and system of knowledge in our nation-state, however, there
are many issues pertaining to social sciences in India that require
our immediate and serious attention for the sake of making them more
meaningful and relevant in contemporary times. By focusing
predominantly on the contemporary state of affairs (teaching and
research) in sociology in India, this paper tries to raise some of
those issues.
Before Independence, sociology as a social science discipline was not
much favoured by the colonial administration in India. It was taught
as a subject in only four universities located at Bombay, Lucknow,
Mysore and Hyderabad. Out of them, only university of Bombay had a
separate department devoted to higher teaching and research. However,
in independent India, the acceptance of sociology as a basic social
science in the academic institutions is an uncontested fact. Every
university has a department of sociology and the subject is taught in
the most of our colleges. For a long time, it has been a widely
taught course of study, both at the under-graduate and post-graduate
levels. Sociologists have been occupying positions of member or
consultant in organizations designing and promoting development in
the country. Sociology is one of the most preferred subjects for the
candidates appearing for the public services examinations. There has
been greater recognition of the works by Indian sociologists. Their
works are published by reputed publishers and cited and referred
across the world. Sociological organizations are running successfully
with regular publication of high quality journals. To quote N.
Jayaram, “As a profession sociology has grown considerably over the
last 50 years. The life membership of Indian Sociological Society,
the sole and undisputed all India professional body of sociologists
in the country, has increased manifold. Besides, several state level
and even university level sociological societies have emerged”.
The enormous development of the practice of sociology (teaching and
research) in India does not stop us observing that the discipline
needs a critical look at itself for augmenting its own meaningfulness
and relevance. Indian sociology lacks a tradition of self-reflexive
interrogation of its own past formation and present location. It is
one of the important reasons behind its lack of concerns with
contemporary social issues. Critiquing of the discipline in the realm
of knowledge requires more urgency at the moment because contemporary
Indian society including its knowledge system is passing through a
structural crisis caused by both indigenous and exogenous (global)
forces. There is a need to remind ourselves that knowledge for the
sake of knowledge should not be the aim of a science including
sociology. The discipline must be cultivated in such a way that can
be used for the development of society including its knowledge
system. This paper has raised some issues pertaining to the nature of
sociology in India. It is believed that comprehensive addressing of
those issues and the concomitant problems through teaching and
research will chart out a significant course and a new vision for the
discipline in this age of globalization and its structural
ramifications.
From
the very beginning, sociology in India, due to its western colonial
background, is steadfastly dug into the rock of theories and concepts
which are not rooted in indigenous reality and which are more often
than not derived from an a priori view of knowledge. Therefore, the
theoretical body of sociological knowledge in India is, by and large,
given. For most of us, the task at hand is to learn what is given.
Our competence is measured by the level of our knowledge of given
facts. Such a disaggregated approach raises questions about the
sociology of curriculum making, our mode of teaching and our gross
insensitivity to traverse the gap between the text and the pupil that
makes the text such an alien, distant and fearful object.
It creates a situation in which we express our complete inability in
making connections between what we teach or learn in one class and
another, or between what is happening around us and what we learn
from sociology texts. For example, sociologists in India were/are
found discussing social order, cohesion, system, consensus
(structural functionalism) and developing symbolic models
(structuralism) even when societies in which they live face crisis,
experience conflict, violence, mobilization, poverty, hunger,
suicide, etc. Anand Giri has rightly observed that from the very
beginning the practice of sociology in India has not really cared to
create a curriculum which takes seriously our own cultural
predicament and the Indian point of view.
There has not been enough effort to detach Sociology in India from
its colonial legacies and reconstitute its nature and programme in
response to social crisis, movement and change taking place in our
society. The colonial context of Indian sociology is still
determining the academic practice of Indian sociologists to a great
extent. They have not been able to shrug off a legacy of colonial
division of labour in the realm of academics that deems it fit that
the west provides theory and models and the east (India) furnish the
empirical data.
Most of them have received and used western theories
enthusiastically and uncritically.
To quote M. N. Srinivas and M. N. Panini, “Sociology in India has
been hospitable to divergent stream of thought. However, an approach
or point of view characteristic of Indian sociologists has not yet
emerged that may indeed be a sign of its openness … Sociology has
to go native if it has to be creative”.
This academic apathy to critically redefine and recast the
theoretical foundation of Indian sociology in emerging reality is
still continuing. Such a situation leads to the state of terrible
meaninglessness and irrelevance particularly among students or
learners of Indian sociology.
A related but slightly different form of disjunction is experienced
between sociological theories and Indian sociology courses in our
universities. To quote Beteille, “The most acute pedagogical
problem in university departments of sociology in India is to
integrate what is taught under sociological theory and what is taught
under the sociology of India”.
This raises questions about meaningfulness and relevance of
sociological theories and brackets the framing of Indian sociology
courses. Students are required to memorize names of books and
authors, theories, concept and definitions without contextualizing
them into the historical or spatio-temporal specificities and
referring to the politics underlying their uncontested universal and
value-neutral character. This apart, Indian sociology courses,
following the tradition of orientalism, are highly indological
(Brahminical) in which we do not find equitable space for the
writings by and on social revolutionaries such as Phule, Ambedkar,
Periyar and Jayaprakash Narayan. Further, the courses make a
dichotomous distinction among castes and ethnic and religious
communities. For example, in the courses we invariably find modules
such as ‘Muslim marriages are contracts whereas Hindu marriages are
sacraments’.
Western rooting of Indian sociology in terms of theories, methods and
concepts has jargonized its language. Jargons are used to describe
even the self-evident. M. N. Srinivas and M. N. Panini opine that
without shedding jargons which sits more heavily on sociology than on
other social sciences we will neither be aware of the relevance of
Indian sociology for popular education nor make clear to laymen the
importance of their discipline for citizenship.
