On the Foibles of Indian Sociology: Some Suggestions Towards Their Rectification

I

The idea of India as conceived by colonial administrators was invariably negative. Let me refer to just two of them. In 1883, Sir John Seely observed: ‘India is only a geographical expression like Africa or Europe. It does not make the history of a nation and a language, but the territory of many nations and languages’ (Seely, 1902). Five years later in 1888, Sir John Stratchey held: ‘…there is not and never was an India…no Indian nation, no people of India’ (Stratchey, 2010). These observations should be viewed against the West-European idea of a nation wherein political and cultural boundaries were taken to be co-terminus. But even in West Europe, the cradle of the nation-states, this has not come true as exemplified by the issues raised by Scotland in Great Britain and Catalonia in Spain, just to cite two examples.

To arrive at an authentic idea of India, one should keep in mind the major events which went into the social formation of India. There are ten such events: (a) The Aryan advent ¹ which happened some 3,500–5,000 years ago. But when the Aryans arrived, the pre-Aryan settlers, Adivasis and Dravidians, together constituting a third of the total current population of India were already here. But Indian Sociology has not taken cognizance of these groups in a systematic manner. (b) The emergence of the Indian protestant religions in the 6th century B.C., Buddhism and Jainism, which interrogated the Brahmanical ideological hegemony. (c) The arrival of non-Indic religions—Christianity and Islam. The popular perception is that Christianity in India is a product of colonialism and Islam came to India through conquest. Both these are historically incorrect. Pre-colonial Christianity was present in three geographic regions in the world: Coptic Christians of Egypt, Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia and Syrian Christians of Kerala. The Christian presence in Kerala started in the 1st century A.D., much before the era of colonialism. The series of Muslim conquests started in North India only by the 8th century A.D. but Muslim presence in South India, particularly Kerala, started much before that through trade connections. (d) The emer- gence of Sikhism, which fought both against Islamic and Hindu orthodoxy and established its firm grip, particularly in Punjab. (e) The arrival of immigrant religious communities—Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha’is—to escape religious persecutions in their respective homelands. (f) The anti-colonial movement brought together all the disparate elements including the various religious communities to fight the mighty British colonizers. (g) The partition of India into Muslim Pakistan and ‘Secular’ India, left the conservative Hindus in despair because their aspiration for creating an undivided Hindu India remained unfulfilled. (h) The linguistic re-organization of provincial states by the mid-1950s reinforced the idea of Indian polity as a cultural coalition. Ignoring all these dimensions, India is designated as a nation/society.

There are two other events which are not directly socio-cultural in their content but have socio-cultural consequences. Thus, (i) the introduction of planned economic development which combined the multi-party democracy of the West and the planning process of the then Soviet Union, designated as the Third Way. While rapid economic development was its goal, distributive justice in favour of the poor was also given adequate importance. This brought in the era of rising aspirations for the teeming millions of India. And, (j) liberalization of the economy which increased the economic disparity between the rich and the poor, increasing the distress of the latter, particularly those who were displaced, thanks to the high-tech-driven development.

As against the derogatory conceptualizations of India by colonial administrators, one can identify at least seven different ways in which India has been conceptualized particularly by Indian historians. These are: (a) an ancient civilizational entity, (b) a composite culture, (c) a political entity, (d) a religious entity, (e) a geographic/territorial entity, with a unique cultural ethos, (f) a collective of linguistic provinces and (g) a unity of great and little traditions (see, Oommen, 1999, pp. 1–18).

The idea of India as a civilizational entity and India as a nation conflates civilization and nation; a civilization consists of several nations/sovereign states. Before the partition of the Indian subcontinent, there were more than 500 princely states and several ‘nations’, that is, territorially anchored linguistic communities. Neither ‘natural geography’ nor religion is a prerequisite for a nation to emerge. The European idea that it is natural for a nation to establish its sovereign state is not true for India; state-renouncing nations were aplenty in the Indian sub-continent.

