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CSI0010.1177/0011392120931143Current SociologyPatel

Article CS

Current Sociology

Sociology’s encounter with the

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DOI: 10.1177/0011392120931143
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coloniality, extraversion and

colonial modernity1

Sujata Patel
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India

Abstract
How did the process of decolonization reframe the social sciences? This article
maps the interventions made by theorists of and from the ex-colonial countries in
reconceptualizing sociology both as practice and as an episteme. It argues that there are
geographically varied and intellectually diverse decolonial approaches being formulated
using sociological theory to critique the universals propounded by the traditions of
western sociology/social sciences; that these diverse knowledges are connected
through colonial and global circuits and that these create knowledge geographies; that
collectively these diverse intellectual positions argue that sociology/social sciences are
constituted in and within the politics of ‘difference’ organized within colonial, nationalist
and global geopolitics; that this ‘difference’ is being reproduced in everyday knowledge
practices and is being structured through the political economy of knowledge; and that
the destabilization of this power structure and democratization of this knowledge is
possible only when there is a fulsome interrogation of this political economy, and its
everyday practices of knowledge production within universities and research institutes.
It argues that this critique needs to be buffered by the constitution of alternate networks
of circulation of this knowledge.

Keywords
Colonial modernity, coloniality, decolonialization, extraversion, indigenous sociology

Corresponding author:
Sujata Patel, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Ganeshkhind, Pune, 411007, India.
Email: patel.sujata09@gmail.com
2 Current Sociology 00(0)

Introduction
Decolonization, the process through which the colonial/imperialist states withdrew from
colonized countries, was initiated soon after the end of the Second World War. 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 would need to undertake to become autono-
mous 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.2 A sub-
sequent 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, economists3 came to be immediately recruited to this national
intellectual project. Over time, these ideas had their 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 knowledge
systems.
In this article I discuss the different ways in which the decolonial perspective has
encountered and confronted the traditions of sociology articulated within Europe over
the last seven to eight decades. It also contends that there are many different and distinct
perspectives associated with the decolonial position and that the decolonial perspective
should not be only equated with the Latin American decolonial research programme as it
is being done today (Escobar, 2007). This article highlights the two positions that have
evolved since the 1940s within the ex-colonial regions and countries. The first position
is that of indigenous sociology. Here the decolonial interrogation was framed in a nation-
alist perspective. Indigenous sociology questions the conceptual validity, political legiti-
macy and ethical grounding of the post-Enlightenment western civilization and its
knowledges and asserts instead the ‘difference’ in understanding of the national ‘social’.
It grounds 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 mobilized their sociologists to draw from their territorially
bound cultural traditions to reconstruct alternate, autonomous and sovereign perspec-
tives (Atal, 1981). These efforts have been further intensified in the last two to three
decades, as the indigenous perspective has been embraced by new cultural and religious
communities, for example, the ‘first nations’/the fourth world (Tuhiwai Smith, 2008
[1999]) who are confronting the ‘developmental’ projects promoted by contemporary
western/World Bank experts.
The second position emerges in the early 1980s and is associated with three sets of
scholars located in three different regions of the ex-colonial world. This article makes a
Patel 3

