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Anthropology in
the East
Founders of Indian Sociology
and Anthropology

Edited by

Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar,

&
Satish Deshpande

CALCUTTA LONDON NEW YORK

Seagull Books Editorial offices:
1st floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford 0X4 1AW, UK
1 Washington Square Village, Apt 1U, New York, NY 10012, USA
26 Circus Avenue, Calcutta 700 017, India

Copyright © 2007 individual essays by their authors

Copyright © 2007 volume Permanent Black

Printed in arrangement with Permanent Black, India

Seagull Books 2008

ISBN-13 978 1 9054 2 277 7 (Hardback)

ISBN-13 978 1 9054 2 278 4 (Paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Guru Typograph, New Delhi, India

Printed at Lilabati Printers, Calcutta, India
 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Preface viii

Notes on Contributors x

1 Introduction: The Professionalisation of Indian

Anthropology and Sociology: People, Places,
and Institutions
Patricia Uberoi, Satish Deshpande, and Nandini Sundar 1

2 Anthropology as ‘Ananthropology’:
L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937), Colonial
Anthropology, and the ‘Native Anthropologist’
as Pioneer
Kalpana Ram 64

3 The Nationalist Sociology of Benoy Kumar Sarkar

Roma Chatterii 106

4 Recasting the Oraons and the ‘Tribe’:

Sarat Chandra Roy’s Anthropology
Sangeeta Dasgupta 132

5 Patrick Geddes: Sociologist, Environmentalist, and

Town Planner
IndraMunshi 172

6 The Idea of Indian Society: G.S. Ghurye and the

Making of Indian Sociology
Carol Upadhya 194
V! CONTENTS

7 Search for Synthesis: The Sociology of D.P. Mukerji

T.N. Madan 256

8 The Anthropologist as ‘Scientist’? Nirmal Kumar Bose

Pradip Kumar Bose 290

9 Between Anthropology and Literature:

The Ethnographies of Verrier Elwin
Ramachandra Guha 330

10 In the Cause of Anthropology: The Life and Work

of Irawati Karve
Nandini Sundar 360

11 Towards a Praxiological Understanding of Indian

Society: The Sociology of A.R. Desai
Sujata Patel - 417

12 Ties that Bind: Tribe, Village, Nation, and S.C Dube

Saurabh Dube 444

13 Fashioning a Postcolonial Discipline: M.N. Srinivas

and Indian Sociology
Satish Deshpande 496

Index 537
 List of Illustrations

1 Biographical Timespans: Founder Figures of Indian

Sociology and Social Anthropology xiv
2 L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer 65
3 Portrait of Benoy Kumar Sarkar 107
4 Portrait of Sarat Chandra Roy 133
5 Portrait of Patrick Geddes 173
6 Portrait of G.S. Ghurye 195
7 Group picture including D.P. Mukerji 257
8 Portrait of Nirmal Kumar Bose 291
9 Portrait of Verrier Elwin 331
10 Irawati Karve: Family Portrait 361
11 Portrait of A.R. Desai 418
12 Portrait of S.C. Dube 445
13 Group picture including M.N. Srinivas 497
 Preface

THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS IN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY ON

some of the founding figures of anthropology and sociology in India

originated in a seminar, 'Knowledge, institutions, practices: The
formation of Indian anthropology and sociology’, held at the Institute
of Economic Growth (IEG), Delhi, 19-21 April 2000. A selection of
the papers presented at that seminar—those concerning immediate
issues of disciplinary practice—was published as an issue of Seminar
(no. 495) in November 2000.
The present volume, however, has a rather different orientation.
Covering a century-long period from the late nineteenth to the late
twentieth century, it seeks to recount the history of the institutionalis¬
ation of anthropology and sociology in India through the lives and
professional activities of twelve pioneering individuals. Of course,
there already exist numerous biographies or biographical notes on
these and other key figures in disciplinary history, a number of auto¬
biographical accounts, and several notable attempts to write such
history. But, so far as we know, there has been no collective intellectual
biography such as the present which allows us to appreciate not only
the singularity of the personalities who are the subjects of these essays,
but also their shared concerns, dilemmas, and aspirations.
For us, a younger generation living in very different times, these
lives contain many lessons. With a sense of true humility, we recognise
that many of the professional issues that we reflect on today, often
with much fanfare and self-importance, have already been repeatedly
debated by our seniors; and equally, that many of the issues on which
they reflected have been brushed under the carpet and forgotten in
the race to keep pace with global disciplinary trends and fashions.
Collective biography has been a familiar genre in the history of
anthropology in the West, especially in the self-critical and self-reflex¬
ive literature of the last two or three decades. But the emphasis has
 PREFACE IX

been primarily on British and American scholarship, with Asia,

Africa, and Polynesia serving merely as ‘sites’ in which fieldwork was
carried out, rather than as places with their own traditions of schol¬
arship, peopled with active participants who are interested in the
potential of sociology and anthropology to reshape their own lives
and societies, as well as in remaking the discipline from a different
socio-cultural locale. It is a matter of remark that the subjects of
these essays have made little impact on disciplinary practices in the
metropolis—or indeed elsewhere in the non-West. One wonders why.
Design and serendipity have both contributed to the production
of this volume. Apart from the papers originally presented at the
1EG seminar, several others—those by Sangeeta Dasgupta on Sarat
Chandra Roy, Indra Munshi on Patrick Geddes, and Ramachandra
Guha on Verrier Fdwin—have been published elsewhere. We are grate¬
ful to the authors and their publishers for allowing the reproduction
of these essays here. We are painfully aware of the many other pio¬
neering figures whose biographies, for one reason or another, we
have been unable to include. Hopefully, other collective volumes will
follow to take up this challenge.
We are grateful to the Indian Council of Social Science Research,
the Ministry of Human Resource Development, and the faculty and
staff of the IEG for their support to the seminar; to Aradhya Bhardwaj
for her conscientious copy-editing towards making our script ready
before it was sent to Permanent Black; to Dharitri Chakravartty for
preparing the index; and to Uma Kumari for her help in the prepara¬
tion of the manuscript.
Most of all we owe thanks to all the authors of the present volume,
and those of its predecessor Seminar issue, for joining us in this
retrieval and reassessment of well-known and little-known facets of
our shared disciplinary history.
 Notes on Contributors

Pradip Kumar Bose is Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Studies

in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His areas of interest include caste-class
relations, refugees and diaspora, research methodology and the
philosophy of social science. His authored books include Classes in
a rural society: A sociological study of some Bengal villages (1984);
Classes and class relations among tribals of Bengal (1985); Computer
programming for social science (1986); and Research methodology: A
trend report (1995). Among his edited books are Refugees in West
Bengal: Institutional practices and contested identities (2000); and
Health and society in Bengal: A selection from late 19th century Bengali
periodicals (2005). He has written extensively in Bengali and is cur¬
rently a member of the Editorial Board of Sociological bulletin.

Roma Chatterji teaches at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School

of Economics. She is currently working on state-citizen relationships
with special reference to slums in Mumbai, and on folklore and print
culture. She has co-authored (with Deepak Mehta) Living with
violence: Everyday life in Dharavi, Bombay (2007); and Genre, event,
discourse: The production ofPurulia as a folklore region (in press).

Sangeeta Dasgupta is Senior Lecturer in History at Visva Bharati,

Santiniketan. She is currently Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College,
Oxford, on the Agatha Harrison Memorial Fellowship. She is re¬
working her dissertation, Reordering of tribal worlds: Tana bhagats,
missionaries and the Raj, for publication, and also finalising a co¬
edited volume on indigenous movements in South Asia.

Satish Deshpande is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of

Economics, Delhi University. He was formerly at the Institute of Eco¬
nomic Growth, Delhi, and the University of Hyderabad. His areas
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS XI

of interest include caste and class inequalities; contemporary social

theory; the history and politics of the social sciences; and South-
South intellectual interactions. He is the author of Contemporary
India: A sociological view (Penguin, 2003) and co-author of Untouch-
ability in India (Sage, 2006). He has been book reviews editor of Con¬
tributions to Indian sociology and is associate editor of International
sociology.

Saurabh Dube is Professor of History in the Center for Asian and

African Studies at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. His authored
books include Untouchable pasts (State University of New York Press,
1998; Sage/Vistaar, 2001); Stitches on time (Duke University Press
and OUP, 2004); and a trilogy in historical anthropology in the
Spanish language comprising Sujetos subalternos (2001); Genealog
del presente (2003); and Historias esparcidas (2006), published by
El Colegio de Mexico. Among his ten edited and co-edited volumes
are Postcolonial passages (OUP, 2004); Unbecoming modern (Social
Science Press, 2006); Historical anthropology (OUP, forthcoming
2007); and Enchantments of modernity (Routledge, forthcoming).

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and writer based in Bangalore.

His books include Savaging the civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals,
and India (OUP, 1998); Environmentalism: A global history (Addison
Wesley Longman, 2000); A corner of a foreign field: The Indian history
of a British sport (Picador, 2002), which won the Daily Telegraph/
Cricket Society award; and How much should a person consume?
Thinking through the environment (Permanent Black and University
of California Press, 2006).

Triloki Nath Madan is Emeritus Professor (Sociology) at the Institute

of Economic Growth, Delhi. He is an Honorary Fellow, Royal Anthro¬
pological Institute, London, Docteur Honoris Causa, University of
Paris Nanterre. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard University
(1984-5) and occupied the Radhakrishnan Centenary Chair at Hyde¬
rabad University (1995). He is the author/editor of fifteen books,
among them Family and kinship: A study of the Pandits of rural Kash¬
mir (1965, rev. edn. OUP, 1989); Non-renunciation: Themes and
interpretations of Hindu culture (OUP, 1987); Religion in India (OUP,
XII NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

1991), Muslim communities of South Asia (1976/1995, 3rd rev. edn.

Manohar, 2001), India’s religions: Perspectives from sociology and hist¬
ory (OUP, 2006); and, most recently, Images of the world: Essays on
religion, secularism, and culture (OUP, 2006). From 1967 to 1992 he
was editor of Contributions to Indian sociology (new series).

Indra Munshi is Professor at the Department of Sociology, University

of Mumbai. She has published a number of articles on forest policy
and management in India, tribal communities in western India, and
environmental issues. She has co-edited a book titled Contradictions
in Indian society (Rawat, 1995). Her book, Adivasi life stories, is in
press. Her current research interests include life-story approach and
tourism.

Sujata Patel is Professor at the Department of Sociology, University

of Pune. She specialises in the areas of political sociology, urban
sociology, and sociology of knowledge. She has written on the themes
of class formation and conflicts, caste and reservation, gender cons¬
truction, communalism, and on the urban process in India. She is
the author of The making of industrial relations (OUP, 1997) and co¬
editor of five books, three of them on Bombay: Bombay: Metaphor
of modern India (OUP, 1995); Bombay: Mosaic of modern culture
(OUP, 1995); Bombay and Mumbai: The city in transition (OUP,
2003); Urban studies (OUP, 2006); and Thinking social science in India
(Sage, 2002). She is on the editorial committee of Current sociology
and corresponding editor of the International journal of urban and
regional studies and global governance. She is currently working on a
book on the history of sociology in India titled Colonial modernity
and the making of sociological traditions.

Kalpana Ram is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie Uni¬

versity, Sydney. She was previously a Research Fellow of the Australian
Research Council, and at the Gender Relations Center, Australian
National University. She has published extensively on the themes of
gender, postcolonialism, and South Asian anthropology Her key
publications are Mukkuvar women: Gender, hegemony and capitalist
transformation in a South Indian fishing village (Kali for Women,
1991); Maternities and modernities: Colonial and postcolonial
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

experiences in Asia and the Pacific (co-edited with M. Jolly, Cambridge

University Press, 1998); and Borders of being: Citizenship, fertility and
sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (University of Michigan Press, 2001).

Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology, Delhi School of Eco¬

nomics, Delhi University. She has previously worked at Jawaharlal
Nehru University and the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She
has authored Subalterns and sovereigns: An anthropological history of
Bastar, 1854-1996 (OUP, 1997), and co-authored Branching out: Joint
forest management in India (OUP, 2001). Her areas of interest include
political and legal sociology, social history, development theory and
practice, and intellectual history.

Patricia Uberoi has taught sociology at the Delhi School of Econo¬

mics and Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has been Professor of
Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, and is Honorary
Director of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi. She has published
Family, kinship and marriage in India (edited, OUP, 1993); Social
reform, sexuality and the state (edited, Sage, 1996); Tradition, pluralism
and identity: In honour ofT.N. Madan (co-edited, Sage, 1999); and
Freedom and destiny: Gender, family and popular culture in India
(OUP, 2006), as well as numerous articles on family, gender, and
popular culture in India and China. She was co-editor of Contri¬
butions to Indian sociology (1992-2006).

Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist and currently a Fellow at

the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. She has taught
earlier at SNDT Womens University in Mumbai. Her research inte¬
rests focus on contemporary Indian society and culture, globalisation,
economic anthropology, and history and theory in anthropology.
Her most recent research has been on Indian IT workers, and the
cultural and social impact of the IT industry in India.
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 1

Introduction:
The Professionalisation
of Indian Anthropology
and Sociology—People, Places,
and Institutions

Patricia Uberoi, Satish Deshpande,

AND NaNDINI SuNDAR

The problem with us is not that the small amount of good work done
by preceding generations is unjustly criticised by succeeding ones,
but that it is ignored and then quickly forgotten. In India, each gene¬
ration of sociologists seems eager to start its work on a clean slate,
with little or no attention to the work done before. This amnesia
about the work of their predecessors is no less distinctive of Indian
sociologists than their failure to innovate.—Andre Beteille 1997: 98

I. DISCIPLINARY HISTORY IN INDIA:

ITS POTENTIAL IMPORTANCE

IT IS OFTEN REMARKED THAT INDIAN SOCIOLOGISTS AND SOCIAL

anthropologists have only scant regard for the work of their

predecessors. This is both true and untrue. On the one hand,
institutional memory is notoriously short. Once key players have
left the scene or the chain of apostolic succession has ruptured, there
appear to be few institutionalised mechanisms for preserving
professional history. Personal libraries are sold off, destroyed, or gifted
2 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

to ill-run institutions, Fieldnotes, offprints, unpublished manus¬

cripts, photographs, and correspondence are only fitfully preserved
by descendants who tend, soon enough, to tire of their pious respon¬
sibility and the endless battle against dust, mould, and bugs. There
is no recognised and centralised archive for depositing such materials,
no directory of local archives and repositories. Museums and col¬
lections, enthusiastically started, routinely fall prey to neglect and
misappropriation. And even in the university system, one finds that
departmental handbooks and syllabi are difficult to locate, and disser¬
tations often untraceable.1 Altogether, we just don’t seem to have the
interest in disciplinary history that we have seen developing in the
West over the last few decades (though recent meetings of the Indian
Sociological Association may indicate that we are finally catching
up with the times), nor the confidence to claim that ‘our’ ancestors
matter in disciplinary history on a global stage. An obvious reason
for this neglect of the past is that, generally speaking, the modern
disciplines in India look ever to the West for inspiration, accredita¬
tion, and patronage, so that, except to suggest filial piety or personal
loyalty, there seems little purpose in looking backwards or inwards
for professional inspiration.
While historicising the disciplinary past appears to have been re¬
latively neglected, critiquing and evaluating the current state of the
disciplines have been the enduring preoccupations of professional
sociology and anthropology in India from the very beginning. Indeed,
compared to their colleagues in other disciplines, it seems that Ind¬
ian sociologists and social anthropologists are unusually afflicted by
disciplinary angst.2 As the bibliography at the end of this Introduction

1 These problems of the preservation of institutional knowledge were poig¬

nantly and passionately presented by a number of the senior participants in the
Symposium ‘Knowledge, institutions, practices: The formation of Indian anthro¬
pology and sociology’ (Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, 19-20 April
2000), on which this volume and an earlier special issue of Seminar are based
(see Deshpande, Sundar, and Uberoi 2000a, 2000b). See also Deshpande 2001a:
19, 21, 33; Kumar and Mookherjee 1995: 2.
2 See Uberoi (2000) for a review of successive introspections on their disci¬
plines by Indian sociologists and social anthropologists that were published in
the journal Seminar over the years since 1960. The Economic and political weekly
has also been an important platform for the airing of disciplinary concerns.
 INTRODUCTION 3

indicates, they regularly and self-consciously reflect on the past and

present status of their disciplines, and on the challenge of balancing
teaching and research.* * 3 They repeatedly define and redefine the two
disciplines in relation to allied disciplines,4 and especially in relation
to each other. They proclaim ambitious new research agendas (now¬
adays known as Vision documents’), seeking to domesticate the
latest trends from abroad or, alternatively, to make their disciplines
transparently ‘relevant’ to local social and political concerns.5 They
seek reasons for the apparent derivativeness of Indian anthropology
and sociology, and the converse failure of Indian area studies spe¬
cialists to make a mark on their disciplines internationally.6 They
debate the necessity—or otherwise—of formulating a national social
science or cultural ‘policy’, after the erstwhile Soviet model (see
Mukherji 2005a; Saberwal 1975). They routinely reorient their prio¬
rities to the ebb and flow of research funding—whether from the
state or, increasingly nowadays, from international agencies (Mukher¬
ji 2005b). They commend the ever-urgent need for syllabus revision
against the heavy weight of academic inertia.7 They plead for the
reform and strengthening of professional associations as guarantors

See, for example, the discussion sparked off by Veena Das’s (1993) comments
on the sad state of research in sociology (contributors include Deshpande 1994;
Giri 1993; Murthy 1993; and Rege 1997). Another important source and provo¬
cation for such reflections are the successive series produced by the Indian
Council of Social Science Research (1972-4; 1985,2000 and latterly the massive
two-volume Oxford India companion to sociology and social anthropology, edited
by Veena Das (2003a; see also Das 2003 b). In a welcome development, Sociological
bulletin, the journal of the Indian Sociological Society (vol. 54, no. 3,2005), has
recently reviewed the state of sociology throughout the South Asian region (for
a broader, all-Asia perspective, see also Alatas 2006). For anthropology, see e.g.
L.R Vidyarthi, Rise of anthropology in India: A social science orientation (1978).
3 See among others Beteille 2000; Deshpande 2001a; Mukherji 2005a.
4 This has been a feature of discussions under the title of Tor a sociology of
India’ in the journal Contributions to Indian sociology from its first series begin¬
ning in 1957.
5 See Joshi (1972), and other articles in the same issue of Seminar (157).
6 See, e.g. Berreman 1969; Beteille 2003; J.RS. Uberoi 1968.
7 This is a resilient problem in the Indian university system, impacting on
teaching programmes at all levels. See, e.g., Mukherji 2005a.
4 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of professional conduct and standards.8They demand quality journals

which will also give fair representation to a heterogeneous professional
constituency and be receptive to interdisciplinary challenges.9 They
seek outreach beyond the metropolitan centres of learning to the
regional universities and colleges. Intermittently, they challenge the
dominance of social science writing in English over the Indian ver¬
naculars; or deplore the lacklustre quality of regional language social
science texts (Giri 2004; Jha 2005; Shah 2000). Sometimes they also
question whether scholars from upper caste/class backgrounds can
authentically represent the lives and aspirations of the socially mar¬
ginalised (Kumar 2005).
And they do all this, repeatedly and publicly, with barely a backward
glance.
This collection of twelve biographical essays on some of the
founding figures in the history of Indian sociology and social anthro¬
pology has been put together on the assumption that an informed
critique and appreciation of the work of previous generations should
be a prerequisite for the building of sound disciplinary traditions in
India (Madan 1994a: 4-5). Indeed, in one way or another, many of
the problems just referred to were issues for earlier generations of
scholars too, and it is instructive—indeed chastening—to see how
they were posed and addressed in earlier contexts and to reflect on
what might have been had different choices been made, other policies
pursued, alternative circumstances emerged. In this sense, we believe
that our seemingly antiquarian interest in the retrieval of disciplinary
history can provide important insights into the professional issues
of our times.
This is not to say that the disciplinary history of Indian anthro¬
pology and sociology is non-existent. There are a good number of
notices, overview articles, festschriften, commemorative volumes,
commissioned status reports, and surveys of research, in addition to

8 See Oommen 2000; Patel 2002.

9 For instance, feminism (see e.g. John 2001; Rege 1997,2000), development
studies, environment studies, and cultural studies. See the essays by Ravinder
Kaur, Indra Munshi, and Sasheej Hegde and Seemanthini Niranjana in Chau-
dhuri (2002).
 INTRODUCTION 5

numerous biographical and autobiographical essays and books.10

But, while building on these studies, the dozen intellectual biographies
in this volume seek to give a specific twist to the recovery of discipli¬
nary history by exploring, in and through the lives and writings of
their sub jects, the linkages between knowledge, institutions, and dis¬
ciplinary practices.
The essays cover a century-long period from the late nineteenth
to the late twentieth century, beginning with L.K. Ananthakrishna
Iyer (1861-1937), a self-taught anthropologist who contributed sub¬
stantially to the early colonial ethnography of the tribes and castes
of southern India, and ending with M.N. Srinivas, often described
as the ‘doyen of Indian sociology who, after degrees in sociology
from the University of Bombay and in anthropology from the Uni¬
versity of Oxford, went on to found sociology departments in the

10 In addition to Ramkrishna Mukherjee’s The sociology of Indian sociology

(1979), originally written as a trend report for Current sociology (1977), and L.R
Vidyarthi’s The rise of anthropology in India (1978), probably the two best-
known book length studies of disciplinary history, the reader may like to refer
to some of the following, as well as the citations in individual articles in this
volume: (1) Surveys and overview articles: Bottomore 1962; Dhanagare 1993;
Dube 1962; Mukherjee 1973,1976,1979; Pels 1999; Rao 1974; Risley 1910; Sak-
sena 1964; Saran 1958; Sarana and Sinha 1976; Y. Singh 1967; Srinivas and
Panini 1975; Valien 1954; Vidyarthi 1977; (2) Festschriften and obituaries: Atal
1993; Avasthi 1997; Bhattacharya & Bhattacharya 2004; Kapadia 1954; Madan
1994b, 1996, 2000; Madan and Sarana 1962; Momin 1996; Pillai 1976; Sarana
1961; Savur and Munshi 1995; Shah 1990; Singh 1956; Singh and Singh 1967;
Unnithan et al. 1965; (3) Commemorative volumes, such as those published in
connection with the World Congress of Anthropology or the International So¬
ciological Association conferences, both held in Delhi in 1978 and 1986 respect¬
ively (see Oomrnen & Mukherji 1986; Vidyarthi 1979); and jubilee volumes of
institutions and journals (e.g., Ferreira and Iha 1976a); (4) Commissioned
status reports and surveys of research: Indian Council of Social Science Research
1972-4, 1985, 2000; Chatterjee et al 2002, the latter a general survey of social
science research in South Asia; (5) Biographies: Bala Ratnam 1963; Bhattacharya
1990;Hivale 1946; Pramanick 1994; Saran 1965; Sinha 1986; and (6) Autobiogra¬
phies: Bose 1982; I.P. Desai 1996; Dube 1993;Elwin 1964;Ghurye 1973; Srinivas
1973, 1997.
6 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

University of Baroda and at the Delhi School of Economics, University

of Delhi. Our protagonists were selected not merely on grounds of
their contribution to sociological and anthropological knowledge of
India per se, but also (importantly from our present perspective) for
their contribution to the building of the ‘institutions’ through which
this disciplinary knowledge is produced, disseminated, and repro¬
duced in the Indian context (see also Deshpande, Sundar, & Uberoi
2000b). These include not only research institutes and the teaching
departments of universities, but also organs and departments of
government, such as the Census and the Anthropological Survey of
India, professional associations, and, of course, professional journals.
Our choice of focus has delimited our historical survey in several
ways which it is important to state up-front. First, by bracketing the
two disciplines of sociology and social (and cultural) anthropology,
we have taken a preemptive stand on a question that is actually the
subject of continual and intense debate.11 Some of the subjects of
our biographical accounts are regarded (or identify themselves) as
sociologists and some as anthropologists, while others have had
training or careers in both fields, and many of them—to further
complicate the picture—masquerade as sociologists at home and
anthropologists abroad. The problem is that in the Western academy,
which provides the model for our intellectual activities in India,
sociology and anthropology are often institutionally separated, and
also differentiated in terms of theory and methodologies. To put it
rather crudely, sociology is conventionally understood to focus on
the study of modern industrial societies, and anthropology on the
study of primitive, tribal, or pre-modern societies, the'other cultures

11 The problem of the relationship of sociology and social anthropology has

been repeatedly addressed in the Indian context, not least by M.N. Srinivas
(1972: ch. 5, 2002), Andre Beteille (1974, 1993, 2003, n.d.) and, in a justly
famous essay entitled ‘On living intimately with strangers’, by T.N. Madan
(1994a: ch. 6), among many others. In Bombay, too, G.S. Ghurye similarly ass¬
erted that ‘[i]n India, with its huge numbers of groups in all stages of culture,
there is no room for distinguishing and clearly separating social anthropology
from sociology’ (quoted in Pillai 1976: 28). Both the ICSSR survey of research
(1972-4, 1985) and the recent Oxford India companion to sociology and social
anthropology (Das 2003a) similarly bracket sociology and social/cultural anthro¬
pology; also Dhanagare 1993: ch. 3.

)
 INTRODUCTION 7

of the Western imaginary (to cite the title of an influential anthropolo¬

gical text of the 1960s [Beattie 1964] ).12 And, while things may have
changed somewhat over recent years, with a growing number of
anthropologists 'taking the subway to the field’ (Passaro 1997), the
long-established metropolitan division of labour between sociology
and anthropology has, for the most part, been faithfully reproduced,
indeed petrified, in academic structures and syllabi in India,13 as
elsewhere in the non-Western world.14 It’s actually a rather nonsensical
distinction from the perspective of the non-Western sociologist/
anthropologist for, as Andre Beteille remarked a generation ago,

[t] his way of making a distinction [between sociology and anthropology]

can lead to confusion. For if applied consistently, what anthropology is
to an American will be sociology to an Indian, and what sociology is to
an American will be anthropology to an Indian. The distinction will
work only so long as all societies, Western and non-Western, are studied
only by Western scholars. It becomes meaningless when scholars from
all over the world begin to study their own as well as other societies.
(Beteille 1974: 11)

The issue of disciplinary boundaries is of consequence to the task

at hand, however, for the simple reason that sociology and anthro¬
pology in the Western academy have tended to generate rather

12 This is, of course, a rather polite way of phrasing the issue. Diane Lewis,
in her review of the relationship of anthropology and colonialism (1973) des¬
cribes anthropology in so many words as the study of‘non-white’, ‘non-West-
ern’ people by outsiders.
13 Sociology departments in Indian academic institutions are typically under
arts or social sciences faculties, while anthropology departments are most fre¬
quently under the science faculties. In his recent survey of Indian anthropology,
however, Vinay Srivastava reports a very small number ot ‘composite’ depart¬
ments of anthropology and sociology, and also instances of the ‘integration’ of
social/cultural anthropology with human biology and prehistory in teaching
syllabi and research (Srivastava 2000). In practice, too, one finds a number of
sociology departments (such as at the Delhi School of Economics or the Uni¬
versity of Poona) where regular sociology courses (on theory, stratification,
work, industry, organisation, etc.) are taught alongside ‘traditional’ anthropo¬
logical subjects like kinship, religion, and symbolism (Dhanagare 1993: 49).
14 In China, for instance. See e.g. Guldin 1994; Uberoi 1974.
8 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

differently-oriented disciplinary‘histories’. The history of sociology

is linked to the post-Enlightenment project of modernity, to the
evolution of modern social and political theory, and to the
development of a ‘scientific’ approach to the study of man and
society (see e.g. Alatas 2006; Aron 1968; Hawthorn 1986), while the
history of anthropology, in so far as it differs from the former (and
of course there will be considerable overlap), expressly connects the
evolution of the discipline with the technologies of domination of
the West over the non-West (see Section II below). Within which of
these ‘grand narratives’ of disciplinary history should we locate
ourselves?
Second, in focusing on the intersection of knowledge, institutions,
and practices in a specific geographical locale (India), our account
of disciplinary history perforce excludes the major inputs to the
sociology and anthropology of India of many scholars—both non-
Indians and expatriate Indians—whose studies of society in India
have contributed significantly to the building of centres of Indology
and South Asian area studies in other parts of the world (see Assayag
and Bene! 2005). In this sense it cannot claim to be a comprehensive
and rounded historical account (albeit in the biographical mode) of
the history of Indian sociology and anthropology. Conversely, how¬
ever, not all our subjects were Indian born or bred: Patrick Geddes,
Scots environmentalist and town planner, founded the Sociology
Department of the University of Bombay; while Verrier Elwin, for¬
mer missionary, self-taught anthropologist, and advocate of tribal
rights came to hold important government assignments in tribal ad¬
ministration in the early years after Independence.
Third, traversing a relatively long historical period through the
individual life stories of our subjects and bracketing sociology and
social anthropology, we offer a somewhat different perspective on a
history that is conventionally rendered in developmental/evolution¬
ary cum typological terms. Vidyarthi, for instance, building on the
earlier expositions of D.N. Majumdar, N.K. Bose, and S.C. Dube,
periodises the history of Indian anthropology into three phases—
1774-1919, ‘formative’; 1920-47, ‘constructive’; and post-1948,‘ana¬
lytical’ (Vidyarthi 1978: 6-7), while Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1979)
similarly identifies a set of early‘reference groups’ (social philosophers,
 INTRODUCTION 9

policy makers, and social reformers, policy promoters and ad¬

ministrators and proto-sociologists), followed by‘pioneers’ (1920s-
1940s), ‘modernisers’ (1950s), ‘insiders’ (1960s), and ‘pace-makers’
and ‘non-conformists’ (1970s). Additionally, spanning colonial and
post-colonial regimes, we also invite the partial dissolution or dis¬
placement of the colonial ‘knowledge-power’ thesis which—as men¬
tioned—has been a conspicuous theme in the self-reflexive and self-
critical disciplinary history of anthropology (though not, at least not
to the same extent, in the disciplinary history of sociology: see
Section II below). For the most part (though the career of Gandhian
activist N.K. Bose provides an exception), we see in the biographies
that span the transfer of power no major ‘rupture’ at the moment of
Independence, but rather the expansion and consolidation of
professional activities initiated under the colonial regime, and we are
left to wonder whether the ‘power-knowledge’ nexus may have been
over-stated or rather simplistically formulated in previous discussions
of anthropology and colonialism; or whether in fact Indian anthro¬
pologists and sociologists were perhaps more innovative, and more
locally embedded, than the superficial appearance of disciplinary
conformity and colonial-postcolonial continuity suggests.
Finally, in juxtaposing a dozen biographies—of men and women
(to be precise, just a single woman, Irawati Karve), of Indians and
Britishers,13 of university-based academics (Sarkar, Ghurye, Karve,
Mukerji, Srinivas, Dube), independent scholars (Roy, Elwin), govern¬
ment servants (Iyer), party activists (Desai), or people who straddled
these different categories (Geddes, Bose), of people from different
regions of the country, of lives played out over a relatively long hist¬
orical duree—we are drawn to consider not merely the differences
that divided them but the recurrent concerns that united them
within the evolving discursive universe of Indian sociology and
social anthropology.
This Introduction seeks in particular to foreground some of these
recurrent themes and dilemmas, and the manner of their articulation
in the lives and disciplinary practices of our twelve subjects. By the

1? Though British-born, Verrier Elwin became an Indian citizen after Indian

Independence.
10 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

same token, it is not an attempt to plot a narrative of linear evolution

(as from amateur beginnings to professional maturity, from mis¬
guided theory to true knowledge), or of decline and attrition (from
transdisciplinary synthesis to arid compartmentaiisation [cf. Mukher-
jee 1979: 54, 66]). Nor does it tell a simple story of successive ‘para¬
digm shifts’ from one form of‘normal’ knowledge to another,16 or
from colonial to post-colonial forms of knowledge and disciplinary
practices. Taken collectively, these biographies bear witness to the
process of transposition of the modern sciences of man and society
into a non-Western environment, and the cognitive, ethical, political,
and practical problems—indeed, at times, the self-alienation and
self-doubt—that such transposition inevitably entails. But they also,
and we wish to underline this point, tell the story of the pioneering
labours of many non-Western scholars whose professional activities,
though no doubt prominently recorded in various ‘country’-specific
studies,17 have received negligible recognition in standard disciplinary
histories.18 For instance, L.K.A. Iyer (see Kalpana Ram’s account,
this volume) lived a life historically coeval with that of Franz Boas,
the acknowledged ‘founder’ of American anthropology. He similarly
worked to document the lifestyles and cultural practices of many
primitive peoples, contributing to the production of a vast ethnogra¬
phic survey of the sort that the British wanted (but did not succeed
in producing) for the British Isles (cf. Urry 1984). But Iyer’s is far
from a household name in world anthropology, and the same could

16 In line with the lnew history of science’, inspired by Thomas Kuhn’s The
structure of scientific revolutions (1962). Kuhn’s formulation has also influenced
the writing of a new history of the social and behavioural sciences, in particular
through the work of George W. Stocking, Jr., an iconic figure in the disciplinary
history of anthropology (see Stocking 1983, 1984, 1985).
17 Such as those produced on behest of organisations like UNESCO, the
International Sociological Association, or the International Congress of Anthro¬
pological and Ethnological Sciences.
18 The point is forcefully made by Deshpande in his article on M.N. Srinivas
(this volume), where he observes, viewing a photograph of the Oxford Anthro¬
pology Department in 1945-6, that few non-white anthropologists are recalled
and remembered in disciplinary history. See also Eades, Yamashita, and Bosco
2001.
 INTRODUCTION 11

well be said for most of the other figures whose biographies we have
included here.19

II. COLONIAL DOMINATION AND THE

COLONISED MIND

The relationship between anthropology and colonialism has received

much attention in a colourful, critical, and oftentimes sanctimonious
literature, spanning some four decades or more.20 Though further
comment may appear redundant, we gesture briefly towards this
literature, produced largely in the Western academy, it maybe noted,
as a background to our discussion of the somewhat different com¬
plexion the issue has assumed in the Indian context where it intersects
with, or runs parallel to, wider discourses on what is sometimes cal¬
led the ‘indigenisation’ of social science knowledge,21 on the practical
‘relevance’ of anthropological knowledge in application to local
problems and conditions in the region, and in general on modern
education (alternatively, modern science) and its role in the past and
present‘colonisation’ of the non-Western mind (Alatas 1974).
By the late 1960s, against the sombre background of the neo-colo¬
nial wars in Algeria and Vietnam and the civil rights movement in
the United States, a new generation of practitioners was obliged to

19 Only two of our twelve subjects—Verrier Elwin and M.N. Srinivas—find

treatment in a recent biographical dictionary of social and cultural anthropology
(Amit 2004). No doubt some were excluded from consideration as‘sociologists’,
or ‘social philosophers’, but the exclusion of Iyer, Roy, Ghurye, Bose, Karve, and
Dube calls for some reflection. Similarly, Patrick Geddes merits a biographical
notice in the International encyclopedia of the social sciences (Sills 1968), but
none of our subjects received biographical treatment in the new International
encyclopedia of the social and behavioural sciences (Smelser 8c Baltes 2001),
though Elwin, Geddes, Ghurye, Mukherji, Srinivas, and Dube find occasional
mention in various articles, mostly those on the social sciences in South Asia.
20 See among others Alatas 2006; Asad 1973,1979,1991; Clifford and Marcus
1986; Diamond 1974; Fabian 1983; Gough 1968; Lewis 1973; Marcus and
Fischer 1986; and Stocking 1968, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1992.
21 See Matas 2006; Barnes 1982; Fahim 1982; Fardon 1990; Gerholm and
Flannerz 1982; Saberwal 1982.
12 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

come to terms with the fact that the intimate knowledge of‘primitive
others’ claimed by their discipline was made possible not just by the
heroic efforts of pioneering anthropologists but also by armies of
occupation, pacification campaigns, colonial rule, and racial domina¬
tion. Claude Levi-Strauss had summed up the legacy of anthropo¬
logy’s dubious past in a hard-hitting address to the Smithsonian
Institution in September 1965:‘Anthropology is daughter to fan] era
of violence’, he said, whereby the larger part of humanity had been
rendered subservient to the minority and millions of people thrown
into bondage (1966: 126)—indeed, so much so that, by the end of
the Second World War and the beginning of decolonisation, the dis¬
cipline of anthropology was perceived to be in grave danger of losing
its human subjects altogether. Physically decimated and culturally
deracinated, primitive peoples were no longer available in their pris¬
tine condition (if ever they were after the onset of Europe’s ‘Age of
Discovery’!) for the anthropologist’s scientific gaze, and anthropology
was scripted as an ‘urgent’ or‘salvage’ operation on behalf of‘vanish¬
ing’ peoples and their fast-vanishing cultures.22
Tracing the history of anthropology from its early armchair be¬
ginnings, when anthropologists were forced to rely on the data col¬
lected by administrators, missionaries, travellers, and traders, to its
professionalisation and institutionalisation in universities, profes¬
sional associations, academic journals, etc., Joan Vincent (1990) has
shown how British anthropology was, from its very beginnings, im¬
plicated in the colonial experience. Early American anthropology
too had its own internal colonial dimension, with the establishment
of the Bureau of Ethnology to study native Americans in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, while American imperialism in the
Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and South America over the twen¬
tieth century was accompanied by increasing anthropological involve¬
ment in these areas (Huizer and Mannheim 1979; Vincent 1990).

