Indian Sociologists

The previous chapter (kesy204) introduced the European founders. This one asks how sociology became Indian. It introduces two ‘accidental’ pioneers of anthropology — L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy — and four founders of the discipline: G.S. Ghurye (caste, race and tribes), D.P. Mukerji (tradition and change), A.R. Desai (the state and nationalism, from a Marxist view) and M.N. Srinivas (the village). The book has four biographical boxes (three with a portrait), quotations from D.P. Mukerji, five activities and nine exercise questions. Caste and tribe are taught in depth on the live Social Institutions page (lesy103), and Srinivas's Sanskritisation on Cultural Change (lesy202); this page teaches the thinkers and their debates, and cross-links the rest.

• Builds on Introducing Sociology Chapter 1 (sociology and social anthropology in India; colonialism), Chapter 2 (caste, groups — with Srinivas's Rampura terms), Chapter 3 (institutions, the state), Chapter 4 (culture, tradition) and Chapter 5 (fieldwork, Srinivas's method); this book's Chapter 1 (structure, conflict), Chapter 2 (rural and urban change), Chapter 3 (environment and displacement) and Chapter 4 (Marx, Durkheim, Weber — whom Desai and Srinivas drew on).
• Pairs with live chapters: Indian Society, Chapter 1 Introducing Indian Society (colonialism, nationalism) and Chapter 3 Social Institutions: Continuity and Change (caste, tribe, family); Social Change and Development in India, Chapter 2 Cultural Change (Sanskritisation, westernisation), Chapter 4 Change and Development in Rural Society and Chapter 8 Social Movements (tribal movements).
• UPSC: GS1 (Indian Society) asks about tradition and change, continuity of social values, caste and tribal development — these thinkers supply named, quotable frames. The Essay paper rewards the same frames (tradition and modernity, the welfare state, the village). Indian thinkers occasionally help in GS4 answers. Prelims has asked about Sanskritisation (linked on lesy103 and lesy202), not yet about these thinkers by name. (The Sociology optional is not covered here.)

• Sociology taught at Bombay from 1919; Calcutta and Lucknow in the 1920s. Questions: sociology in a colony, in a civilisation with ‘primitive’ groups, in a planning democracy.
• Accidental anthropologists: L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861–1937, Cochin survey 1902, Calcutta 1917–32) and Sarat Chandra Roy (1871–1942, Ranchi, Oraon/Munda/Kharia monographs, Man in India).
• G.S. Ghurye (1893–1983): Bombay department for 35 years; Indian Sociological Society (1951); tribes as ‘backward Hindus’; Risley's race thesis true only for north India; six features of caste.
• D.P. Mukerji (1894–1961): India had ‘too much’ society; living tradition; change through shruti, smriti, anubhava — collective anubhava is the revolutionary principle.
• A.R. Desai (1915–1994): Marxist; Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948); welfare state = positive, democratic, mixed economy — judged by five tests, ‘something of a myth’.
• M.N. Srinivas (1916–1999): Oxford-trained; Baroda (1951), Delhi School of Economics (1959); village studies; the village is a real unit (against Dumont); no ‘little republics’.

Sociology is young even in Europe; in India interest in it is a little over a century old, and formal university teaching began only in 1919 at the University of Bombay. In the 1920s Calcutta and Lucknow began teaching and research in sociology and anthropology; today almost every major university has such a department. Early on, NCERT stresses, it was not clear what an Indian sociology would look like, or whether India needed one. Three questions made India's context specific. If western sociology arose to make sense of modernity, what was its role where modernity came intertwined with colonial subjugation? If western anthropology arose from curiosity about ‘primitive’ cultures, what was its role in an ancient, advanced civilisation that also had ‘primitive’ societies within it? And what use was sociology to a sovereign India about to begin planned development and democracy? These questions were not available ‘readymade’; they took shape through doing sociology.