synthesis of the arguments presented by the Latin American scholars with those made by
scholars from the Indian subaltern studies school and mediates these with those of the
West African philosopher Paulin Hountondji. I contend that these different scholars have
used (independently of each other) Marxist ideas on social structuring of knowledge to
make a methodological and epistemic critique of European and western sociology/social
sciences together with the nationalist-indigenous knowledge systems. I deliberate on
some of the theoretical ideas of Partha Chatterjee, a key member of the subaltern studies
project and assess the significance of his concept of colonial difference (1993 [1986],
1997) for a critique of the nationalist-indigenous. Chatterjee provides, the article con-
tends, a framework to comprehend the intimate linkages of power that have organized
the episteme of the west and the east through colonialism and nationalism. I distinguishe
his understanding of the colonial from the coloniality/modernity thesis of Anibal Quijano
(2007) and Enrique Dussel (1993, 2000) and in turn the concept of externalization pre-
sented by Paulin Hountondji (1997). These distinct positions highlight the colonial con-
nection that has organized ‘native’ knowledges through the circulation of knowledge.
The section concludes with the argument that Hountondji’s critique of indigenous knowl-
edge and his assertion of the endogenous alternative provides a strategy for moving for-
ward from the frames of Eurocentrism discussed by the above-mentioned scholars.
While mapping the many permutations and combinations of the decolonial critique of
western sociology, I make a plea for a decolonial methodology, which combines the fol-
lowing multiple claims: (a) that there are geographically varied and intellectually diverse
decolonial critiques being formulated using sociological theory to critique the universals
propounded by the traditions of western sociology/social sciences; (b) that though the
decolonial critiques are presented as binaries: east vs west or south vs north (Connell,
2007; de Sousa Santos, 2014; Quijano, 2000), these engage with the heritage of aca-
demic colonialism in each specific nation-state/region/territory in distinct time periods
and in relation to specific colonial states; (c) that some of these recent critiques also
interrogate their own distinct ‘native’ scholarships and question both colonial/western
and native/indigenous scholars who propagate these; (d) that collectively these diverse
intellectual positions argue that sociology/social sciences are constituted in and within
the politics of ‘difference’ organized within colonial, nationalist and global geopolitics;
(e) that this ‘difference’ is being reproduced in everyday knowledge practices and is
being structured through the political economy of knowledge. I suggest that these differ-
ent knowledges are connected through colonial and global circuits and have thereby
created knowledge geographies. Most importantly, I argue that the destabilization of this
power structure and democratization of this knowledge is possible only when there is a
fulsome interrogation of this political economy, its everyday practices of knowledge
production within universities and research institutes and when this critique is buffered
by the constitution of alternate networks of circulation of this knowledge.
The article is divided into three sections. The first section offers a perspective on
indigenous knowledge through a discussion on two thinkers, DP Mukherji from India
and Akinsola Akiwowo from Nigeria.4 This helps the argument to move to the next sec-
tion, which discusses the contemporary deliberations within the decolonial thought. This
section debates the concepts and theories of coloniality/modernity and exteriority/interi-
ority, endogeneity and extraversion and of colonial modernity.
4 Current Sociology 00(0)

Indigenous sociologies, methodological nationalism and

alternative sociologies
By the late 1950s–1960s, there was a clear understanding among the scholars of the
newly independent Asian and African nation-states that indigenous sociology should be
promoted and that it would imply (a) the constitution of social science concepts in local
regional languages with the use of local resources; (b) the promotion of research by
insiders/citizens rather than outsiders/non-citizens; (c) the determination of research pri-
orities in terms of national priorities that in turn can aid the nation-state in evaluating its
developmental programmes for national reconstruction; and lastly, (d) formulating
autonomous and alternate theoretical and methodological paradigms in terms of local/
national philosophical and cultural legacies (Atal, 1981). I have argued earlier, that these
efforts can be perceived as using the framework of ‘methodological nationalism’ to
organize alternate sociologies.5 Indigenous sociologies trod the same path as European
sociology did in late 19th and early 20th centuries when methodological nationalism
promoted the colonial processes but, in this case, methodological nationalism encour-
aged a critique of European sociologies. As a consequence, while European sociologies
remained unconscious of their nationalist universalist origins (Wimmer and Glick
Schiller, 2002), indigenous sociologies stated their own ‘universals’ through self-con-
scious proto-nationalist/community-based culturist positions (Patel, 2015, 2018).
The formulations of indigenous sociologies created pathways to interrogate European
universals. Through a discussion of representations of its nations/communities, its cul-
tural 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 north-
ern sociology6 and its language of ‘universal sociology’ and to substitute it with alternate
ways of doing sociology outside the north/west.
Below I explore (very briefly) how these characteristics were reflected in the work of
two sociologists: the first from India, DP Mukerji (1894–1961)7 and the second from
Nigeria, Akinsola Akiwowo (1922–2014), and also evaluate how contemporary scholars
have tried to resolve the methodological problems that their scholarship has presented in
order to provide a relatively more incisive and complete argument regarding autonomous
sociologies (Alatas SF, 2003). The consideration of ideas of these scholars is important
to identify the homologies in writings of indigenous sociologists.
Both Mukerji (Madan, 2013; Mukerji, 1952) and Akiwowo (1986) contend that soci-
ology is a discipline that is culture-specific, i.e. it represents theories that capture particu-
lar experiences and practices of various communities and thus is particularistic in
character. These practices and experiences are related to specific values, and the indi-
genization of social sciences should thus be based on understanding of these particular
values. Mukerji and Akiwowo’s mission is to organize new theories and perspectives that
reflect these practices and experiences of their cultures and to simultaneously develop
new methodological and epistemological precepts to examine them. However it is impor-
tant to note that in spite of the above-mentioned similarities in their project, the philo-
sophical and cultural roots of their scholarship are in different knowledge traditions,
distinctive to their two regions, India and North Africa and to their affiliated groups.
Patel 5

