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Nationalist Ideas and the Colonial Episteme: The Antinomies Structuring

Sociological Traditions of India

Article  in  Journal of Historical Sociology · April 2021

DOI: 10.1111/johs.12311

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DOI: 10.1111/johs.12311

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Nationalist Ideas and the Colonial Episteme: The

Antinomies Structuring Sociological Traditions
of India

Sujata Patel*

Abstract
The paper traces the growth of sociology in India through three phases. The first phase, it argues,
begins in the 30s with the slow consolidation of the discipline. In this phase, sociology was asso-
ciated with the Indological perspective and the social was perceived in culturist terms and analysed
through the prism of the past, in and through Sanskrit texts. In the second phase, which begins in
the early 60s, when University education expands in India, this indigenous perspective is re‐framed.
There is a shift from textual studies to empirical investigation and the village becomes the site for
studying Indian civilization. This paper makes a detailed analysis of the social anthropological
perspective of M.N. Srinivas whose theories on village and caste influenced the sociological
imagination in this phase. The third phase starts in the late 70s with the growth of social move-
ments of the subalterns which challenge the received culturist nationalist sociological imagination.
Today sociology together with other social sciences are at crossroads in India due to the impact of
neoliberalism. The latter has encouraged privatisation of education, decreased state funding in
material and human resources and an increased state control on academia. All three have affected
the autonomy of the teachers and as well the University system and thus the efforts to chart a new
sociological imagination in which the Indian social is perceived in global comparative terms. It is
difficult to assess which turn sociology in India will take in these circumstances.

Introduction

In the first issue of the journal, Sociological Bulletin, published by the just established Indian Sociological Society, D.
P. Mukerji (1952), an important voice of sociology in contemporary India, lamented the lack of significance of
sociology as a discipline. Despite its early origin and establishment as an academic discipline in 19191, it was, he
argued, being taught only at 4 Universities as an undergraduate and postgraduate subject. He thus took the op-
portunity in 1952, when this article was being published, to present a prolegomenon for developing sociology in

Sujata Patel is a distinguished Professor at the Department of Sociology at the Savitribai Phule Pune University.