22 See Sturtevant 1967; also Beals 1967 in follow-up of the Smithsonian-

Wenner-Gren Conference (1966) on ‘urgent anthropology’ where Claude Levi-
Strauss’s note on the ‘future’ of anthropology was circulated. See also the cri¬
tical remarks of Abbi and Saberwal on the concept of‘salvage anthropology’
(1969: 4-6) in the volume, Urgent research in social anthropology, based on a
conference by that title held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla,
in 1968.
 INTRODUCTION 13

'Project Camelot’, an operation run by the US Department of Defense

and the Central Intelligence Agency that funded anthropological
research in South East Asia in the early 1960s was a particularly noto¬
rious example, though by no means the first, last, or only one (see
e.g. Horowitz 1967; Szanton 2004).
Asads (1973) benchmark volume for studies of anthropology
and colonialism highlights a number of salient points regarding the
institutional and ideological contexts in which anthropology deve¬
loped, the often contradictory relationships of anthropologists with
colonial administrations, and how these affected the self-definition
and theoretical orientations of the discipline. In his introductory
essay, Asad argues that 'anthropology is rooted in an unequal power
encounter between the West and the Third World’, in which ethno¬
graphic and historical knowledge of the colonised domains not only
enabled the colonisers to 'know’ and thus administer their territories
better, but also reinforced the inequalities in capacities between
European and non-European worlds.23 Similarly, Edward Said (1979)
and Bernard Cohn (1990) have both pointed to the manner in which
orientalist or anthropological ‘knowledge’ of a country’s traditions
and customs helped to 'fix’ sociological categories, such as caste,
ritual, custom, law, and political institutions, into a timeless essence
that denied the necessity for administrators to concern themselves
with the changing political aspirations and concerns of living people
on the ground.
The critique of anthropology’s colonial roots is made not only at
the political but also at the theoretical level. Functionalism and em¬
piricism, and subsequently modernisation theory, were said to have
an'elective affinity’ with colonialism (Anderson 1968; Banaji 1970;
Lewis 1973) in their focus on small, bounded wholes and tribal units
(rather than the links of these entitites with wider economic and
political systems [Frank 1967; Wallerstein 1984]); in their concern
with surface phenomena and their contribution to surface stability,

23 Asad modulated his stand in later years, however, declaring in 1979 that
the practical role of British anthropologists 'in support of British imperial
structures’ was only ‘very occasionally direct but on the whole insignificant’
(1979: 607), and in any case scarcely worthy of further illustration once the
general connection between anthropological knowledge and the expansion of
European power had been well established (Asad 1991: 315).
14 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

at the expense of the underlying relations of power and exploitation

which were often exacerbated by indirect colonial rule (Bloch 1975,
1983); and in their neglect of history, which might have shown the
processes, such as expropriation and marginalisation, through which
these groups were often constituted (Wolf 1982). The objectification
and ‘denial of co-evalness’ to the ‘primitive other’ (Fabian 1983)
which accompanied the framing of cultures in the ethnographic pre¬
sent, based on fieldwork/participant-observation, are also seen as an
outgrowth of the functionalist methods and fieldwork techniques of
early anthropology. Some of these criticisms are applicable to a
much later stage as well, when anthropology had ostensibly gained
awareness that cultures are not isolated wholes, and had taken up
studies of culture contact and acculturation. As William Roseberry
(1989) points out, these studies in the 1950s and 1960s often ignored
the unequal power situations in which ‘acculturation’ took place,
and the long histories of contact which pre-dated ‘modernisation’.
Apart from the issues of racial and civilisational dominance that
were seen to have driven the anthropological enterprise from the
very outset, another set of epistemological-theoretical questions
also served to intensify self-critical interest in the disciplinary history
of anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Broadly speaking, these
were provoked by the insights of poststructuralist theory and literary
criticism, and concerned the methodology of construction of‘ethno¬
graphic authority’. Given the discursive nature of social anthropologi¬
cal knowledge, what kinds of rhetorical devices and representational
techniques did the discipline deploy in order to produce authoritative
statements on ‘other’ cultures? What kind of a picture did the disci¬
pline present when the ‘observers’ were ‘observed’ (Stocking 1983)?
The hallowed institution of fieldwork, the single most important
factor in establishing the scientific credentials of the discipline,
proved upon close scrutiny to be not so magical after all (Stocking
1992), and reading the marginalia and the ‘rough work’ of the lead¬
ing lights produced a picture startlingly at odds with the impression
of detached and dedicated scholarship cultivated by the discipline.
Questions were asked about the future of the discipline and its very
raison d’etre in a globalised world, and a range of methodological in¬
novations proposed to address the asymmetries and biases inherent
in the production of anthropological knowledge, including‘dialogical’
 INTRODUCTION 15

or experimental’ ethnography, a greater emphasis on life histories

and oral histories, and an anthropology of the ‘self’ rather than the
other (see e.g. Fox 1991; Price 1990;Trouillot 2003).
With the benefit of hindsight and the demands of political correct¬
ness, it is all too easy to pass quickjudgment on anthropology’s sym¬
biotic relationship with colonial rule. But this is not the whole story,
of course, and it is not difficult to find consolingly redeeming feat¬
ures in anthropology’s chequered past. Indeed, there is a whole
strand of literature which highlights anthropology’s radical nature—
in relativising Western morality (Margaret Mead), in showing that
race was not a scientific category (Franz Boas), in encouraging inte¬
rest in other cultures, in celebrating a common humanity, etc.24 As
Wendy James has argued (1973), the very nature of the anthropolo¬
gical enterprise and its defence of alternative ways of life and modes
of thought tend to turn it in a liberal direction. Moreover, colonialism
was not a monolithic institution imposed on the colonised, and—
as is clear in the Indian case—there were important differences of
perspective between administrators, missionaries, ethnographers,
traders, and the military, and between ‘anthropologically-minded
administrators’ and other colonial officials, particularly with regard
to the formulation of tribal policy (Guha, this volume; Sundar 1997:
156-61). There were also differences among the emerging band of
Indian anthropologists, some of whom (like K.P. Chattopadhyay
and N.K. Bose) were actively involved in the nationalist struggle
against British rule.
All the same, the vigorous debates of the 1960s and 1970s, following
Vietnam, at least created a heightened awareness among anthro¬
pologists worldwide that, whatever their intentions, anthropological
evidence could all too easily be put to the ser vice of imperialism and
aggression. In turn, the practical consequences for individual anthro¬
pologists and anthropology could be dire:

The prospective fieldworker, for example, may find that he is banned

by the government or rejected by the intellectuals of the country he
seeks to enter; or he may be forced to pose as an economist or sociologist

24 Vincents (1990) overview of the evolution of political anthropology pre¬

sents many examples of anthropologists whose theory and practice did attempt
to take account of the colonial factor (see also Lewis 1973).
16 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

in order to gain acceptance. Frequently he encounters resentment from

the group he has chosen to study. A willingness to tolerate the anthro¬
pologist has been replaced by outright distrust and suspicion. Finally,
when the fieldworker returns home to write and lecture about ‘his’
people, he is increasingly confronted by representatives of the group
who challenge the validity of his findings. (Lewis 1973: 581)

This realisation encouraged concerted attempts by the profession

to draw up alternative ethical guidelines and to rethink ways in
which anthropology and anthropologists could help repay the people
with whom they lived and studied (though the form which human
subject protection has taken under Institutional Review Boards in
the US may be proving unfeasible [see Lederman 2006]). Some of
this self-consciousness regarding the 'practice’ of anthropology,
particularly questions of the ethics of field research and the ‘stand¬
point’ of the observer vis-a-vis the observed, have found sympathetic
echoes in the writings of Indian sociologists and anthropologists
over recent years,25 though generations of Indian students continue
to be dispatched to ‘survey’ hapless populations in the routine course
of their disciplinary training.
Understandably, the debate on the relationship of anthropology
and colonialism has had a somewhat different trajectory in the Ind¬
ian (compared to the Western) context. In 1968, hot on the heels of
the exposes that wracked the Area Studies and Social Sciences com¬
munities in the US, the Indian monthly journal Seminar published
a special issue on the theme of‘academic colonialism’. In his ‘poser’
to that issue, Satish Saberwal analysed the several forms that academic
colonialism may assume in the ex-colonies: (i) In some cases, he
wrote, foreign academics and intellectuals may exercise ‘political
dominance’ by using their status to directly influence the course of
local politics; (ii) in other cases, intentionally or otherwise, the
information collected by individual social scientists may be used by
the CIA and other such agencies for political domination and
subversion. To these he added a further feature, namely (iii) that
North American academics may exercise intellectual domination
through their economic and political patronage of individuals and

25 See various essays in Beteille & Madan 1975; Srinivas, Shah, & Ramaswamy
1979; and Thapan 1998; also Giri 2004; Kumar 2005.
 INTRODUCTION 17

institutions in the non-West, with ‘disastrous’ consequences, in his

estimation, ‘for problem selection, research design, and modes of
publication’ (Saberwal 1968: 13; cf. Alatas 2006). This ‘intellectual
domination’, or‘colonisation of the mind’, as Yogendra Singh elabo¬
rated in another article in the same Seminar issue, means that Indian
intellectuals must perforce operate within a system of thought which
is culturally alien: ‘they acquired it, and continue to acquire it not as
creative partners in the universal community of intellectuals but as
the handy-men of history.’ This is why, according to Singh, their
work‘tends to be more imitative than innovative’ (Singh 1968: 27).
And, around the same time, J.P.S. Uberoi (1968) took the debate a
step further, attributing the much-lamented ‘crisis’ of metropolitan
anthropology and the recurrent complaints of the ‘unoriginality’ of
Indian anthropology to‘foreign dominance in all matters of scientific
and professional life and organisation’ in the ex-colonies, notwith¬
standing the attainment of self-rule (swaraj) in the political sphere.
In short, in the Indian context, ‘academic colonialism’ was seen to
concern not merely the brute facts of the colonisation and oppression
of other peoples via anthropological knowledge, as in the metropoli¬
tan debate, but, even more insidiously, the ‘colonisation’ of the non-
Western mind through the imposition of Western education, Western
categories of thought, and the value-frame of modern (^Western)
science. This colonisation of the mind, as Ashis Nandy was later to
elaborate, outlives the literal time-span of colonial rule and ‘releases
forces within the colonised societies to alter their cultural priorities
once for all. In the process, it helps generalise the concept of the
modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psycho¬
logical category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and
outside; in structures and in minds’ (1983: xi).
There is nothing very new in such views, it must be said, for con¬
cern over the colonisation of the Indian mind was in fact coterminous
with the very imposition of colonial rule and colonial education (see
Zastoupil and Moir 1999). Writing as early as 1928, to take a random
example from a huge literature, the eminent philosopher K.C. Bhat-
tacharya spoke of the urgent need for what he called ‘Svaraj [self-
rule] in ideas’. ‘We speak today of Svaraj or self-determination in
politics’, he said, and indeed ‘man’s domination over man is felt in
the most tangible form in the political sphere’. But there is ‘a subtler
18 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

domination exercised in the sphere of ideas by one culture on an¬

other, a domination all the more serious in the consequence, because
it is not ordinarily felt.’ True, Indians had welcomed this new education
as a ‘blessing’, but they had not done so, he complained, in an ‘open-
eyed’ and critical manner. The result was that, even ‘after a century
of contact with the vivifying ideas of the west’, there was still no ‘vig¬
orous output of Indian contribution in a distinctive Indian style to
the culture and thought of the modern world’, and ‘not much evid¬
ence of such creative work done by our educated men’ (Bhattacharya
1984: 383-5).26 In this broader sense, therefore, the practice of all
modern branches of knowledge in the non-West must be deemed
derivative and dependent, and there is nothing particularly‘colonial’
about ‘anthropology’ as a discipline that should single it out for spe¬
cial attention, or differentiate it from its near neighbour, sociology,
or from the social sciences in general (cf. Alatas 2006; Deshpande
2001b).
Several of the case studies in this book provide fodder for anthro¬
pology’s auto-critique, of which the contributors are all well aware,
but they also complicate and problematise the question of the link
between colonial power and anthropological knowledge beyond its
current confines, and encourage several different lines of questioning.
First, they confirm that ‘the West’ versus ‘the rest’ is not a very pro¬
ductive way of interpreting the history of anthropological practice
in South Asia, whether in terms of race or intellectual provenance.
There were villains and heroes on both sides of the divide. For ins¬
tance—and putting aside here the received distinction of anthropo¬
logy and sociology—the eminent and eccentric natural scientist,
geographer, town planner, sociologist, and utopian visionary Patrick
Geddes, a founder-member of the British Sociological Society in
1903, had originally come to India in 1915 under the best of imper¬
ial auspices to present an exhibition on ‘Cities and Town Planning’
(see Munshi, this volume). He spent more than a decade on and off
in India, preparing some fifty studies on town planning for colonial

26 See other articles in the same special number of the Indian philosophical
quarterly in which Bhattacharya’s article was reprinted, some of them appreciat¬
ive of his stand, others highly critical.
 INTRODUCTION 19

authorities and for the rulers of some of the Indian princely states
(see Geddes 1947), taking up the foundation chair in Civics and
Sociology at the University of Bombay in 1919. But Geddes was
scarcely a meek and pliable instrument of imperial governance. His
radical ideas and unorthodox methods ran counter to established
theories and practices of modern town planning—he was widely
credited with excessive ‘idealism’ and ‘impracticably’27—and in fact
he found greater encouragement for his experiments in the Indian
princely states. On the other hand, he was certainly not a recruit to
the Eastern Spiritualism versus Western Materialism way of thinking.
A social thinker and activist, he saw modern India—still at the thres¬
hold of industrialisation and urbanisation—as a potential experi¬
mental laboratory from where an alternative route to modernisation
could be scripted, demonstrating where the West had gone wrong in
its fateful separation of‘place, work and folk’ and endorsing his plans
for urban renewal and regional integration in his native Scotland.
The case of Verrier Elwin is especially complex (see Guha, this
volume; also 1999), in his celebration of indigenous adivasi traditions
against both the colonial government and Hindu nationalists, and
in his shifting positions on the Congress—from being a follower of
Gandhi to being critical of the Congress as overtly Hindu to influ¬
encing Nehru on independent India’s tribal policy. Elwin’s debates
with the other anthropologists of his time, like G.S. Ghurye or D.N.
Majumdar, can hardly be classified as a Western versus Indian debate—
but as debates between opposing positions within India, positions
which continue to be articulated by different sides even today.
On the other side, it would surely be misplaced to demonise the
‘native’ ethnographer as merely the witting or unwitting instrument
of colonial governance and oppression. Kalpana Ram’s paper (this
volume) takes up the interesting case of L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer

2/ An unsigned note in the first issue of the Indian journal of sociology

(January 1920, pp. 97-8) defends Geddes against the charge ofbeing<impracticaf
in his schemes for civic improvement thus: 'He has an artistic temperament
which continually manifests itself not only in his architectural and other de¬
signs, but also in his sympathetic appreciation of the symbolism of the peoples with
whom he comes into contact in the course of his activities. . . . Contrary to a not
infrequent impression, Professor Geddes is a practical man [emphasis added].’
20 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

who, following the 1901 Census, was invited to conduct the ethnogra¬
phic survey of Cochin state (a princely state under‘indirect’ colonial
rule), and later of the princely state of Mysore, and was recognised
by colonial authorities and British academies of learning as a pioneer
of anthropology in the colonies. As Bernard Cohn (1990) and others
have argued (see Appadurai 1993, cited in Sundar 1999), the census
and ethnographic surveys were instruments both of scientific inquiry
and colonial administrative control, and Iyer’s task—superficially at
least—was merely to fill in the gaps in Risley’s pre-devised schedule.
Was he, then, completely lacking in ‘agency’ as a thinking member
of his own society?
Ram argues to the contrary, and on several grounds. On the one
hand, she suggests that Iyer’s habitus28 as a Tamil Brahman made
him (and others of his community) peculiarly receptive to the scien¬
tific/civilising mission of European colonial rule—a question of
‘elective affinity’ (in the Weberian terminology), rather than of nak¬
ed imperial coercion, or simple and pragmatic venality. On the other
hand she outlines the various subtle ways in which Iyer moderated
and subverted his appointed task of ethnographic survey. For instance,
he rather downplayed the anthropometrical focus of the anthropology
of his day; he conducted his ethnographic investigations personally
rather than bureaucratically through government functionaries;
and he enjoyed the insider’s familiarity with several of the languages
of the region (an asset of the ‘native’ ethnographer on which there
has been surprisingly little comment). Equally important was his
command over the techniques and technologies of modern scientific
investigation, enabling him to move with confidence from the role
of native assistant and informant to that of a valued co-professional.
His mastery of photography was a case in point—at once mimicry
and sign of professional arrival (cf. Pinney 1997: ch. 1).
Similarly, the lawyer-cum-anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy
(1871-1942), a respected friend of missionaries and administrators,
received professional recognition from the world community of an¬
thropologists as well as patronage and decorations from the colonial
state for his pioneering work in establishing anthropology in India
(see Dasgupta, this volume). Yet Roy fully believed that the findings

28 A term borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu (1977).

 INTRODUCTION 21

of modern science could be reconciled with the truths of the Vedas

and that Indian anthropologists, with their locational advantages
and a millennial-old humanistic tradition of scholarship behind
them, could do better than foreigners in recording and interpreting
the cultures of India’s tribal peoples, thereby to bring about the ulti¬
mate renewal of the science of anthropology (Roy 1938).
Second, these biographical essays suggest that colonialism maybe
relativised as merely one form of ‘othering’ among others, albeit a
uniquely powerful and profoundly influential one. In this light, the
critical challenge would seem to be to undertake a comparative ana¬
lysis of colonial-Western and ‘indigenous’ modes of ‘othering’ and
the ways in which they shape anthropology. While this perspective
would carry the risk of softening the villainy of colonialism, it could
also offer the possibility of putting colonialism ‘in its place’, thus
countering the perverse way in which it tends to dominate even our
understanding of domination.
Many of the essays reveal their subjects’ deep ambivalence regard¬
ing their disciplinary tools and practices. On the one hand, the
anthropologist studying the Indian ‘tribes’ would likely replicate the
standpoint of classical anthropology vis-a-vis the primitive; or, as
Deshpande argues (this volume) with reference to Srinivas’s pro¬
motion of‘village studies’, would conduct his/her research with the
unspoken advantages of the upper-caste, Western-educated, urbanite.
Yet many of these pioneers also felt a great empathy, often amounting
to genuine admiration, for their subjects. S.C. Roy, for instance,
came to believe (in Dasgupta’s words) that‘empathy with the subjects
was more important than the tools of anthropology that were drawn
from the West’, ultimately, almost despite his profession, celebrating
many aspects of‘primitive’ tribal culture. Similarly, for Verrier Elwin,
‘truth’, a higher truth, was to be sought in the ‘other’; the tribal peo¬
ples whose lives he recorded were individuals to be loved and res¬
pected, not laboratory specimens for detached scientific observation.
Reflexively, too, he wrote himself into his books—no longer
participant-observer but participant in the true sense, blurring the
boundaries of science and fiction and caring little for his professional
reputation.
Third, even as they studied primitive ‘others’, almost all our sub¬
jects (Geddeswas the exception, of course) saw themselves as engaged
22 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

in the study of their own society, within the framework of the nation¬
state (imagined, emergent, or actual): tribals, peasants, and workers,
along with the anthropologist-observer, were all coevally and equally
citizens of India (cf. Beteille 1974). In this sense, whether for assimila-
tionists or for isolationists, the assumption of cultural pluralism was
both the challenge and the starting point of investigation. Moreover,
the audiences they addressed were not exclusively scholarly ones;
many of them wrote bilingually, with varying messages for different
circles.
Fourth, while all our subjects sought to utilise the received voca¬
bulary and concepts of their disciplines, faithfully rendering them in
alien soil, many of them also sought to translate these into indigenous
categories of thought, or to seek analogies or even precedents from
within their own traditions. The example of Benoy Kumar Sarkar,
who ‘discovered’ evidence of positivism in the classical Ffindu tradi¬
tion, has already been mentioned (Sarkar 1937; see Chatterji, this
volume). And there were several others, like D.P. Mukerji, who found
in the Upanishadic tradition an alternative and enabling definition
of human ‘progress’ (Madan, this volume).
Some of the essays in this book explicitly raise the question of the
location/habitus of the anthropologist in relation to colonial authority
on the one hand, and the peoples brought under the anthropologist’s
gaze on the other, or in relation to marginalised communities (tribals,
lower castes, industrial workers, etc.) in the anthropologist’s own
society. Some reflect on the‘contradictions’ of the enlightened Indian
under colonial rule, or of the Western anthropologist ‘gone native’.
Others do so more inexplicitly, via their reflections on disciplinary
boundaries, and on the social and ethical responsibility of the socio¬
logist/anthropologist in relation to the state. These are questions to
which we will return after a brief excursus on the role of biography
as entree to disciplinary history.

III. THE USES OF BIOGRAPHY IN

DISCIPLINARY HISTORY

Biography has long been an important means of doing intellectual

history. In Lacapra’s words (1983: 185), it provides ‘the space in
 INTRODUCTION 23

which there is an interaction between lived and written texts’ and

serves as a useful way of understanding how places and people
translate into theories, and how perception mediates empirical obser¬
vation. Academic disciplines rarely develop merely on the strength
or merit of ideas alone for, as Max Gluckman once remarked, the
production of knowledge is asocial process mediated by and through
individuals’ (quoted in Vincent 1990: 15).29
Given that anthropology, more than other disciplines, is embodied
in the lives of its practitioners and their experiences in the ‘field’ in¬
volving a variety of relationships with ‘others’, biographies of indivi¬
dual anthropologists have become increasingly popular as a way of
raising questions about the discipline. In the West more broadly, but
in the United States particularly, many of these questions have fo¬
cused on the role of anthropological knowledge in assisting colonial¬
ism and imperialism (see above), on the difference that feminist
epistemologies would make to a reading of the same ethnographic
material (e.g. Weiner 1976 on Malinowski), or on how individual
political predilections may result in different theoretical stances (see
Lewis 1951 versus Redfield 1930;Freeman 1999 versus Mead). Placing
private diaries alongside published accounts, reading ethnographies
‘against the grain’, or even revisiting earlier fieldwork sites have been
fruitful in terms of revealing aspects of the ‘hidden history’ of an¬
thropology (see Clifford 1988).
In the last two decades, this interest in biography has been ex¬
tended in a different direction by the appearance of a number of
edited volumes of biographical and autobiographical essays.30 These
collective biographies are interesting not only in what they reveal of
individual lives and texts but in the way that these lives speak to each
other, building up a larger picture of theoretical shifts, of paths taken
or not taken. However, most of the emphasis has been on British and
American scholars. Asia, Africa, and Polynesia enter merely as the

29 For a good discussion of the way the institutional location of scholars,

(albeit within the overall space of Anglo-American anthropology), their relative
power and influence, their informal social network with their peers, etc., in¬
fluence the contours of their discipline, see Vincent (1990: 14-19).
30 See the Stocking volumes (1983, 1984); also Gould and Pitts (2002) on
geographers, and Assayag and Benei (2003) on scholars of South Asia.
24 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

‘sites’ in which fieldwork was carried out, rather than as places with
their own traditions of scholarship where people are actively interested
in shaping the discipline as a whole. When the spotlight is turned on
to Indian lives, not only do they speak to each other to reveal a speci¬
fically South Asian milieu but, when compared to those of American
or British anthropologists over the same hundred-year period, enable
us to draw interesting conclusions about how simultaneous time is
theorised differently in different locations (the 1950s as a time ex¬
perienced very differently in India and the US, for example).
With a couple of exceptions (Guha, Deshpande), the essays in this
volume follow a fairly standard ‘Western’ model of biographical
writing where the life of the subject is chronologically laid out, per¬
sonal and intellectual influences traced, and singularities which set
the life apart from others highlighted (see Aaron 19780; Metcalf
2004: 120). It’s a rather commonsensical model, in fact, leaning to¬
wards the ‘sociological’ and ‘ historical’ rather than the ‘psychological’
or psychoanalytical.31 And, while there is material here in plenty for
psychobiography—of sibling rivalries, of oedipal struggles, of loss
and pain and disappointment, of tangled relations with significant
others, of domination, abjection, and rebellion, of self-alienation
and self-doubt—these personality conflicts remain in all cases very
much in the background, and are certainly not projected as the
motor of professional development.
On the whole, too, these essays assume the unity of the self, and
this again is a position that is nowhere expressly problematised. It
has been argued, for instance, that the idea of an ‘individual’ with co¬
herence over time is itself a Western myth, a product of the ‘age of
personality’ created by a ‘Western humanist industrialised culture’
(Clifford 1978: 44). Pointing to the problems that poststructuralism
poses for biography, Clifford argues that while biography cannot
escape the obligation to ‘deliver a self’, it can at least undertake to
make the sell’s relationship with others, and with society in general,

31 By way of contrast, see e.g. Eric Erikson on Gandhi (1969), or Ashis

Nandy’s studies of scientist J.C. Bose and mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan
(Nandy 1980).

)
 INTRODUCTION 25

as visible as possible (ibid.: 44). In some ways, Cliffords exhortation

brings 'Western conceptions of personhood closer to others. For
example, Arnold and Blackburn (2004) argue that, in their writing
of life histories, ‘Indians present individual lives within a network of
other lives and that they define themselves in relation to larger
frames of reference, especially those of family, kin, caste, religion,
and gender’ (Arnold and Blackburn 2004:19; see also Boorman 1962
on Chinese biographical styles).
Yet differences in styles of biographical or autobiographical writing
can go deeper than that. In a fascinating account of the autobiography
of a religious scholar, Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya, Barbara
Metcalf points to the ways in which his autobiography differs from
a standard Western model. First, as against a chronological deve¬
lopment of his life, he presents his character as essentially given, and
expressed through repeated episodes. Second, as against individual
agency, he focuses on forces that are larger than himself—the divine
powers of his elders. Third, his story is essentially of his relation to
other people. ‘Muhammad Zakariyya’s own life gains significance
not by individuality but by devotion to a particular pattern. . . . The
fundamental purpose of the autobiography is to serve as an interactive,
pedagogic tool to instruct others’ (Metcalf 2004: 120-1).
The fact that Maulana Zakariyya (1897-1982) lived through the
same period as the scholars in our volume and yet conceived of his
life in ways that are so different from theirs casts into relief the whole
question of Indian intellectual life. Formal Western education not
only created different intellectual strata, but fundamentally different
conceptions of personhood (see Shils 1972 for a threefold categoris¬
ation of Asian intellectuals). Perhaps, since the people we write
about were part of this formal system modelled on Western education,
there is no other way in which we could have described them except
through a ‘Western’ biographical style. Yet, as Shils perceptively
writes, ‘in no Asian country is even the first class, the modern or
“Westernised” intellectual so modern and “Westernised” that they
preserve no traces of the indigenous traditional culture in their
outlook, in their tastes and social relations, in their self-identification,
or in their loyalties’ (Shils 1972: 377). He also points out that, despite
26 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the Westernised tag, these intellectuals usually know more about

their own high culture than others,32 while remaining relatively free
of regional communal influences (ibid.)- Inevitably this made a dif¬
ference to the kind of sociology and anthropology they practised,
which marked it apart from North American or European anthro¬
pology of the same period. Unfortunately, this tradition of bilingual
scholarship, exemplified in so many of the scholars in our volume,
seems to have passed in India, but that is another story which will
be told in future histories of the disciplines.
While the biographical essays in this volume may assume the
‘unity5 of the self, they do not necessarily endorse an essentialist idea
of an unchanging self. In the accounts given here, several subjects
appeared to be fairly consistent in their ideas throughout their
professional careers, finding their disciplinary orientations and secure
academic positions fairly early in life (e.g. Ghurye; Karve; Srinivas).
Others moved in and out of academic positions to administration
and government (Bose; Dube). Some gradually distanced themselves
from their earlier professional attitudes, as in the case of S.C. Roy,
already mentioned, whose initially detached scientific attitude to the
tribals of Chotanagpur was ultimately superseded by empathy and
concern, and who eventually felt that he could dispense with the
eternal apprenticeship of the colonial anthropologist and see Indian
‘men’ study Indian ‘man’! Others underwent drastic career changes
and ruptures for one reason or another (Bose and Elwin come to
mind), their ideas and perceptions changing accordingly.
Given the overall orientation of this volume, the authors of the
biographical essays focus on their subjects as sociologists/anthropolo-
gists, and not on other aspects of their lives which may have been
equally if not more significant in their biographies. For instance,
Irawati Karve was also a Marathi essayist of some stature (see Sundar,
this volume); N.K. Bose was a nationalist and a Gandhian activist
who wrote eloquently about his association with Gandhi (Bose 1953;

'2 This may be much less so now, a generation on from Shils’s study. See
Andre Beteilles comments (1994) in respect to K.P. Chattopadhyay’s confident
recourse to Sanskrit texts and analogies, and the same was true of many others
of the older generation—notably G.S. Ghurye (who held degrees in Sanskrit),
but also D.R Mukerji and Irawati Karve (Upadhya, Madan, Sundar, this volume).
 INTRODUCTION 27

see Bose, this volume); Patrick Geddes was a hands-on town planner;
and Verrier Elwin aspired to be recognised as both poet and novelist.
But these aspects of their lives remain relatively in the background
in these accounts.
The essays are also ‘sociological5 in the sense that, in one way or
another, all seek to relate their subjects’ lives, their writings, and their
styles of sociology/anthropology to the times in which they lived.
Kalpana Ram, whose biography of L.K.A. Iyer has already been men¬
tioned, does so through Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus: in Iyer’s
case, both the individual habitus of the Tamil Brahmin, and the
social habitus of the progressive, reform-minded princely states of
southern India. Similarly, we learn that G.S. Ghurye was a Saraswat
Brahman, and that his ideas were moulded by elite English education,
the social reform movements of western India, and a particular style
of Hindu nationalism to which in fact he contributed substantially
(Upadhya, this volume). Again, we learn that Irawati Karve was a
Chitpavan Brahmin, married into one of the leading reformist fami¬
lies of Maharashtra. In her case it is suggested that her progressive
family background enabled her to enjoy a professional career that
few women of her time could aspire to, though this does not in any
sense fully account for her dedication to the discipline. T.N. Madan
urges us to read D.P. Mukerji’s lifestyle and professional work against
the intellectual setting of Calcutta in the early decades of this century
(the twin forces of Christianity, Western education, and reformism
on the one hand, and Hindu resurgence on the other), while Pradip
Bose suggests that N.K. Bose’s sociological writings in the vernacular
belonged within the tradition of the many nineteenth-century Bengali
intellectuals who had established societies for the promotion of
‘useful’ or ‘scientific’ knowledge. And so on. In all these cases, the so¬
cial background or context is conceived in a generally straightforward
way, in terms of personal networks, institutions, and political and
intellectual currents and not in terms of such concepts as the‘collective
consciousness’ of a class or an era, as Emile Goldman, for instance,
had done in relating the Pensees of Pascal and the tragedies of Racine
(1964, 1980). Nor do the authors attempt literary or deep structural
analysis of their subjects’ writings in order to relate them to a wider
socio-cultural context (e.g. the papers in Clifford & Marcus 1986;
28 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

White 1978). Such methodological experimentation, aligned with

literary-textual criticism, must remain a challenge for the future.
To these observations we could append our own comment to the
effect that all these lives (with the obvious exceptions of Geddes and
Elwin) can be subsumed within the emerging stream of Hindu
middle-class life. This of course is a story worth telling in itself—the
dominance of the Hindu middle classes on professional and intellec¬
tual life in twentieth-century India—and it may well have influenced
the type of sociology/anthropology that got done, as in the greater
focus on caste, kinship, and religion, to the relative neglect of class
inequality, industrial relations, etc. (see Ram, Upadhya, Chatterji,
Madan, and Sundar, this volume), for this was a middle class that
seemed to need to stay connected with tradition even while engaged
in the practice of modern science. But none of this ‘social background’
quite explains why some individuals rebelled against social expect¬
ations and predestined career paths—like the Gandhian N.K. Bose,
who resigned his post to join the Non-Cooperation Movement
(Bose, this volume), or A.R. Desai who, notwithstanding his relatively
privileged class background, actively worked for the Indian Left
movement (Patel, this volume).
A number of authors have remarked that much of the existing
biographical literature on their subjects is more hagiographic than
critical, not least because much of it has been produced in the con¬
text of obituaries and festschriften—genres which, by their very na¬
ture, tend to magnify virtues and achievements and erase blemishes.
The comment is a reminder, though, that the habitus of the biographer
is also an active component in the production of biography. As a
matter of fact, two of our biographers have familial links with their
subjects. Anthropologist Kalpana Ram is the great-granddaughter of
L.K.A. Iyer (whose son and grandson were also anthropologists!).
This circumstance compels her to try and specify the difference be¬
tween the habitus of her subject and her own: that of a woman pro¬
fessional, living abroad, engaged in recovering both a personal and
a disciplinary history, a young scholar familiar with the radical criti¬
que of anthropology’s links with empire, a feminist scholar ever-
sensitive to the ‘invisibility’ of women in traditional anthropology.

)
 INTRODUCTION 29

How is she to evaluate L.K.A. Iyer’s contribution from her present

location? And how are we, the readers, to understand Iyer’s work in
this light?
Historian Saurabh Dube’s task must have been, if anything, even
more challenging, for Dube is writing here of his own father, the
eminent anthropologist/sociologist S.C. Dube, and attempting to do
so as dispassionately as would any non-related historian or chronicler.
The fact that his own professional work (Dube 2001) was conducted
in Chattisgarh, where his father grew up and first developed an inte¬
rest in tribal cultures, is no doubt a complicating aspect of the fami¬
lial-professional relationship of the biographer and his subject.
The relationship of student-biographer to teacher-subject is simi¬
larly one of privileged access, as well as obvious constraint. We recall
how often T.N. Madan cautioned us against speaking casually of a
‘Lucknow School’ of Sociology. A student, and later colleague, of
D.P. Mukerji, he was only too conscious of the differences in ori¬
entation and style between the three leading Lucknow personalities,
Radhakamal Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar, as well as
others like the maverick social philosopher and critic of modernity
(and eventually of social science itself) A.K. Saran. Similarly, Sujata
Patel’s account of A.R. Desai does not especially disclose or reflect
upon a personal connection, though she was herself a student of the
Sociology Department of Bombay University, and subsequently a
close friend of A.R. Desai and his wife, the feminist sociologist Neera
Desai.
With the exceptions mentioned above, the other authors rely
primarily, sometimes exclusively, on the published work of their
subjects. While Elwin, Ghurye, and Bose have written autobiogra¬
phies, others—like Srinivas and Dube—have written essays about
their engagement with sociology that provide important biographical
information.33 In some cases, information has been pieced together
through interviews with students or colleagues (Sundar, Guha, Upa-
dhya), while for Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Chatterji has relied, inter alia,
on a published account of discussions between Sarkar and his

33 See the references in n. 10 above.

30 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

students to understand the ideas and events that shaped him. In a

few cases, there have been prior biographies to build upon,34 and
there are many briefer biographical notices in scattered publications.
However, by and large these lives have been uncharted territories,
and it is a matter of gratification that many authors have gone to spe¬
cial lengths to track down primary sources (archives, libraries, depart¬
mental syllabi, etc.), and to interview the colleagues, students, friends,
and family of their subjects.35 In that sense, true to their professional
training, many of our biographers pursued their research through
the disciplines’ privileged methodology—inquiries in ‘the field’.
We realise that, methodologically speaking, linking personal lives
with particular texts (whether literary or scientific) and with the
thought-world of the times in which the author lived is a rather pro¬
blematic endeavour, as literary critics aver (Wellek & Warren 1966),
and in fact our authors fight shy of frontally addressing such thorny
conceptual-methodological issues, as they also avoid the temptation
of situational determinism and the challenge of psychobiography.
But, within the straight, ‘as it comes’ format they have followed, the
essays are quite varied, with differing emphases from one to another
on family background, life-history, professional writings, academic
and personal networks, and intellectual influences.
Yet, in sociological terms, there are striking similarities between
their lives and approaches and those studied here, leading one to
conclude that perhaps there is something like an Indian ‘sociological
sensibility’ that developed over time, even if people who came into

,4 Understandably, Patrick Geddes has been the subject of numerous

biographies and biographical essays, among them Boardman 1944; Ferreira
and Jha 1976b; Geddes 1947; Ziffren 1972. For Sarkar, see Bhattacharyya 1990;
Flora 1998; for Ghurye, see Pramanick 1994; also, most usefully, Pillai 1976,
1996, 1997; for Elwin, see Guha 1999; Flivale 1946. Vidyarthi (1978) contains
useful thumbnail biographies of notable Indian anthropologists, including
L.K.A. Iyer, S.C. Roy, B.S. Guha, K.P. Chattopadhyay, N.K. Bose, D.N. Majumdar,
Irawati Karve, A. Aiyappan, M.N. Srinivas, S.C. Dube, and Ramkrishna Mukher-
jee. See the individual essays in this volume for further biographical references.
35 Satish Deshpande also conducted a long interview with M.N. Srinivas
shortly before the latter’s death. Regrettably, the follow-up interviews did not
take place. See Deshpande 2000.
 INTRODUCTION 31

the profession did not bring it with them—for example, a concern

with pluralism and diversity, and science and rationality, as well as
the engagement with nationalism and later nation-building. At the
same time, filling in the gaps on some individual biographies would
also help to identify the directions not developed by Indian sociology.
Perhaps this is clearest in the case of I.P. Desai, whose use of large-
scale household surveys and personal interviews to study the relation
between caste and backwardness in Gujarat (1976, 1996) was never
built upon to study inequality or discrimination—a stunting of the
methodological possibilities available to Indian sociology that could
partially be traced to the dominance of M.N. Srinivas’s style of in¬
tensive ethnography and his vigorous attack on questionnaires,
statistics, etc.; or Ramkrishna Mukherjee, another proponent of sta¬
tistical and quantitative methods who also, in many ways, ploughed
a lonely track. Similarly, as more women come into the discipline,
future biographies might also help us to understand the difference
that gender might make to the practice of anthropology/sociology.36
In the following section we seek to explore some of the dimensions
of the universe of discourse of Indian sociology and anthropology
in which our protagonists were participants: what they shared, how
they differed, and, not unimportantly, their blind spots.

IV. THEMES AND ISSUES

(a) Science and Modernity

In a superficial sense, the establishment of both sociology and an¬

thropology as academic disciplines in India might be seen as the lul-
fillment of Thomas Macaulay’s vision (1835) for Indian education
which sought to produce, through English-medium schooling, a
class of ‘interpreters’ between Britain and her colony, ‘Indian in
blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and
in intellect’ to whom would fall the task‘to refine the vernacular dia¬
lects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science
borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them fit

36 See e.g., Huizer and Mannheim 1979; also, in the Indian context, L. Dube
1975, 2000; and essays in Panini 1991; Thapan 1998.
32 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population1

(ibid.: 598,601; see Zastoupil and Moir 1999). Almost all the founding
figures in the history of academic anthropology and sociology saw
themselves as engaged in the production and dissemination of scien¬
tific and useful knowledge. Their purpose was not, however, merely
to serve the Empire—to open India and its peoples to scientific
scrutiny and thereby enable its efficient administration and control.
On the contrary, they believed that mastery of the science of the
coloniser was the essential first step to qualify for self-rule and estab¬
lish India as a modern nation-state within the world community of
nations (see also Dutt Gupta 1972; Mukherjee 1979: 30; Prakash
1999).37
Colonial science thus presented two types of challenge to the nat¬
ive practitioner of anthropology/sociology. In the first place, s/he
might strive to equal, and even surpass, the coloniser at his own
game, initially by perfecting ‘mimicry’ of the techniquesx>f modern
science, and then by exploiting the locational advantages of the
native ethnographer (linguistic facility, Indological learning, etc.).
The pioneer anthropologists, L.K.A. Iyer and S.C. Roy, exemplify this
effort, taking pride in being able to transcend their colonised identity
and win recognition as non-racialised ‘Men of Science’, where
‘“Science” was the shared idiom of the British and Indian middle
class elites’ (Ram, also Dasgupta, this volume). Secondly, the indi¬
genous scholar might explore local scholarly traditions, particularly
the Hindu classical texts, to affirm the prior presence of an Indian
tradition of scientific reason and experimental practice: thus, ‘with
the vital sign of modernity—science—lodged in the “inner” fiber of
the nation, India could be modern without being Western’ (Prakash
1999: 231). This mode of argument was already well established in

3/ Auguste Comte, regarded as the founder of modern sociology, had great

popular appeal in Bengal in the latter half of the nineteenth century. However,
as Geraldine Forbes has shown in her study of the reception of positivism in
Bengal (1979), Comte was seen not so much as a social scientist but as a sort
of religio-spiritual leader providing a scientific-modern critique of colonialism.
His new‘religion of humanity’ attracted many followers amongst the educated
middle classes, albeit via English Positivism.
 INTRODUCTION 33

Bengali intellectual circles by the time the social philosopher/socio¬

logist Benoy Kumar Sarkar published The positive background of
Indian sociology (1937; Chatterji, this volume).38
While both anthropology and sociology as modern disciplines
partook of the prestige of modern science, there were different un¬
derstandings of the nature of the scientific endeavour—between and
among anthropologists and sociologists, and through the century-
long period covered in this volume. For many of the anthropologists/
sociologists who are the subjects of these biographies, the ‘scientific’
aspect of their discipline was understood in simple empiricist terms
as the search for facts through observation, and the testing of these
facts in the laboratory or the field (cf. Mukherjee 1979: 43). Carol
Upadhya describes G.S. Ghurye’s approach in exactly these terms,
his empiricism motivated by his nationalist desire to challenge and
correct what he saw as the mischievous misinterpretations of Indian
society and history by colonial scholars, as well as by his distaste for
abstract theory (a scepticism shared by many others, like N.K. Bose,
for instance).
For the most part, as noted earlier (see n. 11) anthropology is ad¬
ministratively classed in India among the sciences—an extension of
the biological sciences, to which are uneasily conjoined, in the con¬
ventional four-field model, prehistory and archaeology, social and
cultural anthropology (overlapping with sociology), and linguistics
(see Srivastava 2000).39 Many of the early anthropologists maintained
an active interest in physical anthropology, pre-history, or linguistics,
even as they focused primarily on society and culture.49' Most of
them had prior training as natural scientists, and they accordingly

38 The most noteworthy example being Brajendranath Seals The positive

sciences of the ancient Hindus (1915). For other references, see Dutt Gupta 1972;
Prakash 1999.
39 See e.g. the international professional journals, American anthropologist,
Current anthropology and Man, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; or
the Indian journals, Man in India (founded by S.C. Roy in 1921) and Eastern
anthropologist (founded by D.N. Majumdar in 1947).
40 For instance, Iyer, Karve, Chattopadhyay (see Beteille 1994; Vidyarthi
1978: 320-7); B.S. Guha (Vidyarthi 1978: 317); Majumdar (see Sarana 1962).
34 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

sought to employ the tools, methodologies, and protocols of the

natural sciences as they understood them. In this model, society was
conceived as a ‘laboratory1 in which specimens of primitive humanity
could be measured, and their social and cultural characteristics re¬
corded and classified according to received scales and protocols.
Others, like N.K. Bose (a geologist by training), insisted that anthropo¬
logy was not so much a laboratory science, but first and foremost a
field science, requiring the practitioner to test hypotheses and gather
evidence through first-hand investigations in the field (Beteille 1976;
Bose, this volume).41
Despite the prestige of science as the pre-eminent sign of modern¬
ity, the definition of anthropology/sociology as ‘science’ was also
problematic in certain respects, which might be briefly noted. First,
there is a paradox in the fact that the greater the disciplinary special¬
isation, the more the ‘fragmentation’ of knowledge. Some of our
subjects, especially the earlier pioneers (see Mukherjee 1979: ch. 2)
straddled several science, social science and humanistic disciplines
(Patrick Geddes was notable in this regard), and others actively
sought to arrive at a ‘synthesis’ of different approaches and method¬
ologies between ‘traditional’, usually sanskritic, learning and modern
Western knowledge, and between the different modern disciplines
of scientific and humanistic scholarship. The intellectual trajectory
of the Lucknow sociologist, D.P. Mukerji—‘an art critic, a music cri¬
tic, a literary critic, a drama critic, a critic of life’ (Rau 1965: iv)—
is described by T.N. Madan as, above all, a ‘search for synthesis’ (this
volume; also Mukherjee 1979:36-7): Mukerji deplored‘the vivisection
of knowledge which has been going on all these years in the name
of learning, scholarship and specialisation’, and sought to define
human ‘progress’ in the Upanishadic vocabulary of shantam, shivam,
advaitam (harmony, welfare, unity).
Second, to the extent that the pursuit of science is a highly spe¬
cialist activity, authenticated by experts, it has an intrinsic leaning to
exclusivism and esotericism, thereby defeating its mission of cultural

41 As Beteille points out, however, N.K. Bose’s idea of‘fieldwork’ was more
extensive (as in the Malinowskian or Boasian traditions) than intensive, as in
the Radcliffe-Brown tradition (Beteille 1976: 11-12). In this mode, Bose was
a tireless fieldworker, as was Irawati Karve.

)
 INTRODUCTION 35

regeneration (cf. Pieris 1969). Indeed, it is interesting that a number

of our protagonists felt compelled to write other, popular books for
the non-professional reader, though such books might carry negligible
weight with their co-professionals (Bose; Karve; Desai; Dube), while
others sought outlet in ‘literary’ genres—essays, fiction, poetry—to
express the psychic truth of ethnographic experience freed of the
conventions and constraints of scientific writing.42 This, it should
be said, is not unique to the Indian situation (though it might well
be exaggerated in colonial/post-colonial settings) for, as Wolf Lepenies
has argued at some length, sociology as a ‘social’ or ‘moral’ science
was from the very beginning uneasily poised between science and
literature as rival modes of interpreting human reality:

[S] ociology is a discipline characterised by cold rationality, which seeks

to comprehend the structures and laws of motion of modern industrial
society by means of measurement and computation, and in doing so
only serves to alienate man more effectively from himself and from the
world around him; on the opposite side stands a literature whose intui¬
tion can see farther than the analysis of sociologists and whose ability
to address the heart of man is to be preferred to the products of a disci¬
pline that misunderstands itself as a natural science of society. (Lepenies
1988: 13)

Before concluding this section it might be added that, paradoxical

as it may seem, there has also been a critique within Indian sociology
of both the culture and methods of Western science—of empiricism
and positivism, of the ideology of man’s ‘conquest of nature’, and ol
the dual cultures of science and the arts in modern, industrial so¬
cieties. A.K. Saran, a pupil of D.P. Mukerji and follower of A.K.
Coomaraswamy, was an articulate proponent of the case for an
alternative sociology built on indigenous theories of society (e.g.

42 See papers in Clifford and Marcus (1986) for discussion of both the alie¬
nating constraints of formal ethnographic writing, as well as the literary tropes
typically employed in the production of ethnography. According to T.N. Madan
(this volume), D.P. Mukerji’s considerable volume of published work in Bengali
includes, inter alia, a volume of correspondence with Tagore about literature
and music, and ‘a fiction trilogy in which he employed the stream of conscio¬
usness technique, apparently for the first time in Bengali literature.’
36 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Saran 1965). And there have been others, too, over the years (see
Mukherjee 1979: 59ff.; Nandy 1988; J.P.S. Uberoi 2002; Visvanathan
1997; cf. Alatas 2006).