Mukerji was highly influenced by the emerging Indian nationalist movement that com-
bined a culturist with a Marxist position while Akiwowo was firmly rooted in the poetic
traditions of his Nigerian tribal group, the Yoruba.
DP Mukerji’s project was to create a sociological theory of modernity based on Indian
conditions, circumstances and civilizational legacies. His ideas had its foothold in the
questions: how does one understand India’s current economic and social problems, what
is the nature of change in India and why has British/western social science language
proved inadequate in comprehending this change and India’s social problems? Mukerji
contended that the discipline of sociology needs theories that can capture practices and
experiences of the groups living in a region given that change can take place only within
received contexts and practices. Such practices are related to specific ideals/values of
these groups and thus the indigenization of social sciences should be based on under-
standing of and the explaination of these values. Mukerji also claimed that given the
economic and political roots of all social and cultural values, sociology needs to be com-
prehended as a unified and holistic interdisciplinary discipline. In his scholarship, he
deliberated how change has been conceptualized in India and concluded that an Indian
sociology needs to create a vocabulary that assesses change as being related to accept-
ance, adaptability, accommodation and assimilation. On this basis he posited that Indian
modernity cannot be assessed in a social scientific language of conflict, which according
to him is the oeuvre within which certain European sociologies are fashioned. Rather it
should be formulated as a theory based on cultural symbiosis, which he argued is the
outstanding feature of India’s long civilizational history. Mukerji elaborated the princi-
ples of Indian cultural symbiosis through three Sanskrit concepts: shantam (harmony –
that which sustains the universe amidst all its incessant changes), shivam (welfare – being
the principle of coordination with the social environment), and adavaitam (‘unity of
unity’ or synthesis); these concepts being drawn from his understanding of Hindu scrip-
tures (Patel, 2013, 2015).
As against Mukerji who used received 19th-century perceptions of Orientalist-
Hinduism8 to comprehend change in India, Akinsola Akiwowo (1999), the Nigerian
sociologist, initiated his debate on indigeneity in Africa by affirming that sociology can
be constituted from tales, myths and proverbs of the people together with ‘the laws of
true African wisdom’. These sources reflect according to Akiwowo the values of the
region. At the Department of Sociology of the University of Nigeria, he and his col-
leagues attempted to put together a sociological theory extracted from the poetry of the
Yoruba tribe of Nigeria. Akiwowo and his colleagues argued that the concept of asuwada
which they extracted from an analysis of the Yoruba poems is the key philosophical prin-
ciple of the Yoruba tribe and from which sociologists can organize a theory of sociation
– their goal being to constitute a general theory of sociology. They argued that the con-
cept of asuwada asserts that though the unit of all social life is the individual, an indi-
vidual as a ‘corporeal self needs fellowship of other individuals’ (Makinde, 1988: 62–63).
As a consequence, community life based on a common good is sui generis to the exist-
ence of the individual within the Yoruba tribe.
How can one characterize these two epistemic voices? To what extent do they provide
us an ‘alternate’ way of doing sociology? While agreeing that the concepts and theories
are based on cultural particularities (such as class or status in the case of European
6 Current Sociology 00(0)

