Sociological Imagination and Literary Sensitivity: A Tribute to M. N. Srinivas

Introduction

Professor Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (b. Mysore, 16 November 1916–d. Bangalore, 30 November 1999), well known as M. N. Srinivas among sociologists and anthropologists the world over and as MNS among his colleagues and students, is one of the most distinguished architects of sociology ² in India. In his sixty-six-year-long career as a sociologist—from 1933 when he first studied a course in sociology as part of the BA (Honours) programme in Mysore to his demise in November 1999—he carved a niche for himself in the teaching, research, and profession of sociology in the country. Although he followed in the line of pioneers like Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, Radhakamal Mukerjee and Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji, Srinivas was unique in two respects. In the first place, he engaged with sociology during the period of its transition from social philosophy in the Indian academia. He was a key figure in the establishment of sociology as an academic discipline and was critical of its unregulated proliferation. In the second place, and more importantly, his engagement with sociology encompassed three salient socio-economic and political epochs: (a) colonialism and imperialism, (b) independence and Nehruvian socialism and (c) the era of globalisation and neoliberalism. The dynamics of these three epochs are reflected in his sociological thinking and writing. Being invited to give a lecture in memory of this stalwart is indeed a special honour. I sincerely thank the Professor M. N. Srinivas Endowment Fund and the Indian Sociological Society, particularly its President Professor R. Indira, for inviting me to deliver this lecture.

What is distinctive about this lecture is that it is being delivered in Mysuru. Mysuru, then known as Mysore, is the city in which Srinivas was born and grew to adolescence, the city in which he was educated and obtained his BA Honours Degree, and the city that shaped his sociological imagination early on. It is also the city in which he nurtured his life-long friendship with R. K. Narayan, ³ the reputed novelist and writer of short stories in the English language in India. The relevance of this friendship for the instant lecture is suggested by its title.

Personally, this lecture is special to me. I was acquainted with Srinivas for twenty-six years, from 1973, when I first met him at the Department of Sociology, Bangalore University until his death in 1999. Although our relations were not always cordial, I held him in high esteem and had great respect for his scholarship.

I first heard of Srinivas as an undergraduate student of sociology at St Joseph’s College, Bangalore (now Bengaluru) during 1967–1970. Professor Nagaraja Shastry, who lectured on ‘Indian Social Institutions’, referred us to two books by Srinivas—Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (1962) and Social Change in Modern India (1966)—though they were not listed in the reading list. After Srinivas moved to the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bengaluru, he initiated a fortnightly seminar series in 1973 in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, Bangalore University, which was then headed by Professor C. Rajagopalan. This seminar series gave me an opportunity to meet and hear Srinivas on a regular basis. He was in attendance when I, as a young research scholar groping for a research topic, presented a paper on ‘Dowry System among the Bunts of South Kanara’. Almost a decade later, when he was preparing his J. P. Naik Memorial Lecture on dowry to be delivered at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, ⁴ he telephoned me about a point that I had made in my presentation. This speaks highly of the attention that he paid to the presentation of even novices.

In October 1980, I reviewed the second edition of Srinivas’s India: Social Structure for the weekly magazine of a Bangalore daily, Deccan Herald, which was published under the caption ‘Too good to be true’ (see Jayaram, 1980). The review was critical of some of the views expressed by Srinivas in the book. Srinivas mentioned the review in one of our meetings and explained where I was wrong. But what soured our relations was my review of the book Basic Needs Viewed from Above and from Below (The Case of Karnataka State, India), which he had authored with T. S. Epstein, M. N. Panini and V. S. Parthasarathy, published in the magazine section of the same daily under the caption ‘No solutions to poverty’ (see Jayaram, 1983). This longish review, done from a Marxian perspective, was very critical of the study reported in the book. It followed a couple of exchanges between Panini and me in the subsequent editions of the magazine section.

That Srinivas did not take kindly to this review soon became evident. He ignored me in academic meetings and even complained about me to some sociologist friends. Placing myself in his shoes now, I can well understand his hurt feelings and even feel sad about the whole episode. Almost a decade after this, one fine afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from Srinivas inviting me home to discuss the book project on caste that he was embarking on. At this meeting, he asked me to write a chapter on the protean relationship between caste and Hinduism (Jayaram, 1996), which eventually appeared in the volume titled Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar (Srinivas, 1996a). This gracious gesture on the part of Srinivas is testimony to his large heartedness as well as his recognition of scholarship of those many years junior to him. ⁵ I should also record here that Panini, too, put the episode behind him and has been cordial to me since then.

The Theme

Sociological writings and those of the social sciences generally are found by many an intelligent reader to be difficult to wade through. This is ironical, these readers tell us, since these writings are about human beings and about human predicament. To some extent this unintelligibility of sociological literature stems from the methodological orientation that sociologists adopt believing their discipline to be a science. The objectivist ontology and the positivist epistemology that their studies are based on necessitate them to use quantitative data and methods of analysis to arrive at generalisations. ⁶ While the use of numbers and statistics is necessary in sociology, the belief that the discipline’s scientific stature would be enhanced by greater mathematisation is fallacious. One may recall here C. Wright Mills’ scathing criticism of what he called ‘abstracted empiricism’ (Mills, 1959, pp. 50–75).