(b) Disciplinary Boundaries

There is surely some irony in the fact that the institutionalisation of

a discipline is both a moment of arrival and maturity, and a moment
of loss occasioned by the refining of disciplinary boundaries of in¬
clusion and exclusion. Thus Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1979: 54) con¬
trasts the relatively eclectic ‘pioneers’ of professional Indian sociology
from the 1920s through the 1940s with the generation of professionals
(the ‘modernisers’) who built up sociology and anthropology in the
universities and research institutes from the 1950s, remarking on the
‘narrowing of the horizon of knowledge’ that ensued as the discipline
got established and gifted amateurs made way for trained profes¬
sionals.
Sociology and anthropology were not the only disciplines that an
older generation of Indian sociologists/social anthropologists drew
upon. One notable feature, now rarely found, was the apparent
ease with which they related to the heritage of Sanskrit learning
(cf. Beteille 1976: 2). Few of them found it necessary to expressly
argue for the synthesis of Indology and sociology, as Louis Dumont
and David Pocock were later to do in a foundational programmatic
essay in Contributions to India sociology (1957), or as McKim Marriott
outlined in his prolegomenon to the sociology of India ‘through
Hindu categories’ (1990). It came very naturally to them. Thus, as
noted, Benoy Kumar Sarkar discovered ‘positivism’ in an obscure
(presumed spurious) Sanskrit classic, the Sukraniti, for which his
book on positivism in Hindu social thought was originally an intro¬
duction (cf. Seal 1915), and N.K. Bose had recourse to classical archi¬
tectural manuals to understand the architecture of Orissa temples.
G.S. Ghurye, trained in anthropology at Cambridge under W.H.R.
Rivers, was also a Sanskrit scholar of recognised accomplishment
who turned routinely to classical texts for understanding all manner
of contemporary phenomena—costume, architecture, sexuality,
urbanism, family and kinship, Indian tribal cultures, the caste system,
 INTRODUCTION 37

ritual, and religion—and many of his colleagues and pupils (K.M.

Kapadia and Irawati Karve, for instance) did likewise.
Apart from the engagement with the biological sciences on the
one hand and Indology on the other, the earlier sociologists and so¬
cial anthropologists had various understandings of the relationship
of their discipline with other branches of modern knowledge: indeed,
in each case this was the core of their professional self-understanding.
For some, like Sarkar, sociology was the paramount discipline, em¬
bracing both social philosophy and social reform, history, economy,
and politics. For others, working within the overall conceptual
framework of Marxist political economy, sociology was conceived as
an overarching discipline with the potential to combine and synthesise
the sciences and humanities (see Madan on D.P. Mukerji; also Lepenies
1988). Geddes’ conception of sociology, as evidenced in his plan for
a faculty library in the University of Bombay, was to include ‘Archeo¬
logy, Ethnography and Anthropology, History and Biography, etc.’,
combined with ‘Civics’ subjects, such as ‘Town Planning, Sanitation,
Education, etc.’43 For Nirmal Kumar Bose, understanding material
culture was intrinsic to the practice of social anthropology—a pers¬
pective that has only recently been revived and carried forward. In
Calcutta, sociology was long allied with political science,44 while in
several centres (Bombay, Lucknow, later Delhi), sociology was insti¬
tutionally linked with economics, underlining perceived commonal¬
ities but also provoking sibling rivalries and turf wars as economics
emerged to become the natural ally of the developmental state. Criti¬
ques of the current state of sociology/social anthropology typically
seek to realign sociology with other disciplines—particularly history
and political economy (see Patel on A.R. Desai, this volume)—and
conversely to cut the ties with cultural anthropology or social philoso¬
phy or social work, as the case may be.45 On the whole, the humanistic

43 The Indian journal of sociology,v ol. l,no. 1 (Baroda January 1920),pp. 99-
100.
44 Or, in another reckoning, social anthropology was partitioned between
politics (Benoy Kumar Sarkar), geography (Nirmal Kumar Bose), and anthro¬
pology (K.P. Chattopadhyay).
45 See successive articles in the journal Contributions to Indian sociology un¬
der the title of Tor a sociology of India’.
38 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

potential of sociology and the engagement with literature and the

arts that D.P. Mukerji had argued for and personally exemplified has
been relatively marginal.

(c) Nationalism and the Nation-State

We are yet to form a detailed picture of the ways in which n ationalism

exerted its influence in shaping Indian sociology and social anthro¬
pology. To be sure, almost every historical account of the discipline,
whether it concerns an individual, an institution or the discipline at
large, makes mention of this factor but, as the essays in this book
show, the question of nationalism occupies a very wide spectrum,
ranging from N.K. Bose, well known as Mahatma Gandhis secretary
and an ardent nationalist who spent time in British Indian prisons,
to the communist inspired anti-imperialism of A.R. Desai, Benoy
Sarkar’s participation in the Swadeshi Movement of 1905, the some¬
times strident Hindu nationalism of G.S. Ghurye, or S.C. Dube’s
anti-British gesture in setting fire to an item of Crown Property (a
postbox)—an excess of youthful exuberance which very nearly cost
him dear. Minimally, for those entering the profession in the pre-
Independence period, their mastery of these modern sciences of
man itself signified the aspiration and capacity for self-rule; for
those of a later generation, professional competence was a reflection
ot India’s claim to academic maturity on a world stage. No Indian
anthropologist/sociologist can be said to have opposed nationalism,
except in its narrowest and most bigoted forms, and all were inevitably
affected by it in one way or another.
None of the founder figures of sociology and social anthropology
in India doubted that Indian society was the obvious and natural
object of their professional attention (see below), though some, like
Benoy Sarkar, D.P. Mukerji, and A.R. Desai, also sought to plot
India’s future on the larger canvas of world historical processes (the
latter two within a Marxist framework). Inheritors of the legacy of
Indian social reform, the issues that concerned them most were
those pertinent to the viability of the prospective or emergent
nation-state: the challenges of nation-building in a fractured society,
and the challenges of economic development. Whether within the
 INTRODUCTION 39

government (Elwin, Bose), or in the universities and newly established

research institutions, sociologists and anthropologists sought to re¬
flect on the nature of the civilisational unity of India as a plural so¬
ciety—the relation of Hinduism with the other religious traditions
of the subcontinent, of sanskritic or brahmanical Hinduism with
popular religious traditions, of tribal populations with the settled
peasantry; and of linguistic-cultural regions with each other within
the newly instituted federal framework. While some sociologists
were worried over the culturally alienating effects of modernisation—
Radhakamal Mukerjee and D.P. Mukerji in Lucknow, for instance
(see Madan, this volume)—the anthropologists were particularly
concerned with ensuring the survival of India’s many tribal cultures
and the protection of tribal peoples from exploitation by non-
tribals, as well as their material betterment, education, and overall
development. Indeed, tribal policy was the subject of bitter debate
between Verrier Elwin ('protectionist’) on the one side, and G.S.
Ghurye (‘integrationist’) on the other, with N.K. Bose, sometime
Commissioner of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (1967-70)
attempting to strike a middle position (see Bose 1972). Of similar
concern was the future of the caste system—at once a fundamental
institution of traditional Hindu society and the basis of enduring
social inequality and social exclusion (Srinivas).
Second, how were sociologists/anthropologists to contribute to
state-led development programmes, albeit as poor relations of the
economists, the architects of the new planned economy? Many of the
first generation of post-colonial intellectuals saw it as their
professional responsibility to help formulate and evaluate government
development projects. As Nirmal Kumar Bose wrote in 1972, in an
essay entitled Anthropology after fifty years’,

[A]n anthropologist does not merely play the part of an observer in a

game of chess. He has a greater and a deeper commitment, namely, that
in India he has to draw a lesson from what he observes, so that he can utilise
his knowledge in the attainment of the equalitarian ideal which our nation
has set before itself as its goal. If he accepts this ideal then, with his supe¬
rior analytical apparatus, and the use of comparisons and sympathetic
thinking, he can suggest many modifications in the ways in which the
40 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

government or leaders of society are trying to bring about justice where

injustice prevails today. And this is where applied anthropology has a
significant role to play and a heavy responsibility to bear.46 (Bose 1972:
5-6, emphasis added)

Thus, S.C. Dube actively participated in early community develop¬

ment projects (Dube 1955,1958), N.K. Bose was Commissioner for
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Elwin was the government’s
advisor on NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh), and Karve undertook
research on urbanisation and displacement by large dams for the
Planning Commission. Others, however, like M.N. Srinivas, saw the
sociologist’s work as primarily the critical exercise of interpreting
larger social processes, whose value and academic credibility lay in
its distantiation from the immediate objectives of the state as well as
from the Left-inspired compulsion to study society only in order to
change it.

(d) Questions of Methodology

The specification of disciplinary boundaries is self-evidently related

to questions of method and of the nature and admissibility of data.
There were, and remain, several competing models. That is, sociology
as social philosophy is based on synthesis and comparativism—an
‘armchair’ exercise in the interpretation of the relation of man and
society. The foundational texts conventionally taught in sociology
courses (Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, etc.) are the works of great

46 The essay, written to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of the Anthropology

Department of Calcutta University in 1972, was the lead paper in a collection
of Boses essays of the 1950s and 1960s reflecting on various current problems
of Indian society, including tribal welfare, the productive systems of tribal com¬
munities, communal separatism, Backward Classes, and policies for the Sche¬
duled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Interestingly, Bose went on to elaborate
that applied anthropology must go ‘hand in hand’ with theoretical anthro¬
pology—otherwise/theory becomes an ivory tower in which idlers spend their
days in mutual admiration or applied anthropology becomes a string of
empirical attempts in which one is thrown about like a shuttlecock without
attaining useful results, but always living in the hope . . . that ones honesty and
purpose will lead to the desired goaf (Bose 1972: 6).
 INTRODUCTION 41

theorisers and synthesisers. Empirical sociology, on the other hand,

requires practical fieldwork, which may be of several types.
The preeminent model of fieldwork in Indian sociology/social
anthropology nowadays is that of the ‘participant observation’ of a
functioning, ‘bounded’ community over an extended period of
time, and many of our subjects undertook fieldwork in this mode.
In particular, both S.C. Dube and M.N. Srinivas conducted participant
observation fieldwork in village settings, routinising the ‘village
studies’ that subsequently became de rigueur in Indian social anthro¬
pology (Deshpande, Dube, this volume; Deshpande 2001b; Jodhka
1998), and Verrier Elwin’s monographs were similarly based on
participant observation—excessively ‘participant’, his critics might
say, for Elwin had all but ‘gone native’ (Guha 1999). Others, however,
beginning with L.K.A. Iyer, conducted fieldwork which was extensive
more than intensive, covering a number of different ethnographic
sites (Iyer, Roy, Bose, Karve, Ghurye via the researches of his many
students) in a way that has recently become rather more accepted
than it was in the heyday of structural-functionalist village and tribal
studies (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1995). As Sujata Patel
points out (this volume), A.R. Desai’s perspective was relatively un¬
usual among Indian sociologists of his day—macro- rather than
micro-sociological in its ambition to see the whole, not merely the
parts; and concerned with the historical forces that shape the present,
not merely with the ethnographic present. A number of the earlier
anthropologists/sociologists were also comfortable with quantitative
survey work, at the interface of economics and demography,47
whereas nowadays there seems to be a distinct polarisation between
qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, the former fail¬
ing the economists’/demographers’ tests of standardisation and
generalisation, the latter too often uninformed by sociological theory.
A great deal of current sociological research is in fact conducted

47 For instance, N.K. Bose’s survey of Calcutta (1968). Irawati Karve con¬
ducted, individually or jointly with her colleagues, a large number ot large-
scale empirical surveys (see the discussion in Sundar, this volume), among
them a study of social dynamics in a small ‘sugar’ town in Satara district (Karve
& Ranadive 1965). G.S. Ghurye oversaw many survey research projects among
the numerous dissertations that he supervised.
42 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

through survey methods rather than long-term participant observa¬

tion fieldwork.
It appears that, in general, most of our subjects were secure in
their confidence in the truth and method of the modern sciences of
man and society, yet their self-confidence was often tinged with deep
ambivalence, as the accounts in the volume attest. In certain cases,
the resistance of their subjects to the invasive investigative techniques
of classical anthropology, or their apparently cussed and irrational
reactions to volunteering information or being photographed, served
as reminders that the anthropologists power of investigation—the
‘othering’ imperative of positivist social science—might be experienc¬
ed by its subjects as dangerous and threatening. Kalpana Ram suggests
that some such reservations may have persuaded L.K.A. Iyer to go
easy on certain components of the standard protocols of ethnogra¬
phic survey. S.C. Dube recounts how the Kamar tribals mistook his
anthropological activities (village census, etc.) as connected with the
ongoing recruitment of tribal labour for the War effort; and how
they were convinced that his camera would extract their life-essence
(Dube, this volume). The Gandhian Nirmal Kumar Bose paused to
consider the propriety of studying patterns of culture among the
Juang tribals when their manifest problems were a high incidence of
deadly malarial infection and dire poverty (Bose, this volume): the
scientific study of other cultures, he always maintained, should
never disregard the larger context of poverty and exploitation (Bose
1972).
Apart from their concern with issues of human rights, citizenship,
and exploitation, many of the founding figures of the discipline were
deeply concerned with issues of cultural survival even while advo¬
cating social reform and national integration. S.C. Roy, very much
an anthropologist of the old school, came to challenge the hierarch-
isation of cultures inherent in the discipline, maintaining (for ins¬
tance) that the Oraon tribals had actually contributed positively to
the cultures of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa (Roy, this volume). Others
came to appreciate the ecological wisdom of many of India’s tribal
peoples—the functioning social institutions of tribal life, the richness
of their folklore and arts, their ‘natural’ approach to sexuality, their
reverential attitude to nature, the relatively high position of their
 INTRODUCTION 43

women, and so on. Verrier Elwin, as noted, took his appreciation of

tribal life-ways to poetic heights, justifying the policy of cultural
isolationism; and the Scots nationalist Patrick Geddes deplored the
social and cultural insensitivity of local British administrators, who
arrogantly imposed their own standards of town planning and sani¬
tation without consideration of local wisdom and experience (Geddes
1947).
Beyond their concern over the erosion of tribal cultures and the
destruction of tribal habitats was the overriding nationalist imperative
to include all peoples, whatever their level of material development,
within the project of the nation-state. In this sense, as Saurabh Dube
remarks in reference to the tribal ethnographies of S.C. Dube,
‘anthropological demand’ was subordinated to ‘nationalist desire’ to
appropriate tribal and non-tribal, primitive and peasant, as coeval
citizens of the Union of independent India. Indeed, this universe of
discourse was shared by both ‘isolationists’ (Elwin) and ‘integration-
ists’ (Ghurye) among Indian anthropologists and sociologists, ex¬
plaining, perhaps, why the ethical-methodological considerations
of the relation of‘self’ and ‘other’ were, and remain, relatively muted
in the Indian social science context.

(e) Sociology/Anthropology—For Whom?

For those Indian anthropologists/sociologists aspiring for recognition

in the international system, English is the natural and preferred lan¬
guage of scientific communication. It is also, in the Indian context,
the preferred language for engaging the attention of national-level
policymakers and of elite public opinion. All of our Indian prota¬
gonists had English-language education, and some of them were
stylists of considerable ability. Yet many of them obviously felt that
this competence, and the national and international reputation that
it attracted, was insufficient. Some felt that the language of scienti¬
fic communication failed to express the personal and emotional
experience of fieldwork; they turned to literary forms—very often
in the Indian vernaculars—as an alternative medium of self-expres¬
sion (see above). Ramachandra Guha (this volume) describes Verrier
Elwin (who of course wrote in English) as blurring the boundaries
44 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

‘between literature and anthropology’: according to Guha, he was

both a pioneer of the ‘ethnographic novel’ with his Phulmat of the
hills (1937) and A cloud that's dragonish (1938), and a diarist of poe¬
tic sensibility (Elwin 1936, 1964). In fact, Elwin ‘was a published
novelist (and privately published poet) before he turned to anthropo¬
logy, and returned to literature after he had finished with anthropo¬
logy’, bemoaning that contemporary professional anthropology had
lost poetry, drama, and inspiration and passed over to ‘the serologist,
the genealogist, the utterly dreary folk’ recognised as the stalwarts of
British structural-functionalism. Apart from a book on social distance
and a volume of correspondence with Tagore on themes of literature
and music (in Bengali), D.P. Mukerji also published a fiction trilogy
in which, apparently for the first time in Bengali literature, he emp¬
loyed the stream of consciousness technique (Madan, this volume).
Irawati Karve’s novel, Yuganta, based on characters from the Maha-
bharat, won her a Sahitya Akademi award, one of the nation’s most
prestigious literary awards, and she is considered a pioneer of the
‘personal essay’ in Marathi.
Others sought wider social impact for their research by writing
books for the general reader and articles in the popular press, both
in English and the vernaculars, in which some of them were also re¬
cognised stylists in their own right (Sarkar, Mukerji, and Bose in
Bengali; Karve in Marathi; Desai in Gujarati; Dube in Hindi)—so
much so that, sometimes, ‘scientific narration or documentation
takes a back seat, and the language itself imposes control over the
text’ (as P.K. Bose remarks of N.K. Bose’s Bengali writings, this
volume). As an activist in Left-wing political groups, A.R. Desai
wrote widely for a general public, both in English and, increasingly
in his later years, in Gujarati; he was also a dedicated archivist, over¬
seeing a huge project to document the Indian working class movement
(Patel, this volume). In many cases, the satisfaction obtained from
the public response to these general writings, as to Bose’s influential
work Hindu samajer garan, initially serialised in the popular Bengali
literary magazine Desh (Bose 1976 [1949]), was compromised by the
condescending attitude of their co-professionals in India and the
indifference of the global professional community. Saurabh Dube
(this volume) describes how, through the last decade of his life, S.C.
Dube wrote mainly in Hindi ‘with passion and desire, urgency and
 INTRODUCTION 45

anxiety. . . combining a literary sensitivity, a sociological sensibility,

an ethnographic imagination, and a citizens concerns,.. . conceptu¬
ally translating and imaginatively recasting the terms of the social
sciences into Hindi.1 Yet, as the literary critic Namvar Singh (1997:
109) has observed, Dube ‘also received punishment for this crime.
He came to be considered a second-grade intellectual1 by his co-pro¬
fessionals at home and abroad. Sadly, Hindi-medium sociology
teaching continues to rely on indifferent translations of often out-
of-date Western texts, along with ‘guides1 produced by local college
and university teachers.48

(f) The Study of 'Other' Societies

Notwithstanding anthropology’s classical self-definition as the study

of‘other’ societies, the Indian-born sociologists and anthropologists
who feature in this volume all believed it to be their role and res¬
ponsibility to study Indian society. Relatively few India-based socio¬
logists/anthropologists of the postcolonial generation have studied
societies outside the subcontinent, though this is occasionally stat¬
ed to be a desirable objective,49 and their numbers have not grown
appreciably.50 What is more, South Asian students in the Western
academy tend to return routinely to India for their fieldwork (or to

48 B.L. Abbi, Pushpesh Kumar, personal communication.

49 See Srinivas, Shah, and Ramaswamy (1979: 3) who remark that: The study
of non-Indian societies by Indians is done mainly as part of the study of
international relations and there are therefore very few field studies of other
societies by Indian sociologists, and little appreciation of the problem of doing
fieldwork outside India. This is unfortunate. There can be no science of society
in India without bringing to bear a comparative perspective, and this is possible
only if Indian sociologists study non-Indian societies also. A comparative perspective
is also necessary for more pragmatic ends, including the understanding of
problems of development and nation-building. A major effort is needed to
promote the study of non-Indian societies [emphasis added].'
50 Of those who have established themselves professionally in India, one
might mention Behari L. Abbi (New Guinea), Satish Saberwal (Kenya), J.P.S.
Uberoi (Afghanistan), and Patricia Uberoi (China). For a brief time in the late
1960s, the UNESCO Asia Research Unit of IEG was enabled to carry out
comparative studies in other Asian countries (T.N. Madan; Ratna Naidu).
More recently, the Indo-Dutch IDPAD programme has encouraged a number
46 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

locations in the Indian diaspora), thereby contributing their skills as

‘native informants’ to the growth of South Asian Area Studies in the
US and elsewhere, more than to comparative anthropology.51 The
few Indian professionals who have conducted fieldwork outside
India complain of lack of interest or recognition for their work in
India.
The reasons for this relative insularity (typical of non-Western
anthropology in general, it might be noted) are difficult to pinpoint.
Lack of funding is an oft-cited explanation,52 but this rather begs the
question: has there in fact been an unmet demand? National character
is another explanation: Hindus, it is said, have never really interested
themselves in other peoples (a proposition which may well merit re¬
examination). Or maybe it was simply that the problems of Indian
society and the demands of nationalism and nation-building seem
so urgent that there is little time or incentive to think of other so¬
cieties. Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that at least some
of the subjects of our biographies sought to interpret Indian society
in a broader, comparative context (independent of the ‘Greater
India’ chauvinism which was also a powerful ideological force through
much of the period covered in these biographies [see Bayly 2004]).
This aspect of their work is rarely commented on. Certainly, the
pioneer anthropologists, L.K. A. Iyer and S.C. Roy saw their researches
as contributing importantly to the discipline of anthropology per
se—that is, to the comparative, scientific study of human social ins¬
titutions—and not just to the study of India.53 The polymath, Benoy

of sociologists to undertake fieldwork in the Netherlands. Regarding the

methodological challenges of this ‘reverse anthropology’, see Palriwala (2005).
1,1 The failure of South Asian anthropologists to achieve visibility in the
discipline as a whole is remarked upon by Nicholas (1969), among many
others.
32 While this certainly would apply to research undertaken by Indians in
Western countries, where costs of living are much higher, fieldwork in many
Asian and other Third World countries would not necessarily be unduly
expensive.
53 Cf. Uberoi (1993: Introduction) which discusses the role of Indian data
in the evolution of kinship studies (through the pioneering work of Rivers,
Maine, Morgan, Levi-Strauss, and Dumont) as the reciprocal of the domesti¬
cation of anthropological kinship studies in India.
 INTRODUCTION 47

Kumar Sarkar, who was familiar with several classical and modern
European languages and a prolific translator of European texts of
social and political philosophy, clearly felt that the interpretation of
European social and cultural processes need not be the sole prerogative
of the Europeans themselves. For him, as for other Bengali nationalists,
Chatterji tells us (this volume),‘the engagement with Western thought
enabled him to think of Indian civilisation as inherently cosmopolitan
and therefore modern.’ Inspired by the ideal of pan-Asianism, he
also wrote two books on China, based on his visits and studies in that
country—a book on Chinese religion ‘through Hindu eyes’ (1975
[1916]), and a tract on the outlook for democracy in China (1919).
The Sanskrit scholar G.S. Ghurye similarly thought it relevant to
look into sources in Latin and Greek to establish the fundamental
features of Indo-European kinship systems (1962). One wonders
whether this ambition for a comparative understanding of Indian so¬
ciety (whether by independent assessment of the features of European
modernity or by the unmediated study of other non-Western
societies) has not now dissipated.54

V. DISCIPLINARY MEMORY

The compilation of this volume has been both an exhilarating and

a chastening experience: exhilarating in exposing us to the details
of the professional life-histories of twelve exceptional individuals;
chastening in the reminder of the extent of our ignorance of our own
disciplinary history. We were struck to find that so many of the de¬
bates that recurrently feature in our professional journals or meet¬
ings of professional associations have deep (and rarely acknowledged)
roots (see Uberoi 2000); but equally struck to realise that many of
the issues that preoccupied our predecessors have completely faded
from view. The nationalist/nation-building agenda has taken a new
shape for the second generation, post-Independence; ambitious
professionals now aspire to perform on a world stage, to demonstrate
their awareness of current metropolitan fashion rather than to reach
out to inform, educate, and persuade a local audience beyond the

54 One might cite here Andre Beteille (1974), Satish Saberwal (1995), and
J.P.S. Uberoi (1978, 1984,2002) as among the few self-conscious practitioners
of comparative sociology.
48 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

reach of the English-language national press. They also seem chary

of addressing the 'big’ issues of Man and Society in India—for ins¬
tance, the nature of the state and the political process, or the sources
of civilisational unity, of social breakdown, and of communal anta¬
gonism (cf. Saberwal 2000). On the other hand, as already remarked,
they rarely seek to study other societies outside India to develop an
independent comparative sociology. And while the era of cMan and
Plan’ (Mukerji 1958) is now well behind us, few would dare claim
sociology as the paramount and encompassing social science: it
seems now to have accepted its position as a poor relation to econo¬
mics and other 'policy5 sciences. Alternative futures are left to others
to imagine.
While the twelve personalities whose biographies are presented in
this volume are widely recognised as among the 'founders’ of sociology
and anthropology in South Asia, we realise that there were numerous
others who were also important in shaping the contours of the two
disciplines in India. For the most part, their exclusion here is largely
a matter of chance—not finding the people to work on them, the
right people not finding the time, and so on. It would certainly have
been invaluable to include essays on people like K.P. Chattopadhyay
who, like Ghurye, belonged to the first generation of professionally
trained anthropologists to set up university departments in India
(see Beteille 1994); I.P. Desai who developed a distinctive Baroda
style of sociology; A. Aiyappan who built up the Madras Museum
and later started the Department of Social Anthropology at Utkal
University; B.S. Guha whose name was synonymous with the Anthro¬
pological Survey of India in its early years; Radhakamal Mukerjee
and D.N. Majumdar (for the latter see Madan and Sarana 1962;
Sarana 1961), leading members of the Lucknow Department; and
Surajit Sinha who wrote comparatively little but whose work has
been quite influential in historical sociology in India (see Bhattacharya
and Bhattacharya 2004).
Notwithstanding the acknowledged role of our twelve subjects in
pioneering professional sociology and social anthropology in India,
it is a matter of note that our contributors have so often commented
here on their subjects’ lack of ‘lasting influence’, the distortion and
 INTRODUCTION 49

misrepresentation of their legacy, or the fact that pious ancestor

worship has substituted informed appreciation and incisive critique
of their work. Thus, L.K.A. Iyer is now remembered as a native cog
in the wheel of colonial ethnographic survey. S.C. Roy fares a little
better, since the journal he founded, Man in India, is still in existence,
and his ethnographies remain till today a recognised source for the
legal authentication of tribal customary law. The intellectual giant,
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, is reduced now to just a regional footnote in
disciplinary history. While Sarkar is apparently still well known in
Bengal for his translations of numerous texts of Western social and
political philosophy, these texts are no longer deemed central to the
theory and practice oflndian sociology: he ‘wrote at a time when the
field was still fluid’, Chatterji explains. Patrick Geddes may well have
become a contemporary cult figure in the fields of social ecology and
town planning, but intellectually (so several of our contributors
conclude) he left ‘no mark’ on the Bombay University Sociology De¬
partment that he had founded and—with a few exceptions—has had
negligible influence among Indian sociologists today (Upadhya;
Munshi (2000), this volume; cf. Visvanathan 1987). D.P. Mukerji—
a man of the spoken more than the written word, according to T.N.
Madan—is scarcely known today; his books are mostly out of print
and absent from teaching syllabi. Verrier Elwin continues to be
‘treated with condescension in the academy’ (Guha), though his
tribal ethnographies remain in print and are widely read. Votaries of
‘Action Research’ do not appear to take inspiration from the likes of
N.K. Bose (Gandhian) or A.R. Desai (Communist), both of whom
had contributed so importantly to documenting the socio-political
movements in which they participated.
Nandini Sundar speculates at some length in her contribution on
Irawati Karve’s lack of lasting influence. Was it because Karve practised
anthropology in the classical sense (including archeology, prehistory,
and physical anthropology) that she does not qualify as an ancestress
for contemporary sociologists/social anthropologists? Is she now re¬
cognised only or especially in the regional context, not the national?
Did she have too few students to keep her memory alive? Did she
have the wrong publishers to promote her books on a national scale?
50 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Was it because she was a woman in a profession still dominated by

men? Any or all of these factors may have made a difference but, re¬
flecting on these essays across the board, some factors appear to be
more important than others: in particular, a large and strong teaching
department; metropolitan location; writing in English; the control
of professional associations; access to a professional journal; and,
perhaps increasingly, international recognition and networks of
patronage.
But this volume is not intended as a guide to disciplinary immort¬
ality. It aims simply to allow these extraordinary professional lives to
speak to each other and to a successor generation of sociologists and
social anthropologists, ourselves included. There are many lessons
to be learned and we owe much to our contributors for making this
dialogical engagement possible.

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 2

Anthropology as Ananthropology’
L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937),
Colonial Anthropology, and the
'Native Anthropologist5
as Pioneer

Kalpana Ram

When Ananthakrishna entered the field of anthropology in the first

decade of this century, anthropology was undeveloped in India, and
the facilities, resources and prospects which exist for anthropologists
nowadays were non-existent then. It must have required singular
courage and devotion to have started on a career of anthropology in
those days. That is why Ananthakrishna became a legend to subse¬
quent generations of anthropologists. In fact, anthropology was jok¬
ingly referred to as ‘Ananthropology’. It can be said with justice that
the work and example of Ananthakrishna contributed substantially
to the building up of a scientific tradition in modern India.—M.N.
Srinivas, Anthropology exhibition souvenir, Madras, 1962, cited in
Bala Ratnam 1963: 57

THE FORM IN WHICH M.N. SRINIVAS, FROM HIS POSITION AS

Professor of Sociology at Delhi University, tells of the achievements

of Ananthakrishna (hereafter A.K.) Iyer, is one Bourdieu describes
as elaborating The image of the great predecessors’. The form is given
by a retrospective construction of lineage and genealogy: the great
predecessors, viewed from the perspective of subsequent generations

)
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 65

Fig. 2: L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer with his wife Gangai Ammal and
their son L.A. Natesan. (Photograph courtesy A.K. Ramdas)

of academics in that field, appear as those who provide the terms of

self-definition for their descendants (Bourdieu 1993:65). This is not,
however, the form in which academic institutions require their
members to narrate their own lives: that form is given by the academic
66 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

curriculum vitae, written for institutional circulation and promotion.

If we were to narrate A.K. Iyer’s life in the academic form of a CV,
and add a few biographical details, it would look something like
this:

Ananthakrishna Iyer graduated with a ba from Christian College, Madras,

in 1883, and first worked as a clerk in the land settlement office at Wya-
nad. He became a teacher at Victoria College, Palghat, teaching science.
While teaching, he graduated in L.T. and became headmaster of a
school run by a Christian mission at Changanacherry. At this point, the
subcollector of Palghat became Dewan of Cochin and embarked on a
wide-ranging educational programme in the state which required trained
teachers. The Dewan offered Iyer appointment as Science Assistant in
Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam. In 1902, the secretary to the Dewan
asked Iyer to take up, as a purely honorary job, an ethnographic survey
of the state of Cochin—a task required of all provincial governments
and states by the colonial state. Iyer worked during the week as a teacher
at the Ernakulam college, and on weekends as Superintendent of Eth¬
nography for the Dewan. Twelve monographs were issued by the govern¬
ment press of Ernakulam between 1904 and 1906. In 1908, the first
volume was published, and a second in 1914. Iyer was chosen President
of the Ethnology Section at the first meeting of the Indian Science
Congress in Calcutta and there met the vice chancellor of Calcutta Uni¬
versity. In 1914 he was appointed by the Dewan as Curator of the State
Museum and Superintendent of Zoological Gardens at Trichur. In 1916
he delivered a series of special lectures on ethnology in India at the Uni¬
versity of Madras, the first of its kind within Indian universities. He was
now appointed Lecturer in Anthropology and Ancient Indian History
and Culture at Calcutta University; in 1920, he became University
Reader at this university. The same year, the university introduced the
first anthropology postgraduate course and Iyer was appointed Senior
Lecturer in order to set up a new anthropology department. He held the
position till 1932-3. In 1924 the Maharaja of Mysore invited him to
undertake an ethnographic survey of Mysore, resulting in four volumes,
the last three completing information initially collected by H.V. Nanjun-
dayya, Superintendent of Ethnography. Iyer undertook a lecture tour
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 67

of European universities in 1934. He received an honorary doctorate

degree at the University of Breslau. In India, he was conferred the hon¬
ours of Rao Bahadur in 1921 and Dewan Bahadur in 1935. In his last
years, he had embarked on an ethnological study of Coorg. He died in
1937.

The present essay is as much an exploration of the way we, as con¬

temporary social scientists and middle-class Indians, write about
and remember our disciplinary ancestors as it is about the figure of
A.K. Iyer. The reason for this departure from the usual intellectual
biography lies partly in methodological considerations and partly in
my familial positioning in relation to Iyer. As A.K. Iyer’s great grand¬
daughter (by his third marriage) as well as anthropologist, my nar-
rativisation of ancestry is necessarily overdetermined, blurring the
boundaries between the professional and the familial. What makes
this ancestral connection even more extraordinary is the transmission
of anthropology as a ‘family business’ across three generations of
men in my maternal family. Paternal authorisation of the son, and
a reciprocal memorialisation of the paternal ancestor, are intimately
linked in this mode of transmission. Iyer’s eldest son by his second
marriage, L.A. Krishna Iyer, went on to collect data as Special Ethno¬
grapher to the Census Commissioner in 1931-2, and as Officer in
Charge of the Ethnographic Survey of Travancore from 1935 to
1942. Drawing on this material, he wrote three volumes of the Tra¬
vancore Tribes and Castes published in 1936, 1939, and 1942, and
later in the Coorg Tribes and Castes. In 1945 he was appointed Head
of the Department of Anthropology in the University of Madras. His
son, L.K. Bala Ratnam, began his academic work via a book coauthor¬
ed with his father—a popularising volume on anthropology published
in 1961. He was General Secretary to the Social Sciences Association
in India, and author of many publications, some of which are direct
memorialisations of the contributions of his grandfather. He has
been a key figure in establishing a Centre for Anthropological Studies,
named after A.K. Iyer, located in the ancestral village of Palghat at
Lakshminarayanapuram. One of the objectives of the Centre is to re¬
vive interest in and pursue research on the contributions of A.K. Iyer.
68 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

The centres publications on the occasion of Iyer’s birth centenary

(see Bala Ratnam 1963) and subsequently (Bala Ratnam 1991) pro¬
vide some of the source material for my essay.
The writing of disciplinary ancestry is often limited to a history
of ideas and affiliations entirely intellectual—to the delineation of
a shared style of thought and ideas. Such a history is extended, at
best, to a discussion of academic and professional institutions. In
this case study, however, there are features which resist such a rendi¬
tion. Anthropology itself existed in 1902 only in a loosely formative
stage. There certainly existed no institutional mechanisms for so¬
cialising Indians into the colonial discipline. What is it that enables
an individual Indian to make an entry into the set of practices des¬
cribed as ‘anthropological’? Iyer’s admission into a colonial science,
the ‘Science of Man’, provides a unique opportunity for examining
those non-disciplinary enabling elements of the social field which
are always present in the reproduction of academic institutions and
theoretical traditions. Bourdieu has defined ‘the habitus’ as a set of
dispositions and affinities that are individualised but durable enough
to make possible a transmission of social and cultural capital across
generations (e.g. Bourdieu 1977,1993). But what exactly is the‘habi¬
tus’ in our present context? If, as numerous considerations of colonial
forms of knowledge have pointed out, anthropology was a discourse
designed to study native peoples’ rather than for these to figure in
it as speaking subjects, then what made it possible for someone like
Iyer to carve out a speaking position for himself? And what kind of
speech did that position render possible?
This shift in the form of the question enables me to pose a further
question: can caste, class, and gender be regarded simply as elements
in a structure of power relations, to be considered in purely structural
terms, with individualism as the only theoretical alternative? Or can
they be regarded, in a livelier fashion than usual, as embodied skills
and forms of enablement that bring the individual and social power
together? Is class a matter merely of the unequal distribution of these
skills? Or do the prior fundamental class and gender interdictions,
and separations between different kinds of knowledge and practice,
shape the very form taken by knowledge?
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY 69

Habitus has a further significance for this essay: I write as the great
grand-daughter of Iyer. Insofar as the familial habitus is to appear
as an object of enquiry and thought here—and it can do so only in
an incomplete fashion, as it furnishes elements of my own speaking
position—this is not because of an effort of sheer will or imagination
on my part but because I have experienced a partial break with this
habitus. My induction into anthropology has not been as straight¬
forward as that of the men I have just described: there have been dis¬
continuities, both in disciplinary and in gender terms. The partial
break I refer to is shaped by differences of generation, migration, and
in ways not unconnected with either age, gender, or migration—a
different kind of theoretical and political socialisation. The situation
offers a set of possibilities and constraints. It provides both the dis¬
tance from which to ask certain kinds of questions and the nearness
that motivates the questions. But the nearness also generates, as a
thoroughly internal set of constraints, the kinship expectations born
of the nurturance given by older generations.

I: COLONIAL WAYS OF KNOWING

When the Secretary to the Dewan of Cochin, Achuta Menon, asked

Iyer to undertake an ethnographic survey of the state, the princely
state had little choice except to respond to an externally imposed
requirement flowing from the colonial state’s decision to embark on
an ethnographic survey of all of India as part of its 1901 census ope¬
rations. The ethnographic grid of enquiry that Iyer used was a given’.
The imposed nature of the colonial apparatus of ethnographic and
ethnological investigation would have been particularly apparent at
the time that Iyer made his entry. Although no tradition can be de¬
fined in entirely local terms, an ethnographic survey was particularly
alien to Indians. Its foreign character consisted not in its external
origins but in its very mode of operation, which relied on a separation
of outsider investigator from the native investigated. This separation
derived partly from the ‘objectivist’ model of science that shaped
anthropology. The model rests on a fundamental division between
the knower and the world, between the detached scientist and the
70 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

observed natural world. European modernity has also given us tra¬

ditions critical of this separation. The mistaken extension of a scien¬
tific subject/object distinction to members of the social world has
been the object of a sustained critique by phenomenological traditions
of philosophy (cf. Heidegger 1992; Merleau-Ponty 1986). This tradi¬
tion remains internal to the terms of Western philosophy. What it
ignores is the way in which colonial relations of power sustained and
elaborated the terms of this transposition. We can only speculate
about the extent to which this model of natural science was in turn
shaped by the form taken by colonial state power. The colonial state
has been characterised in terms remarkably similar to the model.
One historian, for instance, contrasts the colonial state with previous
forms of the state in India. The colonial state was not only Tar more
powerful, centralized and interventionist’ but also Tar more self¬
consciously “neutral” .. . than any previous state’, ‘standing above
society, and not really part of it’ (Pandey 1992: 16).
British colonial forms of knowledge have been relatively well ex¬
plored in recent years. Bernard Cohn, in many ways a forerunner of
this body of work, writes of the many forms of colonial modalities
of knowledge, such as the museological, the enumerative, the historio¬
graphic, the observational/travel modality, and the survey modality.
Of the survey modality, explored in his early work on the census,
Cohn writes:

The survey as an investigative modality encompasses a wide range of

practices, from the mappping of India, to collecting botanical specimens,
to the recording of architectural and archaeological sites of historic
significance, or the minute measuring of a peasant’s fields. . . . Upon the
acquisition of each new territory, a new survey was launched, which
went far beyond mapping and bounding to describe and classify the
territory’s zoology, geology, botany, ethnography, economic products,
history and sociology. (Cohn 1996: 7)

Another scholar, Asad, has advised us not to overestimate the im¬

portance of anthropological knowledge to the structures of imperial
domination. Much more important was the Vast body of information
routinely accumulated by merchants, missionaries, and adminis¬
trators’ (Asad 1991: 315). What remains undisputed, however, is the
centrality of the colonial state for anthropology. The ethnological
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY 71

project of survey—with its classificatory grid of castes’, ‘tribes’, and

races (Robb 1995)—works as a particularly intensive colonial subset
of the overarching governmental category of‘population’. Its modes
of operation follow all the three paths traced by Foucault for ‘popu¬
lation’. It is simultaneously ‘a datum ..., a field of intervention,
and ... an objective of governmental techniques’ (Foucault 1991:
102). The ethnographic investigations Iyer was invited to join were
proposed in 1899 to the Secretary of State in India by the British
Association for the Advancement of Science. The proposal was ac¬
cepted as part of the colonial state’s census operations of 1901.
Science and governmentality—Indians as scientific ‘datum’ and
Indians as objects of administrative control—weave in and out of
one another as modes of meaning. The terms in which the government
accepted the need for an Ethnographic Survey of India as part of its
1901 census invoke the utility of a tidy record of its subject population:

It is unnecessary to dwell at length upon the obvious advantages to

many branches of the administration in this country of an accurate and
well-arranged record of the customs and the domestic and social rela¬
tions of the various castes and tribes. The entire framework of native
life in India is made up of groups of this kind, and the status and con¬
duct of individuals are largely determined by the group to which they
belong. (GOI 1901: 138, cited in Ghosh n.d.)

The opening statements of the same memorandum conceive of eth¬

nography as a provider of‘datum’, scientifically conceived and im¬
plemented:

It has come to be recognised of late years that India is a vast storehouse

of social and physical data which only need to be recorded in order to
contribute to the solution of the problems which are being approached
in Europe with the aid of material much of which is inferior in quality
to the facts readily accessible in India, and rests upon less trustworthy
evidence. . . . (ibid.)