J Hist Sociol. 2021;1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/johs © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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India. He contended that sociological thinking needs to be embedded in the consciousness of the people in India and
it needs to be taught extensively. He argued that this is so because India was transiting from being a community
into a society due to the interventions by the government to initiate planned social change through various leg-
islations2. A sociological consciousness would help the experts to comprehend both the specific Indian context and
examine simultaneously what has changed and evaluate the implications of such changes. Thus, the challenge to
Indian sociology, he argued, is to set for itself an agenda to comprehend its own ‘social traditions’, these being
cultural rather than economic and political. In this search it has to refrain itself from borrowing its sociological
perspective from others, because for him,
Indian culture is a specific entity, being the sum of certain traditions, which had grown out of the assimilation of
certain traits and retained their general character down the ages….Thus, the need of…a scientific study of the Indian
social and cultural processes behind the political and dynastic changes… (Mukerji, 1952, pp. 26–27)
Since this write‐up in 1952, there has been a substantial change in the physical infrastructure and human
resources organizing the discipline. The number of Universities teaching sociology had increased from 4 in 1952 to
50 in 1977 and these had enrolled 6,548 Masters level students and 415 doctoral students (Saberwal, 1983, p.
303). By 2000, the numbers had galloped upwards with the expansion of undergraduate teaching. The University
Grants Commission (UGC) stated that in 2001, nearly 50 per cent of the 200 universities taught sociology. These
universities graduated nearly 100,000 students, 6,000 post graduate and 200 doctoral students in sociology (UGC
2001). Today there are 920 universities (as of November 2019) in the country, with 580 being public universities
(50 of these being funded directly by the Centre and the rest by the various State [provincial] governments) and
another 124 being Institutes of higher learning. Most, if not all of these would‐be having sociology courses in some
form or another.
D.P. Mukerji’s lament obviously is no longer true; sociology as a discipline is being taught extensively across
India3. This paper is about the second aspect of Mukerji’s prolegomenon; the content of sociology in India. The
question that I address in this paper is the following: did sociology in India as it grew in strength and spread across
the country over the last six and half decades reflect what Mukerji envisaged or did it change into something else?
The paper argues that we can trace three phases in the growth of the discipline’s content. In the first phase, which
begins in the late 30s the discipline presented itself as doing indigenous sociology through the scholarship of some
international scholars and a small number Indian professionals. Though these scholars differentiated themselves
from each other in terms of particular cultural frameworks they were using, they were bound together in their
assertion that sociology in India needs to study the Indian social in its own terms rather than through ‘western’
eyes.
We can identify three competing schools4 of sociological thought developing in India from the 1930s onward.
The first called the Bombay school (Dhanagare, 2011; Jayaram, 2013) is associated with the Sanskritist scholar, G.
S. Ghurye, who led this department from 1924 to 1959 after it was established by Patrick Geddes, the urbanist in
1919. Ghurye promoted an Indological approach (Upadhya, 2002, 2007). The second, called the Lucknow school of
sociology which included D. P. Mukerji and his three colleagues, Radhakamal Mukherjee, D. N. Majumdar and A.K.
Saran (Joshi, 1986; Madan, 2013).The third group was associated with the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology
(CIS)5 edited by the French sociologist, Louis Dumont and the British anthropologist David Pocock. The former
combined a philological approach and ground it in his understanding of Hindu civilization leading him to present a
new set of culturist arguments in the text, Homo Hierarchicus (1966) (Lardinois, 2013).
By the late 60s, as University education strengthened, a new phase in sociological theory emerged and with it
three new perspectives. The first was associated with M.N. Srinivas who provided an ethnographic and social
anthropological perspective to the analysis of India, the second, led by Y. B. Damle used quantitative methodology
with the structural functional perspective imported from the USA and the third, associated with the scholarship of
A.R. Desai used a Marxist‐ historical perspective to orient the discussion towards the structure of classes in India,
its relationship with Indian nationalism and its impact on state policies, agrarian change and peasant movements6.
The above‐mentioned developments occurred in the context of the growing professionalization of the discipline
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through the establishment of two professional associations in the early 50s. The first association was the Indian
Sociological Society (ISS) launched in December 1951 by G.S. Ghurye, whose main activity was publishing a journal
titled, Sociological Bulletin and the second, the All India Sociological Conference (AISC) instituted by the Lucknow
school scholars organized conferences of sociologists (Patel, 2002, pp. 175–176)7.
With University education expanding these competing and plural trends were replaced by one dominant