Six decades ago, Pitirim A. Sorokin critiqued the tendency among sociologists and other social scientists to uncritically apply quantitative techniques, especially to claim scientific status for their research, as ‘metrophrenic preoccupation’, and the cult of numerology in psycho-social studies as ‘quantophrenia’ (Sorokin, 1958, Chapters 7 and 8). Similarly, in the early 1970s, Stanislav Andreski found social scientists resorting to ‘quantification as camouflage’ (Andreski, 1972, Chapter 10). Then there was Darrell Huff’s ‘splendid piece of blasphemy against the preposterous religion of our time’, namely, statistics (John Connell on Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics, 1973, back cover). But sociologists seem to be unmindful of these criticisms; their commitment to positivism continues. Thereby, they miss out the essential link that sociology has with history, ethics, philosophy, religious studies and even literature.

Sociologists adopting the alternative approach, which is briefed by constructivist ontology and interpretative epistemology, often seem to share the ‘widespread impression that the use of jargon is necessary to establish one’s scholarly credentials’ (Srinivas, 1998, p. 2527). What Mills calls ‘confused verbiage’ (Mills, 1959, p. 27), or Peter L. Berger describes as ‘the technical dialect for which sociologists have earned a dubious notoriety’ (Berger, 1963, p. 7), or Andreski dubs ‘the smoke screen of jargon’ (Andreski, 1972, p. 59), is perhaps most glaring among those attempting to theorise on human society and human beings in society: the writings of Talcott Parsons and the Parsonians and David McClelland and the McClellandians are an extreme case in point. The ‘turgid and polysyllabic prose’ (Mills, 1959, p. 217) that one comes across in sociological writings, and those of the social sciences generally, is related to the conscious or unconscious imitation of physical sciences. But, as Mills put it pithily, ‘The fact is that it is not readily understandable; the suspicion is that it may not be altogether intelligible’ (ibid., p. 26).

Srinivas was a singular exception to this common tendency among sociologists; his writings are undoubtedly the most readable among the sociologists in the country. He conformed cent per cent to the cardinal principle of intellectual craftsmanship enunciated by Mills: ‘… you should present your work in as clear and simple language as your subject and your thought about it permit’ (ibid., p. 217). The best proof of this is The Remembered Village (Srinivas, 1976), Srinivas’s finest monograph, ‘one that he considered his best’ (Menon, 1999, p. 112). This monograph is remembered for its ‘felicitous style’ (Mayer, 1978, p. 46). ⁷ After all, Srinivas ‘aimed at writing [it] for the intelligent layman instead of for the specialist’ (Srinivas, 1976, p. xiii). ⁸ This could as well be said about all his writings in general. As Mayer notes, ‘The value of Srinivas’s contribution has been enhanced by his willingness to push forward his insights at the level of general statements about Indian society, where they reach a much wider readership than the purely anthropological [or sociological] one’ (Mayer, 1978, p. 41).

More important than its remarkable lucidity, The Remembered Village is, as P. C Joshi describes it, ‘an intensely human document’ (Joshi, 1978, p. 75):

It arouses in the reader deep interest in rural people. By the time one has completed reading the book one gets so deeply engrossed in the human characters and affairs of Rampura that one feels one had personally lived in the village and known its people directly. (ibid., p. 76)

Thus, The Remembered Village is an exemplar of insightful ethnographic observations in an easily accessible language. Could I have chosen a more apposite subject to pay tribute to the memory of Srinivas than reflecting on the relationship between sociological imagination and literary sensitivity?

Sociologist, Sociological Imagination and Literary Sensitivity

The starting point of my reflections is the first Hassan Raja Rao lecture titled ‘Social Anthropology and Literary Sensibility’ delivered by Srinivas at Dhvanyaloka, Mysore and later published in Economic & Political Weekly in September 1998 (Srinivas, 1998). In this lecture, discussing the importance of fieldwork in sociology, Srinivas refers to Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who ‘emphasised that it was not enough to collect information, but that the anthropologist should go beyond it and try to look at the world as the indigenes did’ (ibid., p. 2526). This, Srinivas recognises, is an extremely difficult thing to do. It is only by exercising her/his imagination and ability to empathise with others, can the sociologist cross the barriers between herself/himself and the people she/he studies. In doing this, the sociologist is close to ‘the novelist who places himself in the position of the diverse characters in his novel’ (ibid.,p. 2526). To succeed in what they do, both the sociologist and the novelist must have what Mills calls ‘the sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1959).