What sustains this movement betweeen the scientific observation

of the natural world and the administrative categorisation of a sub¬
ject population is a third set of terms provided by evolutionary bio¬
logies of racial embodiment. Within the overarching framework of
meaning provided by evolutionism as science, there was little need
72 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

to make a distinction between the scientific investigation of the

natural world and the ‘Science of Man. The historian Bayly refers us
to earlier antecedents for the Ethnological Survey of India:

In 1869, the Ethnological Society of London invited specialists to map

the ethnological composition of individual Indian regions according to
the established ‘scientific’ criteria of ethnology—‘physical character’,
‘language’,‘civilisation’ and ‘religion’ (Huxley 1868-9). Significantly, the
meeting was held in what was then called the Museum of Practical Geo¬
logy. It was accompanied by displays of ethnographic photographs,
geological samples, flint axes and other ‘specimens’. (Bayly 1997: 189)

Once Iyer had established his reputation as an ethnographer of

castes and tribes, he could be made Curator of the Cochin State
Museum and Superintendent of the Zoological Gardens in Trichur
in 1914. People could be observed as one observes the natural world,
and they could be classified as so many representatives of different
historical periods. Fabian (1983) has pointed out, in an influential
formulation, the denial, within this framework, of ‘co-eval’ tempo¬
rality between the observer and the observed. But a further refinement
is needed. The special scientific appeal of civilisations such as India’s
lay precisely in the ‘coeval’ appearance, within India, of what appeared
in other places as temporally successive phases of evolution. What
occurred in linear form in Europe occurs simultaneously in India,
where there is a peculiar collapsing of evolutionary phases, so that
all social forms are arrayed in one space, coexisting in one temporal
frame. Unlike more fragile ‘primitive’ societies which crumbled
under the onslaught of colonial contact—in which anthropologists
such as Rivers detected a pervasive psychological malaise (Jolly
1998)—India provided a particularly interesting laboratory as a
civilisation made complex by the hardy survival of forms extinct
elsewhere, alongside the more evolved forms.
In the Introduction to Volume 2 of Iyer’s The tribes and castes of
Cochin (1912a), Alfred Haddon of Cambridge writes:

These backward jungle folk have a peculiar interest for ethnologists as

they appear to retain many of the customs and beliefs which we may
well suppose characterised mankind in very ancient times; they are
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 73

ethnological survivals which bear the same relation to anthropology as

that borne to zoology by those generalised or persistent types dating
from geological antiquity in various groups of animals that rejoice the
heart of the zoologist. (Haddon 1912: ix)

Iyer makes his own case for ethnology by distinguishing scientific ra¬
tionality from administrative rationality and preferring the former.
But the case is made within the terms available:

The work hitherto done in Indian Anthropology has been mainly for
administrative purposes. But nothing worthy of the name has been
done to ascertain the types persisting in a country to which no other
country in the world can be compared as possessing so many varieties.
(Iyer 1925: 18)

These ways of constructing the differences between India and

Europe are not confined to the past, nor are they confined to a parti¬
cular political orientation. They have entered into socialist analyses
as well. Consider D.D. Kosambi’s famous ‘walk through Poona’ in the
1950s (Kosambi 1956). He encounters in his neighbourhood ‘the
Law College (which teaches post-British law in English), the Bhan-
darkar Oriental Research Institute, the Fergusson College, several
country houses of Bombay millionaires, and a modern state sheep¬
breeding farm run on scientific lines .. .’.However, the neighbourhood
also contains ‘a tent-dwelling nomadic group of Ras Phase Pardhis
whose basic costume (for the men) is a simple loin-cloth, who never
take a bath, but who retain the natural cleanliness, mobility, superior
senses of wild animals’(ibid.: 26); and, later on, the Parvati temple
‘now dedicated to fashionable brahmin gods’ (ibid.: 37). During any
such walk in India, he suggests, ‘it will be possible to see the interaction
of obsolete with modern forms of society’. The formulation is cer¬
tainly more dynamic and purposeful than the purely typological
gaze of the ethnologist. But the evolutionary terms of categorisation
remain the same, as does the singling out of India by virtue of its uni¬
quely ‘coeval’ array of evolutionary stages.
Iyer had to work with a much tighter set of constraints than post¬
colonial intellectuals. The framework he had initially to work within
was even more narrowly specified and specifying than a broadly
74 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

defined ‘colonial field of knowledge’. He had to adapt himself to the

conceptual grid’ dictated by the Census Commissioner for the 1901
census, H.H. Risley—author of Tribes and castes of Bengal (Risley
1891).
But does the overwhelmingly‘given and externally imposed nature
of these categories require us to conceive of the colonial grid as dic¬
tating every possible move that could be made?

II: THE AGENCY OF A 'USER' (1):

MAKING SELECTIONS

Agency of the kind available to someone in Iyer s position was at

once less and more than the terms suggested by the question. It was
certainly less than the collective agency represented by the terms laid
down in the ethnographic survey questionnaires and backed by the
authority of the colonial state. However, it was more than the pas¬
sivity of mechanically carrying out externally given orders. In con¬
sidering this intermediate level of agency I take inspiration from de
Certeau’s (1984) description of everyday practices and the agency of
those who are ‘users’ of that which is pre-given. Language provides
a prime example. If we shift our perspective from the pre-given
structures of language as la langue, to the perspective of parole, of
language as used, then we find enunciation is always fresh, because
always taken up in a specific and novel context. The same insight can
be applied to other practices. The pedestrian in a cityscape has to
walk within an inherited system of urban spaces, but in walking
transforms each spatial signifier:

And if on the one hand he actualizes only a few of the possibilities fixed
by the constructed order (he goes only here and not there), on the other
he increases the number of possibilities (for example, he forbids himself
to take paths generally considered accessible or even obligatory). He
thus makes a selection, (de Certeau 1984: 98)

Iyer was commissioned to gather ‘data’ according to a closely spe¬

cified and deterministic set of categories. Yet, as a part of his procedure,
we catch glimpses of the agency of the kind described for the speaker
of a language and the walker of city streets. According to a former
Director General of the Anthropological Survey of India,

)
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 75

Iyer adhered to the 27-point format drawn up in 1885 by H.H. Risley

and two others for the ethnographic survey of India. Iyer simplified this
format into a 14-point one which covered the origin and tradition of
a community, internal structure, marriage, custom, inheritance, religion,
occupation, life-cycle ceremonies, dress, ornaments, etc. Iyer also like
others borrowed the conceptual framework of Nesfield on the occu¬
pational categories of the people of India, but he stuck to the ethno¬
graphic format. (Singh 1991: 39)

Selecting, simplifying, assembling pre-given elements slightly differ¬

ently—these are the forms of agency availaible to the user of that
which is imposed from without.
There were other significant selections made by Iyer from Risley’s
format. The data for the surveys was to be ‘collected firstly by the cir¬
culation of questionnaires to local government officers, and secondly
by the physical measurement of the population in the manner
prescribed by Risley’ (Bates 1997: 245). Iyer departed from these
expectations in two ways. First, he omitted to follow Risley in his
anthropometric, ethnological strand of enquiry, despite the fact that
it had been enthusiastically adopted in the Madras Presidency by
Edgar Thurston who ‘relied heavily on his authority as a government
officer’ to make people submit to his measuring instruments (ibid.:
246).
Anthropometry brings to a climax the transposition of the physical
sciences on to the social world. A measure of the coercive relationship
thus brought to bear on the object of anthropometric attention in
already unequal situations may be glimpsed from Thurston’s ironic
comments on the fear he inspired in his subjects (cited in Prakash
1999: 42-3). Measurements of‘the nasal index’ were used by Risley
to distinguish between Aryan and Dravidian physique, and were in
turn related to social status in the caste hierarchy: ‘it is scarcely a
paradox to lay down as a law that a man’s social status varies in in¬
verse ratio to the width of his nose’ (cited in Ghosh n.d.: 16). Iyer was
not so unaffected by prevailing discourses as to dispute the scientific
significance of ‘race’—he invited Dr Baron von Eickstedt, Director
of the Ethnographic Museum and Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Breslau, to fill in the chapter on the racial history of
India in Volume 1 of The Mysore tribes and castes. Elowever, he was
76 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

able to take advantage of the waning influence of anthropometry, by

the time of the last ethnographic survey, to refrain from making it
his own main focus. A review of Iyer’s work in the American anthro¬
pologist congratulates him for his decision to ignore this dimension:

The book is, on the whole, free from flaws which are found in other
books of similar nature. It does not contain any anthropometric data,
as the author has planned to confine himself to descriptions of the cus¬
toms, manners, traditions, etc. of the various tribes and castes. (American
anthropologist, 1910, cited in Bala Ratnam 1963: 24)

In his method of investigation, Iyer did not favour the more

bureaucratic procedures employed by British administrators, which
included sending ‘administrative circulars to Tehsildars and other
local functionaries’ (Singh 1991:39). Although Singh describes these
functionaries as ‘steeped in rural life and [to be] depended upon to
send a reasonably authentic account of the communities they were
called to report upon’ (ibid.), Iyer was not content with such reportage.
We have already noted his opposition to administrative styles of
knowledge in favour of scientific method. He visited villages and
interviewed people himself. In Cochin, he would have had the ad¬
vantage of knowing the language, but it is clear from his preface to
the Mysore volumes that he embraced the philosophy of rigorous
first-hand investigation in other linguistic regions as well. He had
been given printed monographs of thirty-four tribes and castes put
together by Nanjundayya, but he was not content to publish what he
was given. As he writes in the Preface to Volume 1:

The thirty four monographs which had been published between 1903
[and] 1918, were carefully revised and edited in the light of fresh and
additional information. The notes on the fifty other tribes and castes
were mostly fragmentary. Some of those notes contained important
material which has been utilised by the present writer. But most of them
were mere field notes in pencil on a few topics out of which nothing
could be done. If these tribes and castes were to be dealt with, it was clear
that a fresh investigation into the manners and customs of all these
tribes was imperative, and on representation of this fact, the Government
of His Highness the Maharaja of Mysore were pleased to accord sanction
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS ‘ANANTHROPOLOGY' 77

to all facilities required to institute a fresh survey of these tribes and

castes. The articles in the descriptive volumes are . . . the outcome of the
fresh investigations and first-hand study undertaken by the writer. (Iyer
1935b: iv)

None of these preferences and selections occurred outside colonial

ways of knowing. The ethnographic‘fourteen-point format’ consisted
of the following sorts of categories: origin and tradition of caste or
tribe; habitation; marriage customs; pregnancy and childbirth;
inheritance and tribal organisation; religion, magic, and sorcery;
funeral ceremonies; occupation; physical and mental characteristics;
food; and social status. While much has been written over the last
decade about ‘caste’ as a metonym for India, we have scarcely begun
to explore the smaller and seemingly innocuous categories through
which castes and tribes were investigated and which have shaped the
way in which ‘culture' is understood: categories such as ‘customs’,
‘beliefs’, and‘rituals’(but see e.g. Asad 1993; Needham 1972).1 In my
work on the changing construction of female sexuality among coas¬
tal Catholic fisherpeople, I am tracing the continuing effects of the
construction oftradition’ as a collection of false beliefs and irrational
rituals (Ram 2001). The centrality assigned to ‘beliefs’, for example,
in defining and investigating the ‘religion’ of other cultures rests on
a thoroughly Christian genealogy of religion. As Needham points
out, ‘the opening words of the Christian confession of faith, the
Creed, define the “interior state” of the adherent by the declaration
“I believe in God” ’ (Needham 1972:20). The ethnographic question¬
naire and its categories drawn up by a committee of the British Asso¬
ciation for the Advancement of Science in 1874 was heavily influenced
by E.B. Tylor, who had just published Primitive culture in 1871. One
effect of using these categories, argues Tomas (1991), was that of
filtering out the effects of colonial presence from representations of
a pristine primitive culture.
Similarly, Iyer’s preference for first-hand investigation over the
bureaucratic issuing of questionnaires to minor functionaries takes

1 The category of‘custom’ has been taken up particularly in the Pacific, both
as practice (‘Kastom’) and as object of intellectual debate (cf. Keesing and Ton-
kinson 1982).
78 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

advantage of a certain already existent tendency in British anthropo¬

logy. Stockings essay (1992) on the history of‘fieldwork’ in British
anthropology describes the ‘armchair’ anthropologists who, steeped
in evolutionary comparisons, were ‘very seriously concerned with
improving the quantity and quality of their empirical data’ (ibid.:
17). Initially reliant on ‘gentlemen amateurs abroad’ (ibid.: 18), by
1883 E.B. Tylor—as Reader in Anthropology at Oxford—was in
regular correspondence with those who could gather first-hand
ethnographic data, notably, missionary ethnographers. In 1884 Tylor
prepared a ‘Circular of Inquiry’ for the use of government officers,
missionaries, and travellers. If the theorists were to Teach the theo¬
logical stratum in the savage mind’, then bureaucratically inspired
questions were too blunt as instruments. Inquirers were urged rather
to watch ‘religious rites actually performed, and then to ascertain
what they mean.’ Similarly, collecting myth-texts ‘written down in
the native languages’ and ‘translated by a skilled interpreter’ was ‘the
most natural way’ to get at ‘ideas and beliefs that no inquisitorial
cross-questioning would induce the Indian storyteller to disclose’
(ibid.).
However, the dilemmas of the colonial quest for empirical accuracy
did not end there. If bureaucratic questionnaires were inadequate
because of lack of familiarity with the language and inadequate con¬
tact with the people, then missionaries, preferable on both these
counts, were a problem for a different reason: their interventionist
agenda.‘The centrality of religious belief in the evolutionary paradigm
tended, however, to compromise data collected by those whose
primary commitment was to the extirpation of “heathen superstition’”
(Stocking 1992: 20).
This contradictory relationship between the colonial desire to
intervene, to evangelise and civilise‘natives’ on the one hand, and on
the other the desire to capture, in the interests of science, authentic
and pristine culture by way of ethnographic representation, is
explored further in Tomas’s essay on British anthropology and the
Andaman Islands at the close of the nineteenth century. Tomas ar¬
gues that the type of investigative methodology that could be mar¬
shalled in the colony was not simply a matter of intellectual theory,
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 79

but depended on the nature of colonial control. Observational

methodology, as has often been noted, screened out a part of what
could be observed by the ethnographer, namely the effects of over
two decades of colonial ‘pacification’. However, the ideology of ob¬
servational science also had its own momentum and, by the turn of
the century, earlier authoritative ethnographies were being criticised
as inadequately based on genuine linguistic competence:

. . . much of the Notes on their Anthropology published by Man is in¬

correct, and the language he knew was a hotch potch of three or four
dialects. His work is chiefly written on the information of a few boys of
different tribes, and two convict jamedars. This is not my idea of ac¬
curate scientific research, and the results, thought good for 1881, will
not do for 1899. (T.B. Portman, personal communication to E.B. Tylor,
quoted in Tomas 1991: 90-1)

In such a situation, the ‘native anthropologist’ fills a valuable

niche. The ‘native’ status of the ethnographer is perceived by Europ¬
eans, who introduce and review Iyer’s volumes, as crucial in enhancing
the truth value of his investigations, particularly in respect of linguistic
skills. There is a promise here of being allowed in where no European
can tread, or, as the Calcutta Statesman of 4 January 1910 puts it,
‘Mr. Iyer has also given us many details which no European could
have found out, more especially with reference to their marriage and
burial ceremonies’ (cited in Bala Ratnam 1963: 25). The Indian
Patriot of 27 January, 1913 states that Iyer has‘justified Herbert Ris-
ley’s remarks that a native of India alone can do justice fully to des¬
cribe the wonderful details of the customs and ceremonies of the
thousand odd tribes and castes that inhabit India’ (cited in Bala
Ratnam 1963: 27).
The ‘native anthropologist’ evidently features in the colonial era
as one of a series of intermediary figures adopted as mediations be¬
tween the colonial and the ‘native’. Iyer fits in with the description
of journals like the Indian antiquary which ‘welcomed dialogue with
educated “native gentlemen” on ethnological topics’, education here
being signified by the formation of‘European-style learned societies
among educated “progressive” Indians’ (Bayly 1997: 185). We have
80 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

only described the view from the perspective of the coloniser. From
the viewpoint of the colonised, however, even the position of the in¬
termediary looks different.

HI: THE AGENCY OF A 'USER' (2):

ACQUIRING SKILLS

The dominant discourse of liberalism has socialised us into conceiv¬

ing of agency primarily in terms of‘choices’. The centrality of choice
in notions of subjecthood is closely tied to the centrality of consent
in the liberal framework. For an act to be ratified as agential and con¬
sensual, it must be free of coercion and chosen between equally
available options. From the point of view of the colonised, however,
consent and choice are not as salient a feature of social life, which
is why we have to re-attune ourselves to a smaller scale of shifts and
assemblages.
I wish to push the challenge to inherited liberal notions of agency
a little further. Even the recent theoretical innovations on the meaning
of agency continue to be driven by the assumption that agency is
entirely coterminous with the exercise of choice—only, it has now
to be located in ever more minute spheres of action. I suggest that
this downward spiral can be avoided if we recognise that the choosing
subject is only one ingredient—if an important one—of the agential
subject. More relevant to the colonial situation is the agency exercised
in learning to master the use of the newly imposed language. When
Iyer began work on The tribes and castes of Cochin series, he was
Science Assistant at Maharajas College, Ernakulam. His ethnographic
work was undertaken on a purely honorary basis. Iyer spent his week¬
ends on fieldwork, transcribing the work at night during the week
(BalaRatnam 1963: 19-20). By the end of his life, when he set off on
a lecture tour of Europe and England, he counted as his circle of
acquaintances Western anthropologists such as Hocart in England,
and William Koppers, Dr von Eickestedt, and Baron Heine Geldern
in Germany; and he addressed the meeting of the International Cong¬
ress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in London. He
was corresponding with the leading figures in anthropology—
Crooke, Frazer, Tylor, Haddon, Keane, Rivers. By the end of his career
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 81

Iyer was, in other words, no longer an implementer of narrowly

specified and externally constructed agendas, but a skilled speaker
and wielder of an entire discourse socially recognised by a European
world.
Volume 1 of Mysore tribes and castes (Iyer 1935a) is far more than
an application of an externally given format. It contains wide-ranging
essays on all the anthropological topics of the day, including caste,
religion, marriage, and family. The nature of the essays also reflects
a widening in the range of anthropological practices in which Iyer
was engaged. He was now an academic teacher as well. The Preface
makes it explicit that this book is informed by the urgencies of teach¬
ing undergraduate and graduate students at Calcutta University. The
book is meant to remedy the lack of reference books for Indian stu¬
dents and aims to provide a single source-book‘to indicate the main
lines of what to study in Indian Ethnology’ (Iyer 1935b: vii). The
discussion of caste brings together and compares the contemporary
theories then available, contrasting the racial theories of Risley with
the occupational theories of Ibbetson and Nesfield. The author feels
able to invite other ‘experts’ as colleagues who can supply missing
elements in his Preface. Professor Baron von Eickstedt, University of
Breslau, is asked to write the chapter on the racial history of India.
The illustrations to the Mysore volumes show the acquisition of
a similar ease and mastery over a dominant style of photography.
This is the museological style, which seeks out the anonymous hype’,
whether it takes the form of the typical natural habitat such as the
forest, the typical human habitat such as the village (see Plate 52, ‘A
typical village showing types of houses’ [Iyer 1935a: 410]), or human
beings themselves as representative of a broader category such as
tribe (Plate 25, ‘A Banjara and his wives in their gorgeous costumes’
[Iyer and Nanjundayya 1928: 157], caste, or occupation (Vol.2,Plate
35, ‘Two Besthas with their fishing nets, Sagar’ (ibid.: 239). At the
same time there are, in the Mysore volumes, photographs that are
more reminiscent of what Pinney (1997) regards as the portraiture
genre of photography. This genre is more intimate and engaged than
the ‘detective’ genre, which comes to the fore after the events of 1857
to supply photographs that can be used as ‘future identificatory
guides’ (ibid.: 45). A striking instance in Iyer of the more intimate
82 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

style of portraiture is Vol.2, Plate 66, ‘A Sri Vaishnava Brahman in

vow5 (Iyer and Nanjundayya 1928: 508). Although the man is still
there as a representative of a wider category, his face is utterly indivi¬
dual and he looks at the camera with an intensity that invites involve¬
ment. Still others, such as the photo of the Maharaja of Mysore,
strategically placed as the frontispiece to Volume 2 of the Mysore
tribes and castes (ibid.) and photographed with the formal backdrop
of a painted balcony, a tapestried chair, and a walking cane, resemble
the court portraiture photography of Lala Deen Dayal, projecting
‘formal representations of royal grandeur’ (Pinney 1997: 88).
As Pinney’s work documents, such photographic images which
‘mimicked key colonial aesthetic forms’ were being produced by the
‘vast numbers of local Indian-run studios’ from the mid nineteenth
century (Pinney 1997:72). The stigma attributed to a‘mimic culture’
(as opposed to an ‘original’ culture) has been a central object of post¬
colonial critique. While sharing in the general objective, my means
of pursuing this goal here lie not in deconstruction, but in pointing
to something quite basic and therefore easily overlooked—namely,
the quality of agency involved in developing skills in that which is
initially alien, in expanding one’s repertoire of practices. This kind
of expansion of individual agency, common to all aspects of learning,
also centrally entails mimicry. In the colonial context, the ordinari¬
ness of such agency is transfigured (cf. Taussig 1993). Mastery is ac¬
quired over a discourse fashioned expressly to treat Indians as‘datum’
rather than as enquiring subjects in their own right.

IV: THE ‘VAMCAVAU’ NARRATIVES OF THE

MODERNISING INDIAN MIDDLE CLASS:

IYER'S GENERATION AS 'PIONEERS'

M.N. Srinivas’ pun on anthropology as ‘Ananthropology certainly

hits off—in the alliterative mode so beloved of South Indian rhe¬
toric—the great predecessor as someone who supplies ‘the exalted
vision of the writer’s or artist’s craft; which may shape the aspirations
of a whole generation’ (Bourdieu 1993: 66). Iyer’s birth centenary
was celebrated by the Social Sciences Association; the welcoming
address by M.D. Raghavan, Ethnologist Emeritus of Colombo
Museum, describes Iyer as ‘both a prophet and a pioneer’ (Bala Rat-
nam 1963: 9).

)
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 83

The terms pioneer’ and ‘innovator’ have played an important role

in European modernity’s self-definition. As part of modernity’s
understanding of itself as ever dynamic, ever the space of individual
freedoms, these terms implicitly mark and define the meanings of
‘tradition’. They do so in characteristically binary oppositional terms.
If modernity is the space of freedom, then tradition must be that
which holds people back, which keeps them from innovating, from
fulfilling their potential as dynamic individuals. If modernity is
egalitarian, then tradition has to be hierarchy.
The antinomies were forged in part by Europe’s relationship to
its colonies, and in part derived from mapping Europe’s construction
of its own past (‘feudalism’) on to a colony such as India. In turn,
these binary oppositions have played a major role in fashioning the
self-image of the modernising Indian middle class. The Iyer genera¬
tion may be viewed as the first generation of the Indian middle classes
to become adept at wielding Western discourses in its own right,
without external direction. But in the eyes of its successors the Iyer
generation is something more. The agency it exercised is celebrated
in more glowing terms. Its eminent figures are represented as ‘pio¬
neers’ forging a path in untrodden territory. I wish to examine such
narratives for the indirect insights they can yield. The terms in which
the achievements of the pioneers are celebrated indirectly offer a
guide to what the middle class regards as the key features of Indian
modernity. The roll-call of Iyer’s sons and their achievements, listed
as part of Iyer’s memorialising essay by his grandson Bala Ratnam,
reads as follows:

— Geologist and Petrologist of the Geological Survey of India

— Tata Professor of Geology at Patna University
— pioneer researcher in Atmospheric Physics and Agricultural Meteo¬
rology
— first Professor of Economics at Scottish Churches College, Calcutta,
Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Railways, Chief of Transport
Division in National Council of Applied Economic Research

There is a consistency about the stories this segment of the middle

class tells of its predecessors, a sameness which points to the outlines
of a habitus. An account of her grandfather (‘thatha ), C.P. Rama-
swamy Iyer, written by his granddaughter Shakunthala Jagannathan
84 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

(1999), is prefaced by her reasons for writing it: ‘So few of today’s
generation, young and middle-aged are aware of the difficulties men
like him faced and overcame in pre-independent India to achieve
what they did’ (1999: 5).
An account of his eleven years as Dewan of Travancore from 1936
is explicitly framed by the notion of the pioneer. Here the several
fields of pioneering, represented by a family over two generations in
Iyer’s case, are collapsed into one man. The granddaughter’s repre¬
sentation takes the form of a list simply entitled ‘Thatha’s Firsts in
Travancore’:

— the first [caps, in original] state to permit Temple Entry for Dalits
(known then as Harijans)
— the first state to introduce free and compulsory education
— the first time a University was established in Travancore, including
Marine Biology, Science
— the first state to make a one-crore investment in an industry, and to
commence procurement of foodgrains to prevent famine
— the first to nationalise road transport
— the first cement concrete highway in India from Trivandrum to
Kanyakumari
— Thatha established the first Fertiliser factory
— the first Travancore Rayon plant, and the first Aluminium Cable
making plant, the Cement industry, etc.

In his account of the cultural authority of science in colonial and

nationalist India, Prakash writes of science ‘as a multivalent sign’
which ‘. . . traversed a vast arena, encompassing fields from literature
to religion, economy to philosophy, and categories from elite to popu¬
lar.’ The divisions, he argues, ‘overlook and conceal how politics and
religion, science and the state run into each other, how it is precisely
through spillovers and transgressions that modernity penetrates the
fabric of social life’ (1999: 7). The ‘spillover’ proceeded not only from
one discursive domain to another, but from British to Indian elites,
among whom science was taken up as their very own project.
Prakash’s book emphasises the nationalist colouring given to the
science project by middle-class elites, particularly in the enterprises
of a ‘Hindu’ science. Equally, one should recognise the appeal to
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 85

members of the colonised Indian elites of science’s claim to transcend

all racial location. At a time when such universalisms are under severe
critique from poststructuralist and feminist quarters, it is easy to
overlook the importance of such meanings for subordinate popula¬
tions. In fact, these were more than meanings—they offered forms
of identity. As a universalising discourse which was supposed to have
no regard for the social location of the enquirer, science offered
Indians a certain degree of cultural capital (see below), a way of
reshaping themselves that won them far more prestige than the racial-
ised identity on offer. The offer was not illusory. As we have seen, the
world that Iyer had made himself part of by the end of his life fur¬
nished recognition by prestigious Western institutions—certainly less
than a genuinely "universal’ identity, but also more than a purely
racialised one. Science offered not simply a mode of enquiry, but a
way of fashioning one’s being into a new identity with the promise
of being able to expand beyond the colony into the world at large.
The practices that contributed to this self-fashioning are set out in
eloquent detail in Bala Ratnam’s account of the rigorous routines
associated with Iyer’s anthropological fieldwork:

A week or ten days before the commencement of the summer and Puja
vacations, he used to prepare for the field trip. After reaching either
Bangalore or Mysore, he would proceed to the outstations, stop in the
travelers’ bungalows or circuit houses, and accompanied by the local
revenue officials, visit the villages or settlements of the different castes
and tribes. He would already have studied whatever material was avail¬
able regarding their habitat, manners and customs. He would interrogate
the headman of the tribe or caste and the more important persons be¬
longing to the group, about the different social institutions, and take
down notes. He would also take a number of photographs. Most of the
photographic illustrations in his books were taken by him using a half
plate stand camera, assembling the group and taking the photographs.
Starting at about 8 or 8.30 in the morning, he would return by about
1 or 1.30 pm. Sometimes when a longer distance had to be covered,
and the interrogation or items to be observed took up more time, he
would not mind staying on, returning for lunch at so late an hour as 3
or 4 pm. He was anxious to ensure getting a proper photograph of any
86 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

group, so that in the event of failure, he could rectify it without loss of

time on the following day. After dinner, therefore, he would convert
the bathroom into a dark room to develop the photographs and by the
time fixing was over and washing completed, it might get past midnight.
His zest for work was unflagging and many a person who used to be
with him freely confessed their inability to stand up to the strain of his
exacting regime. (Bala Ratnam 1963: 32)

The description of the ‘regime’ vividly conveys the relentless drive

of bodily practices, the stern discipline and drive that are a part not
only of the field of knowledge but of the identity appropriate to a
‘Man of Science’.
In addition to what these stories reveal of the past, they tell us a
great deal about our present. The stories of‘pioneering’ frame agency
in more dramatic ways than mine in this essay. On the other hand,
they do not make as much of the colonial context, not even in order
to take narrative advantage of the drama of crossing racial interdic¬
tions. Instead, they locate Indians of a certain generation as part of
a universal and universalising class of modernisers, members of disci¬
plines that also belong to no particular racial or class group. They
are ‘men of’ science, law, engineering, economics, and so on. Unlike
the theses suggested by studies of Indian nationalism over the last
decade, the drama here is supplied not by the tensions between
nationalism and colonialism but by the oppositions between mod¬
ernity and tradition. I regard these stories as being very like those of
the Tamil vamcavali, the way/path of the vamcam or lineage, which
Dirks (1987) happens on in his attempt to reconstruct the history of
the ‘little kingdom’ of Pudukottai. Referring to the vamcavali of the
Maravars of western Tirunelveli, Dirks describes a genealogical record
that consists of a succession of episodes concerning selected ancestral
heads of the family (Dirks 1987: 75). What gives potency to these
vamcavalis is that they are not simply‘lists’ of a genealogical nature.
Instead, they are, like most performative traditions in India, strongly
narrativised. The episodes describe a progression that moves from
‘the violation’ to the ‘proper performance of ritual norms’, a ‘struc¬
turally ordered opposition, which is then mediated by devotion’
(ibid.: 82). Thus, in a move that is familiar in bhakti literature, the

)
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 87

Maravars proceed from the crude but unflinching devotion of a hun¬

ter or, in another instance, of a highway robber, to the agamic puja
proper to a king.
In the case of the vamcavali I am referring to—as with Dirks’
Maravars—one can trace certain functions in the narrative structure
which help to establish ancestors as heroes. All are pioneers in various
branches of scientific modernity. The orientation of these stories is
overwhelmingly towards the future. The face of the teller is turned
forward, looking ahead to inspiring many such further achievements
by succeeding generations. Indeed, that is the function of their
retellings within familial contexts.
The ‘violation with established practice described by Dirks’ Mara¬
vars, which in turn enables the ancestors to emerge with their cultural
capital enhanced, is also relevant to the vamcavalis of modern elites.
For the other side of the Man of Science is the Man of Reform. The
two may be combined in the same man, but they act more as func¬
tions that may be distributed over different men in the same shared
lineage or background. Significantly, the two areas of‘tradition’ which
are singled out repeatedly as the sites for a ‘progressive’ violation are
the two areas isolated by the British as the sites of a recalcitrant and
oppressive tradition—caste and the status of women. Upper-caste
vamcavalis routinely refer to the flouting of caste and gender conven¬
tions by late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century ancestors.
Under the heading ‘Pioneer and Reformer’, his grand-daughter
narrates an incident prefiguring C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer’s work in im¬
plementing temple entry for Dalits during his Dewanship of Travan-
core. Approached by a Dalit graduate, Sivaraj, he readily takes him
on as law apprentice, only to find him missing during lunch—no
doubt a thoroughly Brahmanic vegetarian affair with ‘thatha’, a
stickler for punctuality, unambigously at the head of the group. Sent
to look for Sivaraj, the servants find him eating his lunch outdoors.
The incident leaves a deep impression. ‘I made up my mind on that
day to do all I could to integrate this section of people into Hindu
Society’, he said (Jagannathan 1999: 75).
Science as well as social reform fuelled the upper-caste move to
flout caste conventions. Iyer’s obituary in Man (1937) written by
A.C. Haddon and F.J. Richards, describes him ‘coaxing a gang of shy
88 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Nayadis to come within the 300 feet which custom prescribes as the
limit of their approach to a Brahmin (Bala Ratnam 1963: 2).
The area of cultural capital claimed through the transgression of
tradition depends partly on the perspective of the teller, lyers mother
is described by L. A. Natesan, son of Iyer, in his unpublished memoirs,
as an unselfconsciously progressive mother-in-law:

From the uniform testimony of all her daughters in law about her, giving
them all ample freedom which was unknown in Hindu households in those
days, there can be little doubt about her gracious manners, trusting
nature and reliance on the goodness of her daughters-in-law. (L.A
Natesan, unpublished memoirs, emphasis added)

No such interest in gender relations guides the telling of Iyer’s

marriage by Bala Ratnam. His third and longest lasting marriage to
Gangai Ammal, my great grandmother, is described in entirely
conventional terms as ca model of marital life which lasted about 45
years’; and: ‘He was indeed quite happy with Gangai Ammal, who,
throughout the period of 45 years of married life, gave her husband
most devoted help by running the house tactfully and efficiently,
and braving most cheerfully all the difficulties of life with a great
scholar’(1963: 17,44).
Women who rise above oppressive gender norms can be just as
important to these vamcavalis, even though the main accent is on
the men. This is Jagannathan on C.R Ramaswamy Iyer’s mother:

Widowed at a young age, Rangammal’s aristocratic bearing and in¬

dependent spirit never left her. She would not wear the blouse-less white
cotton saree or the naarmadi that Brahmin widows had to wear in those
days, but had the family weaver at Kanchipuram weave orange silk sarees
with maroon borders specially for her. . . . She also innovated a new
way of draping this saree.... It also pioneered a trend amongst Brahmin
widows of well-to-do families who started wearing similar sarees. (Jagan¬
nathan 1999: 13)

The stories tell of constant innovation and pioneering. Nor are they
altogether mistaken. Circumstances were shifting rapidly, and there
is a change occurring in the nature of dominance, both internally
between the sexes, and across classes. It is simply that the shift is not
of the wholesale kind envisaged in the dramatic break with‘tradition’.
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 89

Rather, as with the heroes of Maravar clan stories, these violations

of the caste/gender order work to equip the more enterprising mem¬
bers of a caste or class with cultural capital.

V: EMBODIED FORMS OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

What is forgotten or suppressed in this version of modernity are

class and caste, not only as factors that disable Dalits and women
but as factors that enable upper-caste men to carve out a dominant
niche even as they set about reform in the colonial context. It is there¬
fore not simply ‘pioneers’ we are discussing in these stories, but
Indians of a certain kind and of a certain background. In this section
I wish to take seriously the notion that the habitus is embodied.
This does not mean that the body is a passive register, or, in the
Foucauldian and textualist idiom now popular, that it is ‘inscribed
upon’ by the disciplines of power. Nor is the habitus a set of rules to
be reproduced. Rather, it entails a specific version of socialisation.
Embodying the habitus therefore entails being equipped with skills
which do not specify what one does, but rather may be used in order
to flexibly respond to changing contexts. I wish to discuss habitus
under the broader heading of the princely states within colonial India
before focussing more narrowly on the constitution of‘knowledge’
in the Brahmanic habitus.

The Princely States

It is not a coincidence that the expanded role that Iyer was able to
play as an Indian in the field of colonial science took place entirely
in the princely states of South India. In his biographic sketch of Iyer’s
life, Bala Ratnam remarks on the opportunity provided by the ‘far
reaching educational programme’ launched by the Dewan: ‘To start
an adequate number of schools the State required a large number of
trained and experienced teachers. The newly organised Education
Department, therefore, offered an attractive avenue of employment
for many graduates with T.T. Degree’ (1963: 18).
The ‘reform’ orientation of the rajas in states like Travancore and
Cochin can be re-framed in the terms set out in the present essay.
These states elaborate, in a much larger way than is open to an indi¬
vidual, the capacity to make an externally given agenda their own,
90 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

and they do so in a skilled fashion. The agenda is broader than any

particular programme, and is the expression rather of modernity
and modernisation more generally. The princely states establish a
very early lead in this respect. In the educational field alone, Travan-
core’s maharajas invested heavily, from the 1860s on, in vernacular
primary schools. Cochin in the 1890s was following suit. The political
historian Robin Jeffrey attributes the joint lead in literacy and public
education to ca complex interaction of old Kerala’s culture with an
expanding cash economy and princely governments intent on
‘improvement’. Travancore’s Maharajas from the 1860s sincerely be¬
lieved in the desirability of education’ (1992: 56). In her work on the
Devadasis of Mysore, Nair (1994) argues that the reform-oriented
modernity of the princely states was made possible by the fact that
modernity was not represented, in regions like Mysore, by an alien
and external colonial state. As a result, she argues, the familiar anti¬
nomies between a public sphere defined by colonial modernity and
a private domestic sphere defined by resistance to reform did not
apply: ‘legislative and administrative initiatives that attempted a
molecular transformation of social relations in Mysore, often
reach[ed] into the heart of the family without provoking protests
comparable to those in British India’ (Nair 1994: 3157).
A striking instance of this is the abolition of the devadasi system.
In Madras Presidency the legal bill was introduced in 1929 and be¬
came law only in 1947, and then as the result of diverse social move¬
ments ranging from the Self-Respect Movement to middle-class
women’s call for reform. In Mysore, on the other hand, the legal ini¬
tiative had been undertaken by the Mysore government as early as
1892. Upper-caste discomfort with aspects of cultural traditions re¬
flected the success of missionary critiques, but in the princely states
this discomfort could be translated into legislative and administrative
initiatives. Nair traces the initiatives undertaken by the Mysore ad¬
ministration in evolving a ‘legality delinked from religion’ (1994:
3163).
All of Iyer’s commissions flow from states such as these. In these
states, Iyer was part of a social class of Western-educated upper castes
that populated the bureaucracy. Here, state patronage was not so
bifurcated by considerations of race. Iyer was a friend of C. Achuta
Menon, who was Secretary to the Dewan of Cochin. Iyer owed his
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS ‘ANANTHROPOLOGY 91

first appointment at Victoria College, Palghat, to his acquaintance

with P. Rajagopalachari, who was formerly Sub-Collector of Palghat
and subsequently Dewan of Cochin. C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer’s reform
programme as Dewan of Cochin from 1936 to 1947 brought together
a modernising Tamil Brahman elite with a modernising princely elite
in Kerala.

