Sociological Research in India

On Historical Sociology

Hetukar Jha’s paper ‘Historical Sociology in India’ surveys the sociological works that made use of the historical materials for an explanation of the phenomenon under consideration.

An erroneous understanding that followed a cursory and brisk reading of the writings of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, the Oxford social anthropologist, was the dichotomy of the structural–functional approach in opposition to the historical method, and the opposition of social anthropology to ethnology; the unfortunate assumption of this reading was that the discipline of ‘comparative sociology’, the other name of sociology, and its branch with the name of ‘social anthropology’, became a synchronic study, overwhelmingly concerned with society ‘here-and-now’ rather than ‘what it was’ and ‘how it has evolved into what it is now’. Well known to the practitioners of sociology and social anthropology is the distinction between ‘conjectural history’ and ‘authentic history’. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski, the architects of the functional method, who were both committed to a scientific study of social relations and cultural practices, were arch-enemies of the ‘imaginative reconstructions’ of the past and not of a systematic study of historical records and archaeological remains. In fact, as we learn from their respective autobiographical notes that both of them were keen to undertake studies of evolution and diffusion of social and cultural traits after they had completed their major ethnographic writings, for they rejected the doctrines of classical evolutionism and classical diffusionism and not of the processes of evolution and diffusion.

By contrast to what happened in British academics, Jha tells us that almost every sociological work in India was rooted in an understanding of the configurations of the past. If it was not historical, it was Indological. Those looking at Indian society against the backdrop of classical writings contributed to the sociology of knowledge. It was different from the approach of the sociologistic positivism, which unwaveringly promoted a ‘field view’ of the Indian society in comparison to the ‘book view’, the terms that became popular with the writings of M.N. Srinivas. Those who carried out a first-hand study of Indian society were, however, not unsympathetic to the historical method; but a distinction was always kept in mind between ‘making sociology a branch of history’ and ‘making use of the historical material, if authentic, to grasp the dynamics of the present’.

Beginning with the emergence of historical sociology in Germany, Jha impressively covers sociological and anthropological works of the colonial period, documenting the contributions that different curio-seekers and scholars of that time made, including the missionaries whose primary interest was in converting local populations. The section titled ‘Historical Approaches of the “Pioneers”’ (vol. 1, pp. 36–41) gives a succinct account of the writings of the builders of sociology, but what their respective approaches were is unclear. So is the following section dealing with the historical studies carried out after India’s independence. The section on the place of history in tribal studies is especially interesting, since for the rise of the functional approach, ‘a-historical’ tribal societies, preliterate and simple, played a cardinal role. These societies were studied as ‘they were at that time’, since the studies of their change and dynamism could not be carried out in the absence of reliable historical evidence. One could not also rely upon the writings of the missionaries, travellers, soldiers and social workers, for they often were exaggerated, apocryphal or based upon the testimony of a couple of respondents rather than presenting the view of the community as a whole. Pursuing the distinction between ‘history from above’ and ‘history from below’, Jha argues the case of plural histories in every society.

Theory and Methods

Generally, when a survey of research works in sociology and social anthropology is conducted, a section on theory and methods is not considered for inclusion, because it is thought that Indian scholars have scantily contributed to these areas. When pursuing courses on sociological and anthropological theory and methods, the students read Western authors—in original and also commentaries on them. The tacit belief is that their theories and methods can be applied to the understanding of the Indian social reality. These theories and methods are assumed to have a universal application. Although being developed from the Western experiences by scholars from the West, it is thought that since all societies have a basic structure (almost unalterable)—West being no exception— and also that eventually all societies will bear resemblance to the West, these theories and methods could be inductively applied to all.

Being convinced of the ubiquity of the Western scholarship, many of us applied the same concepts and methods to Indian situations; and if the applications were found unyielding, the problem was sought not in the theories and methods, but in the way we used them. Whilst some of us were still beholden to them, the others protested, arguing for the specificity—and distinctness—of the Indian society, thus pressing the need to have a repertoire of concepts (distinct from the West) that would aid its proper and unambiguous understanding.