Those who characterize India as a composite culture focuses on the fusion of Hindu and Islamic cultures; they ignore Dravidian and Adivasi cultures partly because Indian history starts with the Aryan advent! At any rate, the Muslim ‘conquest’ of North India provides the cut-off point thereby hinting at the externality of Muslim Indians. However, if the synthesis of the two cultures—Hindu and Muslim—were a reality, the demand for partition would not have crystallized.

The most pernicious idea of India is that it is a religious entity based on the demographic majority of Hindus constituting about 75% of the total population of India at that time—pre-partition India. But Muslims of the sub-continent were the biggest congregation of Muslims in the world in pre-partition India, most of whom were converts from local castes and tribes, and hence their nativity was Indian. At any rate, the foreign elements among Muslims, the Ashrafs, were a small segment and the vast majority of Indian Muslims were drawn from the Ajlafs, converts from the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the Arzals, converts from the Dalits; only their religion was ‘alien’. The Muslims were in India for 700 years at the time of partition and several Muslim-ruled principalities too existed. What the timespan required to nativize a community is a relevant issue here. Therefore, to conceptualize India as a ‘Hindu nation’ was anchored to religious majoritarianism. And this was precisely how the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) conceptualized India. Invoking this trial, the Muslims too claimed that they were a ‘nation’ leading to the partition of the Indian subcontinent. The Sikhs too defined themselves as a ‘nation’, following the examples of Hindus and Muslims, and demanded a Sikh nation–state but their demand remains unfulfilled.

If the RSS defined India as a Hindu Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the ‘Father of the Nation’ articulated in 1938 in Hind Swaraj: ‘If the Hindus believe that only Hindus should people India, they are living in dreamland…. In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms; nor has it ever been so in India.’ In fact, a nation established on the basis of religion cannot be democratic (see, Oommen 1994, pp. 455–472).

If religion is not a necessary element in nation formation, what are the basic requirements for a nation to emerge? All available empirical evidence suggests that these are territory and language, which could be ancestral or adopted. Given the circumstances of India’s birth as a Republic and following the trail of West European nation-states, Hindi was adopted as the ‘national’ language. As Ambedkar who drafted India’s Constitution reported; ‘Hindi won its place as a national language by one vote’. (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 103) That is, Hindi has legality and not legitimacy to be the national language of India. To complicate matters, to bolster its number, some forty mother tongues, some of which have as many as ten million speakers are counted as Hindi speakers making it the language of 38% of Indians. Article 351 of the Indian Constitution prescribed that Hindi should be the national language of India, to establish a nation–state, an idea was patently European and unsuitable for India.

Conceptualizing India as a unity of great and little traditions would bring forth issues of inter-group inequality between the great and little ‘traditions’ undercutting our democratic ethos. Privileging the biggest religion (Hinduism) or the biggest language group (Hindi) cannot cope with India’s socio-cultural complexity. And, this is evident from the present four competing conceptualizations of India, namely, cultural monism, cultural pluralism, cultural federalism and cultural subalternism (see Oommen, 2004, pp. 745–755).

Cultural monists opt for the nation–state model of Western Europe. But even after five centuries of nation-building the problem remains fundamental in the case of multi-national states of Europe as exemplified by the cases of Basques and Catalonians in Spain, and Scottish, Welsh and Irish peoples in Great Britain to recall just two examples. In the Indian context, the nation–state model must privilege Hinduism and Hindi which would destroy the present democratic ethos of India. Although Hindus constitute a little over 80% of Indian citizens, they are woefully divided based on castes and languages. It is untenable that the discriminated would unequivocally surrender their group identities for citizenship equality. This is a great challenge for Indian sociology and remains largely unaddressed.

The linguistic complexity of the Republic of India is mindboggling. Languages drawn from four language families are spoken in India; Aryan (73%), Dravidian (25%) and the remaining 2% are drawn from Austro-Asiatic (1.5%) and Tibeto-Chinese (0.5%) linguistic families. And the mother tongues spoken in India were 782 (in 1951), 1019 (in 1971) and 1576 (1991) according to the Indian Census. This means assertions of identity based on languages are not diminishing but increasing despite the ongoing processes of industrialization and urbanization, and the consequent spatial mobility. Understandably, India has twenty two officially recognized languages, indeed a rare phenomenon in the present globalizing world of the nation-states. For these reasons, the slogan: ‘one nation, one culture and one people’ is at loggerheads with the empirical reality of India.

