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Article on Social Movement Studies-Rajesh

Article in Asian Journal of Social Science · April 2021

DOI: 10.1016/j.ajss.2020.10.001

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Asian Journal of Social Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ajss

Social movement studies in India, within and beyond sociology: Proposing

postcolonial political sociology as an evolving framework
Rajesh KP
Department of Social Sciences, Maharashtra National Law University, Moraj Design and Decorator (DnD) Building, Mihan Fly Over, Wardha Road, Khapri, Nagpur,
India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: The social movement theories, particularly emerged since the late 1960s and the empirical studies informed
Social movements by these theories occupy a decisive space in the current sociological studies of social movements. Often, the
Postcolonial political sociology theories that emerged in the American and European contexts overlooked the significance of ‘political sociology’
Civil society
as a theoretical terrain while conceptualizing contemporary social movements. Thus, this paper attempted to
Political society
reinvent the significance of political sociology in two-ways: a) it critically engaging with the classical tradition of
Social and Political
political sociology; b) critical scrutiny of the major trends appeared in the sub-field of social movements within the
disciplinary domain of sociology in India since the 1980s has been undertaken. Given this, the paper recognizes
the theoretical urge for a new framework to understand social movements in reference to the specificities of the
non-Western societies like India, and thereby proposes an approach termed as the postcolonial political sociology
of social movements.

The emergence of diverse social movements from the 1960s, par-
ticularly in the context of Europe and America, greatly influenced in
shaping the dominant theories of social movements. Informed by these
developments in the Euro-American context, the field of social move-
ments became a vibrant area of research in postcolonial societies, in-
cluding India, since the 1980s. Since then, particularly during the last
four decades, Indian society witnessed the emergence of a plethora of
social movements in various domains of life and raised diverse socio-
political, economic, and cultural issues. Given this broader theoretical
and empirical context, this paper attempted to critically scrutinize the
major trends unfolded in the sub-field of social movements within the
disciplinary domain of sociology since the 1980s. Based on this, the
paper argues that the theoretical paradigms proposed in many of the
studies published in the above mentioned period are mostly inadequate
to capture the complex non-Western socio-political and economic re-
alities where the movements emerged and evolved further. The most
contemporary social movement scholars like Fadaee (2017) discussed
the absence of scholarship on Southern social movements in the generic
theories on social movements and emphasized the significance of sys-
tematically including the diverse trajectory of social movements from
the South in Social movement theory. While acknowledging the impor-
tance of this observation, the purpose of this article going beyond that
by articulating the necessity to surpass the social movement framework
in order to conceptualize social movements. Therefore, this paper rec-
ognizes the theoretical urge for a new framework to understand social
movements in reference to the specificities of the non-Western societies
like India, and thereby offers a more contemporary approach termed as
postcolonial political sociology1 of social movements.
This paper is divided into three sections. The first section primarily
focuses on the history of the emergence of social movement studies as
an independent sub-field of Indian sociology in the 1980s. This section
argues, nonetheless, sociologists mainly focused on peasant movements
in their studies during this period, they overlooked the contributions
of subaltern studies in conceptualizing social movements. By examin-
ing the shift in movement studies from the 1990s to the present context,
this section poses two fundamental questions: a) how far the studies pro-
duced in this period (1990s to the present) succeeded in conceptualizing
the movements and collective actions emerged, especially in response
to the capitalist neoliberal regime? b) How much intellectual resources
have been offered by these studies to the sub-field of social movement
studies in India to promote its growth? The final and the most impor-
tant section of this paper offered a contemporary framework called post-
colonial political sociology. The purpose of this section is not to histori-
1
Modern (to a greater extent classical also) political sociology can be broadly
defined by looking into the central task it has undertaken. If we keep that in
mind, it can be conceived as an attempt “to explore and explain the relation-
ship between politics and society, between social and political institutions, and
between social and political behaviour” (Rush, 1992: 15 Cited in Taylor, 2010:
15).

E-mail address: rajeshkp2008@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajss.2020.10.001
Received 2 March 2020; Received in revised form 30 September 2020; Accepted 13 October 2020
Available online xxx
1568-4849/© 2021 Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: R. KP, Social movement studies in India, within and beyond sociology: Constructing postcolonial political sociology as
an evolving framework, Asian Journal of Social Science, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajss.2020.10.001
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