These dilemmas of theory and methods in Indian sociology constitute the theme of Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Jesna Jayachandran’s paper in this volume. They begin with the ‘daunting’ task of identifying the books and articles that sociologists working on India have written which could be read for an understanding of the negotiations that Indian sociologists have made with theory and methods. Will an article that someone has written on ‘structuralism’, as J.P.S. Uberoi did, be aptly classified as a contribution to theory or a short, impressive, piece that Veena Das and J.P.S. Uberoi wrote on caste: Which is a good application of the structural thinking? Indubitably, the first will be counted as a contribution to theory. About the second, there may be a debate about its inclusion under the rubric of ‘caste’ or ‘theory and methods’. In a compendium on theory and methods, the problem of classification and nomenclature is acute: What counts as theory? Is it what is given in abstract terms? Or, is it the application of theory to understand an empirical reality ‘theory’? In other words, will we read Srinivas’s work on religion and rituals of Coorgs for the functional approach? Or, what should we read for Malinowski’s functionalism—his Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) or A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (1944)? In other words, the problem comes up with respect to what constitutes a work on theory and what does not.

So, the outcome is ‘put-it-all-in’—Chaudhuri and Jayachandran’s paper looks for the ‘theoretical orientations’ in the contemporary specialisations, be it caste, gender, diaspora, nationalism and feminism. Ethnosociology of McKim Marriott is as much a part of theory as is the idea of indigenisation. At the end of their chapter, one learns that theory is ubiquitous; no sociological work is bereft of the underlying theoretical premises. And, if it is, it may be classified as something else—perhaps, a journalistic writing—than a work in sociology. Sociology is distinct from ‘commonsense’; we know this from André Béteille’s work on sociological reasoning and its subject matter. All through this chapter, we are introduced to middle-range theories prevalent in sociology and social anthropology, but it leaves us confounded as to what is theory and its concomitant methodology.

Caste

Caste has always attracted the attention of researchers, both of Indian origin and those from different, non-caste and caste-free, cultural contexts, who, in spite of the general decline of caste in the day-to-day life of urban Indians, are still interested in the form this institution, founded thousands of years ago, is taking in contemporary times. Thus, a survey of researches in Indian sociology should have a critical look at the ramifications of caste, not only in India but also in South Asia. K.L. Sharma’s contribution on caste in this volume, largely confined to researches done on caste in India, juxtaposes studies that have arrived at different conclusions from their empirical investigations. Whilst some studies speak of the grossly reduced importance of caste, the others, drawing their data from the realities of rural and semi-urban India, show that caste plays a significant (and gripping) role in many domains of the extra-domestic lives of people.

Basing himself on recent writings, Sharma (vol. 1, p. 198) says that ‘caste as a system has ceased to exist, but caste as a phenomenon has emerged as a revitalised practice in political and cultural domains’. This conclusion is expanded, supported with more and more studies, in the rest of the paper. This statement leads to two sets of questions: (i) What is meant by ‘system’ and how caste was a ‘system’ in the past, which it is not now? (ii) What do we mean by the term ‘phenomenon’? Is system not a ‘phenomenon’? If caste is now not a ‘system’, then what it is? In the past also, caste played important political and cultural functions. Caste councils were quintessentially political. Decisions taken by the ‘elders’, who were so not only in terms of age but also in political skills and oratory, were binding on the entire community, and any defiance was ruthlessly (and sometimes barbarously) dealt with. That these councils are still powerful in some areas, notwithstanding a battery of changes that have occurred in the local economic life, can be gauged from the instances where on their orders, a man or a woman may be paraded naked, or the face of an accused may be blackened or he may be beaten publicly. Undoubtedly, these bodies have mercilessly throttled the streaks of individualism, whether expressed in the matters of marriage or occupation. Sharma (vol. 1, p. 242) also notes the rise of these institutions in affluent areas, closer to metropolises. Intensive studies of the recent resurgence of caste councils need to be undertaken, laying particular emphasis on the factors that make them function almost unassailed, arousing fear not only among the members of their communities but also in the outsiders who wish to write on them. Carrying out field research in certain social contexts has now become a difficult, even perilous, proposition.

That caste is chimeric, taking different forms and nuances in different parts of India, is well documented in Sharma’s paper. The comparison of north with south India with respect to caste configurations and clusters, a project originally conceptualised by Louis Dumont, deserves more attention, as what we mean by caste in a village in Himachal Pradesh is different from what it means in a Brahmin village in Telangana.