In their effort to establish an isomorphism between the idea and reality of India, the notion of cultural pluralism was floated by those who opposed cultural monism. Consequently, although some 80% of Indians profess Hinduism, it was not adopted as the official/national religion of India, although Hinduism occupies a dominant position in Indian society. Similarly, the fact that twenty two languages are recognized as ‘official’ also points to endorsing the cultural plurality of India. Despite these, it cannot be said that India’s governance structures adequately reflect the Indian social reality. Even the linguistic re-organization of Indian states did not meet the aspirations of millions drawn from religious and linguistic minorities in the process of decision-making. There were five secessionist movements in Independent India and seventeen demands for separate provincial states/union territories.

The above tendencies gave birth to the idea of a politically federal India to provide teeth to India’s cultural diversity based on languages. Although the idea is in vogue and some steps are taken towards its realization, the fact that cultural pluralism and political federalism are two sides of the same coin is not fully accepted as of now. For this to happen, a robust system of democratic decentralization is imperative. With a five-layered politico-administrative structure—Union Government, Provincial States, Autonomous Regions, Zilla Parishads and Panchayat Samitis—the skeleton is in place but the required flesh is to be grafted onto them. For a country of India’s size and socio-cultural diversity, this is imperative for democratic governance. Putting into practice a uniform civil code is not a prerequisite. The earlier we recognize this, the better it is for the political and social health of India and authentic sociology of India because civil codes emanate out of religious practices.

The three conceptualizations of India—cultural monism, cultural pluralism and cultural federalism—do not take into account the specific disadvantages of the subaltern peoples of India, the Scheduled Castes (Dalits), Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis), and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), particularly the lower classes in these categories. They together constitute the overwhelming majority of Indian citizens, nearly two-thirds. Their cultural specificities and social disadvantages are not captured by the above three conceptualizations (see, Ilaiah, 1996). Therefore, they tend to highlight cultural subalternism, the view from the bottom, as against the visions from above. Even as this is the view of the disadvantaged majority, cultural subalternism may ignore the interests of the advantaged minority, thereby alienating them from the polity. Above all, the nation is a community in communication in a specified territory irrespective of their differences— economic, political, social and cultural. Therefore, given the mindboggling cultural heterogeneity of India the concept of nation-state is an absolute misfit, although social scientists of India, particularly political scientists and sociologists, have endorsed it. Sociology ought to have a vested interest in nurturing cultural heterogeneity/diversity.

II

Why is it that I am advocating the conceptualization of India as a multi-cultural and multi-national entity? Because that is the only route to arrive at an authentic sociology of India if sociology is the science of society.

Almost all Indian sociologists have willingly endorsed the idea of Western colonialism which I have characterized as ‘retreatist colonialism’ (Oommen, 1991, pp. 67–84). But there are two other colonialisms—internal colonialism and replicative colonialism. Internal colonialism was conceptualized by Hetcher (1975) and replicative colonialism gave birth to the ‘New World’ consisting of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. The Aryan advent was replicative colonialism, but no Indian social scientist characterises it thus. Both the Sanskrit language and caste system, the most elaborate pre-industrial division of labour known in human history, are Aryan gifts to India. ² Perhaps that inhibited Indian sociologists/social anthropologists to explore seriously the class dimension of Indian society (see Deshpande, 2003, pp. 177–220).

The other dimension which remained largely unexplored in Indian sociology until recently was its domination by men in the discipline. However, by the 1970s, a group of feminist sociologists initiated the process of interrogating the dominance of patriarchy in Indian sociology. This is yielding excellent results (see Rege, 2003). While the reference to the ‘Founding Fathers’ of Indian sociology is frequent, nobody refers to our Founding Mothers! Although their number was small, they were not absent given the fact that Irawati Karve, Leela Dube, Suma Chitnis, and others made significant contributions to the development of sociology in India. But the fact that they were all Brahmins ³ reinforces the upper caste domination in Indian sociology. The only exception was Parvathamma, a sociologist of Dalit background from Karnataka. The Indian Sociological Society had its first woman president only in 2016–2017 when Sujata Patel was elected 65 years after the ISS was established. Once the ice is broken, we have had women presidents in quick succession!

