Sociology | Class 11 | Indian Sociologists
Introduction
Indian sociology grew into a distinct field of study because Indian society and its social structure were so different from those of western Europe. Ideas borrowed straight from the west did not fit neatly onto Indian life, so the discipline had to be shaped to answer Indian questions.
The University of Bombay was the first to publicly offer sociology as a subject at the college level in 1919. During the 1920s two more universities, at Lucknow and at Calcutta, began teaching and carrying out research in sociology and anthropology. Today almost every large institution has a department of sociology, anthropology or social anthropology, and often more than one of these is represented.
At the start it was not obvious what the subject matter of Indian sociology should be. In the Indian setting the need for the discipline raised a number of issues:
- Western sociology began as an effort to make sense of modernity. India was also passing through waves of modernity, but these were fundamentally different because they were tightly tied to colonial rule. Indian communities therefore understood modernity in a completely different way from western societies.
- Social anthropology began in the west out of a wish to learn about so called primitive tribes. India, however, already had an old and advanced civilisation living alongside tribal societies, so it was felt that many theoretical vantage points were needed to understand how the Indian social system actually worked.
The specific questions the discipline had to answer in India
- First, if western sociology began as an effort to make sense of modernity, what role would it serve in a country like India? India too was going through the changes brought by modernity, but with one crucial difference: India was a colony. The first meeting with modernity in India was closely entwined with the first meeting with colonial oppression.
- Second, if social anthropology in the west grew out of European interest in primitive societies, what place could it have in India, which had both tribal societies and ancient, sophisticated ones? And in a free, independent India ready to begin its journey of planned development and democracy, what practical role could sociology play?
The founders of Indian sociology had to raise new questions and also work out their own answers. The questions did not come ready made. They took shape only through the practice of actually doing sociology in an Indian setting.
Pioneers of Indian sociology
L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy were true pioneers, in the sense that in the early 1900s they began practising a field of study that did not yet exist in India. There were also no organisations to support the discipline at the time, even though their contributions were recognised and valued by leading anthropologists around the world.
L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer
L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861 to 1937) was one of India's earliest pioneers of social anthropology. He began his career as a clerk, then worked as a schoolteacher and later as a college professor in Cochin state, which is part of today's Kerala.
He was probably the first self taught anthropologist to win scholarly and academic honours at both the national and the international level. During a speaking tour of European universities he received an honorary doctorate from a German university.
Sarat Chandra Roy
Sarat Chandra Roy was a founder of the field and, in his own words, an accidental anthropologist. He first trained in law and moved to practise in the Ranchi courts, where he was eventually chosen to serve as the court's official translator.
His professional need to explain tribal customs and rules to the court gave him a deep interest in tribal life. He visited many indigenous communities and carried out substantial fieldwork among them. His monographs and fieldwork based research articles made him well known among anthropologists in both India and Britain.
G. S. Ghurye
G. S. Ghurye is often called the father of Indian sociology. He headed the postgraduate Department of Sociology at Bombay University for more than three decades, the first such department in the country, and trained a whole generation of Indian sociologists. He wrote on caste, race, tribes, kinship, family and marriage, and also on culture, civilisation, the historical role of cities, religion and the sociology of conflict and integration.
His thinking was shaped by diffusionism, by Orientalist scholarship on Hinduism, by nationalism and by the cultural side of Hindu identity. As the best known voice of the nationalist viewpoint, Ghurye insisted on describing India's tribes as backward Hindus rather than as separate cultural groups.
Ghurye on the caste system
Ghurye highlighted six key features to help explain how the caste system works:
- Caste is a system of segmental division of society.
- Caste society is built on a system of hierarchy.
- The institution of caste places restrictions on social contact.
- Caste implies different rights and duties for different castes.
- Caste limits a person's choice of occupation.
- Caste places strict restrictions on marriage.
Ghurye on race and the colonial caste survey
The main voice of the racial viewpoint was Herbert Risley, a British colonial officer with a keen interest in anthropology. According to this theory, human beings could be sorted into different races based on physical features such as the size of the skull, the length of the nose, or the volume of the part of the skull that holds the brain.
Risley and others treated India as a unique laboratory for studying racial types, because caste had for generations strictly forbidden intermarriage between groups. On this view the higher castes came close to Indo Aryan features, while the lower castes seemed to belong to non Aryan, aboriginal or other groups. The lowest castes, they claimed, were India's first inhabitants, later ruled by an Aryan people who had migrated in and settled.
Ghurye accepted Risley's basic point but thought it was only partly true. He drew attention to the danger of relying only on averages and ignoring the variation within a community. In his view, Risley's idea that the upper castes were Aryan and the lower castes non Aryan held largely true only in northern India. In other regions the differences in these body measurements between groups were neither large nor clearly organised.
D. P. Mukherjee
D. P. Mukerji placed the social system at the centre of his study of society. He argued that to understand Indian society you must first become familiar with its traditions, because the study of a living tradition takes in both the past and a sensitivity to change.
According to him, Indian culture and society are distinct from those of the west. Indian society cannot be called individualistic in the western sense, since a person's behaviour is largely set by the pattern of the group. The social structure of India rests on group, sect and caste.
Traditions are passed to the next generation from the same ancestral sources, and are kept alive through memories and stories told again and again. But being rooted in the past does not stop change. Every community goes through a process of adjusting to change caused by both internal and external forces. In western societies the internal source of change is usually a shift in the economy. In India, however, most of the sources of change come from non economic sources such as values and practices.