narrative, this being the social‐anthropological perspective of M.N. Srinivas. It became the ideal type and was
taught in all teaching departments and its concepts and theories were used extensively to do sociological research.
This happened in the context of four developments. The first was the establishment of a Department of Sociology in
the University of Delhi as part of the Delhi School of Economics8. It became the premier department of sociology
after the recruitment of M. N. Srinivas to lead it9. The second was the creation of the University Grants Commission
(UGC) which mobilized existing teachers to create a standardized syllabus for the teaching of all disciplines across
the Universities in the country10. The third was the establishment of the Indian Council of Social Science Research
(ICSSR) in 1969. This organization funded research and published bibliographic surveys of various social science
disciplines which charted out the specializations in the discipline thereby organizing and creating a fund of
knowledge for each specialization and through this process directing social scientists to do research in these
defined areas11. Lastly, in 1966, the two professional organisations, ISS and AISC merged. By then, G. S. Ghurye had
retired from the University of Bombay and his students together with those from Lucknow came to establish the
current network of sociologists as they were recruited in various departments and institutes as these were set‐up
across the country. With Srinivas, who became the President of the reconstituted ISS in 1967, this group, mainly
based in Delhi, came to be recognised as the new leaders of the profession and included some of contemporary
India’s foremost sociologists (Patel, 2002, p. 276).
The third phase starts about two decades later, in the late 70s when the growth of social movements in India
and the policy of affirmative action led to the entry of a new generation of students from subaltern groups in the
University system. Their presence impacted academia and convulsed the social sciences and brought into the
classrooms their concerns and the histories of discrimination against them. The political movements of the 70s‐80s
in India raised fundamental questions regarding the nature of the state and society. These movement of women,
tribal communities, dalits (ex‐untouchables) and by ethnic groups, together with movements of environmentalists
and regional movements of self‐determination, sub‐nationalism, as also the insurgencies in Kashmir and the
Northeast of India articulated a new language of rights and questioned the conception of passive citizenship being
promoted by the Indian nation‐state since independence (Shah, 2004). These movements provided a critique of the
patriarchal upper caste and class and as well the Hindu majoritarian understanding of the Indian nation‐state, its
economy and its ideological apparatuses, such as the academia. These critiques and the intervention of the sub-
altern studies approach12 in the discipline of history, brought back the discussion on colonialism into social sciences
demanding a critical interrogation of Indian nationalism and its colonial moorings. Within sociology, it led to the
interrogation of the dominant Srinivas‐ian perspective of understanding India (Deshpande, 2007, 2018; Oom-
men, 2008; Patel, 1998, 2005). This had an impact on the ISS whose membership had expanded since the late 90s
and it set up new research committees that dealt with these themes (Patel, 2002). The UGC also introduced a new
syllabus in this context (UGC, 2001).
However, before these deliberations could lead to some fruition and change fundamentally the syllabi and
teaching practices within sociology, the Indian state introduced in 1990 neo‐liberal reforms. This economic
intervention coincided with the consolidation of political forces around the Hindu majoritarian bloc. These pro-
cesses fashioned a new framework for reorganisation of the economy and the polity which while consolidating the
power of the nation‐state, its Hindu majoritarian elite and its rightist ethnic/religious ideology, also diluted dem-
ocratic traditions in place in the country and incorporated it firmly within global economies. This neoliberal and
Hindu majoritarian resolution of the economic crisis has impacted the academic cultures in the country (Jaffrelot,
Kohli, et al., 2019). Particularly in the last decade and a half, it has constrained the formation of new epistemic
voices thereby reversing the small critical spaces for reflexion that had opened up within academia while squeezing
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academic institutions of public funding and promoting Universities to become economic enterprises accountable
only to consumers and stakeholders. These processes have undermined the role of the social sciences and in turn of
critical thinking within higher education and simultaneously routinised existing institutions to hold on to their age‐
old teaching practices, syllabi and pedagogies. This paper is being written in the context of these institutional and
intellectual changes of the last 2 decades, which have been slowly unravelling and have taken a new turn since
2014 when the Hindu majoritarian party has come to power and which has furthered constrained academic au-
tonomy within teaching and research (Sundar & Fazili, 2020).
In the next section, the paper outlines one of the above‐mentioned indigenous perspectives which found
popularity in the immediate aftermath of independence of India in 1947. This was the indigenous perspective of M.
N. Srinivas. In the section following this, the paper assesses the limitation of the indigenous perspective and
elaborates why the discipline stands at crossroads in terms of assessing the contemporary social of India.