Sociologists of Adivasi and Dalit backgrounds are grossly under-represented in Indian sociology, considering their substantial demographic presence in India: Adivasis comprise eight and Dalits 16% of the Indian population, together constituting a quarter of the total. But once they entered the profession, we have a few who started interrogating the authenticity of Indian sociology and social anthropology (see, e.g., Kumar, 2010, pp. 514–532; 2015, pp. 33–39). This is true of the Adivasis too (see, Xaxa, 2020, pp. 77–97). What is important to note here is the possibility of analyzing these excluded social categories from Indian ‘society’ has increased tremendously in Indian sociology once they entered the discipline. ⁴

The basic issue that we have to confront in Indian sociology is the conflation between polity and society, a blind imitation of West Europe. Polity is the unit of analysis for political scientists and economy is the concern of economists. And, society ought to be the focus of sociology. Of course, the interconnections between polity, economy and society ought to engage all three disciplines. But the conflation of polity and society or the state and society is a global issue. In the apt words of Bauman ‘… the term “society”, as used by well-nigh all sociologists regardless of their school loyalties, is, for all practical purposes, a name for an entity identical in size and composition with nation–state’ (1973, p. 43). The first ‘nation’ to emerge in the world was Great Britain or the United Kingdom which was a conglomeration of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, a multi-national state which England has colonized internally to recall Michael Hetcher’s felicitous phrase. In 1798, half of the population of France spoke no French at all and when Republican Italy with a population of 57 million emerged in 1948, only 3% spoke the Italian language. But both France and Italy are designated as ‘nations’ and a ruthless cultural homogenization was implemented to make France a French-speaking and Italy an Italian-speaking nation (see, Oommen, 1997, 2002 for details).

As Charles Tilly observed:

Only a tiny proportion of the world’s distinctive religious, linguistic and cultural groupings have formed their own states, while precious few of the world’s existing states have approximated the homogeneity and commitment conjured up by the label “nation-state”. (1994, p. 137)

In light of these observations, one may conclude: India is the most unfit polity to be designated as a ‘society’ in the world today. If so, the topmost priority of Indian sociologists is to identify the appropriate units of their analyses. The tragedy is that the moment an analyst characterizes India as a multi-national polity or as a conglomeration of societies, s/he is apt to be labelled as ‘anti-national’. But an understanding of the social formation of India as I have adverted to in the beginning will help us clarify the real nature of the entity called India. This is indeed the first task of Indian sociologists as we have come of age—100 years of Indian Sociology!

III

The conundrum between sociology and social/cultural anthropology in India is an extension of the relationship and rivalry between these disciplines in the West where sociology was defined as the study of one’s own society, which is taken to be modern, urban, and industrialized. But there were substantial rural segments in ‘one’s own society’ as implied in the phenomenon rural–urban continuum. But the ‘other’ was spatially and temporally distant from one’s own society, that is, European society. European anthropologists located and analyzed three others—Savage, Black and Ethnographic. But European anthropologists rarely analyzed the ‘Savages’ present in Europe—the Samis of Scandinavia or the Scottish Highlanders. But they did locate the ‘Savages’ of the New World and studied them under the rubric of cultural anthropology (see Oommen, 2007, pp. 164–179).

The Adivasis of India could have been labelled as ‘savages’ as they belonged to pre-literate societies, but they are assigned to ‘rural’ India, reckoned as part of an ancient Hindu civilization. And most Indian sociologists and social anthropologists wanted to absorb them into the Hindu civilization. ⁵ This Hindu expansionism denied the Adivasis of their specific cultural identity. ⁶ The relevant question here is that if there are no ‘others’ in India, what is the relevance of social/cultural anthropology in India?

