- How sociology began in India, and the three questions the Indian context raised for it
- The ‘accidental’ pioneers: L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy
- G.S. Ghurye: the tribal debate, his critique of Risley’s racial theory of caste, and his six features of caste
- D.P. Mukerji: Indian tradition as a ‘living tradition’, and how change happens in India
- A.R. Desai: the three features of the welfare state, his five tests, and why he called it a myth
- M.N. Srinivas: the village debate with Louis Dumont, and why village studies mattered
| Board (2026-27) | Marks for this chapter | Paper |
|---|---|---|
| CBSE (039) | 12 marks (Unit 10, “Indian Sociologists”) | Theory 80 + project 20 |
| UP Board | 10 marks | One 100-mark theory paper, no project |
| Rajasthan Board (RBSE) | 10 marks | One 100-mark theory paper |
| MP Board | 8 marks | Theory 80 + project 20 |
CBSE’s unit lists four topics: G.S. Ghurye on caste and race, D.P. Mukerji on tradition and change, A.R. Desai on the state and M.N. Srinivas on the village (sections 6, 9, 11 and 13 here). The opening, the two pioneers and the tribal debate are not in CBSE’s topic list, but they are in your book and the book’s own exercises (Q1 and Q2) ask about them. UP, Rajasthan and MP Boards examine the whole chapter.
1 Introduction: Sociology Comes to India
Sociology is a relatively young discipline even in Europe, established only about a century ago. In India, interest in sociological ways of thinking is a little more than a century old.
In the early days it was not clear at all what an Indian sociology would look like, or whether India really needed something like sociology. In the first quarter of the 20th century, those interested in the subject had to decide for themselves what role it could play in India.
1.1 Three questions raised by the Indian context
Modernity, but as a colony
Western sociology emerged to make sense of modernity. India too was changing because of modernity, but with an important difference: it was a colony. Its first experience of modernity was closely mixed up with colonial subjugation (being ruled by a foreign power).
Anthropology in an ancient civilisation
Social anthropology in the west arose out of European curiosity about primitive cultures. What role could it have in India, an ancient and advanced civilisation that also had ‘primitive’ societies within it?
Role in independent India
What useful role could sociology have in a sovereign, independent India, a nation about to begin its adventure with planned development and democracy?
The pioneers had to find their own answers and also formulate new questions. The questions took shape only through the experience of ‘doing’ sociology in India; they were not available ‘readymade’. In the beginning, Indians became sociologists and anthropologists mostly by accident.
2 The Pioneers: Two ‘Accidental Anthropologists’
This section is context (it is not in CBSE’s topic list), but exercise Q1 asks exactly this, and state boards examine it.
L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937)
- Began as a clerk, then a school teacher, then a college teacher in Cochin state (present day Kerala)
- 1902: the Dewan of Cochin asked him to assist with an ethnographic survey (a survey describing the communities and their ways of life) of the state; the British government wanted similar surveys in all the princely states and the presidency areas directly under its control
- Worked purely voluntarily: college teacher at the Maharajah’s College, Ernakulam during the week, unpaid Superintendent of Ethnography at weekends
- His work was much appreciated by British anthropologists and administrators; later invited for a similar survey in Mysore state
- Probably the first self-taught anthropologist to receive national and international recognition
- Lectured at the University of Madras; Reader at the University of Calcutta, where he helped set up the first post-graduate anthropology department in India; stayed there 1917 to 1932
- No formal qualification in anthropology, yet elected President of the Ethnology section of the Indian Science Congress; honorary doctorate from a German university during his lecture tour of European universities; titles Rao Bahadur and Dewan Bahadur from Cochin state
Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942)
- A lawyer; graduate and postgraduate degrees in English, then a law degree from Calcutta’s Ripon College
- 1898: went to Ranchi as an English teacher at a Christian missionary school; stayed in Ranchi for the next forty-four years
- Interest began when he practised law at the Ranchi courts and became the official interpreter in the court: he had to interpret tribal customs and laws to the court
- Travelled among tribal communities and did intensive fieldwork, all on an ‘amateur’ basis
- More than one hundred articles in Indian and British journals; famous monographs (detailed books on one subject) on the Oraon, the Mundas and the Kharias
- The authority on the tribes of Chhotanagpur (present day Jharkhand)
- Founded the journal Man in India in 1922, the earliest journal of its kind in India, still published
Both were true pioneers: in the early 1900s they practised a discipline that did not yet exist in India and had no institutions to promote it.