Urban Sociology

When sociology and social anthropology, the two ‘sibling subjects’, started taking shape, the issue of what each one of them would study needed clarification. The division of labour between them was an easy venture. Social anthropology—the term being coined in 1905—was to focus on ‘simple, primitive, non-Western and pre-literate societies’, whilst sociology would concern itself with ‘urban, industrial, developed and complex societies’, largely the societies of the Western world. Wherever sociology as a discipline was implanted, urban studies went along side. Ranvinder Singh Sandhu, the author of the chapter on urban studies, says that the founder of the first Department of Sociology in 1919 at the University of Bombay was an urban sociologist, Professor Patrick Geddes. From 1914 to 1924, he conducted ‘diagnostic and treatment survey of some fifty Indian urban areas’, including the two volumes he wrote on urban development plans for Indore in 1918 (vol. 1, p. 389). However, in spite of his best efforts, urban studies could not attain much popularity till the 1960s. Actually, in the beginning, some cast doubts on the theoretical and epistemological aspects of urban studies. I think it was an extension of the same argument that surfaced in the context of the study of a village: Dumont’s assertion that the Indian village lacks a sociological reality, therefore, it cannot be the starting point of a study. Then, what have to be studied are the institutions (caste, family and kinship, religion) that cut across the spatial and administrative boundaries of villages. Perhaps, in the same vein, the sociological reality of a city was also doubted.

However, things have considerably changed over time. Sandhu was able to locate 202 publications on cities for the period from 2003 to 2009, but he is quick to point out that almost one-third of these are on ‘urban problems’, and of these, the area that has received the maximum attention is of ‘slums and squatters’. Metropolises have been attended largely in comparison to small towns and satellites; and of the metros, studies on Delhi and Mumbai are the most common. Sandhu’s other observation is a little startling: ‘Sociologists have the least contribution to this field [urban studies]’ (vol. 1, p. 391). In other words, urban studies have been committedly pursued by geographers, town planners, historians and economists. Although attempts have always been made to ‘centre’ urban studies, thanks to the valiant attempts of Professor M.S.A. Rao, still, in sociology, it does not occupy the same place as occupied by village studies and the studies of institutions. A part of the answer is that even when urbanisation is proceeding briskly, India’s degree of urbanisation is pretty low—still more than 70 per cent Indians live in rural and tribal settlements. Moreover, Indian urbanisation is regarded as ‘traditional’ where the primordial ties play an important role in social organisation, whether it is the migration of people from rural to urban areas or their settlement in ‘caste clusters’ and ‘community enclaves’ in cities. Rural poverty, alienation of land for development purposes and displacement of communities seem to play a crucial role in the demographic growth of cities, with the result that the cities experience haphazard growth, where slums, shanty towns and squatters mushroom, overtaking all efforts towards planning. Cities no more appear to be the ‘centres of civilization’. To this, I would also like to add that so far we do not have an ethnographic account of an Indian urban settlement or neighbourhood, covering its entire life, something comparable to R.P. Dore’s study of Shitayama-cho, a neighbourhood in Tokyo, which still remains a classic study in urban studies.

Towards the end, Sandhu (vol. 1, p. 427) observes that sociologists have been ‘reluctant to use advanced statistical methods and its [their] visual presentation’, and perhaps it is one of the reasons for the lackadaisical growth of urban sociology. Maybe, but sociology and social anthropology are principally qualitative disciplines, and today, a cursory glance at different social sciences would convince us that qualitative methodology has found a respectable place in them. Rather than taking up the quantitative work, we should strengthen our traditional, ethnographic research. It is high time that a sociologist settles down in an urban neighbourhood, as did Malinowski among the Trobrianders and Srinivas in Rampura, and studies it from ‘within’, providing a ‘rounded picture’ of the lives of the city dwellers.

School Education

Geetha B. Nambissan’s paper is a review of the sociological researches on school education in India. By comparison to the other articles in this three-volume survey, this one looks at the contributions by sociologists and by those who make use of sociological theories and concepts to the understanding of school education from 2000 to 2010, rather than from 2003 to 2010, as is the case with the other papers. One of the reasons could be that the author wanted to give an idea of the researches in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This article is a welcome addition, for the sociology of education was unrepresented in the preceding survey. Sociology of education is far more integrated to the discipline of sociology than are the other ‘special sociologies’ and has produced several works that are widely consulted in the other cognate disciplines.