The Problematique of Indigenous and the Srinivas‐ian Oeuvre

Decolonisation, the process through which the colonial/imperialist state withdrew from the colonized country was
initiated soon after the end of World War Two. This political intervention came as a response to the growth of
strong anti‐colonial nationalist movements in various regions of the world which also debated and presented
policies that the newly constituted independent state needs to undertake to become independent and ensure
freedom from earlier colonial dependencies. These ideas included the role that industrialization and development
can play to organize and manage the ex‐colonial country’s productive resources and build the country’s human
resources. A subsequent concern related to the necessity to organize nationalist oriented social sciences to provide
independent and sovereign theories of and about national reconstruction. In turn it meant that the nation‐state
needed to develop not only its human resources who could articulate such theories, but it also needed to invest in
institutions of teaching, research and publication to support the growth of such human resources. Additionally, it
needed to encourage, reframe and organize ‘native’ language resources in social sciences to articulate autonomous
thought systems. Given the immediate policy implication of the call for decolonization, economists came to be
immediately recruited to this national intellectual project. Over time, these ideas had its impact on other social
sciences and scholars intervened in varied ways to confront this challenge. Within social sciences, it is in sociology
that its impact has been clearly manifest, given the discipline’s long engagement with questions concerning the
interface of society with local cultures, philosophies and knowledge systems.
In the 40s and 50s, indigenous scholarship framed its perspective in terms of the received nationalist positions.
The latter questioned the conceptual validity, political legitimacy and ethical grounding of the post enlightenment
western civilisation and its knowledges and asserted instead the ‘difference’ in understanding of the national
‘social’. It grounded this difference from Europe/West in a notion of ‘belonging’, a cultural identity defined within a
locality/geography and a territory (Deshpande, 2009). Various nation‐states from Asia and Africa mobilised its
sociologists to draw from its territorially bound cultural traditions to reconstruct alternate, autonomous and
sovereign perspectives (Atal, 1981). Yogesh Atal argues that these discussions were organised around three
concepts: decolonisation (which meant moving away from the universalisms of western social sciences), the framing
of indigenous knowledges and its juxtaposition against endogenous interventions and endogeneity (ibid.). These
affirmed the need to evolve new practices and define the content for social sciences on the basis of nation’s needs
and also advocated a key role for the nation state in this process. As a consequence, the deliberations emphasised
the need for ‘autonomy’ (Alatas, 2006), against western forms of ‘dependency’. More particularly, creating nation‐
state oriented indigenous knowledge meant one or more of the following characteristics: constituting social science
concepts in local regional languages with the use of local resources13; research by insiders rather than outsiders14;
determination of research priorities in terms of ‘national’ priorities and in turn aiding the nation‐state in evaluating
its developmental programmes and policies and lastly, an attempt to formulate a new theoretical and
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methodological paradigm in terms of local/national philosophical and cultural legacies (Atal, 1981). Indian sociology
as mentioned above, was already steeped into an indigenous perspective and this is also true of M.N. Srinivas’s
perspective which as mentioned before was adopted to become the dominant paradigm of sociology. Below, I map
the main assumptions that organize the contours of his indigenous perspective.
Critics may ask how Srinivas’s oeuvre represents the indigenous perspective, given that he was against the
cultural approach in Indian sociology and promoted the structural‐ functionalist perspective of Radcliffe‐Brown. In
one of his first essays defining the contours of sociology as social anthropology and published in 1952, in the
Sociological Bulletin (2002, pp. 457–466), its first issue, he says: “A modern sociologist regards a society as a system
or unity, the various parts of which are related to each other”, a classic statement of positivist functionalism
(Srinivas: 2002, p. 460). His work focuses on caste as a system as seen in one of his pioneering articles published in
1955 titled, 'The Social System of a Mysore Village' (2002, p. 40–73).
Indigenous sociology constructs sociology as a discipline that is culture‐specific, i.e., it represents theories that
capture particular experiences and practices of various communities and thus is particularistic in character. These
practices and experiences are related to specific values, and the indigenization of social sciences should thus be
based on understanding these particular values. I argue in this paper that Srinivas incorporates such an indigenous
perspective in three ways. First through his theory of social change and his use of the concepts of Sanskritisation,
westernisation and that of the dominant caste; second, through the use of the perspective of social anthropology
and thus of ethnography or ‘field view’ to assess these changes and third, through his affirmation that the village
should become a site for understanding changes in India and thus for doing ethnography.
It is important to understand the context that defines Srinivas’s theoretical and methodological departures.
Firstly, against the trend sweeping the world in the early fifties which propagated that American sociology had
created the most important theoretical paradigm to study sociology; Srinivas not only raised objections to this
trend but argued for a different point of view and a distinct new position. In his opinion, the acceptance of the
American version of doing sociology would be “a national intellectual disaster of the first magnitude” (Srini-
vas, 2002, p. 465). This position was in continuity with already established traditions of sociology in India and held
by diverse scholars such as G.S. Ghurye, Srinivas's mentor in his earlier days, and on the other by D.P. Mukherjee
and Radhakamal Mukherjee15, all three of whom were concerned with building the foundations of sociology and
anthropology from distinctive Indian material.
No wonder Srinivas declared in 1952 that he saw his role as constructing a type of sociology that 'we want'
(Srinivas, 2002, p. 465). The phrase meant that not only did he want to use the 'Indian' experience to frame so-
ciological principles but also that he wanted to set the terms of how to understand, evaluate and comprehend this
experience and consequently elaborate new sociological principles attuned to Indian experience. He was clear that
sociology had to move away from the study of 'preliterate communities' in India, this being the study of tribes, and
the importance given by experts in tribal studies to 'culture'. This should be, according to Srinivas, be substituted by
borrowing from Radcliffe‐Brown, his notion of 'structure'. He felt the need to study Indian society as a 'totality', a
study which would integrate the various groups in its inter‐relationship, whether tribes, peasants or various cults
and sects. Social anthropology thus was the alternative for Indian sociologists.
For Srinivas, the theoretical emphasis on structure has to be related to method. In a seminal article published in
1954, Srinivas stated, 'An attempt is made in this essay to consider the relation between caste as it is in fact, and
not as it is subsumed by the traditional concept of Varna' (Srinivas, 2002, p. 166). With this statement, a new
method for assessing Indian society was inaugurated, now known as the 'field view' as against the earlier one,
known as the 'book view' (the Indological method). In a series of articles written in the decade of the 1950s, Srinivas
elaborated the nature of the field view and its roots in the use of theory and methodology institutionalized in the
structural‐functional theory of Radcliffe‐Brown and Malinowski's method of ethnography. At the same time, Sri-
nivas adjusted their theories and methodologies to create, in his own words, a new version of the discipline of
sociology and to remake it into social anthropology.
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Of particular significance in understanding Srinivas's departures from the Indological method promoted by
Ghurye are two articles mentioned above, 'Social Anthropology and Sociology' and 'The Social System of a Mysore
Village'. Srinivas starts by distinguishing the social anthropological theory and method, and juxtaposes it against
that of the theories and methods of physical anthropology. He indicates how the orientation of earlier Indian
anthropology towards physical anthropology and ethnology tied it to an analysis of culture rather than society and
against an assessment of the latter’s structure. He also is critical of practices existent contemporary sociology in
India, such as social philosophy and social work. In addition to the critique of American sociology and particularly its
use of the survey method, he affirms the need for Indian sociology to incorporate the anthropological method of
ethnography into sociology to comprehend the specific reality of contemporary India. From this logic flows the
contention that there was no difference between sociology and social anthropology which he understood in the
following terms:

A modern sociologist regards a society as a system or unity, the various parts of which are related to
each other. He considers that any single aspect of society abstracted from its matrix of sociological
reality, is unintelligible except in relation to the other aspects. And even when he is writing only about
a single aspect of a society like religion or law or morals, he brings to bear on his study and his
knowledge of the total society. The importance of such a perspective cannot be over‐emphasised, and
it can only be achieved by the intensive study over a long period of time, of a single small society
(Srinivas, 2002, p. 460)

No wonder he later admitted that,

…it was from two micro studies, one of the Coorgs, …and the other of the village Rampura, …that
concepts such as Sanskritisation and Westernisation, dominant caste, vote bank, and the book view
versus the field view, emerged, and they continue to be used in the analysis of cultural and social
change in different parts of India. It is well to remember here that in spite of its enormous diversity,
India is one culture and this is visible in every village (Srinivas, 2002, p. 566).

One of the first questions asked by social anthropologists according to Srinivas, is about the primary unit of
one’s society. According to Srinivas, in case of Indian society this unit is caste. But what is caste? How do we
understand it as a system? The word ‘casta’ as we know was adapted from the Portuguese and Spanish words and
for many earlier sociologists including G. S. Ghurye it implies ‘varna’ (order, type, colour), a word used regularly in
Hindu scriptures (the book view). In the essay, ‘Varna and Caste’ (2002, pp. 166–172), Srinivas asks whether the
‘varna’ has any empirical verifiability in India today. He initiates a methodological discussion on the caste system in
India and suggests that if one does an empirical analysis (the field view) and if the anthropologist uses participant
observation to comprehend and assess the way the people know themselves, then caste means 'jati' (group defined
through birth). When Srinivas discusses the caste system, in 'The Social System of the Mysore Village', he does it by
evaluating it within the limits of the village.
As against Ghurye whose definition of caste remained couched in the Indological standpoint Srinivas’s use of
the method of the field view allowed the study of caste to be re‐examined with a new lens. Srinivas used the site of
the village to study caste, divided groups in the village in terms of jati and by occupation, and related these to
agricultural activities. Through this process he showed the organic integration of castes with each other and the
subsequent relationship with each other in functional terms, whose principles he draws from Indian civilisation
(Patel, 1998). Herein lies the basis of his indigenous perspective.
Srinivas’s indigenous approach can be best seen in his elaboration of the concepts of Sanskritisation, west-
ernization and the dominant caste. Srinivas suggests that (a) the Indian civilisation had always promoted the
processes of change and that these could be seen in caste mobility; (b) that this mobility, through Sanskritisation
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was possible more for middle ranks of the caste system rather than the lowest ranks; (c) Sanskritisation implied
adopting behaviours and habits of upper castes such as vegetarianism and the various customs and rituals of
Brahminic way of life; (d) that because the British introduced new technologies, such as railways, telegraph and
telephone press, radio communication systems and political ideas of representation‐these allowed the proliferation
of literacy and the Sanskritization process increased; (e) another form of mobility was westernization which was
mainly used by the Brahmins by adopting British food habits, ways of life, behaviours and customs obtaining these
through education and thus obtaining secular appointments, such as that of lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats etc.; and
(f) that it is possible that this would lead to other middle ranking groups to emulate the Brahmins and over time the
entire society becoming western: “Sanskritisation is an essential preliminary to westernization” (Srinivas, 2002, p.
217).16
In Srinivas’s oeuvre the caste system is far from a rigid system in which the position of each component caste is
fixed for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially so in the middle levels of the hierarchy. A low
caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting sanskritic habits,
such as vegetarianism and teetotalism, and by adopting sanskritic rituals. In short, lower castes can adopt customs,
rites, and beliefs of the Brahmins, and as well the Brahminic way of life and thereby upgrade its status.