Tamil Brahman Habitus: The Late

Nineteenth Century

The background practices of Tamil Brahmans in the late nineteenth

century seem particularly well suited to being described in terms of
a ‘habitus’, reflecting in each sub-set of their embodied practices—
such as forms of labour, dietary practices, dwelling, and marriage—
a concern with distinctions from the rest of society. I will refer,
necessarily briefly, to each of these. Spatially, the Brahman agraharam,
a street composed entirely of Brahman households, sets itself apart
as a special environment within the village. Iyer’s son L.A. Natesan
describes Iyer’s village of Lakshminarayanapuram in Palghat as
consisting of

about a hundred houses ranged into an L-shape, the east to west length
having rows of houses facing one another, and the remaining length,
north to south, only partly double rowed on the south. There is a Temple
dedicated to Lord Krishna at the eastern entrance to the village and an¬
other dedicated to Lord Subrahmanya at the southern end on our side
of the house . . . (L.A. Natesan, unpublished memoirs)

Not only is the agraharam set off from the rest of society, there is
also a closing in on itself which is shaped by the style of dwelling:

As each house was contiguous to the next one, the right side wall in the
house was built by the owner, while the right one built by the owner of
the house to his left provided the second wall of his house. ... The
houses were short in breadth and what was lost here is sought to be
made up in the length. The doors were all exceptionally strong, though
dwarfed in size. (L.A. Natesan, unpublished memoirs)

Underlying this spatial demarcation is a separation and expulsion

of all forms of manual labour. Describing Brahman households in
92 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Tanjore—from where the Palghat Brahmans migrated in the nine¬

teenth century—the anthropologist Gough records that, even in the
1950s,

As religious specialists, the men do almost no manual labour, but spend

the greater part of their time in the home, absorbed in ritual and in
kinship relationships. . .. For the most part Brahman men are engaged
in the management of their lands and in the performance of many
religious ceremonies, and do no manual labour. Land is cultivated by
tenants and labourers of the lower castes of the village, who fall into
two major categories: non-Brahmans and Adi Dravidas. (Gough 1993:
147)

The community generated a particularly well delineated set of

regularities in practices around bathing, food, and diet. Although
the overriding distinction is between vegetarian and non-vegetarian
food, meals are fine-tuned elaborations of‘taste’ which it is the full¬
time business of women to attend to since the succession of meals is
a central aspect of the organisation of the day. A concern with the
regularity of bodily routines recurs in different aspects of daily prac¬
tice. The regularity of the bodily routines of Palghat Brahmans, their
repeated visits to the river for ‘ablutions’ and baths in the morning
and evening, moves Iyer’s son L.A. Natesan in his private memoirs
to describe them as a ‘clean and disciplined people’. Writing of the
Havik Brahmans of south Kanara, the anthropologist Nichter cap¬
tures not only the centrality of fooci to this way of life, but the atten¬
tion to the regularity of bodily rhythms:

One aspect of adhering to this lifestyle is an internal clock literally

calibrated to food transit time (hunger, defecation patterns) and acti¬
vity-rest patterns. Deviation from this pattern is a cause of concern. .. .
In everyday discourse, food and digestion are common reference points
among Brahmans. A common Kannada greeting in South Kanara
inquires as to one has finished one’s meals (oota aiytu7.). This constitutes
an invitation to talk about vishesha—happenings in one’s house related
to special food preparations. .. . Among Brahmans, it also constitutes
an opportunity to talk about one’s appetite, digestion, pathya (dietary
restrictions), and participation in social events—all spoken about in
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 93

relation to food consumption. Through observation and overt dis¬

cussion about foods eaten and not eaten, interlocutors learn much about
the quality of life in each others’ households. (Nichter 2001: 88-9)

Such regularities could not be ensured, of course, without substan¬

tial uniformity in the background of marriage partners, right down
to finer distinctions between Iyer (Smartha) Brahmans and Iyengars.
In addition, most ethnographic and historical reconstructions of
Brahman kinship have emphasised the inordinate emphasis on the
control over female sexuality and fertility. Chakravartfs historical
work on an eighteenth-century Brahmanic Peshwa state in Maha¬
rashtra gives us a glimpse into Brahman kinship in a particularly
reified and exaggerated form as state laws, characterised by a-symme-
trically severe punishments for Brahman women convicted of adul¬
tery, particularly with men from lower castes, as well as by the
institutionalised annihilation of the social life of Brahman widows
(Chakravarti 1998).
However, these are all broad background practices—they do not
dictate a particular life, and certainly not in the context of con¬
siderable social change. Nevertheless, there remains a relationship
between a habitus and a life which is the legitimate object of a socio¬
logical enquiry. Within the broad spectrum of practices and skills
made available by socialisation, individual embodiment exercises its
particular agency in re-attuning that which one has received and
previously learned to the new tasks at hand. The very fact that Iyer
was able to enthusiastically Teach himself’ ethnography on weekends
raises with particular force the question of prior attunement. What
were the elements in the socialisation received by Iyer which would
have attuned him and oriented him in assuming a task that was ex¬
ternally organised but nevertheless taken as his very own project?
Of Iyer’s early education his son L.A. Natesan writes:

Education in the modern sense was not known and all that was at¬
tempted was in the traditional style of going through a regular
adhyayana and Sanskrit courses. He got one day four annas as Bhoori
Dakhshina or some such thing and asked to join a small elementary
school on modern lines which had then started near the Sivan Koil.
After completing this, he proceeded to the Kerala Vidyasala at Calicut,
94 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

which later came to be known as the Zamorins College. (L.A. Natesan,

unpublished memoirs, p. 5)

Iyer’s father was a Sanskrit scholar. According to L.A. Natesan, ‘[In

his last years] grandfather was invited on his way back from Benares
by a Sanskrit Patshala people [sic] to be with him. His Vedic schol¬
arship was so striking and he might have found himself usefully em¬
ployed’ (ibid.: 16-17).
We now have a considerable body of scholarship which argues
that the colonial state turned to the textualised Brahmanical versions
of scriptural tradition in defining religion, caste, and tradition itself
(e.g. Dirks 1987; Mani 1998). This European ‘turn’ towards Brahman¬
ism is itself not to be taken as self-evident. Colonialism, too, had as
its background a ‘habitus’. What was it in the European philosophical
and religious ‘habitus’ which allowed such a striking orientation to
exist in the first place? And before turning more fully to this question,
why do we assume that the European resort to Brahmanical interpret¬
ations did not meet with a reciprocal, if unequally placed, ‘turn’ on
the part of Brahmanic intellectuals towards European systems of
knowledge? Were the constitutive features of Brahmanic intellectual
traditions so very different to European ones? Should not an ‘anti-
orientalist’ critique interest itself more in this question, particularly
when there are such striking and independent similarities that stand
out even in a cursory examination. In his study of the ‘Brahmanizing
tendency on the part of medieval ruling elites’, Pollock singles out
the monopolisation of access to the authority of Sanskrit vaidika or
learning as a key feature in the transmission of privilege and inequal¬
ity (1993: 105). What are the characteristics of this vaidika? Pollock
examines the nibandha composed in the middle of the twelfth cen¬
tury by Bhatta Lakshmidhara for the King of Kanaujas:

these digests of social/religious codes of conduct, which define what

maybe viewed as the total society (varnasramadharma), are compendias
of rules and exegeses based on earlier material from dharmasastra and
its ‘metalegaf framework, Purvamimamsa. . . . (Pollock 1993: 105)

The critique of British representations of caste as timeless has

unnecessarily deflected attention from the way in which a Brahmanic
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 95

and upper-caste codification of society was emphasised and reinforc¬

ed in particular historical contexts before British times. We have men¬
tioned one instance of this already, in the eighteenth century Peshwa
state (Chakravarti 1998). Pollock sees the composition of the niban-
dha as a response to the crisis of having to confront the Central Asian
Turks. A similar argument is made by Roy (1998) for the codifications
and regulatory classifications undertaken in the composition of the
Kamasutra which, she convincingly argues, ought to be interpreted
as a shastric composition rather than as a piece of kavya: it seeks to
define and regulate social relations, a privilege confined to males,
and more particularly to Brahman males well versed in Sanskrit.
Roy, like Pollock, attributes the flurry of codification to crisis—in
this case the crisis following the disintegration of the Mauryan empire
around the second century bc. We therefore do not have to define
Brahmanic Sanskritic authority as timeless and unchanging in order
to recognise that there has been, in Indian history, a striking tendency
on the part of ruling elites to compose, from time to time, what Pol¬
lock describes as an ‘encyclopaedic synthesis of an entire way of life’,
or that Sanskrit and Brahman scholarship have had a very specific
role to play in these efforts. Nor can these be seen as isolated episodes
in Indian history—Roy’s very definition of what makes the Kamasu¬
tra a shastric composition invokes the fact that it cites earlier authori¬
ties and situates itself self-consciously in the authority of a normative
tradition (Roy 1998: 54).
Colonial categorisations of caste, tribe, customs, and manners are
not identical to Brahmanic ‘compendias of rules’ which ‘define what
may be viewed as the total society’. The ideology of science and scien¬
tific rationality constitutes at least one crucially different element
and it has left its imprint on the way Sanskritic Hinduism can be de¬
fined and defended (see below). But it certainly would have required
no vast epistemological break to transpose an intellectual socialisa¬
tion based on imbibi ng a shastric‘encyclopaedic synthesis of an entire
way of life’ to the ethnographic-adminstrative aim of producing a
totalising vision of all the different groups with their habits and cus¬
toms. Iyer’s essay on Religion in the Mysore volumes (1935e) effort¬
lessly absorbs an evolutionist schema in which Brahmanic religion
retains its place on the top of the civilisational ladder. But in his
96 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

version Brahmanism is distinguished in a new way from the religion

of‘lower castes’ and ‘tribes’, which henceforth become the province
of ‘totemism’, ‘magic’, ‘sorcery’, and ‘animism’. The religion of the
upper castes consists of named, organised bodies of thought. It in¬
cludes the hymns and sacrifices of the Rg Veda, the philosophy of
the Upanishads, doctrines of karma, as well as the challenge of orga¬
nised discourses such as Buddhism and Jainism, and the advaita phi¬
losophy of Sankaracharya. Magic and sorcery on the other hand are
the province of non-elites:

Primitive tribes all over India and other countries of the world believe
that magicians and sorcerers can assume the figure of any animal they
like. The Parayan and Panan sorcerers have powers of witchraft. The
Mundas of Chota Nagpur have similar beliefs in transformation. . . .
The Todas and Badagas are mortally afraid of the Kurumbas who are
believed to possess the power of destroying men, animals and property
by witchcraft. Thus, sorcery is a living article of faith among the ignorant
and backward people as also among the jungle folk. (Iyer 1935c: 275)

A kind of transposition is at work here, where some of the terms

through which the British distinguished Europe from India become
reworked in order to distinguish elite from non-elite Indians. If the
terms of Western orientalism allow westernisation as the only gateway
through which Indians can enter ‘history’, then in the transposed
version the adoption of upper-caste mores becomes the only form
of change conceivable for the ‘tribal’ and the ‘low caste’ (a premoni¬
tion of Srinivas’s ‘Sanskritisation’ thesis): ‘it is curious to note that
tribes once with very low culture have gradually imbibed the culture
of the higher castes, assumed new caste names or become merg¬
ed into the already existing castes by adopting Brahmanic gotras
or names of new Puranic heroes as their original ancestors’ (Iyer
1935b: 257).
For such transpositions to be possible, they have to be sustained
by pre-existing affinities. In turn, the epistemological affinities are
sustained by the deeper-lying social parallels of class and patriarchy.
In both cases, the dominant philosophical tradition has defined
^knowledge’ in terms of intellectual traditions that are formal, dis¬
cursively organised, and highly elaborated. In both Western and
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 97

Brahmanic philosophical traditions this orientation towards formal¬

ised and textualised versions is in turn based on a denial and suppres¬
sion of certain aspects of the relationship between the human body
and the world. That these relationships have to do with labour and
reproduction may be indirectly adduced from the fact that in both
systems they are projected on to particular social groups—the work¬
ing classes and women—which are henceforth exclusively defined
in terms of their function as labourers and childbearers, respectively.
Western philosophical traditions have been examined from diverse
quarters for their peculiarly disembodied and privileged stance on
the world. Heidegger (1992), and after him Derrida (1976), have
drawn particular attention to the logocentric character of Western
metaphysics. Heidegger argues that there is something peculiar about
the characteristic stance of metaphysics, which assumes a subject
who is all mind, and who seems to need to enquire into the world as
if it were an entirely external object. Bourdieu has in turn traced
such a stance back to the peculiar position of the academic scholar
who, cut off from the world of diverse practices, has the leisure time
or skhole (Bourdieu 2000) to ponder the world rather than engage
in it for practical purposes. The expulsion of the maternal body from
philosophy has been the object of feminist critiques such as Irigaray’s
(1985). She describes the inability of Western metaphysics to accom¬
modate a genuine sexual difference, to allow the maternal body or
the relation between mothers and daughters into representation in
the symbolic order of language.
1 have deliberately foregrounded critiques ot the European philo¬
sophical habitus in order to de-exoticise the critique of Brahmanic
intellectualism. I certainly consider this a more effective strategy than
one that eschews all consideration of Brahmanic ideologies such as
‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ on the grounds that these are orientalist an¬
thropological constructions. Such an objection may enjoy impeccable
anti-orientalist credentials, but it leaves unaddressed important as¬
pects of the experiences of those who have been centrally devalued
by such ideologies.'Pollution’ can be re-understood, in the class terms
I propose, as a heightened form of affect, the disgust that attaches it¬
self to attempts by a dominant system of knowledge to ‘spit out’ and
expel that which it finds unassimilable and undigestible to its
98 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

authority claims—namely, the fleshly domains of the female body

of birth and the body of labour. They are so many forms of‘abjection
(cf. Kristeva 1982). The ritual induction into ‘knowledge’ so consti¬
tuted attempts to reconstruct birth without its fleshly basis either in
human labour or in the bodies of women. The upanayanam cere¬
mony sees the father giving birth to the son in a spiritual birth which
is defined by its abjection of the ‘Sudra’ and the woman. The female
force,-saktiy is redefined in terms that expel the embodied woman
and attenuate the sexual body of the Brahman boy. Henceforth, he
must be all mind. Henceforth, sakti resides in ‘the recitation of Sans¬
krit texts and the fervent worship of Siva, but also [in] control of
bodily functions, and in particular from the conservation of semen
by sexual abstention’ (Gough 1993: 160).
These deeper-lying structural affinities between two class sys¬
tems—and what each has officially designated as ‘authoritative know¬
ledge traditions’—would have enabled a mutual ‘recognition’ to take
place in colonial times. The ‘turn’ to Brahmanic formulations of Ind¬
ian tradition now appears more fully contextualised, although the
unequal context of colonialism did not allow an explicit formulation
of this recognition. British recognition of Brahmanism was displaced
on to texts and a golden past, while its living intellectual exponents
were discredited as avaricious, cunning, power-hungry, and sexually
exploitative. The ambivalence—in its orientalist binarisms of the
empirical Western intellectual versus the otherworldly Brahman in¬
tellectual mixed with a ‘recognition’ of a certain similarity—can be
glimpsed in the introduction by R.R. Marett, Rector of Exeter College,
Oxford, to Volume 1 of The Mysore castes and tribes. Marett unhesitat¬
ingly addresses himself, as a Western scholar, not to Indians as a
whole but to the bearers of the equivalent tradition in India whom
he terms ‘the Indian philosophers’:

Now a life devoted to a striving after perfection is not unfamiliar to

India. . .. But it would seem that hitherto the Indian mind, despite its
noble ambition for self-knowledge, has been disposed to overlook a
good half of its potentialities. . . . Unless I am greatly mistaken, the
genius of India has never taken kindly to empirical studies for the reason
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 99

that it has always reckoned the material side of experience to be sheer

illusion. ... In practice, whatever his theory might logically involve,
the Indian philosopher does not by any means jettison all his cargo. He
simply rejects as superfluous certain grosser needs such as must distract
his attention from the pursuit of spiritual perfection. Thus he has only
to embark in company with like-minded men of other countries on
the quest for truth by way of the empirical sciences to discover that this
way of study also involves ‘simple living and high thinking’—in other
words, a service under discipline as strict as any that sage or saint could
wish to impose upon himself. (Marett 1935: xlvii—xlviii)

Such recognitions of affinity do not end at the boundaries of colo¬

nialism and Indian elites. Iyer in turn sought authoritative knowledge
of the castes and tribes from those whom he recognised as authoris¬
ed to know: ‘He would interrogate the headman of the tribe or caste
and the more important persons belonging to the group, about the
different social institutions, and take down notes’ (Bala Ratnam 1963:
32).
In this account, postcolonial hybridity takes on a different com¬
plexion. It no longer refers exclusively to the internal instabilities of
colonialism as it meets with a necessary failure of meanings (Bhabha
1994: Prakash 1999). Instead, it refers to the hybridity of mutual
transpositions between two systems of power and meaning that
understood ‘knowledge’ on the basis of similar expulsions and inter¬
dictions.

V!: CONCLUDING REMARKS

No sociological case study can fully account for a life lived. Although
one can refine one’s sociological tools, emphasise that a ‘habitus’
does not operate as a set of rules but as a set of potentialities, just
how an individual takes up those potentialities and what meanings
he endows them with will always be in excess of any theory. Brahma-
nic and Western intellectual environments may have flowed together,
as in their construction of the prototypically male scholar who enjoys
the free time of the skhole and the free space of a separate ‘Library
House’—such as Iyer built for himself suitably far away from the
100 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

noise and distractions of the family home, but close enough to receive
fresh supplies of coffee and tiffin from my great grandmother’s
kitchen, hand-delivered by his overawed sons. However, Iyer’s style
of work also required him to break with certain aspects of his back¬
ground. The thorough and exhaustive monographs flowed not from
the stance of a scholar cut off from the world but from the stance of
a scholar prepared to journey into the world, to undertake empiri¬
cal observation and ethnographic encounter. Such a break required
a powerful set of meanings to sustain it, and these were, at least in
part, provided by science. Whatever our contemporary theories make
of such practices and meanings, the zeal and energy with which Iyer
brought these alien meanings to bear on his own social world are,
ultimately, what make him stand out through his vast corpus of work.
Unlike his European colleagues, for whom ‘science’ and colonialism
were part of their own civilisational apparatus, to be projected on to
others, the Indian anthropologist—as part of the culture under obser¬
vation—had to be prepared to objectify his own intimate environ¬
ment in the interests of science. The unhesitating way in which Iyer
made this his own project is nowhere more strikingly exemplified
than in the photograph Iyer provides in Volume 3 of The Cochin
tribes and castes (classified under ‘T’ for Tamil Brahman), with the
caption ‘Three Tamil Brahmans’—these are women from his family,
now re-viewed as typical examples of a strictly scientific category of
enquiry (Plate 4, 1912a). Brahmanic education and its transform¬
ations under colonialism are described in the same neutral tones:

The study of the Vedas and Sastras is, in point of money earning, less
popular among them, and its place is being taken up by western edu¬
cation. Brahman children, boys and young men, are being educated in
all schools and Colleges, and take advantage of the instructions imparted
in them; so that they form a conspicuous majority in the ranks of the
literates. (Iyer 1912b: 338)

The ideals of scientific objectivity Iyer so conscientiously brings

to bear on his practice were bought at a price. Yet even these costs il¬
luminate the present. As the price of applying to social life a scientific
ideal forged in the observation of the natural world, the analyser
 ANTHROPOLOGY AS 'ANANTHROPOLOGY' 101

henceforth could not include himself in the same frame as those

analysed. Iyer had to write as if the processes of Western education
which he describes occurring among Brahman children did not
account for his own capacity to write as he does. To the extent that
‘magic’ comes to be exorcised from social practices and projected
on to the ‘animism’ and ‘spirit cults’ of non-elites, intellectuals sacri¬
ficed their capacity to represent and comprehend the magical aspects
of their own cultural practices—let alone the practices that sustain
the lives of those around them, particularly in a place like India. The
gap between elite and non-elite religion widened as recognition of
the patently magical element in such Brahmanical practices as man¬
tras, agni sacrifices, and asanas was suppressed in favour of a purely
intellectualist understanding of religion. Henceforth, Hinduism
could only be defended as a set of metaphysical philosophical doc¬
trines or as a prefiguration of ‘science’ from the time of the Vedas
on.
Ultimately, the language of costs and benefits, the language of
stocktaking, is inadequate for what I have tried to show in this essay.
Instead, I have tried to read Iyer’s corpus of work and his life-practices
more broadly, in a way that makes them speak to the present. The
concerns I have taken up in this essay are the concerns of those for
whom the past is not dead ‘history’: postcolonial intellectuals with
a stake in tracing genealogies of the present, and feminist and Dalit
intellectuals for whom configurations of caste, gender, and class as
they come down to us from the past retain a vital political signifi¬
cance.
In the Mysore study, Iyer referred to spirit possession, to which,
he observed, women were more prone than men. Perceptively, he
linked spirit possession to disorders in reproductive embodiment
(Iyer 1935d: 274). Yet the possessed woman also brings the dead spirit
to life and, if sufficiently skilled, can make the spirit address the con¬
cerns of those who attend its spirit court. The Brahmanic sraddha
ceremonies performed by sons for their fathers have a different em¬
phasis. They placate the spirit of the ancestor but keep it more firmly,
if more contentedly, in the other world. This has been the prestigious
model of the relationship between the dead and the living. Women,
102 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

who have been excluded from this relationship, must seek another.
Perhaps the possessed woman can be understood as offering us an¬
other model for acknowledging the dead.

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 The Nationalist Sociology of
Benoy Kumar Sarkar1

Roma Chatterji

FOR STUDENTS IN MOST SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENTS IN INDIA

today, Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) represents at best a footnote

in the history of Indian sociology. His work is still taught in univer¬
sities in Bengal, but more as homage to a regional tradition of social
science than because of his contribution to mainstream sociology.
Yet in his day he was known as a cosmopolitan scholar with impres¬
sive knowledge of Europe and the US based on a mastery of several
European languages. He was also a renowned teacher and introduced
the study of modern sociological texts into the institutions where he
taught. Why then does he find no place in our institutional memory?
I attempt to address this question by locating his work in the historical
period within which he wrote. This entails a twofold engagement:
with his life on the one hand, and with the social scientists that he
interacted with on the other. As I will show, he was a nationalist and
a political activist, as well as a scholar who had a living relationship
with ideas current in his time. For him, sociology offered a way of
addressing India’s contemporary concerns and all his writings are

1 I am grateful to Andre Beteille and Satish Saberwal for introducing me to

the work of B.K. Sarkar; also to Nandini Sundar, Satish Deshpande, Patricia
Uberoi, and Deepak Mehta, who have commented on successive drafts of this
paper.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 107

Fig. 3: Portrait of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949)

(Source: Swapan Kumar Bhattacharyya, Indian sociology: The role of
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Burdwan: University of Burdwan Press, 1990)
108 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

constructed like conversations or discussions around significant

events, particularly those that concerned India’s sovereignty.
Sarkar’s scholarly concerns were shaped by his participation in
the Swadeshi (self-rule) Movement in Bengal (1905-7), especially
by his association with the Dawn Society, started by Satishchandra
Mukherjee in 1902, which propagated the study of Indian culture,
particularly of the country’s distinctive spiritual traditions.2 Sarkar
was also a teacher in the Bengal National College set up in 1906 by
the National Council of Education as an alternative to colonial insti¬
tutions of learning in Bengal.3
However, Sarkar’s scholarship, while remaining faithful to the
nationalistic sentiment of the Dawn Society, took a radically different
turn fairly early on in his intellectual career. Thus, instead of affirming
the spiritual distinctiveness of India’s culture and therefore of the
national movement as an idealistic movement against an alien West¬
ern ideal, he tried to demonstrate the materialistic or ‘positive’ orient¬
ation of Indian culture. He argued that this orientation not only
legitimised India’s claim to self-governance (swaraj) but also showed
Western representations of Indian ‘otherworldliness’ as feeble at¬
tempts at rationalising colonial rule.
Scholars like Tagore (1999) and Coomaraswamy (1981) had pro¬
posed that India, having never sought political domination over other
nations, offered a distinctive spiritual ideal, and that her independ¬
ence would therefore benefit the world at large. Sarkar, on the con¬
trary, seemed to accept the fact of political domination as a universal
phenomenon and took pride in demonstrating that Indian history
showed her as capable as any Western colonial power of exercising
‘brute force’ in the interests of imperial domination. He used a com¬
parative perspective to argue that, since India’s history showed rem¬
arkable parallels with those of other nations, she too was capable of

2 Regular classes were held on the Bhagvat Gita, on the ancient village
community as a self-governing unit, on national enlightenment, and on spiritual
traditions. The Dawn Society also emphasised the study of Western philosophy
and history. The emphasis was on moral and spiritual education. For a compre¬
hensive history of the Swadeshi Movement, see Sarkar (1973).
3 In 1907, he also helped establish the District Council of National Education
in Malda, Bengal, which ran several schools in the district as well as a research
institute for the study of the folk culture of Malda.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 109

functioning independently and forming a nation state (see Sarkar

1936).
What caused the shift in Sarkar’s ideas on Indian nationalism?
To answer this question we have to first examine the discourse on
nationalism as it emerges through an interface with the discourse
on Western imperialism and colonisation. Unfortunately, a detailed
discussion on this is beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will
give a brief account of Tagore’s views on nationalism and its space
within Indian civilisation so as to understand Sarkar’s brand of mili¬
tant nationalism and its appropriation of disciplines like history and
sociology.

I. HISTORY AND INDIAN CIVILISATION

Concepts such as autonomy, freedom, and distinctiveness constituted

part of the important themes around which debates on national¬
ism cohered. Coomaraswamy and Tagore thought of autonomy and
freedom as spiritual ideals. For Tagore, India’s distinctiveness and
her contribution to world civilisation lay in the coexistence here of
different races. India’s history showed a process of continuous self¬
regulation, of a social adjustment of differences such that these could
be organised into a spiritual unity. Tagore did not feel that the forma¬
tion of a nation-state would contribute to the maintenance of this
spiritual unity. He thought that the idea of the ‘nation’ was a negative
ideal, expressing a kind of collective insecurity that led to the ex¬
ploitation of‘no-nations’ such as India. The West had developed an
exploitative relationship to the rest of the world as a result of its
enhanced technological and organisational capacity. This acted as a
‘goad’, stimulating ‘greed for material prosperity’, which in turn sti¬
mulated jealousy between various groups of people. Power thus
became a ruling force rationalised by the ideology of nationalism.
Sarkar would have agreed with Tagore’s analysis. He too believed
that power was articulated effectively with the help of science and
required organisational support. But, unlike Tagore, he thought of
power as a positive force and science as a form of practical rationality.
Giuseppe Flora (n.d.), a historian who has written extensively on
Sarkar, says that his particular orientation to Indian civilisation was
characteristic of nineteenth century Bengal. Positivist ideas spread
110 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

as a result of the establishment of scientific institutions like the

Calcutta Medical College in 1835, the Calcutta Mechanics Institute
in 1839, and the Linnean Society of India in 1840. Efforts were made
to synthesise Hinduism with positivist values (see also Raychaudhuri
1995). However, there was an abrupt reversal of this trend with the
partition of Bengal and the rise of the Swadeshi Movement. Satish
Chandra Mukherjee, founder of the Dawn Society, was influenced
by Swami Vivekananda, opposed spiritualism to positivism, and stres¬
sed the significance of India’s spiritual tradition for the modern
world. In fact, Sarkar adopted this position in his early writings, when
he was still a member of the Dawn Society. Later, in his mature work,
he referred to this perspective on Indian civilisation as a kind of veil,
an appearance that India took on when she came face-to-face with
the outside world; but the core of her being was materialist.
What brought about this change in Sarkar’s thinking? He himself
attributed it to his discovery of Shukraniti, a classical text on the
science of government which was thought to have been composed
in the fourteenth century. Sarkar thought that Shukraniti was unique
in that it offered practical guidance to the ruler and was not merely
a philosophical treatise. It offered detailed information on the grada¬
tions of feudatories, councils of ministers, financial budgets, adminis¬
tration, and so on. In addition, it linked this pragmatic discussion
of government to the goals of purushartha, namely, dharma, artha,
kama, moksha, and to the swadharma of the ruler whose duty it was
to sustain the particular swadharma of his subjects (see Acharya 1987;
Sarkar 1939). The 'discovery’ of this text allowed Sarkar to place his
research on Indian politics, history, and culture within an interna¬
tional perspective without losing his nationalistic moorings. He could
acknowledge the specificity of India’s national culture while at the
same time emphasising her common destiny with national move¬
ments elsewhere.
Sarkar’s encounter with Shukraniti not only shaped his under¬
standing of Indian nationalism but also influenced the way he ap¬
proached Western scholarship in general and sociology in particular.
Even though he never thought of himself as a professional sociologist,
his reading of certain sociological classics configured his discourse
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 111

in a particular way. I will here use the sociological ideas that he refers
to in his writings as a point of entry into his nationalist writings and
demonstrate that the work of social philosophers and sociologists
like Tonnies, von Wiese, Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, and Haushofer
were important influences on his thought. To this end, my discussion
will focus on texts that are considered somewhat marginal within
his corpus, namely The sociology of population (1936) and The political
philosophies since 1905 (1942). I refer to his more famous works like
The positive background of Hindu sociology (1937), Villages and towns
as social patterns (1941a), and Tolk elements in Hindu culture (1941b)
only to exemplify his sociological perspective. My discussion is also
informed by Benoy Kumarer Boithoke (1944), edited by Haridas
Mukhopadhya, which consists of a series of discussions between Sar-
kar and his students on ideas and events that shaped his intellectual
life.
Sarkar was a prolific writer. He used his writing as occasion to
engage with authors and events that concerned him at the time of
writing. He was interested less in presenting a coherent body of ideas
than in provoking discussion. Each of his books is a moment in his
engagement with Indian society and her national movement. Only
by focusing on these lesser-known texts may one come to grips with
his style of writing, with the fact that he thought of ideas only within
particular conversational contexts and as intimately associated with
his life and that of the Indian nation. For him—and this applies to
other Bengali nationalists as well—engagement with Western thought
enabled thinking about Indian civilisation as inherently cosmopoli¬
tan and therefore modern. However, to understand the particular
way in which he appropriated sociology, some discussion on his use
of the historical method is necessary.
Gadamer (2000), in his seminal work on hermeneutics and the
Romantic movement, says that history, after Spinoza, came to be
seen as a form of inquiry for approaching phenomena that seemed
at first sight unintelligible. What made sense could be grasped at
first sight; what did not required a detour into history. History be¬
came a kind of laboratory for the comparative study of social insti¬
tutions and even a resource that nations could use in their struggle
112 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

for existence, as well as a way of understanding their present. It was

through the study of ancient texts that the past was made available.
They represented, as it were, the biographies of nations.
It is in this context that we must examine Sarkar’s translation of
the Shukraniti. He thought of it as part of a comparative study on
India’s materialist past that would provide an important counter to
transcendentalist representations of Indian civilisation. He thought
that this text, which he claimed had been composed in the fourteenth
century, provided evidence of an unbroken tradition of political
philosophy in India from the time of the Mauryan dynasty, represent¬
ed by Kautilya’s Arthashastra, to that of the Sultanate period when
Muslim rule was established in India. However, more recent works
on the Shukraniti, like that of Lallanji Gopal (1978), tend to place it
in the nineteenth century and even speculate that it may have been
a forgery (see Flora n.d.). Be that as it may, this text allowed Sarkar
to counter arguments that were current in Bengal from the late nine¬
teenth century which claimed that politics, as a category of knowledge
and practice, was alien to Indian consciousness.
History, embodied in texts like the Shukraniti, became an ideo¬
logical weapon for Sarkar. Kaviraj (1995) shows how history becomes
an important symbol in the consciousness of colonial Bengali in¬
tellectuals. In the discourse of colonial Indology, history is thought
of as an attribute characterising the difference between mystical India
and the rational, scientific West. However, as Kaviraj argues, history
became a double-edged weapon in the hands of nationalist Indian
scholars who used it to point to the ‘constructedness of the past’ and
to argue against essentialist representations of India. Kaviraj says
that history showed a world in the making, a contingent world, in
which social arrangements were fluid and open-ended, pointing to
alternative possibilities that could be logically plausible even if never
actualised. In this view history can allow the free play of imagination,
becoming a root myth for colonised people.
Sarkar saw his efforts in describing the materialist history of India
as a confrontation between ancient India and the India of his time.
As mentioned, he thought that representations of Indian spiritualism
were ways of rationalising her ‘enslavement’ by the West. Thus, if
India could be shown to have no social, political, or economic insti¬
tutions of her own, that is, no history worth recording, then it could
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 113

be argued that it was her destiny to be ruled by others (Mukhopadhya

1944). History, then, became a way of making the past a presence in
the consciousness of colonial India, of establishing relations of com¬
monality between institutions described in ancient texts and those
in contemporary India. For colonial Indians like Sarkar, it was a way
of making the present intelligible.

II. SOCIOLOGY AS A PERSPECTIVE ON

HUMAN CIVILISATION

Sarkar’s ‘sociological’ concerns were shaped by the teachings of the

Dawn Society, especially by Brajendranath Seal who helped introduce
sociology in Calcutta University in 1917. Radhakamal Mukherjee
and Benoy Kumar Sarkar were the first to teach sociology there.
Sarkar took from Seal the idea that Indian institutions had to be
studied from the perspective of comparative sociology. This involved
the study of cross-cutting influences of race, religion, and culture
on social institutions as well as comparisons of the history and
development of ideas embodied in them. It did not refer to a method
per se but rather to an orientation that was sensitive to other cultures.
A delineation of Sarkar’s sociological lineage is extremely difficult.
This is not merely because his definition of the discipline was
expansive—he thought sociology was concerned with social philoso¬
phy and social reform—but also because of his pedagogic concerns.
He believed that sociology was a way of sensitising young minds to
other civilisations and he was not particularly interested in its estab¬
lishment as a rigorous discipline within the Indian university struc¬
ture. Thus he never actually systematised his ideas about sociology,
nor discussed the influence of contemporary sociological writing
on his work. However, there is at least one essay in which he does
discuss sociology as such. This is the expanded version of his presi¬
dential address to the sociology section of the first Indian Population
Conference held in Lucknow in 1936, later reproduced in his book
The sociology of population (1936). Here he discusses several different
perspectives on the subject and lays out his own scheme of the broad
areas of study that could be included under the rubric of sociology.
Thus, ‘sociology’ is divided into the following themes and pers¬
pectives:
114 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

A. Theoretical Sociology
1. Institutional sociology (family, property, state, myth, arts and crafts,
sciences, mores, languages)
a. Anthropology and history as well as sociography
b. Social philosophy and philosophical history

2. Psychological sociology, sociology proper in the narrow sense

C. Social psychology
d. Social processes and social forms

B. Applied Sociology
The study of attempts at remaking of man, societal planning and the
transformation of the world by promoting ‘social metabolism’ along
diverse fronts (Sarkar 1936: 8)

It is evident that Sarkar, in common with many sociologists writing

in the early decades of the twentieth century, used sociology to arti¬
culate their concerns with social reform. However, the specific orga¬
nisation of this schema does give us some insight into the kind of
sociology that Sarkar read and helps us in delineating a sphere of
scholarly influence.
Tonnies and later Ward make a distinction between pure and ap¬
plied sociology. Pure sociology is concerned with the formulation
of concepts that can be applied to the study of concrete historical
societies and social processes: for instance, gemeinschaft and gesells-
chafty which characterise two alternative modes of collective being.
Tonnies also introduces a third category—empirical sociology or
sociography, which is the description of social phenomena. Sarkar
reorganises this classification. Thus, the category ‘theoretical socio¬
logy’ includes the philosophical anthropology of scholars like Kant
and Montesquieu, as well as the comparative ethnology of Bachofen,
concerned with the ends and values of so-called universal human
institutions. Under the second item in this category, ‘psychological
sociology’, he included mainstream sociologists and other social
scientists who had influenced the development of sociology. He
thought that sociology was especially concerned with the psycho¬
logies of different societies that were to be studied from a comparative
perspective.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 115

Sarkar was clearly not interested in pure sociology’ as such, even

though von Wiese—a ‘formal sociologist’ who thought that the sub¬
ject matter of sociology should be restricted to the study of abstract
social forms and relationships—did have a significant influence on
his work, as we shall see. Sarkar is far more interested in applied
sociology—the study of‘human achievement’ and of structural chan¬
ges within groups and institutions, especially with a view to making
recommendations for future progress. He called this the ‘sociology
of social metabolism’.
In the category of‘psychological sociology’ Sarkar includes a host
of scholars such as Tonnies, Gumplowicz, Tarde, Ratzenhofer, Dur-
kheim, Le Bon, Simmel, Pareto, Small, Binet, Freud, Wallas, Ross,
Bogardus, McDougall, Salleilles, Wundt, Ellis, and Stanley Hall. These
scholars, together with von Wiese—for whom Sarkar reserves an
especial place in his conception of sociology—are fundamental for
the ‘enrichment’ of the discipline.
Even though Sarkar wrote passionately about the dynamism of
India’s traditional institutions and about the need for social recons¬
truction, he did very little empirical investigation of concrete insti¬
tutions.4 His interest in applied sociology was tied to his interest in
state formation. Everything that he wrote on social institutions (and
his writings range from essays on folk religion and traditional aes¬
thetics to modes of transport in medieval India and comparative
economics) is tied to a larger concern with Indian sovereignty. Thus,
Sarkar was drawn to sociologists like Ratzenhofer, Gumplowicz, and
Haushofer who wrote on geopolitics and state formation in broad
philosophical terms. I shall discuss their influence on Sarkar’s work
in the next section. Here I will focus instead on the two sociologists,
Tonnies and von Wiese, from whom Sarkar learnt that all social phe¬
nomena could be thought of as geometric patterns, but patterns that
were volitional and therefore inherently dynamic.
Sarkar read von Wiese’s Allgemeine Soziologie (1924, 1929) and
was fascinated by the idea that the study of abstract forms of social
relationships could be a sociological problem (Mukhopadhya 1944;

4 A significant exception is The folk elements of Hindu culture (1941), which

is a monograph on the Gambhira ritual complex of Malda.
116 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Sarkar 1936). Von Wiese believed that sociology was concerned with
the isolation of the processes of sociation, of approach and with¬
drawal, which characterise all social behaviour. It was not concerned
with the functions of social institutions but only with the ‘rhythm
of sociation’. Rhythm has a temporal dimension which von Wiese
conceptualised in terms of‘direction’. Thus, forms of sociation and
relationship could be characterised in terms of particular styles of
movement and interaction (see Barnes 1948).
For Sarkar, von Wiese’s appeal lay in the range of phenomena
that the concepts of form and relation were able to capture. Thus, in
a discussion of von Wiese’s definition of sociology, Sarkar describes
social relations as being composed of phenomena like competition,
boycott, exploitation, and so on, while social forms were crystallis¬
ations of relations such as group, mass, state, people, nation, and
class. All such forms could be analysed in terms of association and
dissociation, by the kind of distance that people maintained in rela¬
tionships and by the direction that these relationships took. Thus
relations of association occurred in three phases or took three
forms—advance, adjustment, and amalgamation; and those of
dissociation—competition, contradiction, and conflict. Each of these
phases was characterised by a particular quality of difference and
mutuality between the participants in the relationship as well as a
particular emotional charge (see Barnes 1948). Sarkar found this
idea extremely attractive. By building ‘direction’ into his definition
of social relationship, he was able to capture its volitional nature.
Sarkar believed that all social formations were brought about by col¬
lective agency, which was why they could also be self-consciously re¬
constituted. However, he did not believe in the concept of a group
mind. Collectivities were made up of individuals who had the
freedom to express their differences. Sociology had to account for
the fact that individuals were both contained by forms of sociation
but could also confront them; they were both inside society as well
as outside it. This allowed Sarkar to consider the influence of leaders,
digbijoyee or ‘world conquerors’ to use his phrase, in the study of
‘social metabolism’. But, more importantly, it allowed Sarkar to syste¬
matise his ideas about Indian tradition as a product of a long process
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 117

of interaction between different cultures, of amalgamation, distanti-

ation and conflict, but also tentative appeasement. Other nationalist
scholars have also spoken of Indian civilisation in these terms, most
notably Tagore: but he thought this gave Indian society the quality
of unselfconsciousness. Sarkar held the opposite view and believed
that even colonisation was a willed relationship, which was why it
could also be repudiated.
From Tonnies, Sarkar took the idea that all forms of thought,
even seemingly irrational ones, were never completely unreasonable
because they were expressions of human will. Thus, gemeinschaft
and gesellschaft represented opposite potentialities. A group or
relationship could be willed because it was desirable for a definite
end; this was called kurwille or rational will, which is able to dis¬
tinguish between means and ends. Relationships could also be willed
out of sympathy or because the relationship was considered valuable
in itself. This was called wesenwille, any process of willing that arises
from the character of the individual.
In Villages and towns as social patterns (1941a), Sarkar uses Tonnies’
distinction between wesenwille (‘natural will1 or action that may be
willed for its own sake or because of habit or inclination) and kurwille
(action that is consciously chosen) to the understanding of the
Krishna myth. The myth becomes a metaphor for Indian society
itself. Sarkar takes up the contrast between the two locales in which
the Krishna lila are played out, i.e. Vrindavana and Dwarka. Thus,
Vrindavana, the archetypal village is a gemeinschaft-like entity and
embodies the spirit ofprakriti or nature, while Dwarka is the product
of sanskara or sanskriti, i.e., man’s influence on nature and the spirit
of gesellschaft. The village/town distinction in the myth is represent¬
ed by a series of related oppositions. Thus, Vrindavana : Dwarka : :
sylvan scene : artificial, built landscape, and cowherd/pariah: sophis¬
ticated courtier : : Prakrit/primordial or natural language : Sanskrit/
artificial or cultivated language. Both sets of qualities are part of
Indian society. We shall see later that the co-presence of the registers
of the real and the imaginary is repeated in his materialist account
of Indian history. This inclusiveness allows him to use history as the
arena for his philosophical cogitation. History, for him, becomes a
118 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

horizon with shifting boundaries, or a landscape in which his theory

of geopolitics or vishwa shakti (world forces) is played out.

III. VISHWA-SHAKTI AND

CREATIVE DISEQUILIBRIUM

The previous section focused on Sarkar’s conception of sociology

and his emphasis on volition in the understanding of social pheno¬
mena. This section foregrounds his views on politics and on the state,
for he did not believe that society or ‘civilisation’ could be understood
apart from the political formations within which it was embodied.
Sarkar (1942) explicitly refers to Haushofer’s work on geopolitics,
on the notion that the state is a territorial embodiment of‘will force’
served by reason, that is, force that can be justified when it is in the
interest of the group. Haushofer was a scholar in the National Socialist
regime in Germany who had been responsible for inviting Sarkar to
the Technisce Hochschul in Munich in the 1930s. Buf Sarkar’s hist¬
orical canvas, the idea that groups are bonded together for survival
and that human interaction is primarily conflictual, driven as it is
by biological nature, is found in the works of Gumplowicz and
Ratzenhofer.5
Gumplowicz said that sociology is concerned with the study of
group interaction. Societies evolve out of such interaction, through
marriage alliances, economic interaction, and warfare. All societies
were held together by material interest. In due course different groups
coalesce to form states. The impetus for state formation originates
in the desire to subjugate others, which in turn leads to assimilation
with the subjugated groups, and finally to amalgamation with them.
This, according to Gumplowicz, is the process by which nations or

5 Gumplowicz (1838-1909) was Professor of Public Law at the University of

Graz, Austria, and is known for his pioneering work in establishing sociology
as a social science (see Barnes 1968). Ratzenhofer (1842-1904) wrote six books
on sociology after he retired from the Austrian army. He worked on the evolu¬
tion of types of human association and believed that all social phenomena
could be reduced to physical, chemical, and biological ones (see House 1968).
Both scholars were considered important in European and American sociology
in the early decades of the twentieth century.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 119

‘folk states’ are formed—whereupon the process begins anew and

newly emergent states begin the process of subjugating other groups
once again. Ratzenhofer followed Gumplowicz in believing that
societies are composed of rival interest groups. However, he also
said that hostility between groups is limited by felt advantages of
cooperation, such as trade between states as well as other processes
of sharing. In the long term, he felt, such processes of limitation had
led to the development of civilisation. Ratzenhofer also believed that
‘interests’ foundational to the formation of society are, however, not
merely social or economic but could emerge from environmental or
chemical (that is, sexual) impulses as well.
The important points that Sarkar took from these two thinkers
were: (i) that material interest provides the dynamic force behind
social evolution; (ii) that such interests lead to conflict between
groups and individuals; (iii) that conflict is a creative force in history;
and (iv) that there is no such thing as infinite progress—all societies
go through cycles of progression and regression. These ideas form
the core of Sarkar’s account of Indian history. He is able to construct
a theory that can account for the seemingly contradictory processes
of colonisation which, as I have mentioned, is attributed to voluntary
self-subjugation as well as to the newly emergent desire for swaraj.
He says that both these desires are part of the universal process of
history shaped by the conflict between varying interest groups. He is
also able to give an alternative view of the colonisation process. As
remarked, according to Gumplowicz history occurs in three
successive cycles of subjugation, assimilation, and amalgamation.
Sarkar, in his discussion of the Muslim and British colonisation of
Bengal, uses this framework to argue for a reverse colonisation in
which Bengali culture is supposed to have amalgamated with the
so-called colonisers.
In The political philosophies since 1905 (1942) Sarkar talks of Ben¬
gali culture as the product of a continuous process of acculturation,
first with the conquering Vedic Indo-Aryans, and later with the
Buddhists and Hindus from Bihar, Punjab, and Kanauj. He says that
Bengali culture was invented by pariahs: ‘the aboriginals living in
hills, forests and river valleys, as well as the untouchable and depres¬
sed classes and some of the lower castes, nay, many of those castes
120 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

who have in subsequent ages got admitted into the alleged higher
castes may be regarded as descendents ... of pre-Vedic and pre-
Buddhist Bengalis . . .’ (Sarkar 1942:61). He claims that the nominal
conversion of Bengalis to Hinduism and Buddhism was the reason
why Islam was so widely accepted in Bengal. It was the religion of
the masses, while Hinduism was an elite religion restricted to the
aristocracy and ‘the commercial oligarchy’. Regardless of class con¬
siderations, however, Sarkar says that both Hinduism and Islam have
been completely ‘Bengalicised’, so that the customary practices of
both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis are more or less identical. Regard¬
ing periods closer to his own times, he says that the same tendencies
ff

can be discerned in the Bengali assimilation of Western ideas in the

nineteenth and twenteeth centuries, that is, from the Bengalicisation
of positivist rationalism by Rammohan Roy to the ‘Mystical duty
sense’ of Mazzini and Kant by Aurobindo. He calls this process of
assimilation a ‘conquest’, not so much by the colonising culture as
by the one that creatively adapts to and naturalises the foreign in¬
fluence.
It is interesting to note that Sarkar has to include Hinduism as a
colonising force when talking about Bengal. The uneasy relationship
between Bengali heterodoxy and mainstream Hinduism has been
widely documented. Vedic Hinduism is supposed to have come late
to Bengal and to have given way to many heterodox forms of
Buddhism and later Tantrism (cf. Chatterji 2003). In the Positive back¬
ground to Indian sociology (1937), Sarkar says that when scholars
talk about 'the expansion of Hindu culture, [this] implies nothing but
the democratization or rather the impact of the masses upon the
main stock of Hindu institutions and ideas’ (Sarkar 1937: 472, italics
in the original).6 This is said while discussing the impact of Bengal
Vaishnavism on folk culture. In other contexts, as we have just seen,
Bengal is given an autonomous status with a separate religion, ‘Ben-
galicism’, an independent Indo-Aryan language, and an indigenous
rationality distinct from those of other regions in India.7 However,

6 ‘Hindu is often collapsed with 'Indian' and is used as a marker for differen¬
tiating Indian from non-Indian culture and civilisation (see Flora n.d.).
Sarkar’s collaborator, Haridas Palit, who documented folk rituals in Malda,
puts forward the view that Bengali had a different origin and therefore a distinct
identity.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 121

it is not as if Bengal occupies an exclusive place in Sarkar’s writings.