sociology), this article is arguing that these culturist propositions cannot serve to create
an objective, acceptable scientific theory. For example, the use of the concepts of shan-
tam, shivam and adavaitam in the case of Mukerji and the asuwada principle in the case
of Akiwowo cannot comprehend the diverse ‘social’ of these two regions.9 Also, it is
important to ask how these sociologists have created the methods to examine the truth-
claims of these indigenous concepts and their theories and thereby established that these
concepts are both effective and relevant. Would there not be other alternate concepts
which are equally relevant, especially in regions where there are huge diversities, such as
India or Africa? The latter query directs the question towards principles of science: how
does one judge the merit of a theory when it is drawn from the indigenous?
An incisive critique of this is provided by Hountondji (1997), who debates the argu-
ments on the indigenous presented in the case of Africa and contends that ‘traditional’ or
indigenous knowledge does not dialogue with western thinking and science. He suggests
that indigenous sociologies have not developed an understanding of science and elabo-
rated ways to interrogate its own assumptions. Hountondji (1997, 2009) recognizes the
significance of local knowledge to understand economic and social development but
questions the emphasis on oral sources without its interrogation from a scientific per-
spective. Any excursion on ethno philosophy, he argues would necessarily involve test-
ing contradictory claims and analysing the grounds of its own rigour. What are the tools
available, he asks, in various cultural/philosophical systems to do such testing? Also,
does basing oneself on ‘culturist’ essentials not reconstruct the colonizer’s gaze that
assumes that African cultures were always consensus driven?
This article is arguing that indigenous sociologies express the seminal attributes of
methodological nationalism also seen in European sociologies (Beck, 2007). Here again,
I would like to make my point more explicit. Indigenous sociologies given their national-
ist stance retain the taken-for-grantedness of official cultural/philosophical discourses,
agendas, loyalties and histories of their nations/communities and territorialization, as
well as the reduction of social sciences to the boundaries of the nation-state (Wimmer
and Glick Schiller, 2002). I contend that indigenous sociologies (in a similar fashion to
early sociological theory) thus represent racist/ethnic/patriarchal perceptions of their
regions/nation-states. Though indigenous sociologies decentred the ‘universals’ of north-
ern positions, they remained trapped in the universals constituted by their own culturist-
nationalist positions (Patel, 2013).
Syed Farid Alatas takes up the challenge that such indigenous sociologies represents
in the text Applying Ibn Khaldun (2014). He shows how this 14th-century social think-
er’s ideas can be applied across new times and spaces. Applying Ibn Khaldun argues that
not only is it possible to use Khaldun’s theory to understand the rise of the Ottoman
Empire and analysis the Safavid dynasty in Iran but also suggests that Khaldun’s theory
of the state can also be used to assess the politics of contemporary Arab states such as
Saudi Arabia and Syria. For Alatas, Ibn Khaldun stands out for his rigorous pursuit and
analysis and for assessing the messiness that characterizes the flux and change of dynas-
tic, regional and global history. Ibn Khaldun’s sociology can be applied because accord-
ing to Alatas, he uses a logic that is systematic, empirical, materialist and self-critical.
Using the case of Khaldun, Alatas asserts that scholarship that has drawn from philo-
sophical systems that have had a presence over a longue durée such as that of Islam has
Patel 7

been forced to develop critical scientific tools to interrogate its own abstractions. For this
reason, such scholarship remains both relevant and effective (Alatas SF, 2014).
In the context of contemporary debates on post-positivism, Alatas’s work and his
assertion create an opportunity for scholars to explore and excavate the presence of such
critical scholarship from other non-western philosophical systems. However, what pos-
sibilities are there to discover and identify such critical scholarship today? This article
suggests that one needs to discuss two issues in this context. First, there has been a deep-
ening of contemporary global knowledge connections across the globe as a consequence
of new technologies that have encouraged its worldwide circulation. Syed Hussein Alatas
(1972) has argued that these trends have created a lure for western social science per-
spectives and the latter are being promoted to comprehend one’s own social and cultural
traditions.10 Thus, it seems that in spite of enormous efforts by various nation-states
which invested extensively in human resource production and which encouraged the
establishment of independent and autonomous university structures, research institutes
and publishing houses, these efforts have not borne fruit. As a consequence, gross ine-
quality in global knowledge production and knowledge assets has not been dented, rather
the use of these new technologies has increased it (UNESCO, 2010). This process has
deepened the legitimation of northern knowledges of sociological/social scientific ideas
in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. As against these institutional processes, the sec-
ond issue for discussion concerns recent interventions using Orientalist theory that has
drawn attention to the deep epistemic linkages organizing knowledge formation between
Europe and the ex-colonial countries. The question that this article addresses in the next
section relates to the way these linkages and interconnections have shifted the debate
from the constitution of alternate sociologies and social sciences to the regional variation
in the theories of modernity. It asks: does this epistemic ‘turn’ in decolonial perspective
offer a new way out of the present malaise?

Eurocentrism, colonial modernity and extraversion11

Below I discuss three sets of contemporary thinkers who have provided a new and origi-
nal critique from the decolonial standpoint. Again, like the above, these scholars articu-
late and debate from the perspective of their own intellectual traditions and their regions’
history of engagement/connections with the decolonial. However collectively, they
assert the deep connections of power that have structured the episteme and the knowl-
edge formation between the imperialist/colonial countries and their own nation-states/
regions.12 Their scholarship draws attention to the necessity to think globally (and not
only nationally/regionally as in the case of indigenous) regarding the decolonial while
simultaneously assessing how these global trends continue to intervene in organizing
knowledge production through economic and political control of knowledge institutions
and knowledge practices. It also discusses the way the theories of modernity have been
constituted in these circumstances in different regions/countries and presents ways to go
forward in this debate.
This section starts with a discussion on the work of Anibal Quijano (1993, 2000,
2007), who through his conceptualization of ‘coloniality of power’ has elaborated the
epistemic linkages between coloniality and modernity. Associated earlier with the Latin
8 Current Sociology 00(0)