The termination of colonialism irreversibly affected Western social anthropology. Terms such as ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, ‘black’, and the like have been rejected by non-Western social anthropologists. The new phrase was an encapsulating one, ‘Third World’—consisting of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If the first two experienced retreatist colonialism, Latin America was subjected to replicative colonialism with differing consequences for disciplines like sociology and social/cultural anthropology. While the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss insists that social/cultural anthropology should keep its focus on ‘savage societies’ (1966, pp. 112–123) his countryman Louis Dumont argued that sociological understanding is advanced more by social anthropologists’ study of ‘other’ societies (1966, p. 23) and the anthropologist Barnes argued that the anthropological method is better equipped to understand sociological processes (1959, p. 15). On the other hand, yet another distinguished French sociologist, Touraine, argued that sociology can develop only in modern Western societies (see Oommen, 1996, pp. 111–125). Against this Babel of Tongues, one is at a loss to situate sociology and social/ cultural anthropology in the world of academic scholarship. And this has affected the two cognate disciplines as they are practised in India and perhaps elsewhere too.

While discussing the subject matter of sociology, Harold Fallding observes ‘…Cultural and social anthropology comprise neither more nor less than the sociology of simpler peoples. So, I think one is entitled to claim all of it for sociology’ (1968, p. 71). Similarly, while writing about the contributions of social anthropologists to the study of complex societies, Eisenstadt writes: ‘…in my view there is no theoretical distinction between sociology and social anthropology’ (1965, p. 69). And Srinivas is forthright: ‘…the traditional but irrational distinction between sociology and social anthropology is so disastrous. A true science of society includes the study of all societies in space as well as time—primitive ⁷ , modern and historical’ (1996, p. 164). In light of these articulations, the academic Berlin Wall between sociology and social anthropology should be abandoned in India. This should also do away with the unproductive, in fact, sterile controversy about data collection techniques between these disciplines (see, Oommen, 1969, pp. 809–815).

I would like to add a word here about the juxtapositioning of the survey method and participant observation. The data collected through the survey method is dismissed as superficial and unreliable by social/cultural anthropologists. But such data are useful for making generalizations and are useful for policy making. In contrast, sociologists usually dismiss qualitative data collected through participant observation by social anthropologists as ‘story-telling’ and not useful for providing generalizations and hence not ‘scientific.’ But we must recognize that data collection techniques are at least partly conditioned by the nature of the society one analysis. Thus, the survey method cannot be invoked in the case of pre-literate societies and participant observation cannot be productively employed in societies inhabited by groups involved in reciprocal repulsion. The much- eulogized village studies in India through participant observation are invariably undertaken by caste-Hindu researchers hardly ‘participating’ in the activities of ‘untouchable’ segments. The social architecture of the Indian village does not permit the free-mixing of castes placed at different points of the caste hierarchy.

Although Beattie (1964) characterized social/cultural anthropology as a discipline analyzing ‘other cultures’ this was never taken seriously in India. Ramakrishna Mukherjee, although trained in anthropology, including physical anthropology, first studied Bengal villages situated in Bangladesh, now. ⁸ Mukherjee was not obsessed with participant observation and qualitative data, the forte of social anthropologists. In fact, he was a past master’s in social surveys and quantitative analyses. He can be legitimately designated as an academic amphibian (see Oommen, 2019, pp. 19–30). The case of T. N. Madan is similar. Although trained as a social anthropologist, his first study was an analysis of his community, the Kashmiri pandits (see Madan, 1965). His subsequent studies were mainly ‘sociological’ in their tenor. The point I want to emphasize is that endorsing the uncalled-for hostility between sociology and social anthropology in India, largely of Western import, did not augur well for the development of sociology in India.

I must also allude to a related issue here. That is, the oft-quoted statement of Louis Dumont that ‘…a sociology of India was at the point of confluence of sociology and Indology’ (1957, p. 7). The problem with the statement is that it unwittingly excludes the first settlers in India (the Adivasis) because they were pre-literate peoples without a written tradition. It also excludes the Dravidians whose Indology is not in Sanskrit. Given the patriarchal domination in Aryan Hindu society, the Indology under reference is male-dominated. Further, the Indologies of Pali-Buddhist and Islamic-Persian traditions—present in India are also ignored. Thus viewed, Dumont’s ‘Indian Sociology’ is upper caste, male, Aryan Hindu in its tenor.

