Class 11 Sociology Book 2 Chapter 5 Indian Sociologists Important Questions with Answers

Q. Who were the ‘administrator-anthropologists’? Name any two.

Answer: British administrative officials of the British Indian government (19th and early 20th centuries) who took great interest in anthropological research, specially surveys and censuses; e.g. Herbert Risley, J.H. Hutton.

Q. What is anthropometry?

Answer: The branch of anthropology that studied human racial types by measuring the human body, particularly the cranium (skull), the head and the length of the nose.

Q. Define assimilation as given in the glossary.

Answer: A process by which one culture (usually the larger or more dominant one) gradually absorbs another, until the absorbed culture is no longer alive or visible.

Q. What is endogamy? Give the most common example.

Answer: A social institution that permits marriage only within a defined social or kin group and prohibits marriage outside it; the most common example is caste endogamy.

Q. What is exogamy? Give one example.

Answer: A social institution that prohibits marriage within a defined social or kin group, so marriage must be outside it; e.g. sagotra exogamy (no marriage within the same lineage).

Q. What does laissez-faire stand for?

Answer: A French phrase (‘let be’ or ‘leave alone’) for a doctrine of minimum state intervention in the economy, with belief in the efficiency of the free market.

Q. What is a ‘living tradition’ according to D.P. Mukerji?

Answer: A tradition that maintains links with the past by retaining something from it, while adapting to the present and incorporating new things.

Q. Why are Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy called ‘accidental anthropologists’?

Answer: Neither was trained in anthropology. Iyer, a college teacher, joined the Cochin ethnographic survey voluntarily; Roy, a lawyer, studied tribes because he had to interpret their customs in court.

Q. Name the two features Ghurye’s Bombay department was the first to implement.

Answer: 1. Active combining of teaching and research within the same institution.
2. Merger of social anthropology and sociology into a composite discipline.

Q. What point in the tribal debate was not really disputed by either side?

Answer: That Indian tribals were hardly ever isolated primitive communities of the classical anthropological texts. The sides differed only on how to evaluate the impact of mainstream culture.

Q. Why did Risley regard India as a ‘laboratory’ for studying racial types?

Answer: Because caste had strictly prohibited marriage between different groups for centuries, so different castes seemed to have kept distinct racial types.

Q. What were the merit and the limitation of Ghurye’s definition of caste?

Answer: Merit: it made the study of caste more systematic. Limitation: it was conceptual, based on classical texts; in practice many features were changing.

Q. Why, according to D.P. Mukerji, must every social science in India be rooted in its social system?

Answer: Because India’s crucial distinctive feature was its social system: history, politics and economics were less developed than in the west, while social dimensions were ‘over-developed’.

Q. Explain the meaning of ‘tradition’ as given by D.P. Mukerji.

Answer: Its root meaning is to transmit; a Sanskrit equivalent is parampara (succession). Traditions are rooted in the past, kept alive by repeated recalling and retelling of stories and myths.

Q. Why is the welfare state called a ‘positive state’?

Answer: Unlike the laissez faire state, it does not do only the minimum for law and order; it actively intervenes to design and implement social policies for society’s betterment.

Q. Did A.R. Desai take a one-sided view of the state? Explain.

Answer: No. He openly criticised the shortcomings of Communist states and, citing Marxist thinkers, insisted that political liberties and the rule of law be upheld in all genuinely socialist states.

Q. Name the two types of Srinivas’ writings on the village.

Answer: 1. Ethnographic accounts of fieldwork done in villages, or discussions of such accounts.
2. Historical and conceptual discussions of the Indian village as a unit of social analysis.

Q. What questions did the specificity of the Indian context raise for sociology?

Answer: 1. Western sociology arose to make sense of modernity; India too was changing, but as a colony, its modernity mixed with colonial subjugation.
2. Social anthropology arose from European curiosity about primitive cultures; India was an ancient, advanced civilisation that also had ‘primitive’ societies.
3. What useful role could sociology play in a sovereign India beginning planned development and democracy?
These questions took shape only by ‘doing’ sociology in India.

Q. Why is G.S. Ghurye considered the founder of institutionalised sociology in India?

Answer: 1. He headed India’s first post-graduate department of Sociology, at Bombay University, for thirty-five years.
2. He guided many research scholars who rose to prominent positions.
3. He founded the Indian Sociological Society (1951) and its journal Sociological Bulletin.
4. His department first combined teaching with research and merged social anthropology with sociology.
He nurtured sociology as an Indian discipline despite limited support.

Q. How did Ghurye criticise Risley’s racial theory of caste?

Answer: Ghurye did not reject Risley’s basic argument but found it only partially correct. Averages alone ignored the variation within a community. The upper-Aryan, lower-non-Aryan pattern was broadly true only for northern India. Elsewhere, inter-group differences in measurements were not large or systematic, so groups had long mixed. ‘Racial purity’ survived only in ‘Hindustan proper’; in the rest of India endogamy may have entered groups that were already racially varied.

Q. Why did D.P. Mukerji say Indian society is not individualistic in the western sense?

Answer: 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. Voluntarism was only beginning to influence the urban middle classes, and its appearance was itself a subject of study for the Indian sociologist.

Q. Explain D.P. Mukerji’s three principles of change.

Answer: Indian traditions recognise shruti, smriti and anubhava. Anubhava, personal experience, is the revolutionary principle. Its generalised form, the collective experience of groups, is the most important principle of change. The high traditions of shruti and smriti were periodically challenged by such experience, as in the bhakti movement; in Indian Islam the Sufis stressed love and experience over holy texts. So anubhava and prem, not buddhi-vichar, drove change.