American dependency school, his scholarship has set the terms of the Latin American
decolonial research programme (Escobar, 2007) which has become popular within
American and European Latin American area studies programmes. Coloniality for
Quijano is an imaginary of the capitalist world; that is, it is the invisible and constitutive
side of modernity and that as an episteme, it has organized the capitalist global system
since the 15th century. Quijano argues that modernity and its theories are built on two
myths: evolutionism and dualism or binaries, both being embedded in Eurocentrism, the
episteme that has structured social sciences in Europe. It will be clear from the above that
Quijano’s arguments are constructed in the context of the history of settled colonialism
in Central and Latin America and that the decolonial perspective emerged in the early
19th century, not much after the nation-state has been formed and in the context of the
growing imperialist influence of the USA.13
Eurocentrism according to Quijano theorizes simultaneously the ‘I’, i.e. Europe, and
the ‘other’, the ‘periphery’; these two being intimately connected as binaries. Additionally,
for Quijano this episteme structures the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ in a hierarchical division, with
the ‘I’ being superior to the ‘other’. Eurocentrism privileges the intellectual and political
space that the Europeans provided for themselves to objectify the colonial world(s). As a
consequence, the periphery’s imaginaries and knowledges were not recognized and if
recognized were considered subordinate and primitive. In social sciences, the two attrib-
utes of the Eurocentric episteme – evolutionism/progress and the binaries/dualities –
give privilege to the experience of European peoples and its society, its economic
organization, the capitalist market and its political organization, the European nation-
state, and legitimize these as the ‘natural’ forms of economic and political existence.
Enrique Dussel reinforces this argument when he contends that Eurocentrism is the
knowledge form and a mode of knowing that claims universality for itself through ‘con-
fusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from
Europe’s position as center’ (Dussel, 2000: 471; Quijano, 2000: 549). Both these think-
ers assert that Eurocentric ideas have been exported to the periphery as commonsense
knowledge and through social scientific thinking. As a consequence, the rest of the world
and its peoples comprehend their problems as being ‘solved’ when they imbibe and strive
to achieve the European experience. The people in the periphery believe that if they pro-
ceed onwards on the pathway to progress as prescribed by Europe, they will become
advanced technologically, have a superior culture, and become modern, leaving behind
their uncivilized backwardness and traditionalities that have characterized their non-
modern societies.
So how does this episteme become part of the consciousness of the colonialized sub-
jects? I suggest that Paulin Hountondji’s (1995, 1997, 2009) ideas on extraversion, that
is, externally produced knowledge, provide us with an outline that has relevance. He
delineates the intellectual chain that produces and reproduces disciplines in various
nation-states/regions and shows how this chain allows colonial ideas to be institutional-
ized and reproduced within ex-colonial countries. He has argued that the critical issue in
any intellectual chain is the production of the means of scientific practices or equipment.
When this process/product is organized and reproduced outside the region/nation-state,
he contends that it leads to slippages in the intellectual chain. Once the first slippage
occurs, further dependences and slippages are reproduced as researchers depend on
Patel 9

books, journals, and other archival material from the mother-colonial countries. As a
consequence, thirdly, there occurs a theoretical extraversion, that is, the uncritical appli-
cation of research specializations, topics and questions to one’s own context. Fourthly,
this kind of extraversion has other consequences – research is organized in a particular-
istic/localized perspective. Thereby there is an absence of the knowledge of larger philo-
sophical and scientific understandings that are needed as background information for the
reconstitution of knowledge. Fifthly, such localization of research is related to the impo-
sition of knowledge systems by colonial and western countries and thus, sixthly, it pro-
motes brain drain and ultimately an intellectual tourist circuit between the core and
periphery. Hountondji’s perspective pushes us to evaluate the way connected knowledge
systems immersed in colonial difference have organized exchange and circulation of
knowledge across the globe, within ex-colonial nation-states and in scholarship, and in
turn influenced production and reproduction of social science disciplines.
In many ways the subaltern project’s perspective resonates with the coloniality/
modernity perspective and at other times it indicates a break with this way of thinking.14
This project, which started publishing its essays in the early 1980s, positioned itself as
providing 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 colo-
nial and nationalist perspectives of the history of India and to argue that there is an
organic epistemic linkage between the latter two.15 Guha contended that nationalist his-
toriography assimilated the commonsense notions of colonial political modernity when
it analysed nationalist politics from the viewpoint of colonial political activities and their
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: 3–4). No wonder, Partha
Chatterjee, one of the important members of this programme, argues that Indian nation-
alism was derivative in nature: that is, its constitution was connected to colonial struc-
tures and it mirrored these. These ideas regarding colonialism and Eurocentrism are
significantly different from Quijano’s given that South Asia and many other regions/
territories under the British in Asia and some parts of Africa experienced non-settled
colonialism.
It is in this context one should read Partha Chatterjee’s concept of ‘colonial differ-
ence’ and analyse the divergence from that of Walter Mignolo (2002).16 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
10 Current Sociology 00(0)