L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861–1937) began as a clerk, became a school and then a college teacher in Cochin state (present-day Kerala). In 1902 the Dewan of Cochin asked him to help with an ethnographic survey — the British wanted such surveys in the princely states and the presidencies. He did it unpaid, teaching at the Maharajah's College, Ernakulam, during the week and acting as Superintendent of Ethnography at weekends; he later helped with a similar survey of Mysore. Probably the first self-taught anthropologist to win national and international recognition, he lectured at Madras, became Reader at Calcutta (1917–1932), where he helped set up India's first post-graduate anthropology department, presided over the Ethnology section of the Indian Science Congress, received an honorary doctorate from a German university and the titles Rao Bahadur and Dewan Bahadur from Cochin.

Sarat Chandra Roy (1871–1942), with degrees in English and law (Ripon College, Calcutta), went to Ranchi in 1898 to teach English at a Christian missionary school and stayed 44 years. Practising law in the Ranchi courts and becoming the court's official interpreter, he had to explain tribal customs and laws to the court — and so became deeply interested in tribal society. Through extensive ‘amateur’ fieldwork he wrote over a hundred articles and famous monographs on the Oraon, the Mundas and the Kharias, became the recognised authority on Chhotanagpur (present-day Jharkhand) and founded Man in India — the earliest journal of its kind in India and still published. Both men practised a discipline that did not yet exist in India and had no institutions; both lived and died under British rule. The four sociologists who follow were a generation younger: Ghurye and D.P. Mukerji were born in the 1890s, Desai and Srinivas about fifteen years later. They came of age in the colonial era, worked on into independence and built the discipline's first institutions.

NCERT calls Ghurye the founder of institutionalised sociology in India. He headed the country's first post-graduate teaching department of sociology, at Bombay University, for 35 years; guided many research scholars who became leaders of the discipline; and founded the Indian Sociological Society and its journal Sociological Bulletin. With little money for research, he nurtured sociology as an increasingly Indian discipline. His department was the first to combine teaching and research in one institution and to merge social anthropology and sociology into one discipline — features his successors endorsed. Best known for caste and race, he also wrote on tribes; kinship, family and marriage; culture, civilisation and cities; religion; and conflict and integration. The influences NCERT names are diffusionism, Orientalist scholarship on Hindu religion and thought, nationalism, and the cultural aspects of Hindu identity.

Ghurye first became known beyond academia through his writings on ‘tribal’ or ‘aboriginal’ cultures and his debate with Verrier Elwin. In the 1930s and 1940s many British administrator-anthropologists saw tribes as primitive peoples with cultures far from mainstream Hinduism, who would suffer exploitation and cultural degradation through contact with Hindu society; the state, they felt, had a duty to protect them and their way of life against pressure to assimilate. Nationalist Indians, equally passionate about India's unity and the need to modernise, thought preservation misguided — it kept tribes backward, as ‘museums’ of primitive culture; like features of Hinduism needing reform, tribes too needed to develop.

Ghurye became the best-known exponent of the nationalist view, calling the tribes ‘backward Hindus’ rather than distinct cultural groups. Citing evidence from many tribal cultures, he showed long interaction with Hinduism: tribes were simply further behind in the same assimilation all Indian communities had gone through. NCERT notes that this argument — that tribes were hardly ever isolated communities of the classical textbook kind — was not really disputed. The difference lay in evaluating mainstream influence: protectionists expected severe exploitation and cultural extinction; Ghurye and the nationalists replied that these ill-effects were common to all backward and downtrodden sections and were the inevitable difficulties of development.

Ghurye's reputation rested on his Cambridge dissertation, published as Caste and Race in India (1932), which criticised the then-dominant theories linking race and caste. Their main proponent was Herbert Risley, a British official deeply interested in anthropology. This view held that humans can be divided into distinct races by physical traits — skull circumference, nose length, cranium volume (anthropometry). Because caste had prohibited intermarriage for centuries, Risley and others saw India as a unique ‘laboratory’ for studying racial types. Risley argued that caste must have originated in race: higher castes approximated ‘Indo-Aryan’ traits, lower castes non-Aryan ‘aboriginal’, Mongoloid or other types, so the lower castes were the original inhabitants subjugated by incoming Aryans.