What sociologists need, according to Mills, is more than information and the skills of reason; much of our time and energy in training as sociologists is spent on these. Of course, information (popularly known in sociology as data) and the capacity to logically engage with it are important. But what they need more ‘is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves’ (ibid., p. 5). This quality, called ‘the sociological imagination’,

… enables its possessor to understand the larger historical sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues. (ibid.)

The sociological imagination, Mills elaborates, ‘enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society’ (ibid.). Thus, ‘no social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey’ (ibid.). I would go a step further and say that, apart from the command over language and expertise in writing skills, sociological imagination is a prerequisite for the felicity with which one can describe her/his observations and elucidate her/his interpretations thereof. Command over language, as also expertise in writing skills, can be honed. ⁹ For acquiring sociological imagination, one must turn to literature; that is, there is an intrinsic relation between sociological imagination and literary sensitivity. ¹⁰

For those who are trained in sociology and who have cultivated sociological imagination, their venture into literature, if they ever do so, is easy. Their literary works exude sociological imagination. The works of Amitav Ghosh, who has been conferred the 54th Bharatiya Jnanpith Award, is testimony to this. ¹¹ Even if they do not become litterateurs, the cultivation of sociological imagination lends to their writings a literary flavour. Srinivas did try his hand at writing short stories, ¹² but his The Remembered Village, blending sociological imagination and literary sensitivity, borders on being a novel.

The Remembered Village is about Rampura (a pseudonym), a village in south Karnataka, as it was in 1948, the year when Srinivas first did ethnographic fieldwork there. His identification with this village was so complete that he refers to it as ‘my field village of Rampura’ (Srinivas, 1976, p. xiii; emphasis added). It is well known that this ethnography of Rampura was written from memory of Srinivas’s field experience because all the copies of his processed notes were burnt in arson on 24 April 1970 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford. I am not sure how Srinivas would have written his monograph if this unfortunate incident had not occurred. But it did not daunt him; his sociological imagination about Rampura in combination with his literary sensitivity gave birth to the monograph as we have it today. ‘Its success’, Sol Tax tells us in his Foreword to the monograph, ‘will suggest not that we should all destroy our field-notes, but that we need not let them destroy our art!’ (in ibid., p. ix). About this art in Srinivas’s monograph Sol Tax states,

… based on the human mind’s extraordinary capacity to bring forth significant details of the past, is a major ethnographic portrait woven from the warp of immersion in the sea of original data and the weft of purposeful seeking after a description of a village in its own terms. (ibid.)

What makes The Remembered Village special is that it remains true to two dicta about sociological writings, which are highlighted by Srinivas as epigraphs. The first is Marcel Mauss’s point that the anthropologist has ‘to be also a novelist able to evoke the life of a whole society’ and the second is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s remark that ‘in a science where the observer is of the same nature as his object, the observer is himself a part of his observation’ (ibid., p. vi). Thus, The Remembered Village turns out to be innovative: ‘it is not only an account of what the ethnographer saw and heard but also of what the seeing and hearing did to him’ (Madan, 1978, p. 8). No wonder, Contributions to Indian Sociology (1978) devoted an entire issue to a review symposium on The Remembered Village.

In his Hassan Raja Rao Memorial Lecture, Srinivas recalls Mauss’s observation that ‘the sociologist has to have a sensitivity of a novelist’ and interprets this to mean that

the anthropologist should not only have the novelist’s sensitivity in the matter of observing people and their interaction with each other, but that he should also have the imagination and empathy to understand what the people he is studying are thinking and feeling, write about them with skill and sensitivity. (Srinivas, 1998, p. 2528)

Litterateur and Sociological Imagination

We take literary sensitivity for granted in the case of litterateurs. Litterateurs lacking in literary sensitivity are aptly ignored. But mere literary sensitivity does not make for a litterateur to be remembered beyond his times. If we look at the great names in literature around the world, they all seem to be endowed with acute sociological imagination. Their works are read and re-read, translated into other languages with varying degrees of success, and find a niche for themselves in the history of literature. In English literature in modern times, the names that readily come to us are those of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Anthony Trollope and Oscar Wilde. Similarly, among Indian writers in English one thinks of Mulk Raj Anand, Amitav Ghosh, Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (R. K. Narayan), Raja Rao and Vikram Sheth. Similarly, there are writers in Indian languages: Dhattatreya Ramachandra Bendre, Santeshivara Lingannaiah Bhyrappa, Vinayak Krishna Gokak, Devanahalli Venkataramanaiah Gundappa, Chandrashekara Kambara, Kota Shivaram Karanth, Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy, Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa (Kuvempu), Arakalagudu Narasingarao Krishna Rao (Anakru), Taluku Ramaswamy Subba Rao (Tarasu), Siddalingaiah, Anasuya Shankar (Triveni), and so on in Kannada, and Munshi Premchand, Amrita Pritham, Bisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti, Om Prakash Valmiki, Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’, Sachchidananda Vatsyayan and so on in Hindi—just to name a few litterateurs in Kannada and Hindi. Of course, there is the impressive literary contributions of Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore.