Q. What are the three features of the welfare state identified by A.R. Desai?

Answer: 1. A positive state: unlike laissez faire, it actively intervenes with social policies for society’s betterment.
2. A democratic state: democracy, specially multi-party elections, is an essential condition; hence socialist and communist states were excluded.
3. A mixed economy: private and public enterprises co-exist; the state concentrates on basic goods and social infrastructure, private industry on consumer goods.

Q. State Louis Dumont’s argument against the village as a unit of study.

Answer: Dumont held that social institutions like caste were more important than the village, which was after all only a collection of people living in a particular place. Villages may live or die, and people may move from one village to another, but their institutions, like caste or religion, follow them wherever they go. So he thought it misleading to give much importance to the village as a category.

Q. How did M.N. Srinivas help establish Indian sociology?

Answer: 1. Built institutions: departments at Baroda (1951) and the Delhi School of Economics (1959), and co-founded the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.
2. Put Indian sociology on the world map through links with British social anthropology and the University of Chicago.
3. Trained a new generation of leaders.
4. Made village studies, with S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar, the dominant field in the 1950s and 1960s.

Q. What arguments did M.N. Srinivas give for the village as a unit of study?

Answer: Srinivas believed the village was a relevant social entity. Historical evidence showed that villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity was significant in rural social life. He also criticised the British administrator anthropologists’ picture of the village as unchanging, self-sufficient “little republics”: villages had experienced considerable change, were never self-sufficient, and had economic, social and political relationships at the regional level.

Q. Discuss the arguments on either side of the debate about how to relate to tribal communities.

Answer: In the 1930s and 1940s there was much debate on the place of tribes in India and how the state should respond.
Protectionists: many British administrator-anthropologists saw tribes as primitive peoples with a distinctive culture far from mainstream Hinduism. They believed the innocent and simple tribals would suffer exploitation and cultural degradation through contact with Hindu society. So the state had a duty to protect the tribes and help them sustain their way of life against pressure to assimilate, which would mean exploitation and cultural extinction.
Nationalists: they believed in the unity of India and in modernising its society. Preservation was misguided and kept tribals backward as ‘museums’ of primitive culture; tribes, like much of Hinduism, needed to develop. Ghurye, their best-known exponent, called tribes ‘backward Hindus’, showing long interaction with Hinduism: they were further behind in the same process of assimilation. The ill-effects were common to all backward and downtrodden sections, inevitable difficulties on the road to development.
Agreed point: tribes were hardly ever isolated primitive communities; the dispute was over how to evaluate mainstream culture’s impact.

Q. Explain the six features of caste in Ghurye’s definition.

Answer: 1. Segmental division: caste is divided into closed, mutually exclusive segments; membership comes only by birth and can neither be avoided nor changed.
2. Hierarchical division: every caste is either higher or lower than every other; in theory, though not in practice, no two castes are equal.
3. Restrictions on social interaction: specially the sharing of food, governed by ideas of purity and pollution; most dramatic in untouchability.
4. Differential rights and duties: following from hierarchy, they extend from religious practices into the secular world.
5. Restricted choice of occupation: occupation is decided by birth and hereditary; caste works as a rigid division of labour.
6. Restrictions on marriage: caste endogamy with rules of exogamy reproduces the caste system.
The definition made the study of caste more systematic, but it was based on what the classical texts prescribed; in practice these features were changing, though all continue in some form.

Q. Explain D.P. Mukerji’s views on tradition and change.

Answer: Social system central: India ‘had had society, and very little else’, so the first duty of an Indian sociologist was to know its social traditions. He must be ‘an Indian first’, sharing in folk-ways, mores and customs, and knowing high and low languages, including local dialects.
Living tradition: tradition keeps links with the past (to transmit; parampara, succession) but adapts to the present and evolves.
Not individualistic: Indian action is group, sect or caste-action, not voluntaristic.
Non-economic change: the economy, the west’s main internal source of change, was less effective in India, where caste traditions held class conflict in check; so a dynamic Indian sociology must explain internal, non-economic causes of change.
Anubhava: of shruti, smriti and anubhava, generalised anubhava (collective experience) is the key principle, seen in the bhakti movement and the Sufis.
Resilience: revolts transform orthodoxy but are reabsorbed into the transformed tradition, typical of a caste society.
Attitude: tradition neither worshipped nor ignored; no unthinking borrowing from the west.

Q. What is a welfare state? Why is A.R. Desai critical of the claims made on its behalf?

Answer: Welfare state: Desai, a Marxist, examined it in “The myth of the welfare state”. It is (1) a positive, interventionist state that makes social policies for society’s betterment, unlike laissez faire; (2) a democratic state with formal democratic institutions, specially multi-party elections; (3) a mixed economy where private and public enterprises co-exist.
His five tests: Does it ensure freedom from poverty, social discrimination and security for all? Does it reduce income inequality by redistribution and by preventing concentration of wealth? Does it make the profit motive subservient to community needs? Does it ensure stable development free from booms and depressions? Does it provide employment for all?
Findings: examining Britain, the USA and much of Europe, he found their claims greatly exaggerated. They fail to provide minimum economic and social security, cannot reduce inequality and often encourage it, have not achieved stable development free from market fluctuations, and suffer high levels of unemployment.
Conclusion: the welfare state is something of a myth. He was not one-sided: he also criticised Communist states and upheld democracy, political liberties and the rule of law.