An important area of research is the inequality in the school education. Initially, it was the problem of equality that the children from the communities of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes had achieved in education in relation to the ‘general population’. Studies were carried out to document the differential achievements of different communities in primary and secondary education, and the social factors that obstructed their progress. The roles of caste and class have been particularly analysed in these studies. The comparison of English-medium education with the state schools was another interest. The former ‘reinforced the élite status of the upper middle classes/castes in India since the colonial period’. In the last 20 years or so, the middle classes moved to English-medium schools, leaving the government schools for lower classes, castes and minorities. Many reasons could be identified for this. The state-run schools were viewed as providing education of poor quality, as they did not make any efforts to improve upon their standards. The administration was more interested in carrying on with routine tasks rather than focusing upon innovations and amelioration of their quality. The element of prestige was equally important. In the job market, it was thought that the schools where one studied played a significant role in one’s absorption and upward mobility in an institution. The aspect of ‘personality’ also mattered: Those who had studied in private, English-medium schools were supposed to be confident, with good command over languages, and they presented themselves far more elegantly than those who emerged from the government schools.

An important context in the social reproduction of inequality is the role of family. André Béteille had argued that among middle classes, caste has declined in its hold on the lives of people, whereas the family has gained importance. Following him, we may say that middle classes are family centred rather than caste centred; so, in the generation of inequality, family plays an important role. Although his observation has been contested by those who find the role of caste and class in generating inequalities, there is no doubt that family is the seat of primary socialisation and its resources play a significant role in conditioning the career and life chances of its members.

The section ‘Inside Schools’ in Nambissan’s paper reminded me of Henri Bergson’s statement that there are two ways of knowing a phenomenon: one is by going around it, and the other, by going inside it. The survey data generated on schools amount to ‘going around it’. Nambissan writes (vol. 2, p. 79), ‘…there has been very little attention paid to opening up the “black box” of schooling and understanding institutional practices and processes including the curriculum and pedagogy’. An exemplary attempt to understand the school from ‘inside’ was Meenakshi Thapan’s Life at School: An Ethnographic Study, reprinted in 2006. The other work by A. Alam on madarsas of Uttar Pradesh is also a rich ethnographic account of the formation of Muslim identity in these schools. We need more works of the same type, on a variety of schools, to understand how life experiences are organised and channelised in schools.

Sociologists score over educationists in two terms: first, the theoretical perspectives with which they analyse the content, process and outcome of learning, and the institutionalised mechanisms concerned with socialisation and education; and second, they base themselves on first-hand studies, trying to have an ‘insider’s understanding’ of the institution. The specific cultural context in which a school is located is an important variable in understanding its functioning and the constraints that act upon it. The linkages the educational institution have with the others need to be understood and explained.

Sociology of Law

One of the areas in sociology that deserves our wholehearted attention is the sociology of law. Law is a social fact. Like all other social facts, it should be studied sociologically, that is, in its relationship with society, for the ontology of law lies in the state of the society. Whilst lawyers (and the students of law) are mostly interested in the content of laws—law being an instrument of social control—the sociologists are expected to know why the laws are what they are, which social forces have acted cumulatively and concertedly for their evolution, how laws undergo change and how the objectivity of laws is affected by the subjective aspects of the individuals who interpret them and help in arriving at judgements. Sociologists undertake studies of laws in action, their unremitting interaction with society.

In their article, J.S. Gandhi and Sheetal Sharma note that while the sociology of law is ‘highly developed as an independent discipline of study abroad’, it is ‘largely unaddressed in India’ (vol. 2, p. 147). It is hardly taught in Indian universities, and there are not many students pursuing researches in law. Professor Gandhi, one of the authors of this paper, is, however, an exception, for he has been consistent in keeping alive his commitment to the sociology of law all these years and has contributed to the preceding trend report of researches that the ICSSR had sponsored. However, the prospects seem to be changing for this specialisation. In the recently concluded (December 2014) Conference of the Indian Sociological Society, in the Research Committee -23 on the Sociology of Law, 21 papers were scheduled to be presented.

By comparison, the anthropology of law is far more developed in terms of the studies it has carried out on customary laws, particularly of the communities in north-east India. Anthropologists have closely looked at the interaction of the customary laws with the codified (state) laws. Conflict between these two has also been documented in the anthropological literature. Cases of those individuals who were punished twice—once by the state laws and the other by the customary—for the same offense have been richly studied. The hold of customary laws on their respective societies has also been an important area of research.