Ghurye did not reject this outright; he thought it only partially correct. He pointed to the problem of relying on averages without considering the variation within each community. Risley's thesis, he found, was broadly true only for northern India; elsewhere inter-group differences were small or unsystematic, suggesting that, outside the Indo-Gangetic plain, racial groups had long been mixing. ‘Racial purity’ had been preserved by the ban on intermarriage only in ‘Hindustan proper’; in the rest of the country endogamy may have been introduced into groups already racially varied. NCERT adds that the racial theory of caste is no longer believed, though it was considered true in the first half of the 20th century, and that historians still hold conflicting opinions about the Aryans and their arrival.

Ghurye is also known for a comprehensive definition of caste with six features: (i) segmental division — closed, mutually exclusive compartments, membership decided by birth alone, so caste can be neither avoided nor changed; (ii) hierarchical division — in theory (not practice) every caste is higher or lower than every other, never equal; (iii) restrictions on social interaction, especially food-sharing, governed by ideas of purity and pollution — most dramatically untouchability; (iv) differential rights and duties, religious and secular, flowing from hierarchy and restricted interaction; (v) restricted choice of occupation, hereditary by birth — a rigid division of labour; and (vi) strict restrictions on marriage — caste endogamy with rules of exogamy, which together reproduce the system.

NCERT's assessment: the definition made the study of caste more systematic, but it was based on what the classical texts prescribed. In practice many features were changing, though all continue in some form; ethnographic fieldwork in later decades described what was actually happening to caste in independent India.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s sociology in India meant two departments, Bombay and Lucknow, both begun as combined departments of sociology and economics. Lucknow had a famous ‘trinity’: Radhakamal Mukerjee (the founder), D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar. ‘D.P.’ was perhaps the most popular — among the most influential scholars of his generation in public life too, through teaching, lectures, newspapers and radio rather than mainly through his writing. He came to sociology through history and economics and ranged across literature, music, film, Indian and western philosophy, Marxism, political economy and planning. Strongly influenced by Marxism, he trusted it more as a method of analysis than as a political programme. He wrote in English and Bengali; his Introduction to Indian Music is considered a classic.

Dissatisfied with Indian history and economics, D.P. turned to sociology because he believed India's distinctive feature was its social system: history, politics and economics were less developed than in the West, but the social dimension was ‘over-developed’ — in his words, India had had society and little else. So the Indian sociologist's first duty was to know India's social traditions — not as worship of the past but with sensitivity to change: a living tradition, linked to the past yet adapting and evolving. The sociologist must be ‘an Indian first’, sharing folkways, mores and customs, and should know ‘high’ and ‘low’ languages and cultures — Sanskrit, Persian or Arabic, and local dialects. Indian society, he argued, is not individualistic in the western sense: a person's desires are largely fixed by the group pattern, so the system is oriented to group, sect or caste action, not ‘voluntaristic’ individual action; the rise of voluntarism among the urban middle classes was itself worth studying.

Tradition means ‘to transmit’; its Sanskrit equivalents are parampara (succession) and aitihya (from the root of itihas, history). Traditions are rooted in a past kept alive by retelling stories and myths, but this does not rule out change — it means adaptation. In western societies the most cited internal source of change is the economy; in India, D.P. believed, class conflict had been ‘smoothed and covered by caste traditions’, so the first task of a dynamic Indian sociology was to explain the internal, non-economic causes of change. Indian traditions recognised three principles of change — shruti, smriti and anubhava; the last, personal experience, is the revolutionary one, and in India it quickly became collective experience (generalised anubhava). The high traditions centred on shruti and smriti were periodically challenged by groups and sects — the bhakti movement, and in Indian Islam the Sufis, who stressed love and experience over holy texts. Thus anubhava and prem (experience and love), not discursive reason (buddhi-vichar), have historically driven change. Rebellion works through collective experience, but tradition's resilience means conflict changes tradition without breaking it: orthodoxy is challenged, transformed, and the revolt reabsorbed — typical of a caste society where class formation is inhibited. So D.P. criticised unthinking borrowing from the West, including in planning: tradition was neither to be worshipped nor ignored; modernity was needed but not to be blindly adopted. He was, NCERT says, a proud but critical inheritor of tradition and an admiring critic of modernity.