Of these great writers, I take three to illustrate my point. Among the English writers, whose writings exemplify the importance of sociological imagination in literature, my favourites are Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope; for want of space, here I confine myself to Anthony Trollope (1815–1882). ¹⁴ Trollope began his literary career with the publication of The Macdermots of Ballycloran in 1847. ¹⁵ But it was the publication of his fourth novel, The Warden, in 1855 that established the manner and material by which he is best known. This, the first of the ‘Barsetshire’ series, was followed by Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). ¹⁶

The human drama of these novels is, for the most part, set in the imaginary West Country county of Barset and its chief town, Barchester. About the locale and milieu of Barchester, Trollope says in his autobiography:

I had it all in my mind,—its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches…. Throughout these stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there’. (Trollope, 1950, p. 154)

The Barset novels are interconnected by characters that appear in more than one of them. Trollope further developed this technique in his second series—Can you Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1876), The Prime Minister (1876) and The Duke’s Children (1880)—known as Palliser novels, after Plantagenet Palliser, who appears in all of them. This series also allowed Trollope to express his views on political matters; hence, the works in this series are known as the ‘Political’ novels. These two series established the novel sequence in English fiction. Taken together they span over twenty years of Trollope’s writing life (Drabble, 2000, p. 1035).

Trollope regards The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), the last novel in the ‘Barsetshire’ series, as ‘the best novel’ he has written (Trollope, 1950, p. 274). While all his novels have a sociological flavour, I regard The Warden (1855) as the best as it sets the context and pace for the novels that follow. The storyline of this novel is succinctly summarised in The Oxford Companion to English Literature:

The income of Hiram’s Hospital, a charitable institution, has grown in real terms down the centuries, but the 12 old beadsmen have not benefited. The surplus has created a pleasant sinecure for the mild-mannered old warden, the Revd Septimus Harding, a fact which John Bold, a local surgeon with a passion for causes, makes known to the national press. Harding finds himself the object of unpleasant publicity, and his son-in-law, the combative Archdeacon Grantly, bullies him to dispute the case along party lines. But Harding is not the man for the fight, sees the anomaly in his position, and with considerable personal courage resigns. The novel ends in an atmosphere of quiet goodwill, with Bold withdrawing his accusations and marrying the warden’s daughter Eleanor, and Harding receiving a new preferment in the cathedral close. (Drabble, 2000, p. 1075)

According to Trollope, more than the elucidation of his plot, the novelist needs to make his readers

so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creations of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures. This he can never do unless he know [sic] those fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them well unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. (Trollope, 1950, pp. 232–233)

He also stresses the importance of recording change and the effects of time: ‘On the last day of each month recorded, every person in his novel should be a month older than on the first’ (ibid., p. 233). Trollope, in fact, attributed whatever success he had attained to the intimacy with which he himself had lived with his characters in his lifelike imagination (ibid., pp. 233–234). ‘His popularity was at its peak during the 1860s; readers admired his treatment of family and professional life, the variety and delicacy of his heroines, and the photographic accuracy of his pictures of social life’ (Drabble, 2000, p. 1035).

Henry James pays the greatest tribute to Trollope’s imagination and sensitivity when he writes:

[Trollope’s] great, inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual … Trollope’s great apprehension of the real, which was what made him so interesting, came to him through his desire to satisfy us on this point—to tell us what certain people were and what they did in consequence of being so. (James, 1894, pp. 100–101 & 106)

Of the grand triumvirate of Indian writers in English, my choice is Raja Rao (1908–2006), the other two being R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand. ¹⁷ Raja Rao, a scholarly Sanskritist, entered the English literary scene in the 1940s with his first novel Kanthapura (1938) when little was known outside India about Indian writing in English. ¹⁸ He wrote four other novels (The Serpent and the Rope [1960], The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of India [1965], Comrade Kirillov [1976], and The Chessmaker and His Moves [1988]), three short-story collections (The Cow of the Barricades [1947], The Policeman and the Rose [1978], and On the Ganga Ghat [1989]), and five works of non-fiction (Changing India: An Anthology [1939], Tomorrow [1943–1944], Whither India? [1948], The Meaning of India [essays, 1996], and The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi [biography, 1998]). He is a recipient of Sahitya Academy Award (1964), Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1988), and Padma Bhushan (1969) and Padma Vibhushan (2007).

Kanthapura ¹⁹ is Raja Rao’s first and perhaps the best-known novel; it was hailed by E. M. Forster as ‘… the finest novel to come out of India in recent years’ (Rao, 1971, cover page inscription). The text is set in the backdrop of the Civil Disobedience movement of the 1930s and deals with the participation of a tiny and secluded village in South India (present day Karnataka) in the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi. The enchanting story is narrated in the form of a sthala-purana or ‘legendary history’ by Achakka, an old Brahmin grandmother of Kanthapura. The story covers inter-caste relations, village traditions and festivals, the cult of village deity (Kenchamma), village leadership and even gender relations. Sociologists reading this novel will wonder if it is not written by one of their own kind, as the novel’s content is ‘ethnography’ of rural dynamics and is imbued with sociological imagination. After all, Kanthapura (pseudonym) is Raja Rao’s field village—‘my village’ (ibid., p. 5)—and the novel’s protagonist Moorthy is considered to be Raja Rao himself, the ‘ethnographer’.