A. R. Desai
A. R. Desai was one of the few Indian sociologists who took an active part in politics through formal party membership. He was a lifelong follower of Marxism and a member of several Marxist political organisations.
His finest achievement was his study of the social background of Indian nationalism. He also researched peasant movements, rural sociology, modernisation and urban problems, political sociology, forms of the state and human rights. Desai offered a Marxist reading of Indian nationalism in which he stressed the economic divisions and processes of the specific conditions of British colonialism.
Desai argued that the material conditions created by British colonialism gave rise to Indian nationalism. The British introduced industrialisation and modernisation, which led to new economic relationships. In his view, when customs and economic relationships are linked, a change in the economy will in time force a change in customs. He believed that caste would fade as new social and material conditions, such as industry, economic growth and education, took hold.
Desai on the welfare state
One of Desai's main interests was the modern capitalist state. Using a Marxist lens, in an essay titled The Myth of the Welfare State, he offered a detailed criticism of the idea and pointed to many of its flaws.
He described three main characteristics of a welfare state:
- A welfare state is a positive state. It does not aim to do only the bare minimum to keep peace and order, unlike the laissez faire approach of classical liberal political theory.
- A welfare state is a democratic state. Its growth was seen as depending on democracy.
- A welfare state follows a mixed economy, in which state owned or publicly owned firms exist alongside private capitalist ones. It does not try to abolish the free market or forbid public investment in business.
Desai then set test questions for judging how well a welfare state actually performs:
- Does it guarantee everyone freedom from poverty and social discrimination, along with security?
- Does it remove income inequality?
- Does it change the economy so that capitalist profit is used to meet the real needs of the community?
- Does it deliver steady growth free from booms and slumps?
- Does it provide jobs for everyone?
Applying these tests to the countries most often called welfare states, including Britain, the United States and much of Europe, Desai found the claims greatly exaggerated. Most modern capitalist states, even the most developed, fail to give a minimum level of economic and social security to all their people. They are unable to reduce economic inequality and often seem to increase it. They have not delivered steady growth free from market swings, and they carry excess unused capacity and high unemployment. On these grounds Desai concluded that the welfare state is, to a large extent, a myth.
M. N. Srinivas
M. N. Srinivas was the best known sociologist of the years after independence, and his training in British social anthropology strongly shaped his work. He helped make village studies the leading area of research in Indian sociology, and effectively put Indian sociology on the world map. He also worked on caste, modernisation and the process of social change.
His village studies drew on two main kinds of writing:
- ethnographic accounts of fieldwork carried out in villages
- historical and conceptual discussions about the Indian village as a unit of social analysis
For Srinivas the village was an important social unit. He criticised the British anthropologists who had promoted the idea that Indian villages were unchanging, self contained and like little republics. Using historical and social evidence, he showed that villages had in fact changed a great deal. Some sociologists, including Louis Dumont, disagreed and argued that institutions like caste mattered more than the village, since people may move from one village to another, and villages may live or die, but their social institutions such as caste or religion travel with them wherever they go.
Advantages of village studies as a site of research
- They gave a chance to show the value of ethnographic research methods.
- They offered firsthand reports of the rapid social change taking place in the Indian countryside as the new nation began its planned development programme.
- These detailed accounts of rural India were highly valued at the time, because they let urban Indians and policymakers understand what was happening there.
- In the setting of an independent nation, village studies gave sociology a fresh and practical use.
Why it still matters
The founders of Indian sociology were arguing about something the country is arguing about again right now: how the state should count and classify caste. Under British rule, officers like Herbert Risley used the census to sort Indians into castes and even into so called races, and Ghurye spent much of his career questioning how reliable those categories really were.
That old debate has come roaring back. For the first time since 1931, India's next Census will count every caste, not only the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The central government announced the decision in 2025, and the Census is scheduled for 2027, with a main reference date of 1 March 2027 and 1 October 2026 for some snow bound areas. It is being carried out in two phases, and the caste count happens in the second phase. The caste question is open ended, which means people say their caste in their own words rather than tick a fixed list.
Why does this stir such strong feelings? Supporters say the country cannot plan reservations, scholarships and welfare fairly without knowing how many people belong to each group, so accurate numbers are basic to justice. Critics worry that counting caste so precisely could harden caste identities and deepen divisions rather than heal them. That is almost exactly the tension the early Indian sociologists wrestled with, and it connects to Desai's blunt test of whether the state really reduces inequality, and to Srinivas's ideas about the dominant caste and social change.
So these notes are not just exam material. They are the toolkit for reading a live national argument. You can see how caste links to population, work and inequality in the Learnacy Hub, carry on with these Class 11 Sociology notes, or browse more study notes and resources across subjects.
Important terms
- Assimilation: the gradual absorption of one culture by a dominant or larger society.
- Anthropometry: the branch of anthropology that studies human ethnic types through body measurements, especially the size of the skull, the circumference of the head and the length of the nose.
- Endogamy: a social rule that sets the boundary of a social or kin group within which marriage is allowed, and forbids marriage outside it.
- Exogamy: a social rule that sets the boundary of a social or kin group within which marriage is forbidden, so members must marry outside it.
- Laissez faire: a French phrase meaning let be or leave alone, used for a political and economic doctrine that favours minimal government involvement in the economy and trusts the free market to regulate itself.
- Traditions: the whole body of values, beliefs, experience, knowledge and wisdom that a culture passes on to future generations.
- Purusha: in D. P. Mukerji's thought, an active person who carries out duties by forming connections with other people.
- Living traditions: traditions that keep their links to the past by holding on to some elements from it while also taking in new ones.