Both were born, lived and died in an India ruled by the British.
3 The Four Founding Sociologists
The four sociologists of this chapter were born one generation later than Iyer and Roy. They came of age in the colonial era, but their careers continued into independence, and they helped shape the first formal institutions of Indian sociology.
- G.S. Ghurye and D.P. Mukerji were born in the 1890s.
- A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas were about fifteen years younger, born in the second decade of the 20th century.
- All were deeply influenced by western sociology, yet offered initial answers to the question the pioneers could only begin to ask: what shape should a specifically Indian sociology take?
G.S. Ghurye
Key work: Caste and Race in India (1932)
Key idea: critique of the racial theory of caste; six features of caste; tribes as ‘backward Hindus’
D.P. Mukerji
Key work: Introduction to Indian Music; 1955 Presidential Address
Key idea: ‘living tradition’; anubhava as the agent of change
A.R. Desai
Key work: The Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948); “The myth of the welfare state”
Key idea: Marxist critique of the welfare state
M.N. Srinivas
Key work: Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India
Key idea: the village as a relevant social entity; village studies
4 G.S. Ghurye: Founder of Institutionalised Sociology
G.S. Ghurye can be considered the founder of institutionalised sociology in India (sociology as an organised subject with departments, degrees, a society and a journal).
- Headed India’s very first post-graduate teaching department of Sociology at Bombay University for thirty-five years.
- Guided many research scholars, many of whom rose to prominent positions in the discipline.
- Founded the Indian Sociological Society and its journal Sociological Bulletin.
- His writings were prolific and wide-ranging; at a time of very limited support for research, he nurtured sociology as an increasingly Indian discipline.
1. The active combining of teaching and research within the same institution.
2. The merger of social anthropology and sociology into a composite discipline.
Both were later enthusiastically endorsed by his successors.
Themes he wrote on: best known, perhaps, for caste and race; also tribes; kinship, family and marriage; culture, civilisation and the historic role of cities; religion; and the sociology of conflict and integration.
Influences on Ghurye (the most prominent are perhaps): diffusionism (the idea that cultural traits spread from one society to another), Orientalist scholarship on Hindu religion and thought, nationalism, and the cultural aspects of Hindu identity.
4.1 Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1893-1983): life at a glance
5 Ghurye and the Tribal Debate
One of Ghurye’s major themes was ‘tribal’ or ‘aboriginal’ cultures. His writings on this, and specially his debate with Verrier Elwin, first made him known outside sociology. In the 1930s and 1940s there was much debate on the place of tribal societies within India and how the state should respond to them.
The ‘protectionists’ (many British administrator-anthropologists)
- Tribes were primitive peoples with a distinctive culture far from mainstream Hinduism
- The innocent and simple tribals would suffer exploitation and cultural degradation through contact with Hindu culture and society
- So the state had a duty to protect the tribes and help them sustain their way of life against the pressure to assimilate
- Assimilation would mean severe exploitation and cultural extinction
The nationalists (Ghurye their best-known exponent)
- Believed passionately in the unity of India and the need for modernising Indian society and culture
- Preserving tribal culture was misguided; it kept tribals backward as ‘museums’ of primitive culture
- Like features of Hinduism needing reform, tribes too needed to develop
- Ghurye called the tribes ‘backward Hindus’, not distinct cultural groups: they had long interacted with Hinduism and were simply further behind in the same process of assimilation
- The ill-effects were not specific to tribes but common to all backward and downtrodden sections: inevitable difficulties on the road to development
That Indian tribals were hardly ever isolated primitive communities of the kind described in classical anthropology texts was not really disputed. The disagreement was only about how to evaluate the impact of mainstream culture on them.