This brings me to the exclusion of religious minorities as a research area from Indian sociology. There are two types of religious minorities in India: Religious minorities of Indian origin and those who originated outside India (see Oommen, 1986, pp. 53–74). The Indic religious minorities are Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs. The first two emerged in the 6th century BC and the third nearly 500 years ago. Hindu expansionism and the Indian state consider these religious minorities as extensions of Hinduism, explicitly denying their specific identities. They are also covered by the Hindu Code Bill by the Indian State.

Of the religious minorities perceived as being of external origin, Muslims make up 14% of the total population of India, which has the second-largest Muslim population among the sovereign states of the world, with Indonesia having the largest. The total Muslim population of India is almost double the population of the largest member of the European Union, namely Germany. And yet, Muslims are rarely the subject of study in Indian sociology. The sociological studies of Muslims were initiated by a Muslim sociologist, Imtiaz Ahmed (see, Robinson & Upadhya, 2014, pp. 140–177). But considering the size and specificity of Indian Muslims, the sociological analyses of Muslims are few and far between. Although the caste system is alien to the Muslim tradition, it influenced Indian Muslims. Thus the upper caste converts and foreign immigrants are designated as Ashrafs, the converts from OBCs are called Ajlafs and the converts from ex-untouchables are designated as Arzals, clearly indicating the ‘Indianization’ of Muslims. ⁹ Similarly, the practice of untouchability exists among Christians too if in a region (e.g., Kerala) both ritually clean and unclean castes have embraced Christianity. These are sociologically critical matters to be studied and reported by sociologists. By ignoring these, important sociological aspects of Indian Muslims and Christians are largely left out of Indian sociology.

There are some sociologists (e.g., Mukherji & Sengupta, 2004) who argue for the Indigenization of social sciences which can lead to their universalization. But in South Asia, given the fact that religion provides the bases for state formation, the possibility is that of communalization of these disciplines. Thus, in Sri Lanka it would be Buddhist sociology, in India, it would be Hindu sociology and in Pakistan, it would be Islamic sociology which would emerge. Ahmed, a Pakistani social anthropologist suggested:

The study of Muslim groups by scholars committed to the universalistic principles of Islam – humanity, knowledge, tolerance – relating micro village tribal studies in particular to larger historical and ideological frame of Islam. Islam is here understood not as theology but as sociology. The definition does not preclude non-Muslims. (1987, p. 56)

Defined in terms of humanity, knowledge, and tolerance and inclusive of non-Muslims, one fails to understand the distinctiveness of and the need for an Islamic sociology or anthropology. Thus, Indian sociology should transcend inward-looking traditionalism, imitative cosmopolitanism and virulent nationalism. It should attempt the judicious blending of the nation with the global rejecting the liabilities and retaining the assets in both.

IV

There are numerous reviews, and compilations of sociology and social anthropology in India. These reviews are not only commissioned by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) but also initiated by prominent publishing houses such as Oxford University Press (OUP). For example, OUP published fifteen volumes under the general editorship of T. N. Madan, an invaluable service to the discipline. There are also individual initiatives in this context. For example, the two volumes edited by Maitrayee Chaudhari (2003, 2010) and the two volumes edited by Sujata Patel (2011, 2020). It is neither necessary nor possible to go into the details of these reviews in a lecture. But none of these publications provides an idea of the organizational structure of the discipline of sociology. I am providing a brief account of that here.

The organizations of professions play an important role in their origin and growth. The Indian Sociological Society (ISS) started in 1951 ¹⁰ at Bombay. Its founder, G. S. Ghurye was the first president from 1951 to 1966, fifteen long years! Not only was the office of the ISS located in the Department of Sociology in Bombay, but the other two office bearers of the ISS, the Secretary and Treasurer were also from the Bombay Department. The second president of the ISS was M. N. Srinivas (1967–1969), perhaps the most distinguished student of G. S. Ghurye. Ghurye resigned his presidency for his student to succeed him and Srinivas democratized the ISS by instituting a systematic election process every 2 years, limiting the tenure of the president and secretary, the two elected office bearers of the ISS, the Treasurer being nominated by the President. Generally speaking, the ISS is a democratic organization of Indian sociologists functioning effectively for the last 70 years. We are here today participating in the 47th All India Sociological Conference. The uninterrupted publication of our official journal, Sociological Bulletin is something that we can be proud of.