Desai was one of the rare Indian sociologists directly involved in party politics. A life-long Marxist, he joined Marxist politics as an undergraduate at Baroda and the Communist Party of India, later resigned, and for most of his career worked with non-mainstream Marxist groups. His father, a middle-level civil servant in Baroda state, was also a well-known novelist sympathetic to socialism and Gandhian nationalism; having lost his mother early, Desai moved often with his father. He studied under Ghurye at Bombay; his Ph.D. on the social aspects of Indian nationalism (1946) became The Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948), probably his best-known work — a Marxist analysis giving prominence to economic processes and divisions while taking account of British colonialism. It had critics but was very popular and much reprinted. He also wrote on peasant movements, 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; though he became President of the Indian Sociological Society, he remained ‘a somewhat unusual figure’.

In the essay ‘The myth of the welfare state’, Desai identifies three features of the welfare state from the literature: it is a positive state — interventionist, unlike the minimal ‘laissez-faire’ state of classical liberalism; a democratic state — formal democracy, especially multi-party elections, being thought essential (which is why liberals excluded socialist and communist states); and a mixed economy — private and public enterprise co-existing, with the state sector concentrating on basic goods and infrastructure and private industry on consumer goods. He then sets five tests: Does it ensure freedom from poverty, social discrimination and insecurity for all? Does it reduce income inequality by redistribution and by preventing concentration of wealth? Does it make the profit motive subservient to the community's real needs? Does it ensure stable development free from booms and depressions? Does it provide employment for all? Examining Britain, the USA and much of Europe, he found their claims greatly exaggerated: they fail to give minimum security to all, do not reduce — often encourage — inequality, cannot avoid market fluctuations, and leave excess capacity and high unemployment. The welfare state is ‘something of a myth’. Writing on the Marxist theory of the state, Desai was not one-sided: he openly criticised communist states and, citing Marxist thinkers, insisted that political liberties and the rule of law must be upheld in any genuinely socialist state.

Probably the best-known Indian sociologist after independence, Srinivas earned two doctorates, from Bombay (under Ghurye) and from Oxford, where British social anthropology, then dominant in the West, transformed his outlook. His Oxford thesis, published as Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, made his international name with its detailed application of the structural-functional perspective. Appointed to a new lectureship in Indian sociology at Oxford, he resigned in 1951 to head a new department at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda; in 1959 he set up the department at the Delhi School of Economics, soon a leading centre. He often complained that institution-building left little time for research, yet wrote widely on caste, modernisation and social change, and village society; with strong British and American links (especially the University of Chicago), he put Indian sociology on the world map and trained a new generation of leaders.

The village was his life-long interest. Only a year's fieldwork in a village near Mysore gave him real first-hand knowledge — decisive for his career. With S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar he made village studies the dominant field of Indian sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. His writing was of two kinds: ethnographic accounts, and historical-conceptual discussions of the village as a unit of analysis. Here he debated Louis Dumont, who held that institutions like caste mattered more than the village — merely people living in one place; villages live or die and people move, but caste and religion go with them, so the village is a misleading category. Srinivas replied that the village was a relevant social entity: history showed it as a unifying identity, and village unity mattered in rural life. He also criticised British administrator-anthropologists' picture of villages as unchanging, self-sufficient ‘little republics’, showing that villages had changed considerably and had never been self-sufficient, being tied into regional economic, social and political relations.

Village studies offered Indian sociology much: a showcase for ethnographic methods; eye-witness accounts of rapid change as the new nation began planned development; and vivid descriptions that urban Indians and policy makers valued. They gave sociology a new role in an independent nation — not confined to ‘primitive’ peoples but relevant to a modernising society.