Gandhi and Sharma begin their paper with a documentation of the monographs on women and laws, covering the areas of patriarchy and violence, property rights of women, the experiences of women of different religious communities, female empowerment and gender constructs in personal laws. Some studies point out that the ‘legal system has failed to protect women against violence’ (vol. 2, p. 148). This section is followed by one where gender issues as pursued in articles are examined. Important findings surface here. One article shows that the modern legislation has yet not succeeded in establishing ‘full gender equality’. Customary practices governing the social life of women thwart their attempts to claim their legal share. For empowering women, their property rights need to be guaranteed. In a study conducted on women in two districts of West Bengal, it was found that they wanted to be ‘considered as individuals’, so that they could have a direct ownership of property. For their independence, changes are required in the legislative, executive and administrative spheres.

Engaging studies have been done on sexual rights. Gandhi and Sharma report a study concerned with the reasons ‘why many married women in India undergo induced abortions rather than using reversible contraception’. It was found that many men seemed to believe that ‘sex within marriage was their right and that women had no say in the matter’. There is, thus, an urgent need to ‘promote women’s sexual rights’ and start a ‘campaign against sexual violence in marriage’ (vol. 2, p. 157). The studies point out that although various legal enactments exist for bringing about a change in the status of women, in reality, not much seems to have changed. The article looks at the consequences of patriarchy, one of which is ‘son preference’. Laws are violated for one’s personal gains. Against this backdrop, one may locate the practice of female foeticide and the belief still held high by women that by giving birth to male progeny they would have high status.

The article refers to Indra Deva’s edited volume (2005) on the sociology of law, but its reference is not given. Similarly, the complete bibliographic details of Vincenzo Ferrari’s volume and the page numbers of B.M. Sethi’s article are missing.

Illness, Health and Medicine

Unlike the sociology of law, medical sociology is a far more popular field. Most sought after than this is medical anthropology, papers on which are taught in medical and nursing colleges, besides there, of course, being full-fledged ‘Departments of Medical Anthropology’ in some institutions (for example, the Delhi-based Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences). Like in urban sociology and urban anthropology, here also certain overlaps are unmistakably noted between medical sociology and medical anthropology, but one of the major differences is that the latter is concerned with the beliefs and practices of simple societies, as they deal with the matters of sickness, illness, health and well-being. The ‘medical systems’ (or better to call them ‘ethnomedical systems’) are in sharp contrast to the bio-medical systems of the Western world in terms of the theories of etiology of illnesses, their classification, treatment and prevention. The ethnomedical systems, like the other components of society, are not insulated. They perpetually interact with the wider world. The bio-medical practices impact upon them, changing certain aspects, while the others remain resilient. The dialectics of this relationship constitutes one of the major commitments of medical anthropologists.

Madhu Nagla’s paper on the sociology of health and medicine endeavours to take care of the research works both in medical sociology and anthropology, thus giving a rounded picture. The idea, put forth by Rudolf Virchow, that ‘medicine is a social science,’ runs through the entire paper: People devise their knowledge to distinguish the state of ‘health’ from that of ‘illness’ and also the social and cultural mechanisms that deal with the disturbances in the body. The first to be taken up for further investigation is the ‘medical system’, which is divided into ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. They are further divided into whether they are ‘evidence based’ or not, whether they have the idea of the ‘supernatural medicine’ and whether all the medicines prescribed are ‘natural’. The term ‘alternative systems of medical care’ is used for those practices that try to challenge the hegemony of the allopathic system; here may be placed homeopathy, Ayurvedic and Unani treatments and all the other types of practices that have limited application, for instance, ‘magnetic therapy’. The term ‘medical pluralism’—it may be noted that it is not a system of medicine—is used for a situation where different medical practices, derived from different schools of thought, are combined for treating an ‘illness episode’. The combination of the different systems, or what G.M. Foster and Barbara Anderson call ‘shopping around’, may be at the same time or longitudinally extended. The combination of different medicines may be on the advice of the ‘therapy-management group’, a set of kin and friends that takes decisions about the treatment of the sick. The best way to study medical pluralism is by resorting to what Max Gluckman called the ‘extended case study method’, to find out the time and context when the sick moves from one kind of treatment to the other and how contradictions between different medical practices are resolved.