I have noted above that M. N. Srinivas democratized the ISS and we should be eternally thankful to him for this. But democracy is a double-edged weapon which can function effectively only if the participants in the electoral process behave responsibly. In the case of an academic organization like the ISS the electorate consists of professionals and their behaviour is expected to be academically responsible. I would like to recall two instances when some members of ISS behaved irresponsibly, diminishing its professional orientation.

In 1998–1999 a young man who did his PhD at Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak and was looking for a job, filed his nominations for three positions in the ISS election—that of President, Secretary and Member of the Executive Committee. One can understand a young scholar aspiring to be a member of the ISS EC to serve the interests of his age group. But wanting to be the President or Secretary of the ISS when he had no professional achievements to his credit is an aberrant aspiration. Although one may pardon this ‘immature’ and ‘irresponsible’ act of a ‘misguided’ young man, can one pardon the irresponsibility of his proposers and seconders, who were faculty members of the Department of Sociology at his university? And the young contestant polled as many as ninety votes as the presidential candidate! This was a clear indication of the utter lack of professionalism among a segment of ISS members.

The second instance I would like to refer to is the defeat in 2012–2013, of Yogesh Atal, an Indian sociologist of high standing, when he contested for the position of ISS President. His opponent who got elected can hardly claim a sociologist of standing in India. Such instances inhibit many deserving sociologists to enter the electoral fray. One cannot prevent a person from aspiring to high positions in professional associations through rules and regulations but only by responsible behaviour of fellow professionals, by casting their votes based on the academic competence of candidates. If it does not exist, populism may triumph which is detrimental to the democratization of professional associations. The ISS members should be aware of this and act accordingly for the health of Indian sociology ¹¹ .

There is another foible of Indian sociology which I would like to mention here briefly, that is, what Dhanagare refers to as the ‘personification of Departments’ (2011, p. 128). Although there are no ‘schools’ of sociology in India, such as the Chicago School or the Frankfurt School, there is a widespread tendency to refer to particular departments as schools and attribute the achievements of these ‘schools’ usually to the first head of the department. Thus, G. S. Ghurye, the first Indian head of the Department of Sociology at Bombay ¹² was trained as a linguist, and sent to the United Kingdom to do his PhD as a sociologist. But he changed his research supervisor to a social anthropologist because according to him ‘anthropological approach to sociology’ (whatever that means) was more suitable (see Savur, 2011, pp. 3–28). But the presence of A. R. Desai, the first self-declared and widely acknowledged ‘Marxist Sociologist’ of India points to the lack of cohesiveness of the Bombay ‘School’.

Similarly, the founders of the Lucknow ‘School’ ¹³ were not academically cohesive. Radhakamal Mukherjee, trained as an economist, was the first head of the combined Department of Economics and Sociology and was a prolific author contributing to the disciplines of Economics, Sociology and Ecology. D. P. Mukherji, an eloquent teacher and public intellectual, also trained in Economics but contributed much less through his publications as compared to his senior, Radhakamal Mukherjee. The third luminary who taught ‘primitive economics’ in the Department was an anthropologist, D. N. Majumdar. And, an illustrious student of the Department, A. K. Saran, who taught at Lucknow, did not even acknowledge the possibility of sociology as a discipline (see, Madan, 2013). The limited point here is that the label ‘School’ is not appropriate for the Lucknow Department either.