NCERT's conclusion presents the four as examples of the diverse ways sociology was ‘Indianised’. Ghurye began with questions set by western anthropologists but brought to them his knowledge of classical texts and educated Indian opinion. D.P. Mukerji, a thoroughly westernised modern intellectual, rediscovered Indian tradition without being blind to its shortcomings. A.R. Desai, like D.P. strongly influenced by Marxism, offered a critical view of the Indian state when such criticism was rare. M.N. Srinivas, trained at the centres of western social anthropology, adapted that training and helped design a new agenda for late-20th-century sociology. A discipline is healthy, NCERT says, when succeeding generations learn from, criticise and go beyond their predecessors — as has happened in Indian sociology.

The chapter has five activities. Short outlines follow; give both sides where NCERT asks for debate.

The nine questions at the end of the chapter (page 100).

Numbers

One-liners

• Formal university teaching of sociology in India began at Bombay in 1919.
• Iyer and Roy became anthropologists by accident, without formal training.
• Ghurye was the founder of institutionalised sociology in India.
• Ghurye called the tribes ‘backward Hindus’; the protectionists wanted the state to protect them.
• Both sides agreed that tribes had long interacted with Hindu society.
• Ghurye held Risley's race thesis broadly true only for north India.
• Ghurye's six features of caste rest on what the classical texts prescribed.
• For D.P. Mukerji, India had ‘too much’ society.
• A living tradition keeps links with the past while adapting to the present.
• For D.P., anubhava — collective experience — is the revolutionary principle of change.
• Desai judged the welfare state's claims greatly exaggerated — ‘something of a myth’.
• Desai defended political liberties and the rule of law even under socialism.
• Srinivas held the village to be a relevant social entity; Dumont did not.
• Villages were never self-sufficient ‘little republics’.

Traps to avoid

• Ghurye (nationalist) called tribes 'backward Hindus'; the protectionists (administrator-anthropologists, Elwin) wanted protection — don't swap them.
• Ghurye did not reject Risley outright: he thought the race thesis partly correct, true broadly for north India only.
• Ghurye's caste definition is text-based (prescriptive), not drawn from fieldwork — Srinivas's 'field view' came later.
• D.P. Mukerji's revolutionary principle is anubhava, not shruti or smriti; anubhava and prem outrank buddhi-vichar.
• D.P. Mukerji (tradition) is not Radhakamal Mukerjee (Lucknow's founder); D.N. Majumdar completes the Lucknow 'trinity'.
• Desai criticised the welfare state for doing too little, not too much — and criticised communist states too.
• Desai's welfare state features: positive, democratic, mixed economy — not abolition of private property.
• Dumont argued against the village as a category; Srinivas argued for it.
• Srinivas's 1942 M.A. book was Marriage and Family in Mysore (NCERT's box says 'Among the Coorgs').
• Bombay's sociology department began in 1919 under Patrick Geddes; Ghurye headed it from 1924.
• Srinivas studied under Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard at Oxford; Ghurye under Hobhouse, Rivers and Haddon.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Thinker–idea–work pairs are the likely format: Ghurye — Caste and Race in India, ‘backward Hindus’, six features, Indian Sociological Society; D.P. Mukerji — living tradition, anubhava; A.R. Desai — Social Background of Indian Nationalism, ‘myth of the welfare state’; Srinivas — Coorgs, Rampura, village studies, Sanskritisation, dominant caste; S.C. Roy — Man in India, Chhotanagpur; Risley — anthropometry.
• Keep the Srinivas pairs straight with the live lesy202 page (Sanskritisation, asked in Prelims 1983) and the welfare-state Directive Principles questions on the Polity pages.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 tradition and change (e.g. continuity of traditional values, 2021; whether customs and traditions suppress reason, 2020): use D.P. Mukerji's living tradition — continuity with adaptation, anubhava as the engine, tradition ‘neither worshipped nor ignored’ — and balance it with the critique that tradition can also entrench hierarchy (the reform view on lesy202).
• GS1 tribes (e.g. whether tribal development centres on displacement and rehabilitation, 2025): frame the protection–assimilation–integration debate (Elwin, Ghurye, Nehru's panchsheel), then the constitutional and legal safeguards, giving both the development and the rights perspectives. Essay: the welfare state (Desai versus market views), the village (Srinivas versus Dumont), tradition and modernity (D.P.) — always attribute and balance.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.