Kanthapura is significant not only for what Raja Rao said, but also for the way he said it. In his ‘Foreword’, which is hailed as a landmark in world literature, he confesses that ‘the telling has not been easy’: ‘One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language’ (ibid.). ²⁰ Of course, English is not alien to us, clarifies Raja Rao: ‘It is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not our emotional make-up’ (ibid.). But many of us in the academia are ‘instinctually bilingual’—writing in our own language and in English:

We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be … distinctive and colourful …. (ibid., pp. 5–6)

Time has indeed proved Raja Rao right; we now have ‘Indian English’ recognised both in the dictionary as well as the word-processing programmes. ²¹

However, the problem is not only that of style. ‘The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression …’, says Raja Rao:

We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly … we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our story-telling. (ibid., p. 6)

Raja Rao follows this style in narrating the sthala-purana of Kanthapura and that it is what makes his story absorbing. I have not found this kind of sociological insight in my reading of village studies as I have found in Kanthapura. It is Raja Rao’s attempt to forge an Indian idiom and tempo through the medium of the English language that distinguishes Kanthapura from the novel-like monograph The Remembered Village by Srinivas.

Turning to literature in my vernacular, Kannada, I am fascinated by the sociological imagination in the writings of Kota Shivaram Karanth (1902–1997). Karanth was a polymath: a writer, philosopher, social activist, environmentalist, Yakshagana artist and film maker. Apart from forty-seven novels, thirty-one plays, four short-story collections, six books of essays and sketches, he wrote thirteen books on art, two volumes of poems, nine encyclopaedias and many articles on various issues. He is a recipient of Jnanpith Award (1977), Sahitya Academy Award (1959) and several other awards. He returned his Padma Bhushan honour in protest against the Emergency (1975–1977).

Karanth’s first novel was Vichitrakoota. His subsequent works like Nirbhagya Janma and Sooleya Samsara portrayed the pathetic conditions of the poor. In Devaddhootaru, he attempted a satire of the India of his adolescence. His later novels Marali Mannige, Bettada Jeeva, Alida Mele, Mookajjiya Kanasugalu, Mai Managala Suliyalli, Ade Ooru Ade Mara, Shaneeshwarana Neralinalli, Kudiyara Koosu, Svapnada Hole, Sarsammana Samadhi and Chomana Dudi are widely read and have received critical acclaim. In all these novels, Karanth examined contemporary society from an essentially sociological perspective. But it is in his Chomana Dudi and Mookajjiya Kanasugalu that we find his astute sociological imagination best at work.

Chomana Dudi (Choma’s Drum), a 112-page novella, focuses on the practice of untouchability in a Karnataka village. It was first published in the year 1933 and has never been out-of-print. Choma, the protagonist of the story, is an ‘untouchable’ bonded labourer who works with his family for a landlord. The travails of Choma and his family members resulting from the exploitative and suppressive caste system are portrayed by Karanth with extraordinary empathy. One can hardly expect to read a more insightful case study of the plight of ‘untouchables’ in rural areas than Karanth’s Chomana Dudi. Throughout the narrative, Choma beating his Dudi (Drum) symbolises the anguish and anger of an ‘untouchable’ against a heinous social system; only Choma’s Dudi remains his loyal friend till the end. B. V. Karanth’s 1975 film based on this novella won the Swarna Kamala Award.

Mookajjiya Kanasugalu (Dreams of a Silent Grandmother), first published in 1968, is regarded as an epic novel in Kannada. Set in the Karnataka village called Mooduru, the novel revolves around two main characters: Mookajji, a widow aged about eighty years, and her grandson Subbraya; neither of the two is presented as the lead character and all other characters only help as points of reference in the narrative. Subbraya loves to listen to the stories told by Mookajji; he finds these stories more interesting than those in novels which fail to portray reality. Subbraya asks questions about a variety of subjects—God, beliefs, culture, social issues—and Mookajji answers them with authority and in an appealing way. Mookajji represents our beliefs and doubts. This innovative rendering of societal knowledge is reflective of Karanth’s sociological imagination. Incidentally, it was this novel which won for Karanth the Jnanpith Award in 1977.

The Importance of Literature for the Sociologist

Literature imbued with sociological imagination, such as those of Anthony Trollope, Raja Rao and Shivaram Karanth is to be found in many a language. Obviously, a sociologist studying a society which has a literary tradition will find its literature to be immensely valuable for it ‘provides a window to the thoughts, emotions, values, dilemmas and conflicts’ of the members living in that society (Srinivas, 1998, p. 2528). Often, it would be useful to consult scholars in the local language in identifying and in the choice of the relevant literature.