Assimilation (glossary): a process by which one culture (usually the larger or more dominant one) gradually absorbs another; the assimilated culture merges into the assimilating culture, so that it is no longer alive or visible at the end of the process.
Administrator-anthropologists (glossary): British administrative officials of the British Indian government in the 19th and early 20th centuries who took great interest in anthropological research, specially surveys and censuses; some became well known anthropologists after retirement. Prominent names: Edgar Thurston, William Crooke, Herbert Risley and J.H. Hutton.
Many tribal movements assert their distinctive cultural and political identity; the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were formed in response to such movements. There is also controversy over the disproportionate burden tribal communities bear for development projects like big dams, mines and factories.
6 Ghurye on Caste and Race
Ghurye’s reputation was built on his Cambridge doctoral dissertation, published as Caste and Race in India (1932). It attracted attention because it addressed the major concerns of Indian anthropology at the time, above all the relationship between race and caste. In it Ghurye gave a detailed critique of the then dominant theories.
6.1 Herbert Risley’s racial theory of caste
Herbert Risley, a British colonial official deeply interested in anthropology, was the main proponent of the dominant view.
Anthropometry (glossary): the branch of anthropology that studied human racial types by measuring the human body, particularly the volume of the cranium (skull), the circumference of the head, and the length of the nose.
6.2 Ghurye’s critique: “only partially correct”
Ghurye did not disagree with Risley’s basic argument, but believed it to be only partially correct.
- Averages mislead: using averages alone ignores the variation in the distribution of a measurement within a community.
- True only in the north: upper castes Aryan and lower castes non-Aryan was broadly true only for northern India.
- Mixing elsewhere: in other parts of India, inter-group differences in anthropometric measurements were not very large or systematic. So in most of India except the Indo-Gangetic plain, racial groups had been mixing for a very long time.
- ‘Racial purity’ had been preserved by the prohibition on inter-marriage only in ‘Hindustan proper’ (north India).
- In the rest of the country, endogamy may have been introduced into groups that were already racially varied.
Today the racial theory of caste is no longer believed, but in the first half of the 20th century it was still considered true. Historians hold conflicting opinions about the Aryans and their arrival in the subcontinent. Ghurye’s writings attracted attention because these were the concerns of the discipline at the time.
6.3 Ghurye’s definition of caste: six features
Ghurye is also known for a comprehensive definition of caste that emphasises six features (exercise Q4 calls it “the social anthropological definition of caste”).
Segmental division
Caste is divided into many closed, mutually exclusive segments (compartments); each caste is one. It is closed because caste is decided by birth: there is no other way to acquire it. A person’s caste can neither be avoided nor changed.
Hierarchical division
Every caste is strictly unequal to every other: either higher or lower. In theory (though not in practice), no two castes are ever equal.
Restrictions on social interaction
Specially the sharing of food, governed by ideas of purity and pollution; most dramatic in untouchability, where even the touch of people of certain castes is thought to pollute.
Differential rights and duties
Following from hierarchy and restricted interaction; they cover not only religious practices but also the secular world of everyday life.
Restricted choice of occupation
Occupation, like caste, is decided by birth and is hereditary. Caste works as a rigid form of the division of labour.
Restrictions on marriage
Caste endogamy is often joined with rules of exogamy. These rules on eligible and non-eligible groups help reproduce the caste system.
S-H-I-R-O-M: Segments, Hierarchy, Interaction, Rights, Occupation, Marriage
Endogamy (glossary): a social institution that defines the boundary of a social or kin group within which marriage relations are permissible; marriage outside these groups is prohibited. The most common example is caste endogamy, where marriage may only take place with a member of the same caste.
