Abstract
Ananta Kumar Giri is a prolific writer. He writes on a wide range of issues and his publications appear in a diverse set of journals. But then journals have a limted shelf life, and are not accesible to one and all. This urge to reach a wider readership has propelled Giri to put together thirty of his articles in a bound volume—all previously published save the last one. With a foreword by Piet Strydom, the volume reiterates Giri’s ‘trasdisciplinary and transparadigmatic cultivation of the quest of sociology drawing upon literature phiolosophy psychology anthropology and spirituality as well as reflective mobilization of self and various sociocultural and socio-spiritual movements’ (p. xvi). Giri’s endeavour is to construct ‘a transformative sociology in a crative trigonometry of philosophy, fieldwork and grounded work’. Giri believes that his substantive work on Chipko, Habitat for Humanity, Swadhyaya and integral education are not just the outcomes of conventional fieldwork. Instead, he sees himself doing footwork in the sense of ‘wandering around different themes of life and society such as values, ethics, and business, ethics and aesthetics of development and practical discourse and practical spirituality’ (p. xvii).
As an erudite scholar, Giri is in a consistent dialoge with some of the great minds of our times. What could in other contexts be dismissed as simple namedropping acquires dialogic encounter between the West and the East in his scholarly renditions. Readers will surely be impressed to see such an impressive list of interlocutors populating the pages of the volume under review: Alain Touraine, Andrew Abbott, Anthony Giddens, Andre Beteille, John Clammer, Pierre Bourdieu, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Jurgen Habermas, Niklas Luhman, Alberto Melucci, Sheldon Pollock, J.N. Mohanty, Eric Fromm, Andre Gorz, Immanuel Wallerstein, Roy Bhaskar, Ulrich Beck, J.P.S. Uberoi, David Harvey, Jacques Derrida, Sri Aurobindo, Karl Mannnheim, Ramchandra Gandhi, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Rorty, David Harvey, Alasdair MacIntyre, Giorgio Agamben, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Evidently, Giri’s journey through Sociology and Beyond freely and, at times incomprehensively, draws upon the historically accumulated wisdom of the East and West. It does not matter if his attempt to open up hitherto unknown windows and horizons makes his prose turgid and style stilted.
On the positive side, Giri makes some important points. For example, in his assessment of social science research in India, he points out an entrenched parochial fixation in Indian sociology. He underlines the fact that very few scholars in the country work on culture and society outside India. He bemoans the presence of a reverese orientalism: ‘we are too preoccupied with ourselves and have little opening and engagement with the world’. Given this insularity, it is praiseworthy that Giri sets for himself the onerous task of making a creative dialogue ‘between insights of thinkers such as Derrida, Habermas and Levinas with issues and themes in culture, society and history in the subcontinent’ (p. 139). One can have no dispute with him in viewing social theory as ‘an engagement in trans-cultural and trans-civilization dialogue on self, culture and society while modernist social scientists in India have bracketed the presuppositions of theorists of Western modernity whose presuppositions many of then uncritically adore’ (p. 140). He discerns a disdain for theoretical work in social science in India that underlines the ‘colonial and neo-colonial mentality that in the West they should produce theory and here in India we should do only fieldwork and produce data’ (p. 141).
Quite justifiably, he finds it alarming that some of the thoughtful interpreters of the human condition from within the Indian tradition such as Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, Tagore do not find a place in the sociological curriculum which is flooded with material coming from the West. In courses on sociology of religion, one comes across Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life but not Aurobindo’s Life Divine. Likewise, he is deeply concerned about the uncritical metropolitanism that constitues the community of discourse in sociology in India. Not surprisingly, the works of Indian thinkers like G.C. Pande and Daya Krishna who have been engaged with the task of deepening and broadening our sociological imagination by exploring the concept of the ‘social’ in Indian traditions go largely unnoticed. Appreciably, in one of his essays, Giri focuses on understanding ‘social’ in Indian traditions by undertaking a dialogue with the seminal work of G.C. Pande titled ‘Bharatiya Samaj: Aitihasik and Tattvik Vivechana’. This is, indeed, quite rare that a sociologist in India has devoted his attention to a work published in Hindi.
However, Giri has a propensity to use high-sounding terms. For instance, the title of his first chapter is ‘sociology and beyond: the calling of an ontological epistemology of participation’ and the subtitle is ‘the calling of an ontological sociality’. In any case, some of his essays touch upon the challenge of understanding Indian society. Some of his insights pertaining to the profession of sociology in India are equally pertinent. He hits the bull’s eye when he says that in Indian sociology very rarely there is dialogue among its practitioners: ‘we, practitioners, very rarely feel that we all belong to an intertwined field of strivings in which we have a moral responsibility, ethical and professional obligation to read each other’s work’ (p. 176). There is tryly a studied and deliberate ignorance of each other’s work in Indian sociology. There are more instances of angry explosions rather than critical dialogue among the community of scholars.
Overall, the volume stradles a wide canvas of themes and issues. There are essays on quality of life, methods of science, and social development as a global challenge. There is nuanced engagement with the idea of the empirical. For Giri, empirical is not only what we observe. Instead, it refers to multiple layers of reality à la Roy Bhaskar. Empiricism is to be understood as both an epistemology and an ontology. Other essays dwell on the aesthetics of production and consumption, psycholgy and the challenge of the postmodern condition, anthropological imagination, and epistemological crisis in anthropology, sociology, theology and sprituality. There is a celebration of the plurality of standpoints in approching the social. Yet, the overall impression of the volume persists as a pot pourri of disparate and eclectic themes and issues without a well-developed and coherent thematic framework. But then, publication, for some, is an end in itself!