Thus, while discussing the Muslim conquest of India, he says that it
must be compared with the periods in European history when Europe
was subjugated by the 'Saracens, the Mongols or Tartars and Ottoman
Turks’ (Sarkar 1937: 91), though even such processes of colonisation
throw up contradictions. Arab culture, personified in the figures of
Albaruni in the eleventh century and Abul Fazal in the sixteenth
century, becomes the medium by which Indian civilisation speaks
to Europe. Sarkar refers to Albaruni as a 'Muslim Indologist’ who
presents Hindu culture 'to his readers in the perspective of Greek
thought’(1937: 462):

This Moslem mathematician of Khiva [Albaruni] is an important

landmark and agent in the establishment of Greater India. His service
to charaiveti [march on], the dynamic march of Hindu culture is
immense. Not the least paradoxical feature in this evolution consists in
the fact that while his masters of the Ghazni House were laying the
foundations of a Moslem Raj in India his scientific and philosophical
researches in Hindu culture were contributing to the Hinduisation of
the Moslem world and through the Moslems to the world. (Sarkar 1937:
462)

World history, Sarkar says, can be thought of in terms of an inter¬

action between vishwa-shakti or'world forces’ and human will. These
world forces encompass the 'totality of man’s environment, natural
as well as man-made—the totality of social, economic, cultural, poli¬
tical, religious and sexual circumstances in which man is placed’
(Bandyopadhya 1984: 36).8 But, for Sarkar, even though man-made
forces also embody the 'laws of necessity’, they are simultaneously
the agents of historical change as they represent the will that is capable
of breaking the laws of necessity. History then becomes a strategic
resource in the struggle for political survival (Sarkar 1936). Historical
societies are nations, willed unities based on the consent of its
members. Not all nations become states, but the ones that do have
to base their sense of autonomy on territorial integrity sustained by
military force. The state could be thought of as an aggregate of groups
and associations bound together within a discrete territory that could

8 Ratzenhofer’s influence should be noted here.

122 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

be supported by external force and (national) culture.9 National cul¬

ture, for Sarkar, could be described in voluntaristic terms, as senti¬
ments, desires, and values, or as ‘systems of influences, conversion,
conquests and domination’ (Bhattacharyya 1990: 257). Thus,
association with a national culture gives rise to human creativity
born from the desire and the power to influence and dominate. But
for Sarkar this creativity is also directed inward—to the democratic
spirit innate within Indian society that surfaces not only in revolu¬
tionary movements but also in the different types of organisations
and associations delineated in the political treatises of the ancient
period, giving proof that ‘Hindus’ have always had the capacity for
self-governance. In this context, the India that Sarkar refers to is
exclusively Hindu. He says that due to the fact that ‘during the white
man’s burthen Hindus were deprived of chances for displaying ag¬
gressive secularism ... [a] general skepticism has grown among Eur-
American scholars as to the capacity of Hindus for organized
activities and institutions’ (Bhattacharyya 1990: 257).10
Why does Sarkar sometimes speak of India as being exclusively
Hindu, while at other times including Islam and the Muslim period
of Indian history as being part of the Indian civilisational process?
He believed that history itself is a process of‘creative disequilibrium'
in which frontiers are constantly being renegotiated (see Flora 1994).
But he also believed that boundaries are experiential entities in the
cultures of nations. At various times in India’s history, Islam could
be thought of as part of Indian experience, that is, when Indian civil¬
isation was in its expansive or dominant phase, while at other times
it was not, as was the case under British rule. In this, India was no
different from any other society and partook of the same universal
processes that were delineated by scholars like Gumplowicz and
Ratzenhofer. However, Sarkar also gives his own particular twist to
this theory.

9 I am not clear about what'nation' means in Sarkar’s writings. Sometimes

he conjoins the term with the state, as in ‘the nation state’, at other limes he
uses it to mean genus or jati.
10 According to Flora (1994) such ‘irrationalities’ as dependence on alien
powers for political government were a consequence of‘international factors’—
the external dimension of vishwa-shakti.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 123

The contradiction between various historical forces is not merely

intelligible in the long time span of the political historian; it is also
anthropomorphised in the figure of the exemplary individual. Thus,
in his writings, figures like Albaruni, Buddha, Vivekananda, and even
Churchill and Mussolini come to represent civilisational expansive¬
ness—but they also stand for the contradictions in their societies.
(This we have already seen with reference to Albaruni.) Sarkar also
has some interesting passages on the Second World War in The poli¬
tical philosophies since 1905 (1942), in which he discusses the moral
effect of Churchill’s speeches on the English people when they were
threatened with the possibility of defeat. He calls Churchill an
'inspired fanatic’—much like Hitler—whose charisma conquered
'British defeatism’. He also says that Churchill embodies in his per¬
sona both the forces of ‘democracy and despotocracy’, again like
Hitler and Mussolini. He calls ‘Churchillian democracy’ a despoto¬
cracy based on popular will, like the dictatorial regimes in Italy and
Germany.
The tension between vishwa-shakti and individual volition is also
expressed in the minutiae of day-to-day events and not merely in
the broad sweep of history. Thus, in a discussion on the Japanese
bombing of‘American, British and Dutch empires in Asia’ in 1941,
Sarkar says that with ‘the War at India’s door interhuman relations
is undergoing swift transformation (ibid.: 67). The transformation
arises, according to Sarkar, because of the exodus of residents from
metropolitan centres to villages (1942). He says that the threat of
war achieved a form of social metabolism in Bengal that generations
of social reformers could not. Thus, with the exodus from Calcutta
of‘domestic servants’ and women, ‘metropolitan residents are com¬
pelled to do cooking and cleaning’ (ibid.). In a characteristic shift
from the particular to the general, he also says that this situation of
enforced self-help has led to ‘the breakdown of distinctions between
superiors and inferiors’ and to the decentralisation of labour, capital,
skill, intelligence, modern conveniences and cultural institutions’
(ibid.: 70) .u

11 Much of Sarkars writing is in this style. Such utterances seem to be a

polemic with ideas that were either current at the time when Sarkar wrote or
that engaged his immediate attention. However, it is not as if the ideas he is
124 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Sarkar considered war a kind of‘world force’, as did many of his

European interlocutors such as Haushofer (whom I have already
mentioned), and Gini, the sociologist/statistician whom Sarkar met
while visiting Italy in 1935-6. However, apart from these casual state¬
ments there is no serious reflection on war as such. Sarkar is far
more interested in the role that charismatic individuals could play
in bringing about ‘creative disequilibrium’. He speaks of‘world con¬
querors’ or avatars that carry ideologies from one people to another.
Only such exemplary individuals, he feels, bend the forces of history
to their will and become active agents of historical disequilibrium
rather than its passive victims. Such individuals serve as counter¬
balancing forces to the non-rational forces that the impersonal agents
of vishwa-shakti sometimes release (see fn. 10).
Sarkar is conscious of the tension between the rational and the
irrational in his writing of history, and between legitimate ideology
and pragmatic self-interest in the domain of politics. Even though
he calls himself an ideological dualist, it is not through the logic of
argument that this tension is articulated in his writing. Rather it is
represented anthropomorphically through the figure of the exemp¬
lary individual. Thus, not only are images of civilisational expansive¬
ness made accessible through figures like the Buddha, Chaitanya,
Christ, and Vivekananda, but so also are the contradictions between
ideologies and cultural practices. Sarkar gives them human form
and thereby allows for the naturalisation of the tension between con¬
tradictory historical forces.
Sarkar applies this formula to all his work. Thus, the disequilibrat-
ing effects of war are presented in terms of examples like ‘the flight
of domestic servants’ from Calcutta, giving war a human and very
mundane face. We see the same process at work in his discussion of

arguing against are clearly stated; rather, the reader is left to infer them from
details in the texts themselves. Thus, the immediate context of this curious
statement could well have been a response to Gandhi’s message of self-help
and moral improvement. Sarkar was ambivalent about Gandhi’s moral philo¬
sophy though he admired his qualities of leadership. He says that Gandhi was
a master politician in the mould of Kautilya and Machiavelli (see Sarkar 1939).
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 125

religion and politics. Gods and goddesses of Pauranic Hinduism are

considered by Sarkar mere projections of pragmatic human concerns
and the day-to-day morality of the folk. Politics is the interests of
the state anthropomorphised into the image of the nation state. This
is clearly articulated in Sarkar s responses to events during the Second
World War, such as the moral effect of Churchills speeches on the
English people when they were threatened with the possibility of
defeat. He says Churchill’s charisma conquered ‘British defeatism’
and calls him an embodiment of Upanishadic idealism and the Gita
cult of duty for duty’s sake . . .’ (Sarkar: 1942: 299). He argues that:
‘For Young England today Churchill is what Hitler was to Young
Germany in 1918-33 and continues [in 1942] to be—the avatar of
patriotism and the avatar of mysticism’ (ibid.: 300).
In spite of his almost obsessive concern with nationalism, Sarkar
was an agnostic when it came to the field of political ideology. Whilst,
in principle, he did want India to take the form of a democratic
state, he took a relativist position vis-a-vis the existing kinds of poli¬
tical regimes. Thus, he was quite willing to consider the possibility
that non-democratic state formations were legitimate in particular
historical situations such as those of war. In the second volume of
Political philosophies since 1905 (1942) Sarkar says that ideals such as
‘de-imperialisation’ and ‘de-colonisation’ have the same significance
for people living through the two world wars as democracy and
socialism had before, that is before the world wars. They‘furnish the
elan de la vie to millions of repressed humanity’ (Sarkar 1942: 282).
But such ideals are only vehicles for ‘inspired fanatics’ who are able
to reshape historical destiny by the force of their will.12
For Sarkar, all political movements have a similar telos—they
swing between the two poles of democracy and ‘despotocracy’. In
spite of the creative disequlibrium that he saw in world history,
political movements had a stable form which he designated ‘demo-
despotocracy’. ‘It is because of the eternal presence of despotocracy
in the human Gestalt that I consider demo-despotocracy to be the

12 Sarkar attributes the phrase‘inspired lanatic’ to Vivekananda (see Mukh-

opadhya 1944: 45).
126 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

normal, natural, fundamental and universal reality. . .’ (Sarkar 1942:

301). He goes on to say that, just as the dictatorial regimes in Germany
and Italy are based on popular will, so also is ‘Churchillian demo¬
cracy’ a despotocracy constitutionally legitimised by the wartime
government in Britain. Thus, both democracy and dictatorship are
responses to specific historical situations.
Specialists on Sarkar’s work like Bhattacharyya (1990) and Flora
(1994) tend to link this aspect of his work to Pareto’s sociology. Sarkar
himself comments on Pareto’s idea of cthe circulation of elites’ in
The positive background of Hindu sociology (1937), but finds it too
constraining as a philosophy of history. Also, he does not seem to
share Pareto’s cynicism regarding oligarchic tendencies within the
politics of the masses. For Sarkar, the democratic impulse is also a
powerful force in world history. Sarkar’s admiration for the ‘inspired
fanatic’, his desire for rapid social change in India as well as his
laudatory writings on the wartime regimes in Italy and Germany,
have led some Indian scholars to label him a closet fascist (see Bhatta¬
charyya 1990). Sarkar’s political ideas were formulated in a period
when India was going through political and social upheaval. He was
able to observe at first hand a wide range of political formations and
perhaps for that reason he took a relativist position vis-a-vis all of
them. After all, as a citizen of a subjugated nation he was aware of
the contradictions inherent in democracy that allowed nation states
to sustain democratic structures within their own territorial bound¬
aries while at the same time colonising other nations. Even though
Sarkar visited Italy and Germany several times between the two world
wars and had close contact with scholars who were associated with
the dictatorial regimes of those countries, he had no sympathy with
the racial and eugenicist theories that were being propagated there.
In fact, he was quite critical of Haushofer’s attempt to analyse
population in terms of concepts such as ‘race destiny’ and so on (see
Sarkar 1936).13 He said that racial ‘miscegenation’ was necessary for
cultural dynamism and it was pragmatic self-interest rather than

13 It is important to remember that Sarkar’s critical reflections were made

in a public forum—that is, in his presidential address to the first Indian Popu¬
lation Conference.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 127

‘strength of soul’ that led to cultural expansion. He did not believe

that political boundaries ever coincided with racial or cultural
boundaries and was outspoken in his condemnation of those who
sought to represent Hinduism as a unique religion. He said there
was ‘no truth’ in Hinduism that was also not found in other religions
(Sarkar 1936, 1937, 1939).
The novelty of Sarkar’s perspective can best be understood by
comparing his ideas with those of his associate Radha Kumud
Mukherji (1989), the nationalist historian and fellow member of the
Dawn Society. For Mukherji, India’s territorial boundary coincides
with her cultural unity. To me it seems that this aspect of Sarkar’s
work is best understood in terms of the sociology of von Wiese and
his perspective on lebensfilosofie. The idea that the form of social life
could be understood as a structure of generality, distinct from its
particular spatio-temporal manifestations, as well as the emphasis
on individuality which found a place in the structure of generality
both as a value and as an embodiment of a certain kind of relation¬
ship, were attractive to Sarkar. Like von Wiese, he felt that sociology
had to account for the fact that individuals were both contained by
forms of sociation but could also confront them; they were both
within society as well as outside it. Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer
are significant influences on his thought. Yet, even here, I do not
think Sarkar believed in the concept of a homogeneous ‘folk state’.
He did not think that the process of assimilation between different
groups was ever complete. All nation states had plural cultures and
it was the friction generated between them that contributed to a state
of creative disequilibrium.

IV. SARKAR'S SIGNATURE ON INDIAN

SOCIOLOGY

I began this essay by saying that B.K. Sarkar’s sociology was at best
a footnote in the history of Indian sociology. It is now time to review
that statement. Sarkar’s sociology was shaped by his nationalism,
more specifically by his membership of the Dawn Society and by his
participation in the Swadeshi movement. The term ‘sociology’ was
used by intellectuals associated with the movement to discuss issues
128 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of Indian independence and self-government, especially within a

comparative historical perspective. The curriculum of the Dawn
Society and its successor, the National College of Education, saw
history both in terms of specific socio-political events as well as
intellectual currents that configured trajectories of human intention-
ality. To this end they felt it important to turn to the study of Indian
philosophy and to traditional social formations, but also to Western
philosophy and history.
Sarkar was introduced to these ideas through the Dawn Society
which, under the auspices of Satish Chandra Mukherjee, organised
classes on subjects as diverse as the Bhagvat Gita, the Indian village
tradition of swaraj, the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, and so on.
Sarkar thought that an exposure to the intellectual heritage of the
West was crucial in the shaping of the consciousness of Bengali youth.
To this end he devoted a considerable portion of his career to the
translation and review of the works of modern European social
scientists, thereby making their ideas available to a Bengali public.
This is probably his greatest contribution to the development of
sociology in Bengal. He also tried to give concrete form to the idea
of historical comparison by isolating socio-economic and political
factors that could be quantified, and established an objective standard
by which the development of various Asian and European societies
could be measured (Sarkar 1936). His concern for social reform led
him to foreground‘applied sociology’, which included concerns such
as poverty alleviation, public health, criminology, and the sociology
of population. These concerns, according to Flora (1994), are still
reflected in the way that sociology is taught in Calcutta University,
and perhaps it is in Bengal that Sarkar s work still has a living presence.
However, his concern with India’s modernity and the use of the
comparative method in this regard is possibly what gives a distinctive
formulation to Indian sociology as it is shared by sociologists across
generations, whether they belong to the ‘Calcutta School’ or come
from other sociological traditions—the one established by M.N.
Srinivas in Baroda and then in Delhi, for instance (see Chatterji 2000;
Shah 2000).
What relevance does Sarkar’s sociology have for us today? Socio ¬
logists like von Wiese, Gumplowicz, and Ratzenhofer, who were a
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 129

major influence on Sarkar, are no longer taught in sociology de¬

partments today even though they once exercised a considerable in¬
fluence when the discipline of sociology was still demarcating its
boundaries. Thus Albion Small, who helped found the Chicago
School of Sociology, was deeply influenced by Ratzenhofer and
Gumplowicz. Distinctions between sociology, social and political
philosophy, and social reform were not as clearly drawn as they are
now. The increasing professionalisation of the discipline has led to
an emphasis on autonomous methodological tools like intensive
fieldwork and survey techniques, as well as theoretical models that
prefer to seek explanations for social phenomena from within the
realm of social life itself rather than from the psychological or Indo-
logical. In the light of this it is evident that Sarkar’s work cannot
contribute to our understanding of mainstream Indian sociology.
However, if we think of the history of sociology and the way that
it is taught in various universities across India, we see that each
department still carries traces of the way in which sociology was ini¬
tially conceived by its founders. This may be through an interface
either with political philosophy (and the department in Calcutta
University still has teachers who have double roles as political
scientists and sociologists),14 or with social anthropology, as we see
in the department that Srinivas set up in Delhi University. It is in
this context that Sarkar becomes important. He wrote at a time when
the field was still fluid. However, Indian sociology is not a
homogeneous subject. It has many different streams that can best
be understood through the diverse pedagogic traditions institu¬
tionalised in the many sociology departments established across the
country. Sarkar’s is an important part not only in the history of Indian
sociology but also of the way that India herself is conceived by Indian
sociology. By rooting themselves in sociology, Indian scholars writing
in British India could stake a claim for India’s modernity. They used
sociology to oppose orientalist representations of India that were
put forward by Indologists. It is this legacy—that is, a concern with

14 Bolanath Bandyopadhyay, who wrote a dissertation on Sarkar as a student

of the political science department, is now on the faculty of the sociology de¬
partment (see Bandyopadhyay 1984).
130 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

India’s present rather than her past—that all sociologists of India,

whatever their methodological differences, share.

REFERENCES

Acharya, Nand Kishore. 1987. The polity in Sukranitisara. Bikaner: Vagdevi Pra-
kashan.
Bandyopadhyay, Bholanath. 1984. The political ideas of Binoy Kumar Sarkar.
Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi 8c Co.
Barnes, Harry Elmer, ed. 1948.An introduction to the history of sociology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
-. 1968. Gumplowicz, Ludwig. In D.L. Sills, ed., International encyclopedia
of social sciences, vol. 6, pp. 293- 5. Chicago: The Macmillan Company 8c
The Free Press.
Bhattacharyya, Swapan Kumar. 1990. Indian sociology The role of Binoy Kumar
Sarkar. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan Press.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1981 [1909]. Essay in national idealism. Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal. *>

Chatterji, Roma. 2000. An Indian sociology? What kind of object is it? (Paper
presented at the xxvith All India Sociological Conference, University of
Kerala, Thiruvanantapuram).
-. 2003. Category of folk. In Veena Das, ed., Oxford India companion to
sociology and social anthropology, pp. 567-97. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Flora, Giuseppe. 1994. Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Italy. Culture, politics and eco¬
nomic ideology. New Delhi: Italian Embassy Cultural Centre and Munshiram
Manoharlal.
-. n.d. Benoy Kumar Sarkar: An essay in intellectual history (PhD thesis
submitted to the Centre of Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi).
Gadamer, Hans-George. 2000. Truth and method. New York: Continuum Press.
Gopal, Lallanji. 1978. The Sukraniti: A nineteenth century text. Varanasi: Bharati
Prakashan.
House, Floyd N. 1968. Ratzenhofer, Gustav. In D. L. Sills, ed., The international
encyclopedia of the social sciences, vol. 13, pp. 328-30. Chicago: Macmillan
and The Free Press.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1995. The unhappy consciousness. Bankimchandra Chattopa-
dhyayand the formation of nationalist discourse in India. Delhi: Oxford Uni¬
versity Press.
Mukherji, Radha Kumud. 1989 [1936]. Hindu civilization. Bombay: Bharatiya
Vidya Bhavan.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 131

Mukhopadhya, Haridas, ed. 1944, 1945. Benoy Sarkarer Boithoke. Calcutta:

Chakravarti, Chatterjee & Co.
Raychaudhuri, Tapan. 1995. The pursuit of reason in nineteenth century Bengal.
In Rajat Kanta Ray, ed., Life and mentality in colonial Bengal, pp. 47-64.
Calcutta: Oxford University Press.
Sarkar, Benoy Kumar. 1936. The sociology of population with special reference to
optimum standard of living and progress: A study in societal relativities. Cal¬
cutta: N. M. Ray Chowdhury & Co.
-. 1937. The positive background of Hindu sociology, Book 1: Introduction
to Hindu positivism (Reprinted 1985. Delhi: Motilal Banarsi Das).
-. 1939. The political institutions and theories of the Hindus. A study of
comparative politics. Calcutta: Chuckervertty & Co.
-. 1941a. Villages and towns as social patterns: A study in the processes and
forms of societal transformation and progress. Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chat¬
terjee & Co.
-. 1941b. Folk elements in Hindu culture. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.
-. 1942. The political philosophies since 1905, vol 2: The epoch of neo¬
democracy and neo-socialism. Lahore: Motilal Banarsidass.
Sarkar, Sumit. 1973. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908. New Delhi:
Peoples Publishing House.
Shah, A.M. 2000. In memory of M.N. Srinivas. Contributions to Indian socio¬
logy, n.s., 34, 1: 93-104.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1999. Nationalism. New Delhi: Macmillan.
 Recasting the Oraons and
the ‘Tribe’
Sarat Chandra Roy’s Anthropology*

Sangeeta Dasgupta

A FEW MONTHS BEFORE HIS DEATH, SARAT CHANDRA ROY

(November 1871-April 1942) confessed to his student Nirmal Kumar

Bose that, if given the chance, he would rework his earlier ethnogra¬
phic accounts of the ‘tribes’ of Chotanagpur, concentrate on village
units and local nuances, and thereby give a new orientation to his
study of tribal culture (Anonymous 1971:266).1 Unfortunately, Roys
wishes remained unfulfilled. This essay focuses on the transforma¬
tions in Roys writings on the Oraons between 1915 and 1938 in an
attempt to reco ver the rudiments of what might have been a possible

*Gautam Bhadra introduced me to the records at the Man in India Office,

Ranchi; the late Meera Roy gave me the rare opportunity of consulting the
private papers of her father, Sarat Chandra Roy; Subrata Ray took considerable
effort in organising reprints of the photographs of his grandfather. For com¬
ments on this essay, I thank Neeladri Bhattacharya, Gautam Bhadra, Nandini
Sundar, Sheena Panja, and Padmanabh Samarendra. This essay draws
substantially on Dasgupta (2004), originally published in the Indian economic
and social history overview (editor Sunil Kumar), vol. 41, no. 2. Used by per¬
mission of the copyright holders and publishers, Sage Publications India Pvt
Ltd, New Delhi.
1 Meera Roy told me that Bose was the author of this article and corroborated
his statement.
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 133

Fig. 4: Portrait of Sarat Chandra Roy taken by his eldest son,

the late Dinesh Chandra Roy, after Roy was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind
medal in 1913, (Photograph courtesy Subrata Ray)

trajectory of Roy's anthropology. It seeks, first, to examine shifts in

the image of the ‘tribe’ in Roy’s work across a period of time; and
second, to show how an academic anthropologist gradually came to
adopt the stance of an activist anthropologist.
134 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Although Roy wrote on several of the tribal communities of

Chotanagpur, his work on the Oraons was both extensive and found¬
ational. As Sir Arthur Keith put it in a letter to Roy: CI doubt if any
one has ever done so much for the Anthropology of a people as you
have done for the Oraon.’2 Roy’s role as an anthropologist was indeed
pivotal in the construction of the ‘tribe’ in Chotanagpur. Missionaries,
administrators, and anthropologists, in India and abroad, often
acquainted themselves with Chotanagpur through Roy’s eyes. Verrier
Elwin wrote of Roy: ‘The home of the beautiful Chota Nagpur plateau
is the home of the great Uraon tribe, the Mundas, the Hos, some
Santals, the Kharias, and a number of smaller tribes, including the
very ancient Asur iron-smelters. These people have been made known
to the world by the works of Bodding and of Sarat Chandra Roy,
their champion, friend and biographer’ (Elwin 1943: 6). Most of the
objects that represented Chotanagpur and the Oraons at the British
Museum, London, and at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, were col¬
lected by Roy; the photographic collection on the Oraons at the Mu¬
seum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, was almost
entirely his contribution.3 He also organised the collection of anthro¬
pological artifacts in Indian museums, and donated a major part of
his own ethnographic and archaeological collections to the Museum
of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society.
Administrative authorities turned to Roy for guidance and medi¬
ation in situations of what Roy refers to as‘unnecessary panic’ caused
by‘ignorance’.4 Legislative and judicial opinion often cited his texts,

2 Roy published letters such as this, sent to him by scholars across the world,
reviews of his books, opinions on his publications, etc. in Man in India. Sir
Arthur Keiths assessment of Oraon religion and customs, along with the opinions
of Col. T.C. Hodson and R.R. Marett, was published under the title ‘Some opi¬
nions’ in Man in India (1929, vol. 9, 2 and 3: i-iv).
3 Refer to the Merlin British Museum Collections Database at the British
Museum, London; the Catalogue of the Objects collections at the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford; and the Photograph Collections Catalogue at the Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. I thank the Nehru Trust for the
Indian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and particularly
Dr Deborah Swallow, for giving me the opportunity of viewing many of these
collections in England.
4 Roy refers to two such interesting incidents: one was at a meeting place of
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 135

and even today these texts are seminal in the judicial construction
of tribal custom.* * * * 5 For example, in the historic case between N.E. Horo
vs. Smt. Jahan Ara Jaipal Singh (reported in The All India Reporter,
1972), which rested on the question of whether a non-tribal woman
married to a tribal could contest elections in a reserved seat, Roy
was quoted as an authority on Munda customs. S.C. Roys obser¬
vations in The Mundas and their country, together with other evidence
on record, had convinced the Supreme Court that once the marriage
of a Munda male with a non-Munda female is approved or sanction¬
ed by the Parha Panchayat they become members of the community’
(Roy 1995 [1912]: lxiv). Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and
activists continue to draw upon Roy’s constructs, whether, as K.S.
Singh notes, ‘in order to create a new sense of history to legitimise
the tribal’s search for identity’, or because Roy’s ‘ideas and draftsman¬
ship’ had ‘left their imprint on the memoranda submitted by tribal
organizations before different government bodies’ (Singh 1982: 1-
2). Unpacking Roy’s descriptions of tribal tradition as a product of
his time, which he constructed and reworked in response to new

a Munda Parha Council held some forty miles away from Ranchi in 1921 during
the Non-Cooperation Movement; the other was before the annual yatra fair or
the ‘inter-tribal dancing-meets’, when the Sub-Divisional Magistrate had
expected trouble on the issue of the ‘emblem’ that was to appear on the flag to
be carried to this meet (see Roy 1966 [1938b]: 27-30).
5 See the judgment in Manu Uraon vs. Abraham Uraon, The All India Reporter,
Patna Section 194PA6-7. Reference to this case also appears in the Archer Papers,
‘Tribal Justice’, European Manuscripts (MSS Eur F 236/51), Oriental and India
Office Collections, London. For a reference to the use of his book, The Mundas
and their country, for understanding ‘the customary rules of succession and
inheritance amongst the aboriginal tribes’, see letter no. 2093-A., dated Ranchi,
27 March 1913, from the Hon’ble Mr H. McPherson, Secretary to the Gov¬
ernment, Bihar and Orissa, Appointment Department, to the Secretary of the
Government of India, Home Department, in Selections from the Ranchi Set¬
tlement Papers, G.P. (D.L.R.) nos 112-60-19.11.1927, unpublished, pp. 71-2.
Even as late as 1971 and 1972, Roy’s text was used in the cases between Bhaiya
Ram Munda vs Anurudh Patar (The All India Reporter, 1971) and N.E. Horo vs
Smt. Jahan Ara Jaipal Singh (The All India Reporter, 1972). Refer to Appendix
V, ‘The Legalistic Aspect of “The Mundas and their Country’”, in Roy (1995
[1912]: Ixiii-lxiv).
136 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

theoretical and political developments, will serve as a caution against

uncritical adoption of his writings in varying contexts.
In his time, Roy occupied a unique space. Late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century anthropology had defined itself unambigu¬
ously as the study of primitive societies. As a discipline that was
created ‘by Europeans, for a European audience5 in order to study
‘non-European societies dominated by European power’ (Asad 1973:
14-15), most of its practitioners in the late nineteenth and early twen¬
tieth centuries belonged to the West. Roy was an exception. A self-
taught man with no formal training in the discipline, he took up
anthropology as a hobby and yet sought to achieve the standards of
a professional. Ele began to write at a time when the discipline of
anthropology was in a stage of infancy even in Britain (Kuklick 1999:
6-8). The first departments of sociology and anthropology in India
had not been set up,6 and ‘anthropologist-administrators’ like Archer,
Hutton, and Mills and ‘professional anthropologists’ like Bose,
Chattopadhyay, Majumdar, Karve, and Ghurye had not emerged on
the anthropological scene.7 Roy was therefore ‘one of the pioneers
of anthropological studies in India’; he was hailed as the Father of
Indian ethnology’by Hutton (Anonymous 1942: iii). Among his colo¬
nial friends, he was the ‘native’ who had acquired their respect and
recognition, whose version was accepted as authentic and authori¬
tative, and whose accounts matched Western standards. Yet towards
the end of his life, Roy advocated ‘a study of anthropology from the
Indian view-point’ (Roy 1937, reprinted 1986) as he drew upon, re¬
viewed, and discarded anthropological models and tried to arrive at
what he conceived to be a partnership between Western and indigen¬
ous writings. Roy, then, was located at the interstices of several cul¬
tures. His voice changed over time as he sought to capture the cultural
heritage of the marginal societies that he had studied by sympathe¬
tically recording what would otherwise have been lost.
Section I introduces Roy as an anthropologist and locates some
of his concerns as he embarked on the task of recording the histories

6 The first departments of sociology and anthropology were set up in Bombay

in 1919 and in Calcutta in 1920 (see Sundar 1997: 158).
7 For these terms see ibid.
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 137

of the peoples of Chotanagpur; Section II discusses his first mono¬

graph on the Oraons, published in 1915; Section III analyses the
shifts in perspective as he wrote his second text on the Oraons in
1928; Section IV analyses Roys writings in the late 1930s when he
was nearing the end of his anthropological career.

I. INTRODUCING ROY

In India, we have vast fields for historical research as yet lying unexplored
or but partially explored. The early history of the so-called Kolarian
aborigines of India is one of those obscure tracts that have hardly yet
been rescued from the darkness of oblivion. A thick curtain of mystery
hangs over the antiquities of. . . prehistoric tribes. ... Of their real
origin and their primitive abode, we are in utter darkness; of their suc¬
cessive migrations in ancient times through different parts of India we
have no written records to enlighten us, and of the various vicissitudes
of fortun e they underwent in the dim dark ages of antiquity our present
knowledge is next to nothing. And yet these are the peoples whose re¬
mote ancestors were once masters of Indian soil, whose joys and sorrows,
once made up the history of the Indian peninsula. . . .
. . . With the lapse of time and the progress of civilization amongst
these tribes, they appear every day to have been paying less and less
heed to the traditions handed down by their ancestors. And thus it has
come to pass that at the present moment a few stray old persons here
and there remain the sole custodians of these heirlooms of their past.
And the time may not be far off when this valuable traditionary lore,
now in a rapid course of detrition and decay, may be lost to posterity
beyond all chance of recovery.
... It is high time, then, that antiquarian investigators should turn
their attention to the quasi-historical traditions of these interesting
tribes ... to trace back their early history so far as is still possible . . .
(Roy 1995 [1912]: 1-2)

Roys perspective represents the classic model of'salvage ethnography’

(see Clifford 1986:112-13), involving the task of recovery. By rescuing
'tribal’ tradition from the inexorable logic of history threatening its
collapse and disappearance, Roy would restore ‘aboriginals’ to their
138 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

rightful position amongst the peoples of India. Anthropology would

capture their ‘unadulterated’ identity, trace the link between their
present and past, and transport readers to a place and space where
such ‘tribals’ had been truly authentic, truly untouched. ‘When we
think of the rich harvest of anthropological material waiting to be
gathered all over India and, here and there, decaying unseen and
uncared for’, he wrote,‘we can by no means regard with complaisance
the comparatively meagre additions made to our store of anthropolo¬
gical knowledge’ (Roy 1930:307). Anthropology also had its personal
rewards: he appealed ‘to all Indian students who feel attracted to
this fascinating branch of study’ to make collections of‘interesting
anthropological material. . . fast slipping away as the days pass by’,
assuring them, on the basis of his ‘own humble experience’, that such
a study‘will bring with it in the shape, at any rate, of personal satisfac¬
tion and delight, an adequate reward for the time spent and the trou¬
ble taken’ (Roy 1921a: 54).8
Roy’s anthropology, however, had a larger intellectual purpose.
The central concern of the discipline, he argued, was ‘to understand
Man—his origin, natural history, his unique adventure in the inner
and outer courts of life, and the goal and meaning of human life and
human society’ (Roy 1937: 243). He identified the tribe as a distinct
cultural type that had retained the customs and beliefs which charac¬
terised mankind in earliest times: ‘The reason why students of An¬
thropology now pay greater attention to the investigation of Primitive
Society is that the social life of primitive tribes is a most fruitful field
for anthropological research, for primitive society exhibits the
ground-plan on which the more complex structure that we call
civilization has been built up’ (ibid.: 249). Anthropology would locate
the past in the present, in the backward, non-progressive, and inert
‘other’. The idea of comparison, a faith in the universality of human
culture and society, structured Roy’s understanding. The intended
aim of social anthropology, then, was academic; it was sustained by
forces internal to the discipline that sought to evolve specialised tools

8 This was an elaboration of Roy’s presidential address to the section of

anthropology and ethnography of the Indian Science Congress at its eighth
annual meeting held at Calcutta from 31 January to 5 February 1921.
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 139

of analysis in order to understand social institutions such as the fami¬

ly, state, and religion.
Indeed, for Roy, anthropology was ‘the scientific study of mankind’
(Roy 1966 [1938b]: 21); it was an objective discipline, a search for
the truth. As Elwin wrote in his obituary of Roy in Man in India:

Roy’s affection for his people was scientific, not sentimental. It was his
reasoned love for them that made him intolerant of slovenly and in¬
accurate writing: love drove him to ‘scorn delights and live laborious
days’ in the Service of Truth that was also the service of his people. . . .
For Roy, then, the discipline of anthropology was a pilgrimage towards
the sainte realite, the country of entire and perfect truth. It aimed at
illuminating the whole kingdom of humanity, its obscure past, its sad
and doubtful present, the certain triumph (in which he trusted) of its
future. Anthropology was the search for Beauty, expressed in terms of
Truth. (Elwin 1942: 195-6)

Sir James Frazer wrote to Roy, in appreciation of his contribution

to the science: ‘I could envy India your possession, for good anthro¬
pologists are too rare anywhere; but I am satisfied that for the ad¬
vancement of our science you are far better situated in India than
you would be in Europe, seeing that India includes such an immense
diversity of races and of cultures, from low savagery up to high civil¬
ization.’9 Roy’s purpose in founding the journal Man in India in
1922 was academic: ‘to assist anthropological study and research in
India, and to serve as an useful medium for the collection of inte¬
resting anthropological information regarding Indian Man’ (Roy
1921a: 11). Tie introduced in the journal a special ‘Student’s sec¬
tion . .. intended for the benefit of beginners in the study of Anthro¬
pology.’10 Following the Tines of scientific enquiry ... suggestions

9 Frazer’s comment is quoted on the back-covers of certain editions of Man

in India as part of ‘Some opinions’ on Sarat Chandra Roy’s Principles and
methods on physical anthropology (Patna University Readership Lectures),
Ranchi, 1921.
10 A representative article was‘Types of cultural theory’ (Roy 1921b: 239-61),
adapted from a lecture delivered by him to students of Patna University. Roy
wrote: ‘In a series of articles of which this is the first, it is proposed to present
140 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

from Western experts’ would also be published ‘from time to

time . . . in the journal’(Roy 1921a: 11). While Roy believed that the
method of enquiry should be drawn from the West, he advocated a
common global endeavour among anthropologists towards the
development of the discipline: ‘A systematic and classified collection
and careful recording of different classes of folk-lore material, district
by district, taluk by taluk, and thana area by thana area, or pargana
area and pargana area, as is being done for the county areas in Eng¬
land, and for other local areas in other parts of Europe and in Ame¬
rica, is the first and most imperative task that awaits students of
Indian folk-lore’ (Roy 1930: 311).
From its outset, British anthropology had sought to present itself
as a science,* 11 one that would prove useful for colonial administra¬
tion. While the prospect of financial support, particularly in the
decades before the discipline was accorded recognition by univer¬
sities, must have been a consideration, ‘in the heydey.of imperial
enthusiasm, the thought of its possible utility must have sustained
some of those who pursued this esoteric and marginal study in
Britain’ (Kuper 1973: 123). Societies like the Ethnological Society of
London, the Folklore Society, the British Association for the Advance¬
ment of Science, and the Royal Anthropological Society argued for
the practical uses of their subject as a means of getting recognition
from the British public and government. Roy appealed to similar
considerations: ‘It is a matter for regret that, although the scientific
value of anthropological research is now generally recognized in offi¬
cial circles, its practical value in the promotion of human welfare
has hardly yet received recognition in India’ (Roy 1966 [1938b]: 21).

the student with a general elementary view of Cultural Anthropology, the

method it follows, and the results it has hitherto achieved’(Roy 1921b: 240-1).
11 Though colonial science, itself an evolving discipline, remained distinct
from the practice of science in the continent, there was an emerging consensus
on what scientific method entailed. The mission of science implied a critical,
‘judging’ epistemology: dominated by the model of natural history, science
sought to reach behind, and classify, everyday phenomena by comparing speci¬
mens of species, languages, or forms of civilisation, and establishing their basic
units and the relations between them. See Pels (1999: 87-8).
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 141

Like his colleagues in Britain, with whom he was in touch, he appealed

to the colonial state to encourage the study of‘Anthropology in Indian
universities ... by recognizing efficiency in Anthropology as a special
qualification for suitable judicial and administrative appointments’
(Roy 1930: 304): ‘It is high time . . . that our Provincial Governments
as well as the Imperial Government should, for the improvement of
the quality of administrative and judicial work, prefer candidates
having anthropological training, in judicial, executive and other de¬
partments of Government, such as Forest and Excise, in aboriginal
areas, and that officers lacking such knowledge should, at any rate,
be required to undergo a course of training in Anthropology’ (Roy
1966 [1938b]: 30).
Yet, even as Roy was critical of the lack of official patronage to the
discipline, he was appreciative of the contributions of colonial ethno¬
graphers and ‘proto-anthropologists’ towards the genesis of anthro¬
pology as a discipline in India.12 ‘ It is to the Asiatic Society of Bengal’,
Roy wrote, ‘that we owe the beginnings of anthropological investiga¬
tion in this country’ (Roy 1921a: 12).‘Almost the whole of the present
anthropological literature relating to India’, he pointed out, was ‘the
result of the labours of European investigators—mostly hardworked
officers of government and Christian Missionaries, and to them India
shall ever owe a heavy debt of gratitude for this invaluable pioneer
work’ (ibid.: 48). Roy’s anthropology was intimately engaged with
official ethnography and yet distinct from it. He depended upon,
and interpreted, the writings of colonial officials; at the same time,
these writings, particularly in the context of Chotanagpur, were often
informed and structured by his ethnography. For example, in his
foreword to Roy’s first volume on the Oraons, Haddon acknowledged
that Roy had ‘placed ethnologists further in his debt’ and emphasised
the ‘great importance’ of such studies ‘for administrative purposes’
(Haddon 1984 [1915]: 1-7). Roy, in turn, acknowledged that it was
Gait, the Census Commissioner of 1911, who was responsible for
his ‘initiation into the study of anthropology as a science’ (Roy 1984
[1915]: v-vi). It was due to Gait’s initiative that Roy was awarded the

12 For a history of the relationship between administrative needs, such as

the census, gazetteers, etc., and anthropology, see Cohn (1990b).
142 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Kaiser-i-Hind medal in 1913 and given a grant to undertake his study

of the Oraons; in 1919 he was given the title Rai Bahadur. Statistics
and observations from reports, survey and settlement records, Dal¬
ton’s writings, and Risley’s anthropometric indices were seen by Roy
as incontestable products of careful and objective analysis, and
therefore duly used in his initial descriptions of the Oraons.
For all his interest in studying the tribes of Chotanagpur, Roy was
not an anthropologist by profession. A graduate in English in 1892
from the General Assembly Institute (later renamed Scottish Church
College), a postgraduate in 1893 from the same institution, and a
graduate of law in 1897 from Ripon College, Calcutta, Roy’s interests,
when he joined the bar at the Alipore District Court of the 24 Parga-
nas, Calcutta, were far removed from anthropology. In 1898 he left
for Ranchi to take up a job as an English teacher at the Gossner
Evangelical Lutheran Missionary school.13 Roy’s arrival in Ranchi
was an accident which changed the course of Indian anthropology,
for it was here that Roy spent the next forty-four years of his life.
He was struck by the contrast that Chotanagpur presented to the
rest of the province of Bengal, of which it was then a part: here was
a land of colour and scenic beauty; he had the deepest sympathies
for its inhabitants, who were so markedly different from the other
peoples of Bengal:

Remarkably refreshing is the contrast its blue hills and rugged ravines,
green sal jungles and terraced fields of yellow paddy, limpid hill-streams
rushing down their narrow beds of rock and sand, and picturesque
waterfalls leaping over abrupt precipices, present to the monotonous
stretch upon stretch of Bengal plains. ... If the difference in external
features between the Chota-Nagpur plateaux and the rest of the Province
is thus great, the difference in the races and tribes that people the two
tracts, their languages, their manners, their religions, their social customs
and political history. . . is, if possible, still greater. (Roy 1995 [1912]:
223)

13 For a detailed bibliographical sketch of Roy, refer to Ray (1996: 3-8, 41).
This rare biographical essay on Roy has been written by Roy’s grandson, who
is himself a student of anthropology. He refers to family history and draws
upon childhood memories of his grandfather.
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 143

As Roy moved from teaching to legal practice, became an advocate

in the bar of the Judicial Commissioners Court, and later assumed
the post of official interpreter in government litigation, he acquired
prodigious knowledge of the traditions and customs of the peoples
of Chotanagpur (Ray 1996: 4). Moved by the hardships they faced at
the hands of apathetic administrative and judicial authorities, Roy
decided to learn their language and‘study’ them assiduously.14 As he
familiarised himself with their customs and society, visited their
poverty-ridden homes and dealt with them in court, he made copious
notes, some of which can still be found in his private papers at the
Man in India office at Ranchi. But for his field notes to be converted
into texts, Roy required tools for analysis. He found Ancient society
by Morgan in the shelves of the mission library. Thereafter, other
books from Europe arrived, helping Roy to write his monographs
and articles with remarkable rapidity and ‘with a lawyer’s keenness
for details’ (Madan 1952: 48): The Mundas and their country was
published in 1912; The Oraons of Chota Nagpur in 1915; The Birhors
in 1925; Oraon religion and customs in 1928; The Hill Bhuinyas of
Orissa in 1935; The Kharias, in two volumes, in 1937. Interspersed
with these were several articles (over a hundred in English and seven¬
teen in Bengali).15 These appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthro¬
pological Society, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta
review, Modern review, Prabashi, Journal of the Bihar and Orissa
Research Society, and of course Man in India, of which he was the
founder-editor. Besides his research in social anthropology Roy was
interested in ‘Prehistoric Archaeology’, or what he termed ‘Prehistoric
Anthropology’. As he looked at what were locally referred to as ‘Asur’
sites in Chotanagpur, Roy believed that ‘a systematic search for and
a regular stratigraphical study of the skeletal and industrial remains

14 Roy wrote: ‘Any one having had occasion to watch at close quarters the
administration of justice in certain aboriginal areas of India will be struck by
the amount of injustice done, in spite of the best intentions, by judges and
magistrates and police officers of all grades, owing to their ignorance of the
customs and mentality of the aboriginal tribes they have to deal with.’ See Roy
(1966[1938b]: 27).
15 For bibliographical references on Roy, refer to Anonymous (1968: 217—
25); Archer (1942: 261-2); Sarkar (1972: 354-8).
144 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of prehistoric man in India may yield most important results to¬

wards the elucidation of the Prehistory of man, from the Late and
Early Iron Ages through the Copper Age and New Stone Age back to
the Palaeolithic and perhaps pre-Palaeolithic times’ (Roy 1921a: 45).
Apart from the infinite love that Roy received from the poor‘abori¬
ginals’ whose cause he championed, recognition came from various
corners. In 1915 he became a Corresponding Member of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and thereafter
regularly published in their journal; in 1920 he was elected an Hono¬
rary Fellow at the Folklore Society of London, the only Indian to
have received this honour (Ray 1996: 6). In the same year he was
elected President of the Anthropological Section of the Indian Science
Congress and in both 1932 and 1933 he was elected President of the
Section of Anthropology and Folklore at the All India Oriental Con¬
ference. Roy was also elected member of the Council d’Honour of
the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences; he was a Foundation Fellow of the National Institute of
Sciences in India, as also of Patna University. He was the first to de¬
liver a course of lectures on anthropology in an Indian university
(the Readership Lectures at Patna University under the subject head¬
ing of Principles and Methods of Physical Anthropology), and he
helped the introduction of anthropology as a discipline in several
Indian universities.16
Roy’s long and varied career witnessed the rise of Victorian evolu¬
tionism, then diffusionism, and the eventual displacement of these
by functionalism; at different points in time he applied all these
concepts to the Indian context. At the same time, as a professed Hindu
and nationalist Indian, particularly in the later phases of his career,
Roy sought to methodologically establish an ‘Indian view-point’ for
anthropology, believing that anthropology would help in the inte¬
gration of national life (Roy 1937: 254).17 The advancement of

16 For biographical sketches of Roy, refer to Anonymous (1942: i-v); Madan

(1952:48-51); Bose (1966: i-iv); Anonymous (1971:263-6); Sarkar (1972: 354-
8); Ray (1996: 3-8,41).
17 In the context of tracing the sociology of Indian sociology, Ramkrishna
Mukherjee writes: ‘Most of the pioneers were ardent nationalists, but only a
few of them were actively involved in politics. Also, even those who were engaged
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 145

anthropology was not just a vocation for him; Roy was almost like a
visionary with a mission who, as he sought to understand the subjects
of his concern, experimented with different models and discarded
these when he failed to reach conclusions that satisfied him. At a
personal level, his life reflected the contradictions of an enlightened
Indian under colonial rule—he was a friend of administrators and
missionaries, and yet often their harshest critic. And even as Roy
extensively quoted the works of anthropologists, missionaries, and
administrators, he referred to and upheld in his writings the authen¬
ticity of the ancient Sanskrit literature of the Vedas, the Samhitas,
the Smritis, the epics, and the Puranas.