Of the various genres of literature, biographical writings are perhaps the most useful to the sociologist as they provide her/him with information and insights about the society and culture of a period gone by. This genre includes autobiography (an account of a person’s life written or told by that person), biography (an account of someone’s life written by someone else), memoir (a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge) and diary (a book in which one keeps a daily record of events and experiences). While literature in this genre deals with the lives of particular individuals, they shed light on the social and cultural milieu in which these individuals live(d).

Rukmini Sen’s essay, ‘Reading the Social in Autobiographies: A Glimpse into Everyday Life and History’ (Sen, 2017) discusses the importance of analysing autobiographies as a social science research method. She explores the gamut of information that could be found in autobiographies which the sociologist could subject to interpretation. She also reflects upon ‘the manner in which reading and analysis of autobiographies became an experience of recasting [herself]’ (ibid., p. 281). Although the content of Sen’s analysis is autobiographies written by women, her sociological exploration is applicable to autobiographies and other biographical writings in general.

In my teaching of sociology, I have found the biographical material very useful; I have drawn valuable insights as well as illustrations of sociological imagination from them. Illustratively, I would like to recall the autobiographies by litterateurs, scientists, and artistes: Karen Armstrong (Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase), Agatha Christie (An Autobiography), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Memories and Adventures: An Autobiography), Richard Feynman (‘Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!’—Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton; ‘What Do You Care What Other People Think?—Further Adventures of a Curious Character; Don’t You Have Time to Think?), Frederick Forsyth (The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue), Günter Grass (Peeling the Onion), Graham Greene (A Sort of Life; A World of My Own; A Life in Letters), Alec Guinness (My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor; Blessings in Disguise; A Positively Final Appearance: A Journal 1996–98), Stephen Hawking (My Brief History), V. S. Naipaul (Between Father and Son: Family Letters), Claire Tomalin (A Life of My Own: A Memoir) and Anthony Trollope (An Autobiography); as also by eminent personalities: Charles Chaplin (My Autobiography), Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl), Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin), Alex Haley (Roots), Helen Adams Keller (The Story of My Life; The World I Live In; Midstream: My Later Life), and Henry David Thoreau (Walden; or, Life in the Woods). Of special significance in this context is Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, which, drawing from the real-life saga of a Chinese family over three generations, provides ‘an unmatchable insight into the making of modern China and the impact of war and totalitarianism on the destinies of a quarter of the human race’ (Richard Heller in Mail on Sunday, reproduced in Chang, 1993). Equally impressive is Papillon (trans. from the French by June P. Wilson and Walter B. Michaels) and its sequel Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (trans. from the French by Patrick O’Brian), a testimony to human endurance and human courage by Henri Charriére.

Of special interest for sociologists is Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967), which contains acute observations of native life and customs of New Guinea and North Melanesia and vivid descriptions of their landscapes. Although it covers only a very brief period of Malinowski’s professional life (1914 to 1918, about nineteen months in all), many entries reveal his approach to his work, the sources of his thought, and his personal ordeals and professional discoveries. A simple chronological record of day-to-day events, written in Polish, it was never intended for publication, and her decision to publish it is well articulated by his wife, Valetta Malinowska in her Preface:

… I reached the conclusion that it is of greater importance to give to the present and future students and readers of Malinowski’s anthropological writings this direct insight into his inner personality, and his way of living and thinking during the period of his most important work in the field, rather than to leave these brief diaries shut away in an archive. (ibid., p. ix)

Among sociologists in India, mention may be made of the full-length autobiographies of Ghurye (I and Other Explorations) and T. K. Oommen (Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs: Life and Times of a Sociologist). Srinivas and Madan, among others, have written autobiographical essays.

There are many biographies rich with sociological imagination. I may mention here the biographies of George Washington Carver (The Man Who Overcame, by Lawrence Elliott), the African-American who triumphed over daunting obstacles to become a benefactor of all humankind; the Nobel Laureate in physics and chemistry, Marie Skłodowska Curie (Madame Curie by her daughter Eve Curie); the Nobel Laureate in Physics, Richard Feynman (Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick); the Nobel Laureates in literature Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography by Uma Das Gupta) and V. S. Naipaul (The World is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French; Anthony Trollope (Trollope by Victoria Glendinning) and Frances Trollope (The Life, Manners and Travels of Fanny Trollope by Johanna Johnston).

There are scholars who have made the genre of biography as their forte: Hesketh Pearson (Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, John Nicholson, Tom Paine, William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, George Bernard Shaw, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, James McNeil Whistler, Oscar Wilde, etc.) and Claire Tomalin (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield Samuel Pepys, and Mary Wollstonecraft). ²³ The brilliant American author Irving Stone is well known for his biographical novels: John Adams (Those Who Love), Michelangelo Buonarroti (The Agony and the Ecstasy), Clarence Darrow (Clarence Darrow for the Defense), Charles Darwin (The Origin), Sigmund Freud (Passions of the Mind), Jack London (Sailor on Horseback), Camille Pissarro (Depths of Glory), Vincent van Gogh (Lust for Life), etc.

