Abstract
Manish Thakur’s book, The Quest for Indian Sociology: Radhakamal Mukerjee and Our Times, is a distinct intellectual venture in the study of ‘Indian Sociology’ as it attempts to examine some of the perennial concerns of the disciplinary history by taking the work and life of a pioneer in Indian Sociology. The book undertakes a rather ambitious task of unpacking the contested history of disciplinary development of Indian Sociology by introspecting Radhakamal Mukerjee’s practice of the discipline. As a prelude to this task, the book first attempts to foreground the socio-political context and the larger framework within which Mukerjee began to articulate the central premises of his distinctive vision of the sociology of India. As the author argues, much of the questions that configured Mukerjee’s work in his formative stage can be seen as a critical engagement with colonial modernity. The author depicts how the anti-colonial political platform formed in Bengal and the intellectual clamor of the ‘inner, spiritual domain of the East’ moulded the epistemological and philosophical position of Mukerjee.
In his attempt to bring to the fore the forgotten history of a distinct scholarship, Manish presents the various contours of Mukerjee’s sociology which is largely oppositional to the Western notion of knowledge, yet irreducible to mere ‘indigenity’. He explains how Mukerjee developed a theory of society by ‘sociologising economics’ and presenting a unique Indian or indigenous sociology of our economy. ‘Rural communalism’ is the concept invented by Mukerjee to capture the essence of India’s basic economic unit. For him, it is the moral economy guided by the cultural values that characterises the economic life of the East in opposition to the individualistic West. Likewise, the author neatly delineates the specific ontological and epistemological position within which Mukerjee’s scheme of social science arises in opposition to the Western-centric knowledge production. The position of humanism of Indian civilisation and its transcendal values emanating from a non-dualistic understanding of human life enabled Mukerjee to claim superiority of the East over the knowledge production in the West, characterised by naturalism, empiricism, individualism and objectivism. At a societal level, it is the continuity of Indian civilisation over millenniums and its universal character and innate ability to reflect on the problems of human beings that makes it superior to the West. In other words, Mukerjee’s formulation of society was envisaged by a universalist value system, rather than mere man- and society-centred as found in Western science. The author sees how Mukerjee’s own naming of his disciplinary engagements as ‘social axiology’, ‘normative sociology’ and ‘philosophical sociology’ is an attempt to encompass an adequate notion of sociology different from a narrow understanding of the discipline developed in the West.
The author further shows the importance of Mukerjee’s work in engaging with contemporary debate on the location of academic practice which usually falls back to the colonial encounter between the Western-centric theories and indigenous knowledge production. Manish argues that while much of the Indian assertion around the location of knowledge production hinges on the critique of Western theories for its inability to handle the Indian experience, a counter theory capable of not only addressing the Indian social reality, but also handy to capture Western reality is embedded in Mukerjee’s formulation. In other words, the author asserts that Mukerjee’s work is not merely a counter product to Western or colonial knowledge production on our society, rather it has to be seen as an important contribution to the reverse process as well, namely Occidentalism. The implicit argument here, thereby, complicates the debate that delves upon the binary of East and West. To push it further, one can understand that the alternative formulations of Mukerjee, unlike many others, was moulded by both his deep insight into Indian history and civilisation, and its unique philosophical and moral grounding, and the introspection of Western concepts and theories rooted in its own history.
In the later part of the book, the author succeeds in telling how and why Mukerjee’s vision of sociology remains unique and significant across time. Here, the author asserts that Mukerjee is the pioneering champion of an indigenous sociology, as his works questioned the hegemonic Western-centric approaches much before the post-colonial thinkers. However, while the quest for an indigenous approach of sociology remains at the heart of Mukerjee’s endeavour, the unique epistemological position that underlies his approach offers enormous possibilities for debate, even today. When he criticised Western empiricism, he offered a view grounded in metaphysics, intuitions, ethics and mysticism.
However, while doing a deeper engagement with the work of Mukerjee, the prism of analysis is slightly thin in terms of pointing the limits and problems in Mukerjee’s work. Of course, the author has mentioned that while envisaging an indigenous theory of society embarked on an emerging nation free from the colonial constructions, the overriding influence of ‘Hindu Nationalism’ that was pervading the intellectual clamour in Bengal during those days had influenced Mukerjee’s work too. Apart from this, his excessive writing that shifts from one domain to the other and his ‘commonsensical’ and uncritical understanding on Muslim and lower castes’ issues are also pointed as other reasons in undermining his contribution. Still, while reading the book, one may wonder how and why a scholar like Mukerjee remained in the shadow of the disciplinary history in India. It would have been apt if the author had made a conscientious effort to make a link between the scepticism on Mukerjee’s work in the discipline and some of the criticism levelled against him at theoretical, methodological and empirical levels. It is difficult to agree that the narrow vision of ‘Indianness’ legitimising some of the social asymmetries prevalent in the cultural realm alone kept Mukerjee aside from the mainstream domain of the sociology of India’. In fact, scholars such as G. S. Ghurye and M. N. Srinivas were also levelled with similar criticism, but their contribution to the discipline is uncontestable as they were successful in formulating concepts and analysing empirical realities with more conviction than ambivalence. Mukerjee’s philosophical reflections hinge upon the complex mix of idealism and metaphysics, and his critique of Western episteme grounded in indigenous conceptions and the strong presence of problematic traditionalism present a great deal of ambivalence to engage with. This ambivalence and complexity was not accommodated within a positivist vision of disciplinary development of the sociology of India.
The book is certainly an important contribution to the pertinent and unresolved debate on category formations and indigeneity in ‘Indian Sociology’ because it unearths a rare, forgotten tradition of social thought that not only rejects an alien approach, but also offers a universal theory by gaining insights from the indegienity. The book is highly suggestive, and the author has succeeded in the task he had set himself when he began the book. It is a lucidly written, thematically organised book, which delves deeper to enrich the reader to know about the laying of the foundation of the argumentative history of Indian Sociology.