Evaluating Srinivas’s Indigenous Theory

Srinivas’s theory of social change is about mobility and reference group behaviour. This has been questioned by
those who have studied the contemporary problems facing ex‐untouchables and the lower castes of India (Pan-
dian, 2002)17. While these scholars suggest that the post‐independent modern processes have re‐institutionalised
discrimination, ensured the continuity of upper caste domination and the marginalisation of the lower castes in
terms of the economy and the polity (Jodhka, 2014), Srinivas has instead highlighted the continuous adaptive
character of the caste system and its ability to adjust to modern processes of change. He has presented to us with
the two paths to mobility, that of Sanskritization (emulation of upper caste/dominant practices), and Westerni-
zation (adoption of Western technology, education, 'life‐style', values). The latter path of mobility he argues is
restricted to the Brahmins, and some individuals in the upper castes while Sanskritization is practiced by the lower
castes. He almost provides us with a sequential theory of modernity quite similar to the modernization theories
promoted by sociologists of North America in the 50s and 60s. (Oommen, 2008). For Srinivas, the caste system of
today contrasts with that of the earlier versions of the system, which respected different occupations and ways of
living. These changes make caste adaptive to new influences, open to modifications and yet a system that cannot be
completely transformed or can completely vanish.
In Srinivas' work, the structure of Indian society determined by caste emerges as a kind of adjustment
mechanism that expands and fits into macro changes as these envelop jatis in search of new status positions. This
civilizational approach, borrowed from Ghurye and now reframed through structural functionalism, allowed Sri-
nivas to posit an adaptive caste structure, which has perennially been reproducing itself over centuries—a theory of
incremental social change. Sociologists in India have since adopted this perspective as a way of identifying and
practising sociology in India, despite various differences regarding theory and approach.
Srinivas's indigenous perspective was unclear as to which system he is studying, that of the village or caste. One
presumes that he is discussing the caste system because of his earlier discussions on this theme. But the village is
also seen as a system, viz., the title of the paper mentioned earlier. The lack of theoretical clarity on this issue leads
to a teleological position whereby castes can only be understood sociologically as a system in the context of the
village, while the village in turn can be assessed in the context of the castes. The collapse of the social to the spatial
also made possible an exclusion of groups and communities within the nation‐state whose culture and practices
could not be explained by the caste system, or the dual system of 'varna' and 'jati' as Srinivas understood it
(Patel, 2005). The issue is not merely that of sociological conservatism which many commentators view as deep‐
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seated in functionalism, but is a larger question of exclusion of a number of groups (tribes, religious, and ethnic
groups other than caste) who define themselves differently and who are eliminated from the sociological space.
Srinivas did not agree with the position that the village was a self‐sufficient and isolated unit, but the emphasis on
the village as a unit of ethnographic study made his paradigmatic principles contradicting his avowed intentions
(Patel, 2005).
There have been extensive critical comments on Srinivas's concept of Sanskritization and westernization from
Marxist (the lack of recognition of jati's placement in the economic structure and the processes of politics and thus
its relationship with classes) and from Dalit (Pandian, 2002) and feminist approaches. Today ethnography has
acknowledged the power dimension in the relationship between the insider and the outsider and the politics in the
construction of knowledge of the other. What is the implication of this sociology? In this sociology, we lose not only
a sense of history but also the analysis of colonialism as a force and process of destruction and creation of dis-
courses regarding the binaries of modernity‐ tradition, of capitalism as a generator of change that distributes
rewards unequally, and of development and planning as a process of elite‐organized ideology of refashioning so-
ciety. Srinivas' sociology does not present us with concepts and theory that can evaluate and understand the
contemporary processes of change and conflict in society. In order to have this repertoire we have to accept that
change, especially in the epoch of the world system, as exogenous, market oriented and one which distributes
rewards unequally, and thereby constructs localities and regions, classes and ethnic groups in unequal relations
with one another.
Srinivas’s perspective, fitted in with the upper caste and class vision of nation of the early seventies and his
views on caste, his ideas on social change in contemporary India, and his concept of dominant caste soon became
part of the representations that defined the world view during the Nehruvian period. It also became the new
academic language of practising sociology as he intervened and organized various initiatives that helped to
consolidate this position. He saw sociologists taking a proactive role and argued that sociologists need to assess the
processes of change which he called 'a quiet revolution, bloodless, continuous, progressively more inclusive, and
faster' (Srinivas, 1992), and also mediate between the public and government.
In what ways did sociologists in India react to these processes? By the late 1970s and early 1980s it was clear
(at least to some sociologists) that the discipline was caught into problems. For many, this problem was related to
the methodology being used: that of participant observation. Saberwal (1983) was one of the first to criticise the
sole reliance on participant observation to study social change in India. The latter does not allow, he argued, its user
to present a theoretically and methodologically challenged perspective to assess and examine the complex pro-
cesses of conflict and consensus at work in India. The discipline needed a language that can study the complex
macro interfaces between groups and processes which often were in a relationship of involution. Oommen (2007
[1983]) continued this argument by highlighting how the unit of analysis is critical in understanding contemporary
modern processes. It is possible to examine family, caste and kinship through small units of study. But this is not so
in the case of critical issues of contemporary salience, such as the impact of partition on the Indian nation, or the
question why untouchability continues to be practiced in contemporary India.
The same argument was reiterated by Dhanagare (1980, p. 25), who added to this debate by pointing his
criticism to the functionalist theory, which he argued could not assess conflicts and contestations that are becoming
part of the Indian experience of modernity. Sociology, he argued, needs to be understood as social criticism. If
historical analysis is used to assess the changes, then sociologists would be able to grasp the interrelationship
between macro and micro processes. For Saberwal (1983), the problem was also related to the way the method of
participant observation was conceptualised and institutionalised across departments, within the teaching and
learning processes. With non‐trained teachers as interlocutions of the teaching process, increasingly description
rather than analysis dominated the teaching of this method. This pattern got inflated with simultaneous expansion
of departments. In the 1950s, he stated, an idea gained currency, that modernity can be organised through the
expansion of universities rather than institutionalising it through the creation of a group of professionals that can
understand the strengths and weaknesses of the perspectives and methodologies being used, which would then
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transmit these in professional ways. To Saberwal the problem thus relates to the Indian notions of modernity. Thus,
the expansion of universities and the institutionalisation of Srinivas’s approach as the dominant paradigm bred its
own contradictions. Increasingly, the sociologist/ethnographer‐teacher within departments encouraged doctoral
students to use the perspective of the ‘insider’ and study one’s own community and thereby do research. Overtime,
learning of sociology became a ‘soft experience’ (Saberwal, 1983, p. 308). If sociology in India could boast some of
the best in the field, it was also producing a large mass of professionally untrained students and thus teachers/
researchers.