Exogamy (glossary): a social institution that defines the boundary of a social or kin group with which or within which marriage relations are prohibited; marriage must be outside these groups. Examples: no marriage with blood relatives (sapind exogamy), with members of the same lineage (sagotra exogamy), or with residents of the same village or region (village/region exogamy).
Value and limit of the definition: it made the study of caste more systematic. But it was a conceptual definition based on what the classical texts prescribed. In actual practice many of these features were changing, though all of them continue to exist in some form. Ethnographic fieldwork over the next decades gave valuable accounts of what was happening to caste in independent India.
7 Bombay and Lucknow: The Two Centres
Between the 1920s and the 1950s, sociology in India was equated with two major departments, at Bombay and Lucknow. Both began as combined departments of sociology and economics.
| Department | Led by |
|---|---|
| Bombay | G.S. Ghurye |
| Lucknow | The famous ‘trinity’: Radhakamal Mukerjee (the founder), D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar. Of the three, D.P. Mukerji was perhaps the most popular. |
8 D.P. Mukerji: Scholar and Public Intellectual
- Known as ‘D.P.’, among the most influential scholars of his generation, in sociology and in intellectual and public life.
- His influence came less from his scholarly writings than from his teaching, his speaking at academic events and his work in the media (newspaper articles and radio programmes).
- Came to sociology via history and economics; interests ranged across literature, music, film, western and Indian philosophy, Marxism, political economy and development planning.
- Strongly influenced by Marxism, but had more faith in it as a method of social analysis than as a political programme for action.
- Wrote many books in English and Bengali; his Introduction to Indian Music is a pioneering work, a classic in its genre.
8.1 Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji (1894-1961): life at a glance
9 D.P. Mukerji on Tradition and Change
D.P. turned to sociology out of dissatisfaction with Indian history and economics. He felt that the crucial distinctive feature of India was its social system, so every social science in India must be rooted in it. History, politics and economics in India were less developed than in the west, but the social dimensions were ‘over-developed’.
“… my conviction grew that India had had society, and very little else. In fact, she had too much of it. Her history, her economics, and even her philosophy, I realised, had always centred in social groups, and at best, in socialised persons.”
D.P. Mukerji (Mukherji 1955:2)
9.2 The first duty: know the living tradition
Since society is central in India, the first duty of an Indian sociologist is to study and know the social traditions of India. This study is not only about the past; it is also sensitive to change.
Living tradition (D.P. Mukerji): a tradition that maintains its links with the past by retaining something from it, while adapting to the present and incorporating new things, so that it evolves over time. It includes some old elements and some new ones.
“…it is not enough for the Indian sociologist to be a sociologist. He must be an Indian first, that is, he is to share in the folk-ways, mores, customs and traditions, for the purpose of understanding his social system and what lies beneath it and beyond it.”
D.P. Mukerji
So sociologists should learn both ‘high’ and ‘low’ languages and cultures: not only Sanskrit, Persian or Arabic, but also local dialects. (Explanation, not the book’s words: folk-ways and mores are the everyday customs and the strongly held moral rules of a group.)
9.3 Indian society is not individualistic
- Indian culture and society are not individualistic in the western sense.
- The average Indian’s pattern of desires is more or less rigidly fixed by his socio-cultural group pattern, and he hardly deviates from it.
- So the Indian social system is oriented towards group, sect or caste-action, not ‘voluntaristic’ individual action (action freely chosen by the individual).
- ‘Voluntarism’ was beginning to influence the urban middle classes; its appearance is itself an interesting subject of study.
9.4 What ‘tradition’ means
| Word | Meaning given by D.P. |
|---|---|
| Tradition | Root meaning: to transmit (hand down) |
| Parampara | Sanskrit equivalent meaning succession |
| Aitihya | Sanskrit equivalent from the same root as itihas (history) |
Traditions are strongly rooted in the past, kept alive through the repeated recalling and retelling of stories and myths. But this link with the past does not rule out change; it indicates a process of adaptation to it.