II. AN ‘OBJECTIVE' ANTHROPOLOGIST

Armed with a medley of anthropological concepts, rather than any

one theory, Roy embarked on his project of writing on the Oraons
of Chotanagpur. His desire to present a complete picture’ of tribal
culture was influenced by Tylor’s definition of culture and civilisation
as a complex whole’ that included ‘knowledge, belief, art, morals,
law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man
as a member of society’.18 His study belonged to the realm of‘Cultural
Anthropology’, attempting ‘the no less intricate task of retracing, so
far as possible, the probable course followed in the evolution of the
mental life of man—of his mental achievement or culture from its
earliest inferable beginnings’, seeking ‘to understand, so far as is
possible, the forces or factors either in the physical or mental consti¬
tution of man or in his physical or social environment that may have
guided or influenced the course of that evolution’ (Roy 1921b: 241).
Hence, Roy’s first monograph on the Oraons, The Oraons of Chota
Nagpur (1915), dealt with the origin and early history of the Oraons,
their geographical and social environment, their physical character¬
istics and personal adornment, their village organisation, their econo¬
mic life and social organisation. He had by then conceived his second

in active politics were not dogmatists or doctrinaires in so far as their academic

life was concerned’ (Mukherjee 1979: 29).
18 Roy refers in several of his writings to E.B. Tylor’s monograph Primitive
culture (1871). See, for example, Roy (1921b: 241).
146 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

monograph on the Oraons, Oraon religion and customs (1928), can

account of the religious and magico-religious system, the domestic
ceremonies and usages and the language and folklore of the Oraons
so as to complete our picture of the tribe’ (Roy 1984 [1915]: v).
For Roy, Victorian anthropologists were the pioneers in the field.
In the ‘ethnological notes’ found among his private papers are
references to Ancient society by Morgan, Totemism and exogamy by
Frazer, An introduction to cultural anthropology by Lowie, and
Primitive traditional history, Volume I, by Ffewitt. Evolutionists be¬
lieved that primitive society was marked by an absence of datable
documents and events. Flence, the laws of social development were
to be reconstructed through the comparative method: the belief was
in the historical unity of mankind and in the universal progress of
man; the search was for origins; the sources of anthropological studies
were accounts by travellers, missionaries, and colonial administrators
who reported on natives and native customs; the constituents of the
discipline were physical anthropology, archaeology, comparative phi¬
lology, ethnography, and ethnology, though the importance accorded
to any one of these varied over time (see Urry 1984: 84). In 1921, at
a time when he had already discarded many of their tenets, Roy sum¬
med up the position of the evolutionist school:

An earlier generation of ethnologists, such as Bachofen, Tylor, Lubbock,

Morgan, Bastian, Waitz and others were impressed with the astonishing
similarity of cultural features among different human groups separated
by oceans and continents, as also with the occurrence of apparently
meaningless customs and usages in civilized communities which could
only be understood as ‘survivals’ or ‘vestiges’ of older customs of primit¬
ive folk in different parts of the world. With untiring zeal they set
themselves to comparing, co-ordinating, classifying and systematizing
all available cultural data collected from various parts of the globe by
the study of existing primitive tribes, of archaeological remains and of
‘survivals’ and Vestiges’ of an earlier culture in modern civilization . . .
the similarity of different cultural features in widely-separated areas
was generally attributed ... to the similarity of the working of the
human mind in similar conditions, and in a few instances to migration
from a common original home. . . . The successive stages of the cultural
development of man were arranged in an evolutionary series which
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 147

represented human society as having developed through well-defined

sociological types from the simple to the more complex. (Roy 1921b:
241-2)

However, when writing in 1915 Roy drew upon many of these

concepts, often uncritically. For instance, in a direct application of
Darwin’s notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’, Roy says: ‘Among the
purely aboriginal tribes of the Plateau, the Oraons appear to occupy
the first rank in intelligence and social progress as they stand foremost
in numerical strength’ (Roy 1984 [1915]: 8). Physical anthropology
was given importance: Risley’s anthropometric indices were quoted
(ibid.: 52), skin, eyes, hair, and head forms analysed, and the Oraons
found to be a ‘short-statured, narrow headed (dolicho-cephalic) and
broad-nosed (platyrrhine) people’ (ibid.). In order to trace the transi¬
tion of the Oraon tribe from its ‘savage or hunter state’ to a ‘nomadic
or herdsman state’ to a final ‘settled agricultural stage of social culture’
(ibid.: 8), Roy tried to explain Oraon ‘origin and migrations’ with
references to ‘racial and linguistic affinities’ (ibid.: 16-17). Discussing
the connection made by philologists like Bishop Caldwell between
the Oraon language, Kurukh, and the Tamulian languages of southern
India,19 the Malto, Kui-Khond, and Gondi of northern India, and
the Brahui of Baluchistan, he made the point that the Oraons ‘appear
to be both linguistically and ethnologically a Dravidian tribe’. ‘Race
and language appear to coincide’ in the case of the Oraons, Roy wrote,
‘although language in itself is no test of race’ (ibid.: 17).
To corroborate philological evidence, Roy used the Oraon’s ‘own
traditionary [sic] legend as to the origin of the tribe coupled with
the account of the Vanaras [monkeys] contained in the ancient
Samskrit epic, the Ramayana’ (ibid.: 18).20To the latter he attributed
the status of an historical and authentic text. In one of his many
references to the above, he wrote:

19 The Tamulian languages, Roy wrote, included Tamil, Malayalam, Kanarese,

and Telegu, together with such minor dialects as Koragu, Tulu, Toda, and Kota
(Roy 1984 [1915]: 17).
20 The importance of folklore and tradition was accepted as an important
constituent for debates on race in the latter half of the nineteenth century (see
Urry 1984: 86).
148 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

In the long story of the genesis of man and the spirits recited by the
Oraons at their periodical Dandakatta or ceremony of'cutting the (evil)
teeth’, Rama is spoken of as their 'grand-father’, his wife Sita as their
'grand-mother’, and his monkey-general Hanuman as their ‘uncle’ . . .
In the Rarnayana, the Vanaras are described as a dusky‘cloud-coloured’
people . . . with large teeth . . . and their men and women are represent¬
ed as addicted to drink . . . and as taking a great delight in singing to
the sound of the mridanga or mandal. . . . All these characteristics are
to be met with in the Oraons of Chota Nagpur, in common, indeed,
with many other Dravidian jungle tribes . . . (ibid.: 18).

It is clear that the 'tribe5, or the ‘aboriginal tribe5, in Roys under¬

standing, was an irrefutable and universal category. It therefore
required no definition. With clearly marked characteristics, it was a
community that was essentially pure, simple, and isolated. Its culture
was 'rude5 and 'primitive5. These communities possessed no written
language, their industrial arts were few, and in a rudimentary stage
of development; and the ‘fine arts5, unless their 'rude style of music
and dancing be dignified by that name5, were practically unknown
amongst them. Custom was the only code of morality that a tribe
recognised, and ‘erroneous ideas5 as to the causes of natural pheno¬
mena along with' “superstitious55 beliefs as to the nature and powers
of the supernatural world5 constituted their world of ‘science and
religion5 (ibid.: 124). The Oraons, as a'tribe5, displayed these features.
According to Roy, their ‘low level of culture5 had continued for centu¬
ries, while they led a ‘semi-conscious life of a sensuous nature5 (ibid.:
246). Temporal change, for Roy, was possible only on account of
contact with external agencies. Contact with the Aryans had brought
about for the Oraons a ‘moderate lift in the ladder of civilization5
(ibid.: 22): ‘it was probably during their long association with the
Aryan hero and their long travels in his company through the country
of the more civilized Dravidians of the plains who had already taken
to agriculture and evolved a much higher civilization than their own,
and more particularly during their friendly visits to Ram Chandra’s
dominion in Northern India, that the Oraons first understood the
benefits of cattle breeding and agriculture, and the use of metal im¬
plements and utensils . . .’ (ibid.).
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 149

He believed that under British guidance the ‘primitive tribes’ of

Chotanagpur would eventually chart their journey towards progress.
Hence, for Roy the intervention of colonial masters was crucial for
the future of these communities of Chotanagpur. ‘Providence in His
mercy, had brought the mighty British lion to introduce law and
order’ into the ‘distracted country’ of Chotanagpur (ibid.: 31). ‘These
younger brethren of humanity, so long lagging behind in the race of
life, are being at length launched on the forward path of social, in¬
tellectual, moral and material progress’ (ibid.: 248). Their ‘uplift’,
when it came about, would be ‘one of the noblest of the innumerable
noble achievements of the British Government in India in the cause
of humanity and civilization’ (ibid.: 123). In other words, a tribal
community lacked self-generating tendencies and required the aid
of external agencies to give it momentum.
Significantly, in order to understand Oraon ‘tribal’ characteristics,
Roy referred not to their material culture but to their social structure,
which was seen as a survival of the past. Like the evolutionists, he
searched for ‘archaic and primitive elements’; the ‘survival’ of these
was made easier, he argued, by the geographical seclusion and relative
isolation of Chotanagpur. For example, Roy described the institution
of jonkh-erpa or dhumkuria, translated as the ‘Bachelors’ Hall’, as ‘a
very archaic form of economic, social, and religious organization’, ‘a
genuine and unadulterated product of “primitive” Oraon culture’,
an institution ‘which is of interest only as a survival of savagery’
(ibid.: 124-5). Within the social organisation pf the Oraons, Roy
identified the markers of‘tribalism’: Frazer’s distinction between the
different categories of totems (clan totems, sex totems, and individual
totems) determined Roy’s classification of Oraon totems, totem
taboos, and totem origins. He translated gotras (yet another non-
Oraon word) as ‘totems’ and observed that ‘totemism’ was ‘the funda¬
mental feature of their social organization in so far as kinship,
marriage, and the relation of the sexes’ were concerned, at least in
their‘hunting and pastoral stage’ (ibid.: 186). (He later reviewed his
statements and admitted that in the ‘changed circumstances’ created
by the establishment of agricultural villages and the expansion of
the Oraon population, totemism was ‘now a dying institution among
the Oraons’ [ibid.: 189]). In yet another direct application of concepts
150 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

developed in British social anthropology, Roy identified the Oraon

kinship system as ‘the kind termed “classificatory” by Morgan’ (ibid.:
197), while Tylor’s concept of‘animism’was adopted to explain Oraon
religion.
For Roy, the tribe was a static social category. External influences
were seen to impinge upon the Oraons, although the changes brought
about were adhesions that did not effect any alteration within their
essentially‘tribal identity’. Contrasting them with neighbouring com¬
munities, locating them within an interactive social environment,
and focusing on the interplay of various influences, only enabled
one to understand changes in Oraon customs, not dissolve their
‘tribalism’.21 But even as Roy viewed the tribe as somehow out of
tune with time, conforming to the universal parameters of‘primitive
society’, he believed the Oraons were a historically constituted and
therefore changing community. A disjuncture had appeared, and to
explain it new designations and characterisations were employed.
Thus Roy used, in addition to the category‘tribes’, the term ‘agricul¬
tural community’ to describe the Oraons. It is in this context that he
detailed the land system of the Oraons, their agricultural practices,
their village structure, and the organisation of their households. It is
also in this context that Roy moved away from his goal of providing
an objective and scientific account of the Oraons as a tribe and ex¬
pressed his sympathies for an Oraon agricultural community: ‘Ill-
housed, ill-clad, and underfed, generally over-taxed by the landlords,
frequently oppressed by the money-lender, and occasionally duped
by the labour-recruiter or fleeced by the law-tout, the Oraon of Chota
Nagpur has indeed had an exceptionally hard lot in life’ (ibid.: 122).
The inevitable conflict between a personal narrative and an imper¬
sonal piece of ethnographic writing, between experience and received
theory, had begun to emerge.

21 The Oraons were not, Roy argues, an isolated people but were in constant
interaction with the landlords of the village‘who were for the most part Hindus
and occasionally Muhammadans’, and with the ‘low class Hindu or Hinduised
castes’ of the Lohars, Kumhars, Jolahas, Chicks, Baraiks, Turis, Mahalis, Ors,
and Goraits. In addition, contact was established with other‘purely aboriginal
tribes’ like the Mundas, Kharias, Korwars, and Asurs (Roy 1984 [1915]: 45).
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 151

III. A SHIFT IN PERCEPTION

By the 1920s British anthropologists had turned radically away from

the comparative studies of the nineteenth century. With Malinowski’s
The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), fieldwork—the direct,
first-hand observation of native peoples—became the hallmark of
anthropology. Unlike older, less specialised forms of writing by mis¬
sionaries, colonial officials, travellers, and journalists, Malinowski’s
anthropology celebrated the advent of professional, scientific
ethnography. Apart from direct observation of social practices, lingu¬
istic competence gained importance, for it would render ‘the verbal
contour of native thought as precisely as possible’ (Malinowski 1972
[1922]: 23).
While reviewing the early evolutionary theory of culture in 1921,
Roy pointed to its defects:

the rigid determinism and a too absolute classification of the earlier

evolutionist school which takes little account of tribal migrations and
the transmission of cultural elements from one people or area to another
and the intermixture of races and cultures, was . . . soon found to be
incompatible with all the ascertained ethnological facts. It was dis¬
covered that similar cultural features did not everywhere spring from
the same cause and that different ethnic groups have not always ad¬
vanced in culture in the same uniform order... no hard and fast line
could be always drawn between savagery and barbarism and civilization
and . . . the course of cultural advance has seldom proceeded in a
straight line from one dominant sociological type to another: On the
other hand, it was found to exhibit, in even a greater degree than mans
physical evolution, an irregular alternation of progress and retrogression,
of tardy marches,, temporary halts, backward slips and occasional for¬
ward leaps and sudden transformations. The evolutionary or psycho¬
logical interpretation of cultural phenomena as conditioned solely and
absolutely by the psychological unity of mankind came to be regarded
by many anthropologists as inadequate. (Roy 1921b: 250)

Roy’s second monograph on the Oraons, Oraon religion and

customs (1928), reflected this changed anthropological milieu. The
152 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

sources referred to in his earlier writings now receded in importance;

these were to be either corrected or corroborated by a scientific Roy,
for whom fieldwork and participant observation, as advocated by
the functionalist school, now became a fetish. This would sustain
the anthropologist’s claim to authority; it was in this context that he
became, for the first time, critical of Risley’s writings:

Inaccurate and even erroneous statements ... are unfortunately not rare
in Risley’s accounts of different tribes, and indeed are inevitable in a
writer whose information was in most cases not collected first-hand
but was made up of varying information supplied by subordinate offi¬
cers of Government and other correspondents most of whom had little
interest in the enquiries, had no clear idea of what was wanted and
lacked the equipment and the discernment needed to discriminate
between things bearing the same or similar names but differing in essen¬
tials. (Roy 1928: 322)

In a diary titled ‘Ethnological Notes’, Roy outlined his now pre¬

ferred method of anthropology:

(1) Direct observation of ceremonies and c [sic]. (2) Failing (1) getting
it exacted [sic] by men who habitually perform it. (3) Detailed accounts
from persons who habitually perform the ceremonies. (4) Failing
(1) (2)(3) from correspondents who follow (1) or (2) or (3) by question¬
naire forms of new accts in [sic]. (5) Recourse to old books, pictures,
sculptures etc.

1. Equip yourself with a theoretical study of the subject

2. Flave a clear idea of the nature of your problem—the exact point of
your intended observations
3. Full and complete record of observation should be made forthwith
in the field, and no point or detail however insignificant or trivial it
may appear should be committed or trusted to memory
4. Photographs and free hand sketches should be taken whenever
possible
5. Omit all theoretical considerations in the report
6. Make a full analysis of your data to discover (1) how much of this
was the contribution of the people themselves (2) how much was
borrowed
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 153

[On the margins of point (6) find mention: ‘natural origin, historical
origin and environmental origin.’]--’

Thus, although paradoxically Roy’s second work was intended to

follow up his earlier volume (Roy 1928: Preface, ix), it was different
from his first. While fleeting continuities may be traced between the
two—for instance in the way Roy interpreted Oraon religion as ‘a
system of animism’ and Oraon magic as a ‘force of the nature of
“mana”’ (ibid.: 1)— his second text was replete with information
‘straight from the horse’s mouth’. This included personal interviews
with Oraons, their observations and classifications, and verbatim
representation of mantras, legends, and stories narrated during cere¬
monies and ritual performances. As Roy’s emphasis on personal ob¬
servation increased, legends and songs that found mention only in
the appendix of the earlier work now became integral. Yet, even as
Roy had hoped that his fieldwork in Oraon villages would help him
to capture local nuances and Oraon specificities, local cultural mean¬
ings were explained by expressing them in universalistic terms. There
is therefore an intermingling of‘native’ and alien words in his account
as indigenous terms are translated into anthropological jargon. Dains
appear as ‘witches’, sokhas as ‘sorcerers’, bhuts as ‘ghosts’, najar gujar
as the ‘evil eye’, bhagats as ‘white magicians’, and matis as ‘black magi¬
cians’.
Following functionalist logic, Roy found that Oraon religion and
magic served a purpose: magic served ‘practical needs’, while religion
was meant primarily to satisfy‘a psychic need’ (Roy 1928: 5). Both
were part of a ‘system of belief and practice, doctrine and behaviour’
that were ‘evolved and organized’ by ‘generations of Oraon society’
in order to ‘face the unknown supernatural world and restore con¬
fidence to the mind of the community and the individual when it is
shaken by crises and dangers . . .’ (ibid.: 1). The Oraon made offerings
to gods and spirits through special rites and ceremonies at stated
intervals, Roy argued, in order to ensure safety at the turning points
of an individual’s life—birth, childhood, puberty, marriage, and
death—and to ensure success and prosperity at each stage of the

22 These are copied verbatim from his diary, titled‘Ethnological Notes’, found
among his private papers in the office of Man in India at Ranchi.
154 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

agricultural cycle. Such ceremonies, which emphasised relations of

mutual harmony between the individual and society, helped intensify
feelings of social solidarity in the village, the clan, and the tribe. An
institution thus had a function, and its importance could be located
in its relationship to other institutions in the same society.
Ironically, the term bribe’ is rare in Roy’s text since there was noth¬
ing essentially‘tribal’ in Oraon religion. Oraons, he suggested, could
be animists, semi-Hinduised, Hinduised, followers of Bhagat cults,
or Christians. He discussed in this monograph, in great detail, the
Tana Bhagat movement among the Oraons of Chotanagpur which
had led to the emergence of‘a new religion which is a curious result
of the influence of Hindu and Christian ideas on primitive Animism’
(Roy 1921c: 266). This inclusion was an attempt to revise the earlier
static notion of‘tribal culture’ that he had outlined. ‘The doctrines
and practices of this new religious movement are not without their
interest for the anthropologist’, Roy pointed out. ‘Cultural pheno¬
mena’, he intended to show, were ‘the resultants of more than one
factor’— neither cultural contact and borrowing nor racial heritage
and independent evolution alone can sufficiently explain that
complex which we call the “culture” of a community. . . This move¬
ment is, to my mind, an apt illustration of the relative influences of
heredity and environment in culture—of social inheritance and
cultural contact’ (Roy 1921c: 266).
As Clifford argues, ethnographic accounts ‘simultaneously des¬
cribe real cultural events and make additional, moral, ideological,
and even cosmological statements’ (Clifford 1986:98). Roy’s descrip¬
tion of Oraon religion, then, displays his own religious leanings.
Positive changes had taken place in Oraon religion and customs as
a result of a ‘contact with higher cultures’, he says— in this case, the
religion of the‘Hindus’ (Roy 1928: 314): ‘Contact with Hindu ideas,
beliefs and practices in time stimulated and fructified the Oraon’s
original barren belief in Dharmes as the Supreme Spirit of Good;
and from the belief thus vivified there sprouted in time the blossom
of Bhakti or reverent faith in and loving adoration of a personal
Deity’ (Roy 1928: 323). The ‘higher culture’ that he referred to was,
inevitably, the one to which he belonged. Roy, however, denied the
exclusive importance of Hindu influences in the development of
Oraon religion. In one of his earliest overt appreciations of tribal
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 155

culture, Roy claimed that Oraon religion had a proclivity to produce

‘an indigenous and purer Bhakti movement’ of reform and im¬
provement:‘Ancient tribal tradition and certain tribal customs would
appear to indicate’, he wrote, ‘that the germ of the Bhakti cult had
been long present in the tribal soul’ (Roy 1928: 323). This break in
Roy’s understanding, his first display of admiration for tribal custom,
was to become a marked feature of his subsequent writings. The
departure from his earlier position (Roy 1984 [1915] was already
discernible, though the rupture was yet to come.
It is in the context of a shift in Roy’s approach towards anthro¬
pology that one needs to analyse his initial forays in 1921 into the
search for an ‘Indian school of anthropology’ (Roy 1921a: 55). While
reviewing the history of anthropological research in India, he believed
that the ‘Indian student’ of anthropology should ‘hang down his head
in shame’ since ‘we Indians have culpably neglected to take our proper
share’ in the collection of anthropological data: ‘Instead of taking, as
we should have done, a leading part in that work, a few of us have
contributed in periodicals only occasional papers of ethnological
interest written mostly by way of intellectual pastime during intervals
of other business. . . .And it must be confessed that hardly any syste¬
matic anthropological work by an organized band of devoted workers
has yet been seriously attempted in this country. That is all the more
to be regretted as but few countries present a wider field for anthro¬
pological investigation and afford promise of a richer harvest’ (Roy
1921a: 11-12). As the spirit of nationalism began to surface in Roy’s
writings, he argued that empathy with his subjects was more impor¬
tant than tools of anthropology drawn purely from the West. Roy
thus believed that ‘Indian man’ could best be studied by ‘educated
Indians', and that their knowledge would be ‘a great gain for the
‘Indian nation’ (Roy 1921a: 55, emphasis mine). In other words, cul¬
tural affinity born out of an Indian identity had become a consi¬
deration for Roy: even if he was not an ‘aboriginal’, as an Indian he
was still best equipped to study an Indian subject.

If we do not shirk the inevitable initial grind and drudgery, but diligently
acquire the necessary equipment for anthropological research, patiently
pursue the preliminary spade-work with the same enthusiastic devotion
and perseverance that characterize students of the Science in the West,
156 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

abjure all unscientific bias and abstain from rushing into hasty con¬
clusions and premature generalizations from inadequate and unsifted
data, we may expect to find, in time, a sober well-equipped Indian School
of Anthropology to which the scientific world will look for a correct
interpretation of the evolution of Indian man—his racial affinities,
mentality and culture. For, such a school may very well be expected to
interpret these with more intimate knowledge and better insight and
consequently with a greater approach to scientific accuracy than foreign
investigators, however assiduous and sympathetic, can ever hope to
attain. And thus, and thus alone, will Indian scholarship be enabled, in
the fullness of time, to bring its own peculiar and invaluable contri¬
butions to Anthropology as it brought in the remote past to Philology,
Philosophy and Metaphysics, as it has brought in our own days to Phy¬
sics, Chemistry and Mathematics and as it is expected to bring in the
not very distant future to other sciences as well. (Roy 1921a: 55-6)

It needs to be noted that, in Roys perception, anthropology did not

as a discipline exist in India before colonialism. ‘Indian scholarship’
had contributed to philology, philosophy, and metaphysics from
times in the ‘remote past’, and to the disciplines of physics, chemistry,
and mathematics in the present;23 the ‘Indian school of anthropology’
was however a subject for the future.
This interpretation was to change in the 1930s.

IV. TOWARDS AN 'INDIAN' APPROACH TO

ANTHROPOLOGY

By the 1930s, anthropology had been firmly established as a discipline

in India. As the ‘formative phase’ of Indian anthropology (Sinha 1971:
2), initiated largely by British administrator-scholars and European
missionaries, ended, anthropologists moved ‘in the direction of the
study of culture change . . . and even included peasant, urban and
industrial communities within their purview’ (ibid.: 6). Anthropolo¬
gical debates on tribes entered a new phase as ‘protectionists’ and
‘interventionists’ argued their case over social and cultural transform¬
ation and suggested methods of adjustment to be adopted by tribes

23 C.V. Raman had already been awarded the Nobel Prize by the time Roy
had written this paper.
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 157

in a changing environment. The former line of thinking was upheld

by anthropologist-administrators like Archer, Hyde, Hutton, and
Mills who propagated an isolation from the corrosive influences of
mainstream India; professional anthropologists like Bose, Chat-
topadhyay, Majumdar, and Ghurye, on the other hand, preferred
assimilation as a way of‘uplifting’ the tribes as they argued that pro¬
tectionism would further the British policy of divide and rule within
the Indian population (Sundar 1997:159). Archer was the protection¬
ist in Chotanagpur; Roy too shared some of his views, though he
could never completely discard reformist logic. But his early para¬
meters for defining the tribe were now transformed, once his pursuits
had shifted from academic to activist, and his targeted audience com¬
prised, in addition to university scholars, those interested in political
solutions and constitutional reform.
For Roy, this period was of particular historical significance: it
marked his ascent into the public arena. The Second Round Table
Conference had been held; separate electorates and the minority issue
were on the agenda. This was the time when varying methods for
dealing with the ‘aborigines of Chota Nagpur’ were being animatedly
debated in the forthcoming constitution under the Act of 1935. They
could be assimilated into the general constitution without any dis¬
tinction; they could be treated like the communities of the Santal
Parganas and Angul as ‘Partially Excluded’ from reforms; or they
could be treated as an important minority community (Roy 1936:
25). As a member of the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council, to
which he had been elected for successive terms (Anonymous 1971:
264), Roy suggested that the aborigines of Chotanagpur be treated
as a minority community with special rights and privileges. The Bihar
government, on the other hand, opposed the resolution, arguing that
these communities had not attained the status of other minorities
in terms of wealth, position, literacy, and political organisation. In
the midst of this uproar, a series of articles by Roy appeared in jour¬
nals and newspapers, some of which will be taken up for discussion
here: ‘The effect on the aborigines of Chota Nagpur of their contact
with Western Civilisation’ appeared in the Journal of the Bihar and
Orissa Research Society in 1931; ‘The aborigines of Chota Nagpur:
Their proper status in the reformed Constitution’ appeared in the
Indian nation in 1936; ‘The study of anthropology from the Indian
158 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

view-point’ appeared in the Journal of the Benaras Hindu University

in 1937; ‘The importance of anthropological studies in India’ ap¬
peared in The new review in 1938.
It was the image of the ‘primitive savage’ that Roy wished to reverse
in these articles. From a chronicler of tribal customs and practices
in 1915 for whom ‘scientific objectivity’ in the discipline of anthro¬
pology had been uppermost, Roy had become an avid champion of
the tribal cause. ‘Concern for the welfare of the aborigines has, for
the last thirty years and more, been uppermost in my thoughts and
heart’ (Roy 1936: 25), he wrote. The anthropologist, who had earlier
condemned the ‘aborigines’ as ‘primitive’, and their culture as ‘rude’
and‘backward’, now reversed his stance: ‘Perhaps the hypnotic sugges¬
tion of the inappropriate term “primitive”, sometimes loosely applied
to them, is responsible for the illusion that the Chota Nagpur abori¬
gines are still savages who should be regarded as a standing menace
to peace and good government’ (ibid.: 24). ‘As for the principal
aboriginal tribes of Chota Nagpur—the Mundas, Oraons, Kharias,
Santals, Hos and Bhumijes—they too possess a culture of their own
which is not insignificant or of a mean order’ (ibid.: 22). Interestingly,
the term that Roy chose to describe the communities of Chotanagpur
was aborigines: reclaimers of land and founders of the villages of
Chotanagpur. His repeated use of the term was intended to stress
the point that these were people who had the greatest claims on the
lands of Chotanagpur.
How, then, did Roy describe the Oraons? What were the deter¬
minants of their culture? On the one hand, Roy’s search was, as before,
for survivals of the past—for organisations that had ‘long’ existed
among the Oraons, and which could still be traced amongst them.
Even though ‘within the last hundred years or so, these organisations
have been weakened through the inevitable loss of much of their
older functions and powers, the outer form and some of the social
and even judicial functions of the older organisations still survive’,
he pointed out (Roy 1936: 22). It is in this context that Roy referred
to the Oraon’s ‘effective form of village self-government with village
headmen and their assistants’, ‘councils of village elders discharging
judicial and executive functions’, and ‘a village militia of unmarried
young men’; to ‘their federations of villages’ known as the ‘Parhas or
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 159

Pits’,and their federal executive and judicial councils known as ‘Parha

Panchayats’; and finally, to their ‘wider confederations or inter-parha
leagues’ (ibid.). In effect, Roy was trying to develop a universal story
of the progress of civilisations, a teleological movement from an ex¬
periment in ‘an effective form of village self-government’, to a stage
of‘further’ advance in ‘local self-government’, to the final emergence
of a structure that ‘contained the germs of a State’, the development
of which was ‘arrested under adverse circumstances’ (ibid.). Thus,
Roy provides in his writing two representations: an image of a local¬
ised Oraon culture, and a more general story of the progress of civilis¬
ations. Significantly, his interpretations of Oraon institutions of the
past had changed: these were now seen as Teminisces of a glorious
past’ (ibid., emphasis mine). Oraon culture was rich enough ‘in the
past’ to have ‘contributed, more or less, not only to the racial makeup
of the Bengalis, Beharis and Oriya, but also to the social, religious
and cultural equipment of these peoples’, as ‘every student of Indian
sociology and anthropology is aware’ (ibid.). Further—for the first
time appreciating tribal literature—Roy found in their songs ‘a high
poetic quality’. For a people who ‘had no written literature of their
own’, the ‘exquisite but simple poetic imagery’ in their songs ‘some¬
times puts one in mind of such poets of the civilized west as Robert
Burns’ (ibid.). Roy’s attempt to compare Oraon culture with that of
‘the Bengalis, Beharis and Oriya’, and with the ‘civilized West’, exem¬
plifies his earlier tendency to accept the inevitable superiority of
‘higher cultures’; yet, implicit in the comparison is also a challenge
to the hierarchisation of cultures.
For Roy, in order to capture aboriginal culture, it was now as im¬
portant to locate these communities in the present—yet another
change in his method of perceiving the tribe. Understanding their
present, along with their past, would contest the stigma of inferiority
that had been thrust upon them. Indeed, Roy suggested that the pro¬
gress that these communities had achieved in recent years was ‘pheno¬
menal’ (Roy 1936: 23), as the ‘aborigines’ had ‘peaceably applied
themselves to the betterment of their economic, social and intellec¬
tual condition’ (ibid.: 24). The percentage of tribal literacy was com¬
parable to that achieved by the most advanced groups of the province;
a section amongst them were English-educated and had travelled to
160 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Europe and America; posts were secured in the provincial and

subordinate services of government, and in the ‘liberal professions’;
almost all of them owned property; some of them engaged in trade
and banking; improvement societies, co-operatives, and sabhas deve¬
loped public opinion among the community, fostered unity, and
testified to the power of organisation and discipline (ibid.: 22). Roy
concluded his account: cIn these circumstances, it would appear that
the balance of advantages is in favour of the “Minorities Scheme”
for the aborigines of Chota Nagpur, supplemented by their more
adequate representation in the legislatures, and such additional
provisions for the promotion of their cultural and economic interests
as may be found suitable and necessary’ (ibid.: 25).
The political prescriptions that Roy suggested were accordingly
in keeping with what he considered to be the special problems of the
aborigines. Protection of their agrarian rights called for the imple¬
mentation of special tenancy rules and a tenancy law, along with the
promulgation of an equitable law against usury and provisions for
wider employment. Grants and suitable institutions were sought for
the promotion of their education and culture. Measures that would
ensure temperance were advocated (once again Roy’s affiliation with
‘higher cultures’ is evident). For the administration of the area, quali¬
fied and sympathetic officers, conversant with aboriginal language
and customs, were immediately required.
Caught between two worlds, Roy’s essay is marked by ambivalence.
He celebrated tribal culture but, at the same time, was persuaded by
reformist logic. On the one hand he argued for the value of tribal
culture and suggested that aboriginal culture was comparable to other
cultures; at the same time he was unable to completely break away
from a conservative position : ‘It is only lack of adequate opportunities
of development and absence of sufficient contact with other
civilizations, for which a large portion of them are now fit, that had
long kept them backward. In so far as facilities have been extended
to them, they have proved their capacity to profit adequately thereby’
(Roy 1936: 22-3). In other words, even though ‘primitivism’ was no
longer seen as an intrinsic characteristic of tribalism, the image of a
tribal community as ‘backward’ persisted in Roy’s mind; moreover,
only external agencies could, and had, revealed the path towards en¬
lightenment.
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 161

Even as he was unable to completely break away from the

parameters of Western anthropology, Roy’s perception of tribal
culture had markedly shifted. His tools of representation now ac¬
quired a new interpretation. Although he continued to borrow ana¬
lytic tools from Western scholars, appreciated scientific methodology,
and approved of colonial intervention, his search, particularly in the
last stages of his career, was for an orientation that did not always
endorse the approach of the West. Indeed, the imprint of the prevail¬
ing spirit of nationalism, and of his Indian identity, was conspicuous
in his writings, as his new agenda was to arrive at a novel methodo¬
logy, an ‘Indian outlook on Anthropology’ (Roy 1938a: 146-50).
Anthropology—a scientific discipline that was earlier seen as a
comparatively recent branch of systematised knowledge in Western
countries’ (Roy 1937: 243)—was now seen as a part of the Indian
tradition from earliest times,24 a shift from the position that Roy
held in 1921. What was to be lamented, he pointed out, was the ‘de¬
plorable lack of interest in the scientific study of Man’ in modern
India (Roy 1938a: 245), for‘In ancient India, the study of the Science
of Man did not suffer from such neglect or indifference as at the
present day. . . . The different branches of modern learning known
as History, Social Anthropology and Jurisprudence were represented
in ancient Sanskrit Literature by the Puranas and the Samhitas or
Dharma-Sastras and the Grhya Sutras’ (Roy 1938a: 246). Further,
ancient Sanskrit texts, discarded in conventional scientific approa¬
ches,25 were accorded importance as sources of authority in Roy’s
search for ‘origins’ and for the past, since he found no ‘lack of histori¬
cal sense’ in the ‘authors’ of the Puranas (Roy 1938a: 251). The in¬
formation found in the Puranas, he pointed out, matched the
requirements of scientific anthropology upheld in the West: they

24 Roy made a similar point in the context of the study of folklore and
tradition in India: ‘The collection of folk-lore material, particularly folk-
traditions and folk-customs and folk-rites, has not hitherto been altogether
neglected in India. . .. The Puranas and the two great Epics of India, particularly
the Mahabharata, are undoubtedly rich store-houses of ancient Indian tradition
(Roy 1932: 353).
25 In its search for origins, or in its search for a ‘true’ and ‘objective’ history’,
scientific analysis discarded the texts of Oriental tradition as symbols of a ‘rude
age’ (see Pels 1999: 88).
162 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

'formed storehouses of contemporary social customs and usages,

rites and ceremonies, ethics and politics and law. . . furnish pictures
of contemporary Indian society with its ideals and its different types
and levels of culture’ (ibid.: 247). Paradoxically, in Roy’s understand¬
ing, it was the presence of Western ideas within Puranic thought
which corroborated the wisdom of Puranic knowledge!
However, despite his search for parallels between West and East,
Roy was quick to point out that there was a difference in the 'anthro¬
pology of the East’. 'From our Indian view-point’, he argued, 'the
ulterior object of the Science of Man is, or should be, to understand
the meaning and goal of human existence . . . the eternal spiritual
reality behind life and society, the Sat behind the Asat. . .’ (Roy 1938a:
243); ‘a study of anthropology’ would ‘put us in tune with universal
humanity, and place us in touch with the Absolute’ (ibid.: 250).
The questions that Roy had begun to pose in his assessment of
the discipline now displayed a rare humanism as he asked:

In what way can Anthropology or the Science of man help us in the

world? (in our spiritual and social and intellectual needs?)

How can I put it so as to be helpful in this way to the needs of the pre¬
sent day to the world?

How can it be expressed so as to have vital impulse for humanity’s future

progress?

What is the essence of permanent truth in the science of man?

What is its validity for mankind?

What is there beyond the mere local and temporal—but universal and
eternal in the facts of human life and society that ethnology reveals to
us?