using colonial cultural resources but remain subordinate and suppliant to colonialism.
This distinction Chatterjee calls the rule of colonial difference and suggests that it organ-
izes power and 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. Unlike the conception of binaries/dualities elaborated by Anibal
Quijano above, which relate to Eurocentric construction of ‘I’ and the ‘other’, Chatterjee’s
binaries distinguishes and separates the two dimensions of knowledge conceived by
nationalism – that of the material domain, the knowledge of the economy, statecraft, sci-
ence and technology from the spiritual and the cultural. Nationalist ideas, he argues,
emulate 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 creat-
ing indigenous social sciences was a nationalist project drawing its intellectual 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, 2017).
Nationalist-oriented sociologists in India wholeheartedly embraced the Hindu cul-
tural and spiritual as being the content of their domain and institutionalized it in the cur-
riculum being formulated as university education and within research institutions as
these expanded. As a consequence the economic and political were deleted 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 domi-
nation of colonialism. Indigenous social sciences reproduced ‘the rule of colonial differ-
ence’ in interesting and novel ways (Patel, 2006, 2017).
How do we characterize this knowledge/discipline? I have used the concept of colo-
nial modernity17 to understand this process through which epistemically and institution-
ally contemporary sociological knowledge formation in India and elsewhere was
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 but 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 colonized. 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 ‘background understandings’ and ‘beliefs’ of
doing anthropology and sociology in India (Patel, 2017). In turn, this perception directed
the way research and teaching was organized, wherein not only the nature of Indian
modernity was not explored but sociologists more often than not refrained from studying
the social and political dimensions of power and its relationship with the caste, class and
Patel 11

patriarchal orientation of the contemporary nation-state. As can be seen from the above,
this perspective is distinct from that of the coloniality/modernity thesis. While the latter
perceives modernity as the other side of coloniality and wishes to capture new moderni-
ties (transmoderity in Dussel’s language) in a new episteme of liberation, in colonial
modernity the new modernity can be captured only through a critique of both national-
ism and colonialism.
As can be seen from the above two examples, rather than creating alternate systems
of thought as attempted by indigenous sociologies, contemporary decolonial interven-
tions have argued that the colonial episteme has been reproduced in contemporary social
science language across the world. Nationalist perspectives have had little to no impact
on producing autonomous and alternative knowledges. Given the organic connections
that structure colonial and global systems of knowledge production worldwide, what is a
way forward?

Towards a conclusion
This article has argued that for the last seven to eight decades sociological scholarship in
the decolonizing countries has raised epistemic and methodological issues regarding the
organization of international and global social sciences, thereby continuing the concerns
raised in Bhambra et al. (2020). It has also documented the intellectually diverse pro-
cesses that have emerged in various ex-colonial regions which have elaborated the many
dimensions of the decolonial standpoint. The latter asserts that the politics of difference
has structured the political economy of global knowledge production since the late 19th
century. Much before sociologists of the west recognized that the discipline’s practices
of scholarship needed rethinking, the decolonial standpoint was already pushing scholar-
ship to engage with these questions. While the scholarship in the west argued that the
fundamental challenges to social sciences are due to the sweep of the globalizing pro-
cesses being organized through the new information and communication technologies
(ICT) on the one hand and the questionings of reason and its universals by the postmod-
ernists on the other, the decolonials were arguing that it is traditions of sociology that
have been formulated in Europe and later extended within North American academia
which are problem rather than reason or ICT, and that the crisis of sociology is about the
non-recognition of the colonial in sociological traditions. Thus the decolonial perspec-
tive would argue that unless scholars in the west incorporate the decolonial standpoint in
their arguments that question the epistemological and methodological assumptions of
positivism theory and comprehend its adoption through the methodology of ‘exteriority’
(Dussel, 1993), they will not be able to grasp the limitations of sociological thought.
Rather, the decolonial perspective has shifted our attention to the way the organization of
the political economy of knowledge and contemporary technologies have deepened the
inequalities of social science knowledge. This process is as important as the episteme.
The article has also argued that it is important to engage with the many different ways
difference as an episteme has and is been constituted, organized and imbricated in the
practices of knowledge to be able to gauge the variety of arguments that have emerged
and are emerging to comprehend the world which is constantly producing new geogra-
phies. It has mapped the plural and diverse approaches that have been produced from the
12 Current Sociology 00(0)