Pierre Bourdieu has written in the context of French Universities:
“Many university students are unable to cope with the technical and
scholastic demands made on their use of language as students. They
cannot define the terms which they hear in lectures or which they
themselves use”.
Bourdieu’s remarks are also fittingly applicable to the teaching
and learning of Indian sociology in Indian universities.
We
have recently felt two major obstacles in teaching sociology in our
universities. First, as Avijit Pathak writes, “For many students,
sociological knowledge is not relevant; it is not valued and
appreciated in the practical world of work”.
Students do not find immediate/visible relationship between the
domain of knowledge and the sphere of work. Second, students think
that sociology is a ‘soft’ discipline. It does not have much
cognitive power. Therefore, it is not fundamentally different from
common sense. Hence, no special skill or effort is required to learn
sociology. Such problems have come up because the interests that
guide the knowledge system including sociology and its dissemination
in India are much more utilitarian and technical and sufficiently
immunized from broader social concerns and anxieties. Pathak argues
that there is an urgent need to sensitize sociology students to the
principle of domination written into science and to make them aware
that disinterested cognition or value neutrality is myth. Such an
effort will help in making sociology emancipatory.
Utilitarianism and a much greater demand of ‘hard’ sciences in
the knowledge market has also caused a decline in the academic
quality of research work in Indian sociology. Veena Das writes that
“A discipline that has been nourished by such eminent scholars as
Radhakamal Mukherjee, G.S.Ghurye, N.K.Bose, D.N.Majumdar, and
M.N.Srinivas now stands in a position where there may not be a next
generation”.
Elaborating on it, Andre Beteille observes that works of the most of
younger sociologists in India is characterized by a ‘frantic search
for novelty’. Most of the younger sociologists in India have been
trying frantically for novelty or newness without following the
principle that “newness would amount to little if did not arise
from a careful, detailed and methodical scrutiny of existing
knowledge – its concepts, methods and theories”.
There is an urgent need to remember that “the amnesia and the
failure to innovate are two sides of the same coin”.
There is a need for a proper appreciation of the relation between
tradition and individual talent in Indian sociology.
There are some major areas of concern that require serious thinking
and research in the domain of Indian sociology or social science. One
of such areas is social movement. Social science teaching and
research do seem to have accounted for the phenomenal growth of
social movements in India. Drawing upon multiple intellectual
traditions of politics and resistance and mobilizing a cross-section
of the rural and urban population, building on tradition as well as
use of new technology they have had a decisive impact on politics,
policy and the social imagination. Undertaking a comprehensive review
of literature over a decade ago Ghanshyam Shah indicted historians,
political scientists and sociologists for not paying enough
attention to social movements.
And a similar exercise that he carried out in 2004 revealed much the
same gaps—social science research had produced very few theoretical
studies of movements and movement dynamics, especially in areas such
as leadership, organizational forms and social movement ideology and
huge gaps remain in the collection and analysis of both qualitative
and quantitative data related to social movements.
Another major area of concern is that intersection between law, State
and society. Social science research is yet to map effectively the
ever expanding construction of illegality whether of the urban poor,
the ‘illegal’ migrant or the project displaced. The demolition of
slums, eviction of ‘illegal’ migrants and displacement in the
name of development are firmly rooted in a nexus between law, public
policy and elitist discourse that needs careful and repeated
exculpation, not mere documentation. Indeed the criticism that Indian
social scientists do not engage seriously with policy critique and
advocacy is not new. As far back as 1979 Myron Weiner noted that with
the exception of economists policy was not a matter of serious debate
amongst the social scientists of the day.
While this has changed somewhat with NGOs and academic institutions
increasingly working together it is however true that the visibility
of social scientists in policy debates still leaves much to be
desired.
The higher education system has pretended as if the ‘second
democratic upsurge’ post Mandal never happened. Let alone research
its impact, no meaningful attempt has been made to even understand
the social, political and pedagogic dynamics within universities as a
result of the large numbers of Dalit-Bahujan entering universities
and the higher education system over the past decade and a half. The
same is perhaps true with respect to issues of sexual orientation and
identity, another area which social science research in India has
barely explored even though civil society organizations and community
activists are increasingly engaged with the issue.
The crisis in governance—a common refrain of everyday conversation
as well as academic research—is actually in effect a political
crisis within Indian society. It is seems that social science
research is yet to take note of the fact that politics in India is
raising a ‘fundamental question about the ‘nature of the state’
itself, since some groups with large electoral support, appear
unreconciled to the principles on which political institutions in
free India have been based.’
Nicholas
Dirks pointed out more than a decade ago ‘the Indian state is
barely visible to comparative sociology’.
The lack of attention in social science research to the diversity of
traditions in political organizing of social life and State formation
in general in pre-colonial India lies at the root of the gaps in the
Sociology of State in India. At the same time there is a strong case
for social science research in India to turn towards a more political
study of Indian society in particular caste and religion, their
interplay and relationship with institutions such as political
parties. It is a telling comment that some of the most significant
work in these areas has, at least in the recent past tended to come
from foreign scholars or those located abroad.
This however seems to be trend that dominates disciplines such as
Sociology and History as a whole. A study on social science research
in South Asia conducted for the Social Science Research Council, New
York revealed that nearly half of all articles in two leading Indian
journals of Sociology came from scholars located abroad.
In the case of History the proportion was almost one third and more
or less the same pattern was visible in the case of survey of books
published by four leading social science publishers in south Asia.