9.5 Sources of change: why India differs from the west
Internal and external sources of change are always present in every society. The difference lies in which source works.
Western societies
- The most commonly cited internal source of change is the economy
India
- The economy has not been as effective a source of change
- Class conflict has been “smoothed and covered by caste traditions”; new class relations have not emerged very sharply
- So one of the first tasks of a dynamic Indian sociology: an account of the internal, non-economic causes of change
9.6 Three principles of change: shruti, smriti, anubhava
- D.P. believed Indian traditions recognised three principles of change: shruti, smriti and anubhava.
- The last, anubhava or personal experience, is the revolutionary principle. In India personal experience soon flowered into collective experience.
- So the most important principle of change was generalised anubhava, the collective experience of groups.
- The high traditions centred in smriti and sruti were periodically challenged by the collective experience of groups and sects, as in the bhakti movement.
- This was true of Muslim culture too: in Indian Islam the Sufis stressed love and experience rather than holy texts, and brought about change.
- For D.P., discursive reason (buddhi-vichar) is not the dominant force for change in India; anubhava and prem (experience and love) have historically been superior agents of change.
9.7 Change without breaking tradition
Conflict and rebellion in India work through collective experiences. The resilience of tradition ensures that the pressure of conflict produces change in the tradition without breaking it.
This process, rebellion contained within the limits of an overarching tradition, is typical of a caste society, where the formation of classes and class consciousness has been inhibited (held back).
9.8 D.P.’s balanced attitude
✓ What D.P. held
- Tradition was to be neither worshipped nor ignored
- Modernity was needed, but not to be blindly adopted
- He was a proud but critical inheritor of tradition, and an admiring critic of modernity
✗ What D.P. criticised
- All instances of unthinking borrowing from western intellectual traditions
- Including in such contexts as development planning
Ask people of different generations about children’s games, a popular festival, or typical dress: what has stayed the same and what has changed over the last 10, 20, 40 and 60 or more years? The mix of old and new you find is what D.P. meant by a living tradition.
10 A.R. Desai: The Marxist Sociologist
- One of the rare Indian sociologists directly involved in politics as a formal member of political parties.
- A life-long Marxist; joined Marxist politics in his undergraduate days at Baroda; later resigned from the Communist Party of India; for most of his career linked with non-mainstream Marxist groups.
- His father was a middle level civil servant in Baroda state and a well-known novelist, sympathetic to socialism and Gandhian nationalism. Desai lost his mother early, and lived a migratory life because of his father’s frequent transfers.
- Studied under Ghurye at Bombay; his doctoral dissertation on the social aspects of Indian nationalism (degree 1946) was published in 1948 as The Social Background of Indian Nationalism, probably his best known work: a Marxist analysis of Indian nationalism that gave prominence to economic processes and divisions, while taking account of British colonialism. It had critics but was very popular and reprinted many times.
- Other themes: peasant movements and rural sociology, modernisation, urban issues, political sociology, forms of the state and human rights.
- Because Marxism was not prominent in Indian sociology, he was perhaps better known outside the discipline than within it. He was elected President of the Indian Sociological Society, yet remained a somewhat unusual figure in Indian sociology.
10.1 Akshay Ramanlal Desai (1915-1994): life at a glance
11 A.R. Desai on the State
The modern capitalist state was one of Desai’s major themes, approached as always from a Marxist perspective. In an essay called “The myth of the welfare state”, he gives a detailed critique of the notion and points to its many shortcomings.
11.1 Three unique features of the welfare state
After considering the prominent definitions in sociological literature, Desai identifies these features:
A positive state
Unlike the ‘laissez faire’ state of classical liberal theory, it does not do only the minimum needed for law and order. It is an interventionist state that actively uses its powers to design and implement social policies for the betterment of society.