Biographical writing as a genre is fast emerging in India. Among the autobiographies of Indians, I regard the following as fruitful sociological readings: Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Mahatma Gandhi’s An Autobiography, R. K. Narayan’s My Days: Autobiography and My Dateless Diary: An American Journey, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Tapan Raychaudhuri’s The World in Our Time. ²⁴ I have also read with profit autobiographies of Dalit scholars—Vasant Moon’s Growing up Untouchable in India (trans. from Marathi by Gail Omvedt), which incidentally is the first Dalit autobiography to be published in English, Bama’s Karukku (trans. from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström), Viramma’s Life of an Untouchable (trans. by Will Hobson; retold by Josiane Racine and Jean-Luc Racine), and Siddalingiah’s Ooru Keri in Kannada. ²⁵

Fiction too can be a valuable source of information and insight into a society and culture that a sociologist is studying. In fact, the insights fiction provides ‘are usually beyond the reach of a sociological study’ (Srinivas, 1996b, p. x). Here, Srinivas emphasises the need for the sociologist to distinguish between ‘fiction that reflects and illuminates the lives, ideals and conflicts of the people, and fiction which does not’ (Srinivas, 1998, p. 2528). The ability to draw this distinction, no doubt, is acquired through critical immersion in the literature of a given language.

Srinivas gives illustrations of how, in his master’s thesis on marriage and family among the Kannada castes in princely Mysore, he used the ‘rich source of information and insight’ found in Kannada folklore and fiction (ibid.). In my work on the Indo-Trinidadians, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, Miguel Street, The Middle Passage, The Mimic Men, The Mystic Masseur, and The Suffrage of Elvira, and Ashram B. Maharaj’s, Kahani Village (collection of short stories) and Indo-Trinidadian Folk Tales in the Oral Tradition have been useful. Chandrima Karmakar’s exploration of the preoccupation of Indian diasporic writers with ‘home’, roots, and memory is based on an interpretive analysis of V. S. Naipaul’s Oeuvre (Karmakar, 2015). For understanding the Indian diaspora generally, the works of the three Naipauls—V. S., Seepersad (his father), and Shiva (his brother)—besides Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Jumpa Lahiri, George Lamming, Rohinton Mistry, Ernest Moutoussamy, and so on are indispensable.

Irawati Karve and Gurcharan Das provide a sociological reading of the Mahabharata. For Karve, as W. Norman Brown says, ‘Mahabharata is … a record of complex humanity and a mirror to all the faces which we ourselves wear’ (Karve, 1974, back cover). Viewed from another angle, it is perhaps the first feminist reading of the epic. For Das, the dilemmas and ambiguities inherent in the epic is a pointer to how we can come to terms with the uncertain ethics of the world today, a world that is uncannily similar to that of the great epic (Das, 2009, back cover).

I have already commented on the sociological significance of the works of Shivaram Karanth. Srinivas, too, observes how the novels of Shivaram Karanth are important for anyone interested in the study of Dakshina Kannada region in coastal Karnataka. Similar is the importance of the novels of Kuvempu for our understanding of the Malnad region of Karnataka. Such studies ‘need to be carried out either by those who have a very good knowledge of Kannada or by Kannada literary critics and scholars who are familiar with modern [sociology]’ (Srinivas, 1998, p. 2528). Obviously, good scholarship on a society and its culture calls for dual expertise: sociological imagination and literary sensitivity.

I have earlier mentioned Amitav Ghosh as an apt illustration of this. His Ibis trilogy—Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015)—are works of socio-historical fiction set in the first half of the nineteenth century. This trilogy derives its name from the ship Ibis on whose board most of the main characters from different cultures meet for the first time. It deals with the opium trade between India and China run by the East India Company and the trafficking of coolies to Mauritius. I am equally fascinated by the work of the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1914–1970), famous for his ‘culture of poverty’ thesis. His work on the Mexican Sánchez family—Five Families (1959), The Children of Sánchez (1961), and A Death in the Sánchez Family (1969)—is a masterly study of poverty, rich with sociological imagination and literary sensitivity. Interestingly, republished under the Penguin Modern Classics, these books are listed under both sociology and literature.

In teaching sociology, I have been drawing heavily from my reading of literature; literature conveys what I want to more effectively than merely relying on textbooks. Apart from the classics, some of the books in English literature that I have used are Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and of course, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas.