The Nationalist‐Indigenous and its Roots in Colonial M Odernity

Certainly, the formulations of indigenous sociologies created pathways to interrogate European universals.
Through a discussion of representations of its nations/communities, its cultural history and social life, indigenous
sociology proposed new perspectives, theories and concepts regarding the social and related these to its
geographical regions. Indigenous sociologies gave themselves an alternate epistemic voice to displace the power of
northern sociology and its language of ‘universal sociology’ and to substitute it with alternate ways of doing so-
ciology outside the north/west. However, indigenous sociologies also retain two seminal characteristics of meth-
odological nationalism built‐into earlier European sociology: the taken for granted‐ness of official cultural/
philosophical discourses, agendas, loyalties, and histories of its nations/communities; and territorialisation, the
reduction of social sciences to the boundaries of the nation‐state. Though indigenous sociologies de‐centred the
‘universals’ of northern positions, they remained trapped in the universals constituted by their own culturist‐
nationalist positions. No wonder, indigenous sociologies (in a similar fashion to early sociological theory) repre-
sented racist/ethnic/patriarchal perceptions of their regions/nation‐states (Patel, 2013).
This recognition that indigenous scholarship has limitations has come with the growth of the subaltern studies
school and its critique of nationalism. Since the early 80s when it started publishing essays on the subaltern
consciousness in India, this project positioned itself to provide an alternative to nationalist historiography, which as
mentioned above, was part of the larger project to create indigenous nationalist social sciences for India. Ranajit
Guha’s promotion of subaltern historiography was to create an alternative to both colonial and nationalist per-
spectives of the history of India, and to argue that there is an organic epistemic linkage between the latter two.
Guha argued that nationalist historiography assimilated the common‐sense notions of colonial political modernity
when it analysed nationalist politics from the viewpoint of colonial political activities and its institutions. Nationalist
historiography thus did not take into account politics that did not resonate with colonial and nationalist ideas which
he argued the subaltern were framing through a different language of politics and power, a language which could be
discerned outside this episteme. As a consequence, the subaltern theorists perceived nationalism and its politics as
being elitist and as against that of the subaltern whose politics, notions of power and organization of protest were
unique and distinctly different, none of which could be captured by nationalist historiography (Guha, 1982, pp. 3–4).
No wonder Partha Chatterjee (1986, 1997), one of the important members of this programme, argues that Indian
nationalism was derivative in nature, that is, its constitution was connected to colonial structures and it mirrored
these.
It is in this context one should read Partha Chatterjee’s concept of ‘colonial difference’18. For Chatterjee,
colonialism is fundamentally flawed not only because it is a cruel and unjust system but because it is inherently
contradictory. Colonialism claims to be a modern regime of power which can encourage colonial subjects to self‐
improve and develop, so that they become more rational and leave their "primitive superstition" behind. However,
it uses racism to legitimize its rule and to ensure that the state perpetuates the distinction between the colonizer
and colonized, between the ruler and ruled. Thus, colonialism according to Chatterjee is simultaneously stating two
ideas to the natives: self‐improve using colonial cultural resources but remain subordinate and suppliant to colo-
nialism. This distinction Chatterjee calls the rule of colonial difference and suggests that it organizes power and
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knowledge in the colonized country while it unleashes violence against the colonial subjects when they demand
freedom and self‐rule. Chatterjee suggests that within Indian nationalism the principle of colonial difference has
been reproduced as binaries/dualities. Chatterjee’s binaries distinguish and separate the two dimensions of
knowledge conceived by nationalism – that of the material domain, the knowledge of the economy, statecraft,
science and technology from the spiritual and the cultural. Nationalist ideas he argues, emulates the European in
the material and political spheres and that of Hindu religion, of caste and of extended family structures in the
personal sphere. Given the project of creating indigenous social sciences was a nationalist project drawing its in-
tellectual resources from nationalist ideas, when the disciplines of economics and political science were established
in India, the European notions of economy and state became the basis for structuring these disciplines while when it
came to the social, nationalist intellectuals reflected Orientalist Hindu perceptions to affirm an understanding of
the latter (Patel, 2013, 2014, 2017).
Nationalist oriented sociologists in India wholeheartedly embraced the Hindu cultural and spiritual as being the
content of their domain and institutionalized it in the curriculum being formulated as University education and
within research institutions as these expanded. As a consequence, the economic and political were vacuumed out
from the discipline which now postulated that India was a traditional society, steeped in its past rather than a
society confronting capitalism as institutionalized by the power and domination of colonialism. Indigenous social
sciences reproduced ‘the rule of colonial difference’ in interesting and novel ways (Patel, 2006, 2017).
Sociology in India I have argued drew its concepts and theories from the past, from that of India’s rich histories
and its civilisation. They suggested that though the Indian civilisation had suffered a decline, it was essentially and
fundamentally sound and was embodied with much strength. These strengths had kept the ‘Indian’ people together
over centuries and these ideas will continue to bind them together in the future. They also contended that Indian
society had a distinct character and history and had evolved in interaction with its people and its agencies. Indians
and its social sciences needed to mobilise their society’s creative resources for its regeneration without losing its
coherence and inner balance. They also cautioned Indians not to imitate the West, take its language and its values.
India has to work out its own salvation in its own terms: its temperaments, traditions and circumstances
(Patel, 2013, 2017).
How do we characterize this knowledge/discipline? I have used the concept of colonial modernity19 to un-
derstand this process through which epistemically and institutionally contemporary sociological knowledge for-
mation in India and elsewhere were constituted. Colonial modernity, I have argued, is a discursive term/concept,
that is, it is not only about modernity experienced in the colony or in the period of colonialism. Rather, it is the way
colonialism constituted ideas, ideologies and knowledge systems of the ‘natives’ to refract and make invisible the
‘modern’ contours of everyday experience of the people who were colonised. The study of sociology was to
comprehend a society called ‘traditional’ through three institutions, that of family‐marriage‐kinship, that of caste,
and lastly that of belief and religiosities, all of which were thought to be located geographically in village India. The
study of the modern in the form of the industrial and the urban was given very little importance (Patel, 2018).
The project of indigenous sociology has paradoxically, I have argued, reproduced the language of colonialism
(Patel, 2006, 2017, 2018). As a consequence, the episteme of colonial modernity has become part of the ‘back-
ground understandings’ and ‘beliefs’ of doing anthropology and sociology in India (Patel, 2017). In turn, this
perception has directed the way research and teaching was and is organized wherein not only the nature of Indian
modern has not been explored; but sociologists more often than not have refrained from studying the social and
political dimensions of power and its relationship with the caste, class, and patriarchal orientation of the
contemporary nation‐state. As a consequence, sociological knowledge as part of colonial politics of rule was
expressed and organised in terms of values that were in opposition to modernity and used disciplinary practices
such as Indology and ethnography to elaborate these positions. It was codified with the help of native intelligentsia,
especially the Brahmins and represented the social order as visualised by this group. It thereby mitigated an ex-
amination of the way classification systems of the state organised new forms of inequalities in the colonial territory.
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Singh, 2014 a new rightist regime that uses Hindu majoritarian politics to comprehend the Indian social has
come to power and is reproducing the principle of colonial difference in its strategies of rule; the use of capitalist
logic in understanding the economy and the Hindu traditional in comprehending the social and cultural. As we see
the episteme of colonial modernity being revived in popular and political language the crisis that Indian as a nation
is confronting is not only related to the academic discipline of sociology but it has engulfed the entire country.