A democratic state
Democracy was considered an essential condition for the welfare state. Formal democratic institutions, specially multi-party elections, were a defining feature. That is why liberal thinkers excluded socialist and communist states from this definition.
A mixed economy
Private capitalist enterprises and state or publicly owned enterprises co-exist. It neither eliminates the capitalist market nor prevents public investment. The state sector concentrates on basic goods and social infrastructure; private industry dominates consumer goods.
Laissez-faire (glossary): a French phrase (literally ‘let be’ or ‘leave alone’) for a political and economic doctrine that advocates minimum state intervention in the economy and economic relations; usually associated with belief in the regulative powers and efficiency of the free market.
Mixed economy: an economy where both private capitalist enterprises and state or publicly owned enterprises co-exist.
11.2 Desai’s five test criteria
Desai then suggests test criteria against which the performance of a welfare state can be measured:
11.3 The verdict: “something of a myth”
Desai concluded that most modern capitalist states, even in the most developed countries, fail the tests, so the notion of the welfare state is something of a myth.
11.4 Desai on communist states
Desai also wrote on the Marxist theory of the state. He did not take a one-sided view: he openly criticised the shortcomings of Communist states. Citing many Marxist thinkers, he stressed the importance of democracy even under communism, arguing that political liberties and the rule of law must be upheld in all genuinely socialist states.
Desai wanted the state to do more for citizens than western capitalist welfare states do. A strong opposing view today says the state should do less and leave most things to the free market. List the services the state provides in your neighbourhood (roads, water supply, electricity, street lights, schools, sanitation, police, hospitals, bus, train and air transport) and think how rich, middle class and poor people would be affected if it stopped.
12 M.N. Srinivas: Putting Indian Sociology on the World Map
- Probably the best known Indian sociologist of the post-independence era. Earned two doctoral degrees, from Bombay University and from Oxford; a student of Ghurye at Bombay.
- His intellectual orientation was transformed at Oxford’s department of social anthropology; British social anthropology was then the dominant force, and he shared the excitement of being at the ‘centre’.
- His doctoral dissertation, published as Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, established his international reputation with its detailed ethnographic application of the structural-functional perspective (seeing society as a structure whose parts each perform a function).
- Held a newly created lectureship in Indian sociology at Oxford, but resigned in 1951 to head a new department of sociology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. In 1959 he set up another at the Delhi School of Economics, soon a leading centre.
- He often complained that institution building took most of his energy. Even so, he wrote on caste, modernisation and other processes of social change, village society and more.
- His international contacts, in British social anthropology and American anthropology, particularly the University of Chicago, helped establish Indian sociology on the world map. Like Ghurye and the Lucknow scholars, he trained a new generation of leaders.
12.1 Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (1916-1999): life at a glance
13 M.N. Srinivas on the Village
The Indian village and village society remained a life-long focus for Srinivas. Short visits for surveys and interviews were not enough: only after a year of fieldwork at a village near Mysore did he gain first-hand knowledge of village society. This fieldwork proved decisive for his career.
- He encouraged and coordinated a major collective effort at detailed ethnographic accounts of villages during the 1950s and 1960s.
- With S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar, he made village studies the dominant field in Indian sociology at that time.
13.1 Two types of writing on the village
Type 1: Ethnographic
- Accounts of fieldwork done in villages
- Or discussions of such accounts
Type 2: Historical and conceptual
- Discussions of the Indian village as a unit of social analysis
- Here he joined a debate on the usefulness of the village as a concept
13.2 The village debate: Dumont vs Srinivas
| Louis Dumont (against village studies) | M.N. Srinivas (for the village) |
|---|---|
| Social institutions like caste are more important than the village | The village is a relevant social entity |
| A village is after all only a collection of people living in a particular place | Historical evidence shows villages served as a unifying identity; village unity was significant in rural social life |
| Villages may live or die, and people move, but their institutions (caste, religion) follow them wherever they go | Criticised the British administrator anthropologists’ picture of the village as unchanging, self-sufficient “little republics” |
| So it is misleading to give much importance to the village as a category | Villages had seen considerable change, were never self-sufficient, and had economic, social and political relationships at the regional level |
13.3 Why village studies mattered
Activity 4 asks you to give five clues by which a visitor from another planet could recognise a village, and then test your definition: could there be a village without most of those features? Activity 5 asks whether urban people are still as interested in villages as they were in the 1950s, and why people move between village and city.