decolonial standpoint and has also argued that both plurality and diversity are essential
for the growth of all social science knowledge (Patel, 2010). However, it also asserts,
following the arguments made by the historian Frederick Cooper (2005), that knowledge
circulates through circuits and that these circuits are established during colonialism and
reinforced through contemporary economic linkages, social networks and political
connections.
Through this discussion the article affirms that all geographically distinct knowledges
are interconnected and that these interconnections can impose a power episteme and
structure knowledge systems in various regions of the world through the means of finan-
cial or political control or through scholarship networks. Hountondji (2009), has sug-
gested a need to critically interrogate these dominant frameworks and as well the
indigenous/nativist frameworks and through such interrogation of these traditions build
endogenous knowledges. He has called for new social knowledge networks to be created
that can deliberate many varieties of knowledge and examine concepts and theories from
all parts of the globe, including one’s own, in order to assess when, where and which can
be used. This necessitates the widest possible diffusion of knowledge. To create autono-
mous sociologies there need to be autonomous scholarship networks and only then is it
possible to break the structures of power-knowledge. Connell (2010) resonates this argu-
ment when she suggests that universities and research institutes of the north should take
the initiative as they have the human and physical resources and institutions that can take
such a lead. As can be seen, in this dynamic both globalization and a critique of national-
ism has a major role to play (Hountondji, 2009: 128).

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Sujata Patel https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6785-5981

Notes
1. This article draws on my earlier work (Patel, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019).
2. A strong influence in this debate were the discussions with the communist movement. In
the 1920s the Comintern took the stand that the encouragement of industrialization by colo-
nial/imperialist countries allowed for the growth of a working-class movement in the colo-
nized country and that in turn this weakened imperialism. On the other hand, the Institute of
Orientalist Studies in Moscow argued that the effects of imperialist capital on the colonial
world negated the development of such ‘independence’. Over time, the first view became part
of the ideas of various nationalist and communist movements around the world.
3. On the way the concept and theory of planning originated in India, see Chakravarty (1987).
4. In order to discuss indigenous sociology I have chosen one scholar each from India and
Nigeria for the following reasons: one of the first nation-states to be formed through an anti-
colonial nationalist movement, the post-independence Indian state and its political elite took
a lead to promote nationalist social sciences and invested heavily in creating the infrastructure
in higher education. It also took an important role in promoting nationalist social sciences
Patel 13

in Asia through sponsoring conferences on this theme. Over time it was able to mobilize
scholars in various social sciences to involve themselves in this project. While the Nigerian
state also made similar efforts, its reach was limited to some nation-states of Northern Africa.
However, Akiwowo’s role is significant because he initiated a worldwide debate in indig-
enous sociology and presented his ideas at the World Congress of Sociology in 1986. His
work has introduced important intellectual engagements in the African continent.
5. Beck states that methodological nationalism allows ‘sociology’s visions of culture and poli-
tics, law, justice, and history [to] represent that of [the] individual nation-state’ (Beck, 2007:
287).
6. This is also the goal of Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe (2000). It explores ‘the capaci-
ties and the limitations of certain European social and political categories in conceptualizing
political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 18).
7. Mukerji has been called one of the founders of sociology of India. He wrote 19 books and
innumerable articles and was a inspiring teacher who trained the second generation of soci-
ologists of India. He was considered a social critic, social philosopher and a culturologist
(Madan, 2013).
8. Late 19th and early 20th century scholarship has used Hindu scriptures to constitute a new
sociology. The use of Sanskrit sources by Mukerji reflected a trend initiated in mid 19th cen-
tury scholars in Calcutta, such as Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), who termed his work as
Hindu sociology. On this discussion see Patel (2015) and on a contrary position see Goswami
(2013).
9. For a critique on Akiwowo see Adesina (2006) and on Mukerjee see Patel (2006, 2015).
10. The Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas has argued that the problem is with scholars and
scholarship in southern countries that are ‘captive’ to western scientific practices. These schol-
ars believe that western science is prestigious and applying its scientific practices will enhance
the prestige of their own researches and provide legitimation (Alatas SH, 1972: 10–12).
11. In this section I am drawing on the works of scholars associated with the decolonial research
programme (Escobar, 2007) and the subaltern studies programme (Ludden, 2002) and Paulin
Hountondji. These have been selected because they have contributed to the framing of the
problematique in these different regions. This section draws on distinct ideas of each of the
scholars mentioned herein rather than making a summary of the scholarship of the entire
group of scholars.
12. Earlier, Subrahmanyam (1997) and Bhambra (2014) argued for a need to move away from
assessing knowledge systems and disciplines from contemporary notions of geographies and
thus from the perspective of methodological nationalism. Both scholars contend that there
has been circulation of ideas, images, goods and commodities and that these have changed
the cultural and intellectual experiences of the world in the context of imperial-colonial
exploitation.
13. On the relationship of knowledge and geopolitics see Mignolo (2002).
14. I recognize that some scholars associated with the decolonial research programme such as
Mignolo (2005) and Grosfoguel (2007) argue that Indian subaltern studies and the decolonial
perspective have distinct genealogies and should not be confused with each other. I would
agree with this position. However, some ideas of Quijano and Dussel has resonance with
some of the ideas of Partha Chatterjee and these are being highlighted in this article.
15. Quijano’s use of Eurocentrism to comprehend the relationship of power-knowledge relates to
the Latin American experience of colonialism which was not mediated by lcoal and regional
nationalisms.
16. The concept of colonial difference is also part of the repertoire used by Walter Mignolo, a key
interlocutor of the decolonial research programme. His formulation of colonial difference is
14 Current Sociology 00(0)