Towards the close of her paper, Nagla writes that the problems of illness—new illnesses coming up—are compounding as a consequence of the ‘current development paradigm’, which is recklessly destroying the resources (especially medical herbs) and polluting the environment to an unimaginable extent. An urgent need at this point of time, as has been argued by several others also, is to reverse the contemporary approach to development, thus helping to evolve a ‘people-centric and environment-friendly development process’ (vol. 2, p. 208). This would necessitate placing medical sociology also within the ambit of the sociology of change and development, and locating the nexuses between different institutions.

The need to carry out intensive studies of medical practices in different parts of the world is acutely felt. The studies should not only be of the contents of the medical systems, but also of the world views (or cultural models) they create, and in turn, how they are modified and transformed. If on one hand, medicine is rooted in a cosmological system, on the other hand, it also creates one.

Dalit Studies

Dalit studies, Dalit feminism, Dalit literature and Dalit sociology are commonly accepted and pursued areas of enquiry in today’s social science. Not only that, several associations have come into existence to safeguard the interests of the communities generally regarded as Dalit or are placed under this category. However, Vivek Kumar, in his paper, raises an important question about the ‘sociological definition of Dalits’ (vol. 3, p. 19). He says that in addition to this term, they are also known by several others in different parts of the country, some of which have their own historical antiquity. Their ‘constitutional and legal identity’ is of the Scheduled Castes: They are today divided into 1038 castes, constituting 16 per cent of India’s total population.

One way to approach the problem of definition is to begin with a ‘book view’ of Indian society. Here, the starting point is the Hindu Law Book that Manu had composed. Manusmriti, as it is called, speaks of the division of the Hindu society into four orders (varna), the last being of those who were required to serve the orders placed above them. Those who fell outside the ‘four-order organisation’ (chaturvarna vyavastha) were called the ‘fifth order’ (panch varna, panchama): since they were outside the system, the epithet ‘outcaste’ was used for them in the literature, and so came the distinction between the ‘caste Hindu’ and the ‘outcaste’. The latter was a confusingly heterogeneous category, including not only the tribal and ‘nocturnal people’ (those who worked at night), but also those who belonged to the other religious and sectarian groups. In this were also placed all those individuals (they were not communities initially, but were later transformed in one or the other) who violated the norms of the prescribed ways of living and were subsequently excommunicated. Some returned to the fold of their caste after tendering an apology and paying fine, while the others remained in that state till they coalesced into a community of their own. In a traditional society, an individual’s existence outside the community was unknown and a state of abnormality.

The submission here is that this is one way of looking at a society that has a corpus of literate tradition. The other way is to look at what happens in reality, the ‘field view’ of society, which can be studied without any resort to the ‘book view’. In fact, sociologists are supposed to do exactly that—study the ‘actual, functioning society’. It is for historians to comprehend a view of the past society from ‘written texts available’. Therefore, the ‘book view’ and the ‘field view’ constitute two vantage points (or paradigms) to analyse and interpret the social reality. Not much will be gained by trying to reconcile one with the other, by adopting the ‘book view’ to understand the ‘field view’ or locating the ‘field reality’ in the structure of the society that follows from a reading of the texts. In developing a definition of the Dalit, Kumar uses the perspective of ‘cumulative exclusion’ (vol. 3, pp. 21–23), arguing that the ‘structural location’ of these people has led them to their sufferings at the hands of their exploiters and oppressors, as a result of which their exclusion from the society has multiplied tremendously.

In other words, Dalit, besides being an ‘umbrella term’, under which ‘cumulatively excluded communities’ are placed, is also a paradigm to look at the processes of vulnerability, oppression, exploitation and exclusion in the caste system. As is central to sociology, one would know the arteries of these processes by lengthily living with people in their natural habitats to know it from ‘within’. Kumar (vol. 3, p. 25) says that the reason why focus on Dalits escaped the attention of the sociologists was that ‘they did not live in the Dalit localities, rather they stayed in the upper caste localities, and, hence, they could see the Indian village from just that perspective’.

That the Dalits did not remain a mute witness to all this is closely addressed in Kumar’s paper. Dalit movements in different parts of India have been covered here, so are the attempts to denounce Hinduism and caste system in an attempt to embrace Buddhism, after Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism in 1956. Today, Kumar tells us, ‘more and more literate, employed, and professional people are converting to Buddhism’ (vol. 3, p. 27). The other areas covered in this paper are the life experiences of Dalit women, the impact of globalisation on Dalits, Dalits in different parts of the country and the topics that can be taken up for further research.