14 Conclusion: Four Ways of ‘Indianising’ Sociology
| Sociologist | How he ‘Indianised’ sociology |
|---|---|
| G.S. Ghurye | Began with questions defined by western anthropologists, but brought to them his intimate knowledge of classical texts and his sense of educated Indian opinion |
| D.P. Mukerji | A thoroughly westernised modern intellectual who rediscovered Indian tradition without being blind to its shortcomings |
| A.R. Desai | Strongly influenced by Marxism; offered a critical view of the Indian state at a time when such criticism was rare |
| M.N. Srinivas | Trained in the dominant centres of western social anthropology, he adapted his training to the Indian context and helped design a new agenda for sociology in the late 20th century |
It is a sign of a healthy discipline when succeeding generations learn from and go beyond their predecessors. Later Indian sociologists have subjected the work of these pioneers to constructive criticism to take the discipline further.
15 Quick Revision
- Sociology taught first at the University of Bombay (1919); Calcutta and Lucknow followed in the 1920s. Indian questions: modernity came with colonialism; anthropology in an ancient civilisation; role in planned development and democracy.
- Pioneers: Ananthakrishna Iyer (Cochin survey 1902, Calcutta 1917-1932, self-taught) and Sarat Chandra Roy (Ranchi 1898, court interpreter, Oraon, Mundas, Kharias, Man in India 1922).
- Ghurye: founder of institutionalised sociology; Bombay department 35 years; Indian Sociological Society (1951) and Sociological Bulletin (1952); teaching plus research, sociology plus social anthropology.
- Tribal debate: protectionists wanted the state to protect tribes; Ghurye (vs Verrier Elwin) called them ‘backward Hindus’ needing development; both agreed tribes were hardly ever isolated.
- Risley: caste originated in race (skull, nose, cranium); Ghurye: only partially correct, true for north India (‘Hindustan proper’); elsewhere groups mixed and endogamy may have come later. Caste and Race in India (1932).
- Ghurye’s six features: segmental division, hierarchy, restricted social interaction (purity and pollution), differential rights and duties, restricted occupation, marriage restrictions (endogamy and exogamy).
- D.P. Mukerji: India had “too much” society; the Indian sociologist must be an Indian first; living tradition; tradition = transmit (parampara, aitihya); change in India is non-economic; shruti, smriti, anubhava; generalised anubhava (bhakti, Sufis); rebellion contained within tradition.
- A.R. Desai: Marxist; welfare state = positive, democratic, mixed economy; five tests (poverty, inequality, profit motive, stable development, employment); Britain, USA, Europe fail: a myth; democracy needed even under communism.
- M.N. Srinivas: Oxford, Coorgs, structural-functional; Baroda 1951, Delhi School of Economics 1959; a year in a village near Mysore; with S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar made village studies dominant; Dumont said caste matters more than the village; Srinivas said the village is a relevant entity and not a self-sufficient “little republic”.
- Can I explain how Iyer and Roy became anthropologists by accident?
- Can I give both sides of the tribal debate and the point they agreed on?
- Can I state Risley’s theory and Ghurye’s three objections to it?
- Can I list and explain Ghurye’s six features of caste?
- Can I explain ‘living tradition’ and the three principles of change?
- Can I give the three features of the welfare state and Desai’s five tests?
- Can I set out Dumont’s and Srinivas’ arguments on the village, and four reasons village studies mattered?