based on his evaluation of the Latin American experience of settled colonialism and is used
in terms of the binary of imperial vs colonized.
17. Chatterjee and other subaltern scholars as well as their critics have used the concept of colo-
nial modernity to imply a modernity designed by colonialism. However, my use of this con-
cept is specific to the framing of sociology in India.

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Author biography
Sujata Patel is Distinguished Professor at Savitribai Phule Pune University. Her work combines an
historical sensibility with four perspectives – Marxism, feminism, spatial studies and post-structur-
alism. She writes on themes such as modernity and social theory, history of sociology/social sci-
ences, urbanization and city-formation. She has authored, edited/co-edited 13 books and 63 peer
reviewed papers/book chapters and is a Series Editor of Oxford India Studies in Contemporary
Society and Cities and The Urban Imperative (Routledge).

Résumé
Comment le processus de décolonisation a-t-il redéfini les sciences sociales ? Cet article
recense les apports des théoriciens des anciens pays coloniaux à la reconceptualisation
de la sociologie à la fois comme pratique et comme épistémè. Il montre qu’il existe
des critiques décoloniales géographiquement variées et intellectuellement diverses qui
emploient la théorie sociologique pour critiquer les universels mis en avant par les
traditions de la sociologie et des sciences sociales occidentales; que ces différents savoirs
sont reliés par des circuits coloniaux et mondiaux et que ceux-ci créent des géographies
de la connaissance; que collectivement, ces positions intellectuelles diversifiées
soutiennent que la sociologie/les sciences sociales sont constituées dans le cadre de la
politique de la « différence » organisée au sein de la géopolitique coloniale, nationaliste
et mondiale; que cette « différence » est reproduite dans les pratiques quotidiennes
liées aux savoirs et est structurée par l’économie politique de la connaissance; que la
déstabilisation de cette structure de pouvoir et la démocratisation de ces savoirs ne sont
possibles que si cette économie politique, ses pratiques quotidiennes de production de
la connaissance dans les universités et les instituts de recherche, sont profondément
remises en question et lorsque cette critique est compensée par la constitution de
réseaux alternatifs de circulation de ces savoirs.

Mots-clés
Colonialité, décolonisation, extraversion, modernité coloniale, sociologie indigène

Resumen
¿Cómo el proceso de descolonización ha redefinido las ciencias sociales? Este artículo
revisa las aportaciones realizadas por los teóricos de los antiguos países coloniales para la
reconceptualización de la sociología tanto como práctica como episteme. Se argumenta
que existen críticas descoloniales geográficamente variadas e intelectualmente diversas
que utilizan la teoría sociológica para criticar los universales propuestos por las tradiciones
de la sociología y las ciencias sociales occidentales; que estos diversos conocimientos
están conectados a través de circuitos coloniales y globales y que estos conocimientos
crean geografías del conocimiento; que estas diversas posiciones intelectuales sostienen
unánimemente que la sociología y ciencias sociales están constituidas en el seno de la
política de la ‘diferencia’ organizada dentro de la geopolítica colonial, nacionalista y
global; que esta ‘diferencia’ se reproduce en las prácticas cotidianas del conocimiento y
se estructura a través de la economía política del conocimiento; que la desestabilización
de esta estructura de poder y la democratización de este conocimiento solo son posibles
Patel 17

cuando esta economía política, sus prácticas cotidianas de producción de conocimiento

dentro de las universidades e institutos de investigación son puestas en cuestión por
completo y cuando esta crítica es amortiguada por la constitución de redes alternativas
de circulación de este conocimiento.

Palabras clave
Colonialidad, descolonización, extraversión, modernidad colonial, sociología indígena