Tribal Studies

A survey of research works on tribal societies in India amply shows that tribal studies are getting more and more ‘decentred’. At one time, tribes were mainly studied by social anthropologists, whereas the other social science disciplines largely confined them to urban-industrial (and modern) societies. History was more or less a study of kingdoms and empires, rather than the ‘subject groups’ lying at the lower rungs, and that was the reason why it was called ‘history from above’. Now, almost every social science has started bringing under its purview the insights from tribal societies, for it is believed that such researches would illuminate its subject matter, bringing in the alternative perspectives. Humanities have also started paying attention to the tribal reality. Many experts from language and the literature now work on tribal folklore and dialects. ‘Tribal perspective’, as it may be called, is thus distributed all over the canopy of social sciences and humanities, rather than remaining limited to social anthropology. Surely, these developments have enriched tribal studies, but have also created a situation where contesting perspectives on the same phenomenon often confound our understanding. One of the areas of research could be a comparative study of the differential understandings of tribal communities.

Virginius Xaxa, in his paper, takes up the issue of defining ‘tribe’. A myriad of perspectives is available on this; but what is common to all of them is that tribal society, like any other, is ever changing. The magnitude of change may, however, vary from one to the other. At the same time, it also resists many changes, thus exercising its resilience. An ethnographic study, therefore, will contain an account of both the processes of continuity and change. For understanding this, we need to consider the tribal conception of history and the past—what it was earlier and how its members think it has changed over time. Against this backdrop, it becomes difficult to offer a universally applicable definition of tribe. The anthropological perspective on tribal societies is different from how communities are classified in the list of the Scheduled Tribes.

Although tribes widely differ in terms of their control over resources, there is no doubt that most of them are gradually depressing into the ranks of poverty. The number of agricultural workers hailing from tribal areas has been steadily increasing. Almost 40 per cent people displaced because of development programmes, and a large number of project-affected people, the number of whom is not known, happen to be tribal. Most of the domestic workers in cities and those working in the tertiary sectors of economy, are from tribal societies. Few years ago, they were the proud owners of land, leading a life of dignity and stability. Their crises began with the alienation of their land.

Xaxa refers to studies that abundantly document that the state did little effort preventing land alienation or ensuring food security. Considerable transfer of land occurred because of the nefarious designs of the contractors. Development projects were the other cause of land alienation. It has been pointed out time and again that state is the biggest alienator of land. Studies have shown that tribals have been evicted from their land and lifeline resources, despite legislation and constitutional provisions. In many parts of India, one of the main causes of ethnic violence and conflict is land alienation.

Once the tribals have lost their land, they have no option but to migrate to the places where they get some employment, vouchsafing their bare minimal survival. Those moving to peasant villages become agricultural workers, and those thronging to cities take up a variety of unskilled and semi-skilled occupations, settling down on the outskirts of the cities. In peasant villages, they are placed in one or the other category of caste; in the past, cases of upward ritual mobility among tribes were also recorded, but now, they have declined. In cities, the tribes lead an abominable and dehumanised existence. The particular sufferers of this process are women and children. It may be noted here that while the work on tribal women has increased in number, tribal children need our urgent attention. D.K. Behera, whose work has been cited in this article, is one such anthropologist paying attention to the study of children, particularly from tribal communities.

Towards the end of his paper, Xaxa notices that the maximum literature on tribal societies has come from the eastern part of India, followed by the north-eastern, western and southern regions. Ethnographic accounts were produced on tribal health culture, practices and beliefs. The other issue is of tribal development, displacement, rehabilitation and resettlement in particular. Xaxa has especial praise for the writing of historians on tribes, who have tried to weave in their study the archival, oral and fieldwork evidences.