The Kannada literary works that have come in handy in my teaching are Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Bharathipura, T. R. Subba Rao’s Chandavalliya Thota, Srikrishna Alanahalli’s Kaadu, Bhyrappa’s Tabbaliyu Neenade Magane, and M. K. Indira’s Phaniyamma—just to mention a few. I also access English translations of works in other regional languages: Pather Panchali and Aparajito by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (trans. from Bengali by Gopa Mazumdar); Godan: A Novel of Peasant India by Munshi Premchand (trans. from Hindi by Jai Ratan and P. Lal), ²⁶ Maila Anchal by Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’ (trans. from Khari Bholi by Indira Junghare), Indulkeha by Oyyarathu Chandumenon (trans. from Malayalam by Anitha Devasia), etc.

Drama is a genre in which stories are composed in verse or prose, usually for theatrical performance, where emotions, thoughts and conflicts are expressed through dialogue and action. It is possible to adapt a novel for a drama through a fresh script; many a drama and most films are such adaptations. The reverse is possible, too; the best illustration is Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, a unique anthology containing twenty of William Shakespeare’s best-known plays adapted into stories for children of all ages, but can be read as introduction to Shakespeare. Since drama does not appeal to me much, I fall back upon prose adaptations.

Poetry as a genre, involving verse and rhythmic writing with imagery, regrettably, has the least appeal to me, except a kavithe by Kuvempu, a doha by Kabir, a lyric by Sahir Ludhianvi, and a couplet by John Donne here and there. To be sure, this is not to deny the sociological significance of this genre. Asha Singh (2016), for instance, has analysed Bhojpuri folk songs to delineate women’s articulations of men’s migration. Incidentally, under the guidance of Ghurye, Srinivas wrote papers on Telugu and Tamil folk songs (see Srinivas, 1943, 1944a, 1944b, 1945). Dasa Sahitya, the literature of the bhakti movement composed by Haridasas and Vachana Sahitya, associated with the Sharana movement are waiting for a secular sociological reading.

Conclusion: Self, Subjectivity and Sociology

Reflecting on the importance of the element of subjectivity in sociology in general and in fieldwork in particular, T. N. Madan writes, ‘The problems of social sciences are … constituted in part by ourselves: our personality enters in a big way into what we choose to study, and, even more so, into the course that our fieldwork runs and the results that flow from it’ (Madan, 1995, p. 111; emphasis original). Sociological imagination is part of our social conditioning and literary sensitivity is unapologetically subjective. Sociologists who believe their discipline is a science, like natural sciences, ²⁷ or would like to claim scientific status to what they do, are understandably shy or even critical of subjectivity coming in the way of their quest.

However, the futility of this quest worldwide is now evident. The criticism against quantification in sociology for its own sake and the dehumanising exercise of number-crunching is growing. Often the findings of sociological studies undertaken in the canonical tradition is based on too small a sample, and the way the data are gathered make these numbers spurious, too. It is mistaken to think that the use of sophisticated statistical tools would make sociology a science. If policy makers and others ignore our work, they seem to have a justification.

Lest I be mistaken, I am not making a case against quantitative data or their use in sociological analysis, much less against the need for objectivity in social research. My criticism is against holding the canonical research design as the only way to go about in sociology and making quantification and measurement an end in itself. Exactly seventy-five years ago, concluding his Invitation to Sociology, Peter L. Berger clarified that ‘we are [here] not concerned with methodology but rather with the human implications of having an academic discipline such as sociology … sociological perspective helps to illuminate man’s social existence’ (Berger, 1963, p. 186). His sage caution is worth recalling in full:

Sociology will be especially well advised not to fixate itself in an attitude of humourless scientism that is blind and deaf to the buffoonery of the social spectacle. If sociology does that, it may find that it has acquired a foolproof methodology, only to lose the world of phenomena that it originally set to explore — a fate as sad as that of the magician who has finally found the formula that will release the mighty jinn from the bottle, but cannot recollect what it was that he wanted to ask of the jinn in the first place. (ibid., 187–88)

Berger’s invitation to a humanistic sociology was later echoed by Robert Nisbet’s excellent exposition of ‘sociology as an art form’, one that had strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the 19th century, the age in which sociology came into its full stature (Nisbet, 1977). Drawing from the works of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, Nisbet explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles rooted in history), and actual modes of representation found in the arts (ibid., back cover).

Sociology as a humanistic discipline implies ‘an openness of mind and a catholicity of vision’ (Berger, 1963, p. 190). Sociologists time and again have to engage with the fundamental question of what it means to be a human being and what it means to be a human being in a particular situation. Answering this question and understanding human predicament is impossible without imagination and empathy (Srinivas, 1996b, p. xi). This implies those whom we observe become participants in the study, and we observe ourselves in relation to those whom we study. It is through self-reflexivity that we negotiate the dilemma of objectivity–subjectivity in our study.

Self-reflexivity is a call for sociologists to study oneself as an ethnographic field, to engage in auto-ethnography, as it were. It is a call for blending sociological imagination with literary sensitivity; a call for purposefully blurring the boundaries between sociology and literature: after all, what links the sociologist with literature is her/his desire to better understand the human condition. For awakening the litterateur in us, we sociologists in India will ever remain grateful to Srinivas.