One may however note that the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics headed by M. N. Srinivas (1959–1972) had a semblance of coherence in terms of research done there. ¹⁴ But one cannot claim the coherence attributed to a ‘School’ even to the Department of Sociology located in the Delhi School of Economics (see Srinivas, 1995, pp. 31–52). The personification of Departments is a pale persistence of the ‘guru–shishya’ tradition of Ancient India, although contemporary educational institutions are a far cry from them. I am not suggesting for a moment that all aspects of tradition should be rejected lock, stock and barrel. All traditions have both positive and negative dimensions. The ingenuity of a people depends on their ability to reject the negative and retain the positive dimensions in their tradition (see Oommen, 1983, pp. 253–263). But the problem of ‘guru–shishya’ syndrome is that the latter attributes scholastic infallibility to the former. ¹⁵ The latent function of this is that it thwarts the growth of the discipline/profession.

I may allude briefly here to the disinclination of a few ‘eminent’ scholars in the discipline to view responsibilities relating to organizational matters. ¹⁶ These are basically two: organizing conferences/seminars and accepting editorial responsibility for the official publications. When I was the Secretary-General of the XI World Congress of Sociology in 1986, held in New Delhi, an eminent sociologist asked me: ‘T. K. when is your Congress? I want to leave Delhi during that time so that I can continue my “work” without any disturbance’. He may have fancied that a lot of delegates to the Congress may be ‘disturbing’ him by calling on him!

As we all know, the responsibility of editing our official journal Sociological Bulletin lay initially with the President and Secretary of the ISS. But editorial competence is not widespread and not necessarily found in elected office bearers. When Srinivas took over as the President of ISS he appointed a Managing Editor, who refused to accept the responsibility. But the position of Managing Editor of the Bulletin was revived after a few years and we are fortunate enough to have dedicated and competent Managing Editors subsequently, who had to devote enormous time to the editorial work of the Bulletin. An adequate supply of competent and devoted members is an absolute necessity for the sustenance of professional associations. As of now, we are lucky to have an adequate supply of competent members willing to spend their professional time on the ISS editorial work, an absolute pre-requisite for the sustenance of any discipline.

Indian sociology was very conservative in terms of recognizing new fields of research. I make this observation based on personal experiences. In 1963 when I appeared for an interview at a research institute in Delhi for the position of Research Assistant, the Interview Board wanted to know my PhD topic. On hearing that it is a study of the Bhoodan–Gramdan movement, the Sociology expert on the Committee exclaimed with ample sarcasm, ‘Is it a topic for sociological research?!’ Those were the days when Indian sociologists studied family and kinship, caste and religion, or villages. But Indian Sociology is capable of changing its outlook. Thus in 1976, at the Thirteenth All India Sociological Conference held at Chandigarh, ‘Sociology of Social Movements’ was one of the listed themes of the Conference.

However, the willingness to change is not visible when it comes to themes that in any way interrogate the nation/state! I was invited to write a working paper on ‘Ethnicity and Nation-Building’ for the Seventeenth All India Sociological Conference held at Surat which had ‘Ethnicity and Ethnic Processes’ as one of the listed themes. But I wrote on ‘Insiders and Outsiders in India: Primordial Collectivism and Nation-Building’. The practice of the ISS is to publish the invited working papers in its official journal, Sociological Bulletin. But my working paper was not published in the Bulletin. ¹⁷

I referred previously to the Bulletin’s reluctance to publish a paper entitled: ‘The Rural–Urban Continuum Re-examined in the Indian Context’. I am reasonably certain that some of you might have had similar experiences. The point to be noted is that a discipline/profession which resists venturing into new research areas and/or employing new techniques of data collection and analysis cannot grow. The earlier Indian Sociology realizes this, the better it is for its future.

V

I am invited to inaugurate this All India Sociological Conference, the theme of which is ‘100 years of Sociology in India: Exploring Trajectories for the Future’, a theme on which a substantial number of publications exist, beginning with Ramakrishna Mukherjee’s Sociology of Indian Sociology and Yogendra Singh’s Indian Sociology: Social Conditioning and Emerging Concerns, not to speak of several other publications which followed (Mukherjee, 1979; Singh, 1986). But I have opted to speak ‘On the Foibles of Indian Sociology: Some Suggestions Towards their Rectification’, and perhaps earned more enemies from among my fellow sociologists. ¹⁸ But my intention is strictly noble: To make Indian sociology more authentic. Therefore, even if I incur your momentary displeasure, I hope in the long run and on second thoughts you will recognize my intention.