ENDNOTES
1
Sociology in India had a contemporary presence with the early departments in Europe and in the USA‐Chicago’s
department was established in 1892, that of Bordeaux in 1895 while Max Weber set one up in Munich in 19191, the
same year as the one established in Bombay University.
2
Mukerji specially mentions the legislations to control population, to change the Hindu personal laws regarding marriage,
divorce, adoption and property rights, the Zamindari Abolition Act and the formation of the Planning Commission to
bring about planned social change in India.
3
Though in terms of proportion of the country’s population, the numbers remain very small.
4
The term school in this paper is used to mean an epistemic community. On the debate whether there have been schools
of thought in India, see Dhanagare 2011
5
This journal was started in 1957 and was discontinued in 1966. A new series of the journal was initiated in 1967 under
the leadership of T.N. Madan and since then has continued a debate initiated by Louis Dumont titled, For a sociology of
India, in its pages. In the first article of CIS’s first issue titled “For a Sociology of India’, Dumont (1967: 7) proclaims that
“in principle, that a Sociology of India lies at the point of confluence of Sociology and Indology” and that Indology leads
scholars to accept the unity of India, “India as one” (Dumont, 1967, p. 9). This unity is about ideas and values and thus
makes “Indian society as a whole the object of study” (Dumont, 1967, p. 9). The core values defining India according to
Dumont is: “On the whole, the essential form of the system is of a hierarchical polarity. One might say that India has
institutionalised inequality just as we are trying to do the same with equality”(Dumont, 1967, p. 18)
6
While I have outlined six trends, Tom Bottomore writing in 1962, suggested that Indian sociology manifested three
trends: the social anthropological and ethnographic approach; the philosophical approach embodied by the Lucknow
school and the structural functional approach promoting quantitative analysis.
7
The first conference took place in 1955. See Patel, 2002 for the history of the two associations and the differences
between them.
8
V.K.R.V. Rao, the first Director of Delhi School of Economics envisaged it to have a reputation and aura similar to
London School of Economics. Soon some of the best names in economics in India were associated with it. It also had 3
other departments, sociology, geography and commerce and economics. Economics and sociology and not geography
and commerce became important over time in the country’s academic life. Kumar & Mookherjee, 1995. On the way, Rao
recruited Srinivas to build its sociology department, see Srinivas (2002)
9
In the post independent period, Delhi became the city of state funded educational institutions and coincided with the
decreasing importance of Bombay as India’s intellectual capital.
10
Though established in 1953, the Act incorporating the UGC was passed in the Indian parliament in 1956. UGC is an apex
body for university education in India, charged with the promotion and coordination of university education. It de-
termines and maintains standards of teaching, examination and research. The first committee to evaluate the teaching of
sociology was established in 1961 and was chaired by M.N. Srinivas (UGC, 1966). A second committee was formed to
standardise curriculum in sociology in 1974 and was led by M.S.A. Rao, a senior colleague of M.N. Srinivas who also
chaired the first ICSSR bibliographic survey on sociology and social anthropology. This UGC report was published in
1978 (UGC, 1978). A third committee brought out a report in 1982 (UGC, 1982). Lastly a fourth report was published in
2001 (UGC 2001).
11
The first survey in sociology and social anthropology was published by the ICSSR in 1973. The second was published in
1979 and the third in 1999. Recently in 2014, the ICSSR published the fourth survey (Singh, 2014). Srinivas was one of
the five signatories of the Memorandum of Association that set up the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR)
– the others being four economists which included V.K.R.V. Rao, the economist and Vice Chancellor of Delhi University
who recruited Srinivas. – and, while data on disciplinary funding is not available, one former member‐secretary of the
ICSSR suggests that sociologists were, after the economists, the main recipients of research funds from the ICSSR in its
initial years. Interview with D. N. Dhanagare (Member‐Secretary of ICSSR from March 1991 to June 1993) on 17
February 2001, Endnote No. 18 (Patel, 2002, p. 282).
12
On the history of the subaltern studies see Ludden (2001).
13
The promotion of indigeneity and the standardisation of teaching curriculum also led to a conflict regarding language of
instruction in Universities with the regional elite in State (provincial) financed Universities demanding regional language
instruction. Given that there was little intellectual investment in creating regional language resources in India’s 22
12
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regional languages, this created hierarchical divisions especially in social sciences between English‐speaking metro-
politan and central universities vis‐à‐vis State financed regional language Universities (Jayaram, 2011).
14
Satish Saberwal inaugurated the debate on academic colonialism. See the special issue of the journal Seminar, 112,
December 1968.
15
On D. P. Mukerjee and Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Lucknow school of sociology see Madan (2011a, 2011b) and
Thakur (2014).
16
By late 1970s with the growth of Dalit movement (a movement of Scheduled Castes) Srinivas’s formulations started
being termed as Brahminic. See Pandian (2002)
17
Pandian (2002: 1738) quotes from a review written by Edmund Leach on Srinivas’s book, Caste in Modern India which
Leach suggests that Srinivas was ‘Brahmancentric’. Thus Pandian asks whether Srinivas would have written the same
book if he was a shudra (lower caste)
18
The concept of colonial difference is also part of the repertoire of concepts used by Walter Mignolo, one of the most
important scholars of the decolonial research programme. His formulation of colonial difference is based on his eval-
uation of the Latin American experience of settled colonialism and is used in terms of the binary of imperial vs colonised.
19
Chatterjee and other subaltern scholars as well as their critics have used the concept of colonial modernity to imply a
modernity designed by colonialism. However, my use of this concept is specific to the framing of sociology in India.

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How to cite this article: Patel S. Nationalist Ideas and the Colonial Episteme: The Antinomies Structuring
Sociological Traditions of India. J Hist Sociol. 2021;1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12311

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