Sociology of Gender

In a three-volume set, covering more than 1200 pages, one would expect a separate chapter on family and kinship; but one’s disappointment subsides on finding that the chapter on the sociology of gender, contributed to this survey by Raj Mohini Sethi, takes care of the research writings on family, kinship and marriage. Whilst we are happy that at least this important area of study, which is not covered by any other discipline except sociology and social anthropology, has been taken care of, we are equally worried about the ‘typification’ of the study of family, kinship and marriage as ‘gender study’. Sethi says (vol. 3, p. 110), ‘mainstream sociology has been grouping the subject of gender studies with that of family studies’. So, the ‘non-mainstream sociology’ reverses it: It places family studies within gender studies. Whatever might be the practice of ‘mainstream sociology’, if there is anything like this, we should keep in mind that the areas that gender studies cover are different from those that the studies of family, kinship and marriage pursue. Overlaps are prominent between economic sociology and sociology of development, but one cannot be pushed in the other; any attempt to do so will make both the disciplines uncomfortable. Moreover, gender figures prominently in the study of all institutions—economic, education, religion, polity, science and communication—but then no one would place the study of these institutions under gender studies.

Gender is a paradigm, beginning with the idea that knowledge is gender situated. It is a theoretical standpoint, focusing on the cultural construction of sex in different human societies; and now the gender studies are bound to be complicated further with the inclusion of the ‘third gender’. To take an analogy, sex is central to biological studies, but then it does not make them ‘sexual studies’. The latter is of course a different and legitimate field of study.

Like in many other areas that sociologists study, gender has also been studied from the perspectives of different disciplines. One also should not forget that independent departments and centres of women’s study and gender study are coming up in many universities and colleges across the world. Some of them are also offering master’s programme, besides research commitments that they have. These institutions are generating their own methodological vantage points, for which they are not dependent on the established disciplines. In her review, Sethi (vol. 3, p. 107) adopts an interdisciplinary framework of gender studies, covering research on gender in disciplines other than sociology. However, we should not forget that the emphasis in sociology is different from that in other disciplines. In a review, one may compare the sociological writings with those that come from the other disciplines.

Gender studies use Amartya Sen’s crucial observation about ‘missing women’. Population censuses, one after the other, note an acute imbalance in sex ratio, the consequence of which is that in some parts of north India, men of marriageable age are unable to find spouses for them from their own communities and have no option but to ‘buy’ brides from the other states. One of the reasons of crime against women is the skewed sex ratio. In recent years, a lot of work has been done on the reasons for ‘son preference’ and the use of the new technology of sex selection. Why female children are regarded as ‘undesirable’ has also been studied.

In the section dealing with ‘Gender, Culture and Society’, Sethi (vol. 3, pp. 123–27) says, ‘Cultural studies have become quite popular in contemporary feminist research.’ The ‘cultural artefacts’ (such as films, novels, dramas, mass media and everyday conversations) are closely analysed to see how gender is constructed and represented in them. The writings of Pierre Bourdieu have exercised tremendous impact on cultural studies. Many Indian sociologists have used these ideas. The analysis of mass media shows an ‘extreme marginalisation and deliberate trivialisation’ of women (vol. 3, p. 131). An important conclusion is of the studies that the Centre for Advocacy and Research did on the television serials or soaps that depict women’s issues. It found that they neither showed a profound understanding of women’s issues nor did they take up the matters of women’s oppression. The representation of gender roles was stereotypical—that women were always scheming, trying to harm other women and that mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were bitter enemies. The family presented as ‘ideal’ was the patriarchal joint family. In other words, the media, representing the typical ‘male’ values, reinforced the patriarchal social structure. The analysis of Hindi films also supported this conclusion.

In her concluding note, Sethi (vol. 3, p. 147) observes that although feminist theory and methodology have contributed a great deal to the production of knowledge, gender is not considered a ‘central issue by major social theorists’. The scenario would change when we regard gender as an important aspect in understanding the construction and reproduction of the society.

Annotated Bibliography

Finally, articles in these volumes differ greatly with respect to their respective analytical acumenships. Most of them are simple annotated bibliographies, classified under a head, leaving much to be hoped for in both analysis and interpretation. Some of them do make efforts to initiate theoretical debates, but the usual practice is paragraph-wise summaries of the articles and books published on the topic. All through, while reading these volumes, I was continuously reminded of the articles published in the Annual Review of Sociology and the Annual Review of Anthropology. How different they are! The contributors to this survey should have looked at these closely and profitably before commencing their works.

The references at the end of the articles leave much to be desired. In some cases, the references cited in the text are missing, or the bibliographic details are incomplete or the references are not alphabetically arranged. The name of the author of the chapter on Urban Studies, as given here, is different from what is given in the Contents and the outer cover. Before bringing out a paperback edition of this survey, a thorough check of references and the other details is imperative.