What is the deeper truth + principle underlying what seems at first

sight local and of the time? (This is always implied in the grain of the
thought even when not expressly stated in the language.)26

Roy, in the final analysis, advocated an integrated approach to

anthropology, a combination of Western and Indian methods:

2(1 These questions appear in Roys ‘Anthropological Notes Part If found

among his private papers in the office of Man in India at Ranchi.
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 163

by combining the objective and analytic methods of investigation

followed by the scientists of the West, in combination with the subjective
and synthetic methods emphasized by the Arya Rsis of ancient India
(who, too, did not neglect objective and analytic methods as well),
Indian Anthropologists will succeed in establishing before long an
Indian School of Anthropology for the pursuit of the Science of Man,
which may be expected to give fresh inspiration even to Western students
of the Science. (Roy 1938a: 249)

The incorporation of the unique 'synthetic’ methodology of Indian

anthropology into Western ‘objective’ anthropology would help in
the comprehension of mankind in their totality’, for ‘Then the forest
would be no longer lost in the trees. The student’s eager ears will at
first catch a soft music, and as he approaches nearer the truth, the
music will swell louder and louder. Gradually the synthetizing [sic]
mind of the student of Man will come to hear, contemplate and
comprehend the entire gamut of the music of humanity as a whole.
And such knowledge of human life is calculated to illumine his mind
and chasten his heart’ (Roy 1938a: 249). The ‘world-consciousness’
of a student of anthropology would then be ‘supplemented, chastened
and elevated’ by a ‘spirit-consciousness,—the consciousness of the
one Eternal self in all’ (Roy 1938a: 256).
Was Roy seeking to bring about parity between West and non-
West, and challenging the ‘primitiveness’ that had been bestowed
upon the ‘other’ in anthropological discourse, as he argued for the
‘eternal self in all’? Was his attitude—the attempt to chart an integra¬
ted approach to anthropology even though he failed to break out of
the barriers of Western anthropological methodology and often
consciously clung on to it—a reflection of cultural defensiveness,
located as Roy was in a colonial context? Alternatively, did these ideas
reflect the views of a ‘deeply religious mind’ (Bose 1966: ii),27 of one
who was acquainted with the religious texts of ancient India, who

27 In Roys ‘Anthropological Notes Part If, he cites several studies of religions.

These include James Hastings (ed), Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics; Hopkins,
A study of Gods—India, old and new; Worweck, The living forces of the Gospel;
Daniel G. Brinton, Religions of primitive peoples; W.J. Penny, Origin of magic
and religion; Marett, The raw material of religion, etc.
164 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

immersed himself in the philosophy of the Advaita Vedanta of Sanka-

racharya and who regularly attended religious meetings in Ranchi
at which various aspects of religion and philosophy were discussed?28
One needs to explore these themes as one reviews Roys position in
1937, almost at the end of his anthropological career:

The realization of the truth that all humanity has originated from one
and the same source, and is inspired by the same or similar currents of
thought, feeling and desire, and is consciously or unconsciously pro¬
ceeding towards the same goal... is calculated to expand the students
soul and induce a sense of its universality and infinity. As a result of
this indefinite expansion of the self so as to include all humanity, the
votary of the science of Man will find the latent springs of universal
sympathy and fellowfeeling [sic] in his heart opened out; and in contrast
to the biological rivalry of the animal world he will be inspired with a
sense of universal kinship with man in every clime and in every level of
culture. (Roy 1937: 250-1)

Roy had argued for a universalisation of cultures; but this ap¬

proach, he expected, would have an additional dimension: it would
instil in the ‘souk of the anthropologist an empathy, a feeling of one¬
ness or ‘kinship’ with man across cultures. His dream was for ‘the
establishment of a genuine Federation of the World, a real Parlia-
ment of Man—not a mere political “League of Nations” of the Geneva
brand’ (Roy 1966 [1938b]: 31). In one of his sharpest critiques of
modern, Western civilisation, Roy wrote: ‘Then there will be an end
of the malady of modern civilization, its crass-egotism, and rank
selfishness, its aggressive wars, its gospel of race-superiority and race¬
hatred, its estimation of material progress as the be-all and end-all

28 Ray provides an interesting exchange between Roy and his eldest daughter-
in-law, Kamaladebi. Roy explains to her why, despite his attraction to the
Brahmo faith in his more youthful days, he never ultimately converted to that
faith: ‘In those days, I thought much about it but finally realized that the ultimate
religion is in the mind of man, in his behaviour. If true religion is in the mind
of man, then all religions are equally good. There is no salvation with conversion.
The implication of rituals lies elsewhere: these teach man to be governed by
rules; these bind society together. But ceremony is not religion; religion is in
the minds of men’ (my translation) (Ray 1996: 8).
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 165

of human societies, its cult of temporal power based on brute force

and on the prostitution of the intellect by the invention of diverse
nefarious engines of destruction’ (Roy 1937: 256).
If anthropology was a discipline that challenged the idea of a hier¬
archy of cultures, it could also support a national cause. While Roy
had initially found anthropology to have a more generalised adminis¬
trative and academic intent, it was now found to have a specific
practical utility in the context of India. As an Indian who sympathised
with the Congress (though he never formally joined it), Roy believed
that the discipline would ‘help in knitting the bonds of unity between
different castes and creeds, races and communities’ at a time when
dndia’ was getting1 swaraj-minded’ (Roy 1937: 254). Roy elaborated
upon this point in an article published in 1938:

The cardinal lessons of Anthropology may, for one thing, be very usefully
applied to certain crying problems of our national life. The study of
men of different races and religions of the customs and manners of
one another may help in promoting mutual amity and knitting ever
more closely the bonds of unity between them, and thus eventually
help to banish much of the communal animosity which is the bane of
Indian national life at the present day. (Roy 1966 [1938b]: 30)

Seeking to trace the ‘practical national advantage that may accrue

from a knowledge of Anthropology’, Roy saw in the ‘modern study
of Ethnology’ a ‘service of humanity’, expressed his sympathies for
‘the aboriginal and depressed and suppressed classes’ and condemned
the neglect that had been meted out to them by those ‘who boast of
ahigher civilization’ (Roy 1938b: 30-1).Yet, at no point oftime could
he break out of his belief in the inherent superiority of his own ‘higher
culture’ vis-a-vis the culture of the ‘primitive tribes’ (ibid.: 30).
Anthropology would help, he argued,

in devising and adopting suitable methods of acculturation, or rather

‘inculturation’, of our jungle tribes—i.e. the adjustment of these tribes
to the dominant higher culture of their comparatively civilized neigh¬
bours by inoculating, so to say, the tribal cultures with such helpful ele¬
ments of the higher culture as may, with suitable adaptations, be
profitably assimilated in their social and cultural systems while at the
166 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

same time helping to conserve indigenous customs and institutions of

social value. (Roy 1938b: 30)

The word ‘uplift’ continued to be a part of his anthropological voca¬

bulary as he hoped that ‘universal fellow-feeling and active sympathy
which a proper study of man is calculated to produce’ would inspire
‘some of us ... to exert ourselves to the best of our opportunities
for the economic, educational, social, moral, and religious uplift of
the aboriginal. . .’ (Roy 1938b: 31).
Roy’s stand was clearly different from that of anthropologist-
administrators, or of advocates of protectionism who found the word
‘uplift’ anathema, people who ‘had watched the decay of tribal reli¬
gion, the collapse of ancient forms of village organization, the
extinction of village industries, the weakening of moral fibre that
follows the contact of simple and primitive people with civilisation’
with horror and resentment (Elwin n.d.). A protectionist, Elwin had
argued, ‘admires his (tribal) culture and religion and would like to
preserve all of it that has survival value ... He would have education,
but of a special kind ... he would have temperance, but not pro¬
hibition; he would have advance, but not headlong advance’ (ibid.).
Archer supported Elwin’s position: ‘In Ranchi District, the Uraons,
Mundas and Kharias have been exposed to two forms of moral up¬
lift—one from the Christian Missions, the other from Hindu re¬
formers. Each has produced its own type of “moral” tribesman—-a
type that is puritanical in outlook, is afraid of life, and is on the
whole much less happy than the unadulterated tribesman. Moral
uplift in this sense is a poison’ (ibid.).
In Roy’s opinion, however, despite the negative aspects of colonial
intervention, it was British rule that had enabled the peoples of
Chotanagpur to emerge ‘from their century-long social and economic
serfdom’, and advance ‘not, as of old, with the violence of revolution
foredoomed to failure but with the slow orderly progress which marks
a natural evolution’ (Roy 1931: 393). English education, Roy argued,
was, ‘under present conditions in India, an indispensable condition
of an intellectual equipment’ that would ‘enable the aborigines to
hold their own in the competitive struggle of the modern world’
(ibid.). Yet, as a Bengali bhadralok affiliated to a ‘higher culture’, in
 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 167

sympathy with the Congress, and writing as he did within a national¬

ist milieu, Roy could never advocate unqualified protectionism under
the exclusive aegis of colonial officials. Against setting‘back the hands
of the clock for Chota Nagpur’ (Roy 1936: 25), he argued that the
people of Chota Nagpur would feel ‘a sense of humiliation and irri¬
tation if they were ‘classified’ as ‘Backward’ or ‘Protected’, and there¬
fore as an ‘inferior community’ (ibid.: 23). ‘To seek at this late hour
of the day to pay what I call “Protection’s old arrears”, by restoring
something like the century-old and now obsolete and unsuitable
protection . . . might look like “over protection” and a glaring consti¬
tutional anachronism, so far as Chota Nagpur is concerned’ (ibid.:
25).
If Roy had distanced himself from the administrator-anthro¬
pologist, his differences also lay with the professional anthropologist
of nationalist bent who had argued for an ‘assimilation’ and ‘inte¬
gration’ of the tribals into mainstream India. Challenging ‘state-
enforced isolation from Hindu society’, Ghurye, to cite an example,
had argued that tribals were ‘imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu
society’; their backwardness was caused not by contact with
civilisation but because of the economic and legal changes brought
in by British colonial rule; the solution to their problem lay in ‘streng¬
thening the ties of the tribals with the other backward classes through
their integration’ (Upadhya 2000: 24). Unlike the assimilationists,
Roy, despite certain reservations, was appreciative of colonial inter¬
vention and blamed those of a ‘higher civilization’ for not fulfilling
their responsibilities towards the tribals:

We who boast of a higher civilization undoubtedly have a heavy res¬

ponsibility towards these weaker and less fortunate brethren whom we
have so long culpably neglected. For have they not for centuries been
ground down under the oppression of the rich and the powerful and
groaned under various economic and social evils, not the least of which
is the cruel stigma of untouchability?
The modern study of Ethnology which began in the service of
humanity will, it may be fervently expected, find ever -increasing recog¬
nition in India, where the sum of human misery has perhaps reached
the maximum at the present day. (Roy 1966 [1938b]: 30-1)
168 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

V. CONCLUSION

In tracing Roy’s changing views on the Oraons and the tribe, this
esssay does not seek to contest Roy’s enormous contribution to Indian
anthropology, or to question his knowledge of the peoples of
Chotanagpur. It only seeks to caution against an uncritical acceptance
of Roy’s ethnography, as this has been crucial in determining notions
of the tribe in Chotanagpur. As Clifford and Marcus point out, 'the
vision of a complex, problematic, partial ethnography leads, not to
its abandonment, but to more subtle, concrete ways of writing and
reading, to new conceptions of culture as interactive and historical’
(Clifford and Marcus 1986:25). Roy had seen‘fragments of a cultural
field’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 16), or rather, many fragments,
and many cultural fields. My purpose has been to recover these
fragments, locate them within a historically determined epoch and
field, recognise the varying dialogues between Roy and the Oraons,
and acknowledge the unintelligibility that creeps in when one is
caught within the traditions of British social anthropology and its
partnership with colonialism on the one hand, while seeking at the
same time to establish an ‘Indian’ approach to anthropology. Indeed,
this essay is an attempt to bring into prominence one of the most
committed of men, a prolific writer, and an empathetic individual.
Roy’s writings on the Oraons illustrate the fertile, sensitive, and ever-
evolving imagination of a lawyer-turned-anthropologist whose inter¬
action with various ideas and ideals led to a continuous shift in his
perception of the Oraons and of the notion of tribe.

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Archer, W.G. 1942. A bibliography of Sarat Chandra Roy. Man in India 22, 4:
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anthropology, pp. i-iv. Calcutta: Indian Studies Past and Present.
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Clifford, James. 1986. On ethnographic allegory. In James Clifford and George

E. Marcus, eds. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography,
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Dasgupta, Sangeeta. 2004. The journey of an anthropologist in Chotanagpur.
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Elwin, Verrier. 1942. Comment. Man in India 22, 4: 195-6.
-. 1943. The aboriginals. Oxford Pamphlets on Indian affairs, no. 14.
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-. n.d. On the proposal of Mr. Thakkar to found an ‘All India Society for
safeguarding aboriginal interests’ to be named Indian Aborigines Friends
Society’. European Manuscripts (MSS Eur F 236/11) (Archer Papers) Ori¬
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Haddon, A.C. 1984 [ 1915]. Foreword. In S.C. Roy, The Oraons ofChota Nagpur.
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pology, 1885-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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1972. London: Allen I,ane.
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Pels, Peter. 1999. The rise and fall of the Indian aborigines: Orientalism,
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Roy, Sarat Chandra. 1995 [1912]. The Mundas and their country. Ranchi: Man
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-. 1921 c. A new religious movement among the Oraons. Man in India 1,
4: 266-321.
-. 1928. Oraon religion and customs. Ranchi: Industry Press.
-—■ - —. 1930. Presidential address. Anthropological Section of the Sixth Ori¬
ental Congress, Patna, 1930, pp. 303-27.
-. 1931. The effect on the aborigines of Chota-Nagpur of their contact
with western civilization. Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society
17,4:358-94.
-. 1932. The study of folk-lore and tradition in India./owrna/ of the Bihar
and Orissa research society 18, 3-4: 353-81.
-. 1936. The aborigines of Chota Nagpur: Their proper status in the re¬
formed constitution. Indian nation, pp. 21-5.
-. 1937. The study of anthropology from the Indian view-point. Journal
of the Benares Hindu University 10-8-37:243-56. (Reprinted 1986: The study
of Anthropology from the Indian view-point. Man in India 66,1: 81-93).
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-. 1938b. The importance of anthropological studies in India. New review.
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 RECASTING THE ORAONS AND THE 'TRIBE' 171

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Oriental and India Office Collections, London.
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Man in India, Ranchi.
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Selections from the Ranchi Settlement Papers, Commissioner’s Record Room
and Library, Ranchi.
 Patrick Geddes
Sociologist, Environmentalist, and
Town Planner*

Indra Munshi

I. INTRODUCTION

PATRICK GEDDES' FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF

Bombay was in 1914-15, when he was invited to deliver a series of

four public lectures on the city. The lectures are said to have been a
great success. In the summer of 1919 Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, the
vice chancellor, offered Geddes the post of professor of sociology at
his university. Geddes, then 65, accepted the offer—adding the title
‘civics’ to the designation of his chair—and set about organising the
department of civics and sociology in the university. Before this,
Geddes had been lecturing at Canning College in Lucknow; at the
University of Calcutta; and had organised a summer school at Dar¬
jeeling dealing with a variety of subjects such as regional surveys,
town planning, nature study, social evolution, and so on.
When Geddes took charge in Bombay the department was tem¬
porarily housed in the Royal Institute of Science, not far from the
main university buildings. Characteristically, Geddes gave his daily
lectures in the form of conversations and seminars (a style which his

*This essay was published in an earlier version in the Economic and political
weekly [EPW], vol. 35, no. 6, 5 February 2000. Republished by permission of
the EPW.
 PATRICK GEDDES 173

Fig. 5: Portrait of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). (Source: J. V. Ferreira

and S.S. Jha, eds, The Outlook Tower: Essays on urbanization
in memory of Patrick Geddes, Bombay:
Popular Prakashan, 1976)
174 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

successors tried but with little success). A course on the Elements of

Sociology was also offered to the public three afternoons a week, the
lectures being invariably followed by discussions. Geddes being no
admirer of mere book learning, Saturdays were devoted to excursions
to various parts of Bombay and neighbouring villages and, whenever
possible, to more distant places (Ferreira and Jha 1976: xi).
Between thirteen and eighteen students were enrolled in 1919 for
a three-year course in sociology. The emphasis of the course was on
practical work, for undertaking which Geddes sent his students to
his friends in various parts of India. But when Geddes went to Pales¬
tine in 1920 and the students were left on their own, the senate of
the university did not take a favourable view of the situation. Exaspe¬
rated, Geddes wrote to the senate saying he was conducting not only
a new course in India but an experimental one which had to be al¬
lowed to run for three years without interference. Besides, he argued,
he was training his students in ‘pure’ sociology, for which fieldwork
was absolutely essential (Meller 1990: 225-6).
The initial recruitment figures dwindled since the course did not
run for long periods during Geddes’ absence. By 1924, the last year
in his five-year contract with the university, Geddes’ health had suf¬
fered greatly, as had his ability to enthuse students with his unconven¬
tional courses. His attempt to find an Indian collaborator did not
meet with success either. He sent his best students, G.S. Ghurye and
N.A. Toothi among them, to England for further training. Although
Geddes wanted Ghurye to become his collaborator and assistant—
as he later wanted Lewis Mumford to as well—it did not work out
that way. In fact it was Toothi who found Geddes’ ideas stimulating
and who promoted Geddes’ approach after he returned to India. A
more favourable response seems to have been evoked in Radhakamal
Mukerjee from Calcutta who, as is evident from his studies, found
Geddes’ ideas inspiring. There is, otherwise, little evidence of the
impact of Geddes’ approach on sociologists: indeed one of his bio¬
graphers, Helen Meller, says Geddes’ warmest support in India came
not from sociologists but from the outstanding natural scientist Sir
Jagdish Chandra Bose (Meller 1990: 226-7).
Geddes’ influence on sociologists in India remains negligible, al¬
though geographers and town planners sometimes show a greater
 PATRICK GEDDES 175

appreciation and engagement with his ideas and approach. However,

in the context of increasing environmental concerns, especially the
crisis of urbanisation in India, Geddes’ ideas do acquire contemp¬
orary relevance. Lewis Mumford, no less, describes Geddes as one
whose life shows a constant interpenetration of the general and the
particular, the philosophical outlook and the scientific outlook, the
universal and the regional: this world-enveloping mind was also
deeply concerned with the improvement of life at his own doorstep’
(Boardman 1944: xi). Geddes certainly deserves greater appreciation,
and this essay is an attempt to remind sociologists of his legacy.

II. EARLY INFLUENCES

Patrick Geddes was born in October 1854 at Ballater in West Aber¬

deen, Scotland, and brought up and educated in Perth. Growing up
in the Scottish countryside, renowned for its beauty, in close com¬
munication with hills, woods, fields, and gardens, was an experience
which greatly influenced his personality and career. He was often to
claim that his father was his first and best teacher: he had given him
the finest education for life by encouraging his love of nature, and
especially by teaching him how to care for a garden (Meller 1990: 6).
Significantly, gardens figured prominently in his subsequent work
as a town planner.
After an early education which included subjects such as geology,
chemistry, and botany, Geddes studied biology for many years under
the greatest natural scientists of the time. Huxley’s influence upon
Geddes is said to have been profound and enduring. The splendid
range of Huxley’s mind, which went beyond his specialisations,
inspired many. But, as Philip Mairet writes, it was in disagreement
with Huxley that Geddes developed many of his own ideas. For exam¬
ple, Geddes found Huxley’s contemptuous treatment of Comte’s
positivist philosophy totally unjustified. Like many of his time,
Geddes was impressed by Comte, with whose work he is said to have
formed an enduring attachment (Mairet 1957: 18-20). He was also
attracted to Spencer’s application of the concept of evolution to
society. He accepted Spencer’s view of society as an organism of func¬
tionally interdependent parts and appreciated his attempt to trace
176 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

evolutionary forces working towards changing society. But it was

Fredric Le Play whose method most influenced Geddes’ approach to
sociology, for it was in Le Plays work that he found ‘a point of contact
between the naturalistic and social studies which had been pulling
him in different directions’ (ibid.: 28).
Le Play’s method of survey was governed by his postulate that the
three key units for the study of society were ‘lieu, ‘travail\‘;famille
(place, work, family). The first, or geographical locality, presents the
environmental pressures (needs) and the possibilities (resources)
which determine the nature of the work. Work, in turn, determines
the organisation of the family, the biological unit of human society.
Conversely, the needs and potentialities of the family shape the
character of the work, which in turn progressively modifies the en¬
vironment (Mairet 1957: 28).1
Armed with the approaches of Le Play and Comte, Geddes felt
confident developing his own evolutionary approach to the social
sciences. Taking his cue from Comtean sociology, which sought to
encompass all knowledge, Geddes developed his position as a gener¬
alist and synthesiser of knowledge. He believed he had invented a
new and potentially powerful methodology with which the con¬
nections between all disciplines could be studied (Meller 1990: 45).
Place, work, and people (Geddes replaced 'family’ with ‘people’ or
‘folk’) have, in his scheme not to be ‘separately analysed as into geo¬
morphology, the market economics and the cranial anthropology
which still go on, in necessary detachment from each other. . . .
Within the single chord of social life all three combine’ (Geddes 1968:
267). He argued that geography, economics, and anthropology were
so closely related that their union within sociology was sure to yield
rich results.

1 Branford and Geddes call Le Play the father of scientific regionalism. His
line of reasoning began with the soil and its natural products; it continued
with man, the creature of work and place; it culminated in man the builder of
cities and creator of arts and sciences. It returned through all the ups and downs
to the renewal or the destruction of the soil, as the case may be, by man’s action.
The tale of that cycle, they observe, is the history of civilisation (Branford and
Geddes 1917: 92).
 PATRICK GEDDES 177

In academic sociology, Geddes, alongside people such as Victor

Branford and J.A. Thomson, belonged to a school of civics socio¬
logists which attempted to reassert the importance of environmental
factors in human evolution. This school refuted any attempt to set
heredity and environment in opposition. It sought to popularise the
sociological method of Le Play and £to establish the city as a natural
phenomenon. It transcended the nature/nurture categorisation ‘since
the city expressed the evolutionary process in geographical space
and historical time’ (Halliday 1968: 380). Hence, it is remarked that
for this school ‘sociology was the science of mans interaction with
a natural environment; the basic technique was the regional survey,
and the improvement of town planning the chief practical application
of sociology5 (ibid.). »^=r=- -
In general, for Geddes, a founder-member of the British Socio¬
logical Society in 1903, sociology had to have a definite practical
purpose. Sociologists were to be people of action who took part in
the evolutionary struggle between society and environment so that
positive tendencies were identified and encouraged and negative/
destructive tendencies repressed. The idea was to plan, by application
of laws of nature or social evolution, so that better ways of life might
be devised. These were not mere fanciful utopias; being rooted in
evolutionary tendencies, they could be realised if one planned with
foresight. In contrast to utopian proposals, which are essentially
without definite place and therefore futile, utopias of place (i.e. re¬
gional) are realisable (Branford and Geddes 1917: 250). To Geddes,
utopia really meant making the best of each place ‘in actual and pos¬
sible fitness and beauty5 (Branford and Geddes 1919: 87).

III. GEDDES AND THE CITY

Geddes5 objective in establishing civics as applied sociology, it is ob¬

served, was ‘to dispel the fear of cities and mass urbanisation, and to
release the creative responses of individuals towards solving modern
urban problems5. He pioneered a sociological approach to the study
of urbanisation, discovered that the city could be studied in the
context of region, that the process of urbanisation could be analysed,
and that the application of such knowledge could enhance life in the
178 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

future (Meller 1990:1). He believed that the best method for studying
the city was to begin, on the one hand, with ‘its geographical location,
and, on the other, with the ‘evolution of its historical and cultural
traditions’ (ibid.: 144). In his words,‘to decipher the origins of cities
in the past, and to unravel their life processes in the present. . . are
indispensable ... for every student of civics’ (Geddes 1915: 4).
Theoretically, Geddes proposed that just as the stone age is now
distinguished into two periods, paleolithic and neolithic, so also the
industrial age requires distinction into two phases, an earlier one,
paleotechnic, and the nascent one, neotechnic. The former was char¬
acterised by the dissipation of stupendous resources of energy and
materials, great wealth and poverty, and crowded, dreary industrial
towns. The latter, with its better use of resources and population to¬
wards improving humans and their environment together, seeks the
creation of‘city by city, region by region, of its Utopia, each a place
of effective health and well-being, even of glorious and . .. unprece¬
dented beauty’ (Geddes 1915: 73).
When Geddes began his work in the mid-1880s, industrialisation
and urbanisation had profoundly altered the relation between human
beings and their environment. Geddes belonged to a generation of
writers and thinkers who had developed a critique of the industrial
revolution and its social consequences (Meller 1990: 3-4). He sensed
unrest—especially among the youth of his times, who were disturbed
by the consequences of industrialisation and urbanisation. The unrest
was variously manifest in unemployment and mis-employment,
disease and folly, vice and apathy, indolence and crime (Geddes 1915:
86).
His critique was, however, not that of a romantic, but of a scientist
who wanted to analyse and understand the process of urbanisation.
The purpose of acquiring such knowledge was to direct change, away
from what was destructive and towards the betterment of the life of
individual and community, towards ‘city development’—in his own
words, ‘to criticise the city of the present, and to make provision for
its betterment’. His Cities in evolution (1915), is regarded as an
outstanding introduction to the study of city as an organism. Geddes
was the first writer to see slums not simply as something ugly and
unhealthy, and therefore to be wiped out, but as a ‘living part of the
 PATRICK CEDDES 179

city’ with a past and a future which makes sense in ‘relation to the
whole1 (Summerson 1963: 167).
In Geddes1 vision, plans were to aid the improvement of existing
cities towards ‘cleanliness, good order, good looks’; conservation of
nature was not only for recreation and repose but for the hills, rivers,
and forests which are essential for ‘maintenance and development
of life, of the life of youth and of the health of all’; and both were di¬
rected towards a greater interaction between town and countryside
(Summerson 1963: 94). He believed that in the new period of social
and political evolution, within which reconstructions of the city were
taking place, new ideals of citizenship and a sense of human fellow¬
ship and helpfulness would also emerge. These would express them¬
selves in greater participation in the improvement of the city in the
long-term interest of enhancement of life of all citizens. In a sense,
Geddes’ goal, which transcended the boundaries of conservation,
planning, or even geography, was geotechnic, i.e. the applied science
of making the earth more habitable. For Geddes, achieving a new
equilibrium between a natural and man-made world which went
beyond physical environmental planning to cultural evolution, was
precisely the challenge of modern civilisation (Meller 1990: 13).

IV. THE OUTLOOK TOWER AND OTHER

EXPERIMENTS

An early experiment carried out in pursuit of his civic crusade was

to move into a rundown workers’ tenement in Edinburgh with his
newly married wife, and improve and beautify it. The couple also
founded the first student halls of residence in Scotland. A more fan¬
tastic experiment, however, was given expression in the Outlook
Tower, ‘the world’s first sociological laboratory’, founded in 1892. It
was conceived by Geddes as a civic and regional museum, the idea
being to educate people to understand their region and the larger
environment in all its complexity and from all possible viewpoints.
As Philip Abrams puts it, the Outlook Tower, with its collection of
maps, photographs, projections, demonstrations by means of‘camera
obscura’, and ad hoc lectures,‘was the most brilliant of Geddes’ many
attempts at an action sociology’—a presentation of the sociological
180 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

dimension of cities, urban problems, and town planning (Abrams

1968:66).
Tours conducted by Geddes through the Tower began with the
camera obscura on top of the dome, which reflected the panoramic
outside view in a series of images, like moving pictures—the way an
artist would see it. Then, from the observation balcony outside,
Geddes would show how a meteorologist, geologist, geographer,
zoologist, and botanist would look at the region. To illustrate each
of the outlooks, he set up instruments or specimens, as seemed
required. What existed, therefore, was a kind of index museum, re¬
presenting everything that the natural sciences knew about this
region, which extended from the Highlands and Pentland Hills down
to the Firth of Forth and the North Sea. Next came the outlook of
historians, literary scholars, and men of action like engineers and
planners engaged in reshaping the environment. Their methods of
observation and samples of their studies were also displayed (Board-
man 1976: 4-5).
The storey under the camera obscura was devoted to Edinburgh
and the surrounding region. Prints, maps, sketches, and photographs
were displayed here, showing the city’s chronological history from
pre-Roman times to the nineteenth century. There were also cons¬
tructive plans showing how its defects could be remedied and how
its heritage of culture and art could be preserved, for, as Geddes put
it, 'after regional survey should come regional service’. The floors
below were devoted to Scotland, the British empire, Europe, and the
world in general.
A diagram showing a landscape from mountain peaks to the sea,
with a text beneath naming the occupation which corresponded to
the particular part of the valley section, was displayed. In this simple
diagram Geddes saw the basic elements of sociology—place, work,
and folk—illustrated. In it he also saw The only valid method by
which to study nature and man in order to improve them both’
(Boardman 1976: 186-7; Fleure 1953: 10).
The Outlook Tower synthesised specialised and even conflicting
viewpoints. It also served to highlight all aspects of a place, its ugli¬
ness, poverty, and crime against its heritage of scenic beauty, natural
resources, and human culture. Geddes’ Outlook Tower, it is observed,
 PATRICK GEDDES 181

was far more than a passive repository of knowledge; it was the

outpost from which Geddes launched many projects for civic bet¬
terment and sent out many exhortations in print and in speech to
arouse people to both understanding and action (Ferreira and Jha
1976: 5-6).
The Tower was also Geddes’ alternative to the dull, tedious exami¬
nation-oriented education system which destroyed the creativity of
young minds. Inspired by Le Play who urged social scientists ‘to live
rather than write’, he proposed to educate the young through practical
activities, laboratory work, and field studies. Observation, as opposed
to book learning, was to be the key method of education.

V. GEDDES AS TOWN PLANNER

It must be pointed out at the outset that town planning, which

Geddes called £City Design’, was not a new and special branch of
engineering, or of sanitation, building, architecture, gardening, or
any other fine art, as most people mistakenly believe. It was not a
new specialism added to the existing ones, but a combination of all
of them ‘towards civic well being’ (Geddes 1918,1: 15-16). Here, I
will examine some of Geddes’ ideas on town planning which became
influential among planners. As Geddes’ most distinguished disciple
and follower, Tewis Mumford, points out,c. . . I believe that a sober
historic judgment will show that no other mind had a greater in¬
fluence upon both movements (cities and regionalist) during the
last 50 years. There are many active participators in housing, regional
planning, and city development who do not know what they owe to
him or how many ideas they found “in the air” were originally con¬
ceived by Geddes . .. (Boardman 1976: xi).2

2 Sir Patrick Abercrombie, an architect planner and contemporary of Geddes,

writes that Geddes’ Edinburgh survey led the way in Britain. The survey ap¬
peared in public at the great Town Planning Exhibition in 1910. And, ‘it is safe
to say that the modern practice of planning in this country would have been a
more elementary thing had it not been for the Edinburgh room and all that
this implied. . . . Within the den sat Geddes, a most unsettling person, talking,
talking, talking . . . about everything and anything.’ The visitors could criticise
the show for being a hotchpotch of picture postcards, newspaper cuttings,
 182 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Recognising the significance of the region, Geddes advocated the

‘regional survey' to bring about the reunion of town and country.
The two could then be considered as ‘city regions’, each occupying a
definite geographical area. The big metropolis, he observed, often
grew in wealth and power by exploiting and even exhausting vast
areas with their small towns. The latter became increasingly impov¬
erished, and that was why a worldwide movement for decentralisation
was growing (Tyrwhitt 1947: 29). His notion of regional planning, it
is observed, mediated between the ‘abstractions of universalist plan¬
ning and the parochialism of the locally concrete, and also between
town and country’ (Visvanathan 1987: 21). Yet, that region was far
more central to Geddes’ conception is evident from his plea for a
‘regional outlook’ and ‘regional culture’, whereby a new vision must
arise where people see their life in all its ‘ever widening relations, its
expanding possibilities’, where the personal and the regional, the na¬
tional and the human are reconciled in a common purpose for a
better life. The regional outlook, ‘the rustic, the vital and the ethical’
must increasingly supplement the present ‘too purely urban outlook
with its mechanical, venal and legalistic point of view’ which has so
far dominated politics, education and even science (Boardman and
Geddes 1917:243,249).
To town planning Geddes brought the methods of ‘diagnostic
survey’ and ‘conservative surgery’. The former implied an extensive—
preferably pedestrian—tour of the city, meeting and talking to people
in order to acquaint oneself with how the city had grown and the
problems it faced. Geddes’ ‘diagnosis before treatment’ may seem
obvious today, but the idea was new in town planning at that time.
Addressing a gathering in 1910 he argued: ‘If you . . . wish to shape
effectively the growth of your town, you must first study it, and from
every conceivable point of view. Study its location and means of
communication, its history and culture resources, its industries, com¬
merce and population, and a hundred other factors; in short, make
first a balanced Civic Survey, and then set about drawing plans and

' strange diagrams, crude old woodcuts, archaeological reconstructions. But if

they listened to Geddes’ talk they would no longer feel the same way because
There was something more in town planning than met the eye’ (Abercrombie
1933: 128).
 PATRICK GEDDES 183

passing ordinances’ (Boardman 1944: 248). By his insistence on a

survey to examine the city’s past and present before trying to shape
its future growth, Geddes upset town councillors who wanted quick
results. But through his work Geddes demonstrated that detailed
and thorough surveys could be done without spending too much
time or money.
Conservative surgery, another phrase taken from medical science,
meant improvement of the city with a minimum of human and
financial cost. He believed that every city had its rundown areas,
ugly and unhealthy quarters, congested and narrow lanes which could
be upgraded and renewed without adopting drastic and expensive
measures. These ideas are well illustrated in Geddes’ Indian reports.
He viewed the city as an organism—not as a machine, parts of which
could be easily thrown away. It was this belief which underlay his
argument that it was important to first understand the inner, the
older part of the city which might appear chaotic at first, but in it
‘gradually a higher form of order can be discerned—the order of life
in development.’
In town planning Geddes saw co-operation as the most important
method to solve problems. He believed that while competition was
an essential part of animal and plant, life, co-operation was even
more important in the evolutionary scheme: ‘it is possible to interpret
the ideals of ethical progress through love and sociality, co-operation
and sacrifice, not as mere utopias contradicted by experience, but as
the highest expression of the central evolutionary process of the na¬
tural world’ (quoted from Roe 1995: 77). The idea was to involve
people in improving their surroundings. That he succeeded in doing
so is amply demonstrated by his early experiments, in the Edinburgh
slum referred to earlier and by his Indian experiments, to which we
will now turn. It is important to remember that, underlying his town
planning exercise, was his notion of collaboration between physical
planning and social planning. Therefore, according to Geddes, it was
absolutely necessary for a planner to possess training in sociology.

VI. THE INDIAN EXPERIENCE

Geddes’ earlier engagement and experiments with urban renewal

prompted Tord Pentland, the governor of Madras, to invite him to
184 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

bring his ‘Cities and Town Planning’ exhibition and continue his
educational work in India. Pentland also succeeded in convincing
his friends, Lords Willingdon and Carmichael, governors of Bombay
and Bengal respectively, of the value of Geddes’ work. Geddes was
therefore able to put up his exhibition in important towns. Interest¬
ingly, the original exhibition was lost on its way to India, but Geddes’
friends and supporters in Britain and Europe sent him fresh material
for another, which he took around in India.
Geddes came to India in 1915. During his ten-year stay in the
country, he toured the length and breadth of the subcontinent and
prepared several reports, describing in great detail the nature of urban
problems and the possible ways to overcome them. For the first time
in his life he had an opportunity, in India, to supplement his edu¬
cational and propaganda work with well-paid commissioned town
planning reports. These reports, nearly forty, are said to represent
the first major contribution to the development of modern town
planning in India on a fairly large scale. Geddes is believed to have
done more than any other individual to promote town planning in
India (Meller 1979: 343).
Although Geddes noticed the collapse of the old tradition of town
plans in India, the neglect of sanitary regulations, and encroachments
and congestion everywhere, he paid rich tributes to Indian civilis¬
ation. For example, he was impressed by traditional architecture and
planning in the temple towns of the south. He saw a great deal of
‘civic beauty’ in simple homes and shrines as well as in the magnifi¬
cent palaces and temples. He appreciated some of the features of
Indian homes and towns, such as the proud place given to the vene¬
rated tulsi plant (symbol of the well-kept Hindu home); the shrine
in the courtyard, even the narrow lanes in housing areas which open¬
ed into squares with shade-bearing trees. The narrowness of the lanes,
he found, made for shade and quietness and left the building sites
large enough to enclose courtyards and gardens (Tyrwhitt 1947:
plate 7).
Geddes was often critical of civic officials and engineers whose
interventions for improvement—such as wide, open thoroughfares,
destruction of slum areas, flushed sewers, etc. often resulted not only
in high expenditure but also in great human suffering. Much of the
 PATRICK GEDDES 185

work was in the hands of officers who were not trained for it, who
were unaware of the sociological aspects of the problems, and whose
views on hygiene and sanitation were largely based on European
traditions.3 Their attempts to clean up the city or broaden the roads
often caused eviction and displacement of people, and were, there¬
fore, extremely unpopular (Tyrwhitt 1947: 18-19). This kind of plan¬
ning went against Geddes’ principle that Town planning is not mere
place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful, it
must be folk-planning. This means that its task is not to coerce people
into new places against their associations, wishes and interest—as
we find bad schemes trying to do. Instead its task is to find the right
places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish’
(Geddes 1915: 91).
He condemned a scheme proposed for improvements in Tahore,
which would have demolished temples, mosques, dharamshalas,
tombs, shops, and houses, as indiscriminate destruction of labour
as well as of the cultural values of people (Guha 1992:59). He believed
that an important function of the town planner was not to be a mere
improver of certain streets, however important, at the cost of the
city as a whole. Old buildings and streets ought not be destroyed in
the process (Geddes 1965: 3).
Geddes’ respect for tradition also led him to argue for better main¬
tenance of resources such as tanks and wells. Rather than see them
as malarial hazards, as sanitary officers were inclined to do, Geddes
valued them not only for being an assured source of water but also
for having a positive effect on the atmosphere. Too often the authori¬
ties, impatient at the polluted state of the tanks, had filled them up
instead of taking steps to keep them clean. In Lucknow, for instance,
the engineers had filled up many tanks and water conduits as part of
the campaign to eliminate malaria. In the same year, 1915, heavy

3 It is observed that sanitary and civil engineers seldom questioned their

priorities. Their priorities suited the British; to cut mortality figures by clearing
slums and driving large straight roads through them, as in European cities; fill
up tanks to eliminate mosquitoes; and ensure that the ‘civil lines’ were supplied
with running water, a sewage system and a street cleaner. All this largely benefited
British residents, although it was paid for by a tax on the entire municipality
(Meller 1979: 332).
186 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

monsoons which brought torrential rains caused extensive flooding,

bringing disaster to the city. An easier solution was to stock the tanks
with ‘sufficient fish and duck to keep down the Anopheles’ (Tyrwhitt
1947: plate 25).
Speaking of the great Masunda tank of Thane, Geddes strongly
recommended its improvement not only as a source of water but as
a water park, a beautiful evening resort for the public. He argued
that ‘any and every water system occasionally goes out of order and
is open to accident and injuries of very many kinds, and in these old
wells we inherit an ancient policy of life insurance, of a very real
kind and one far too valuable to be abandoned’ (Geddes 1965: 3).
For Surat he proposed that, by just planting more trees, cutting a
few paths, filling up some unsightly holes, and making a few bridges
from bamboos and branches, a public park could be developed from
the existing‘Nullas’. Young boys and girls could be mobilised as civic
volunteers for the development of the park. No city, he believed, was
too poor to undertake such modest improvements or achieve subs¬
tantial success within half a generation, even without government
help.
Elsewhere, he noted with approval the existence in some cities of
the tradition of a ‘floating car’ accompanied by a ‘water festival’ with
illuminated lanterns. Instead of filling up tanks at the outbreak of
malaria, he advocated the revival of the ‘water festival’, not only
because it was the most joyous form of festival but also the best way
to keep tanks clean. When properly maintained, he found temple
tanks and city tanks ‘the very finest and most beautiful of public
places and public gardens in the world’ (Geddes 1919: 469). He also
defended the ceremonial procession of Lord Jagannath’s ‘car’ which
had obviously come in for a lot of criticism from the authorities. In
it he saw ‘a civic institution and a festival essentially beneficient’. It
encouraged the maintenance of good roads, discouraged perpetual
encroachment upon streets, and, during the collective pull, an ad¬
mirable form of civic education took place (ibid.: 468).
Geddes had come to India with the hope of introducing his doc¬
trine of ‘civic reconstruction’, for modern industrialisation and
urbanisation had just begun in India. To many British administrators,
however, his reconstruction message appeared superfluous and even
 PATRICK GEDDES 187

dangerous. The Indian Civil Service, which provided administrators

for the municipalities, ignored him. After his initial popularity with
liberal governors like Pentland, Willoughby, and Carmichael, he did
not get much support from British administrators, who were gener¬
ally hostile. Meller says 'he remained all his time in India as an out¬
sider, tolerated by the British but not encouraged’ (Meller 1979:204).
But Geddes turned increasingly to the princely rulers of the native
states and came to be regarded as a prophet of civic reconstruction
there. He believed that local knowledge and understanding, along
with consideration and tact, were necessary when dealing with the
requirements of citizens. By deploying the power of social appeal
and civic enthusiasm, the town planner can arouse people to partici¬
pate in schemes of improvement. For plans to succeed, more than
technical expertness and activity, municipal powers and business
methods, were required. 'The town planner fails unless he can become
something of a miracle worker to the people. He must be able to
show them signs and wonders, to abate malaria, plague, enteric, child
mortality and to create wonders of beauty and veritable transform¬
ation scenes’ (Tyrwhitt 1947: 37).
This is exactly what Geddes did for the people of Indore.

VII. THE INDORE EXPERIMENT

Geddes was invited to Indore in 1918 in order to find the means to

improve malaria and plague infestation in the city. The maharaja of
Indore had spent large amounts of money on an alternative system
of water supply for Indore, which was designed to flush water through
the sewers and thereby remove the cause of plague. In spite of the
effort and expenditure, the scheme had not succeeded. Geddes was
consulted, and after ten months of thorough investigation he pre¬
pared a two-volume report discussing the issues of water supply and
drainage, health and disease, and gardens and parks in Indore, in
great detail. More importantly, he proposed the establishment of a
new university which would train students for civic reconstruction
in Indore and elsewhere. But leaving aside the serious issues discussed
in the two volumes, let us look at a delightful experiment Geddes
carried out to get rid of the dreadful plague.
188 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

As he went around the dusty lanes trying to identify problem areas,

the local people are said to have shown signs of open hostility. For
them the sight of a white sahib going around with a map forbode
trouble in the form of demolition, eviction, and so on. The hostility
was so great that Geddes saw people point at him and say, ‘That’s the
old Sahib that brings the plague.’ Taking it as a challenge, Geddes
went to the ruling prince of Indore and asked to be made maharaja
for a day. Having got complete authority to pursue his plans, Geddes
set about his campaign for reconstruction in a novel and efficient
manner. He spread the news all over the city that a new kind of page¬
ant and festival would take place on Diwali day. Diwali being an
important religious festival, but above all it being that ‘annual in¬
surrection of the women from which all men can but flee’—known
all over the world as spring cleaning—the new festive procession, it
was announced, would not follow either the traditional Hindu or
Muslim route through the city, but the one along which most houses
had been repaired and cleaned. Priests were involved in having the
roads outside the temples cleaned, repaired, and planted with trees.
Free collection and removal of rubbish was organised, and over 6000
loads were carted away from homes and courtyards. Rats were trap¬
ped by the thousand in the city. At the same time, much house re¬
pairing, cleaning, and painting were carried out all over Indore, for
everyone wanted the procession to pass along their street.
On Diwali day a grand procession took place. First came the stir¬
ring spectacle of the cavalry, the infantry, and the artillery of state.
Then came elephants carrying cotton and other important crops,
rich merchants, and the goddess Lakshmi symbolising prosperity
and wealth. Soon there followed a dismal scene of poverty, crumbling
houses, demons of dirt, and giant-sized models of rats and mosqui¬
toes accompanied by dreadful wailing and melancholy. After a brief
break came cheerful music heading the long line of sweepers in spot¬
less white, with new brooms and freshly painted carts. Behind the
sweepers marched a civic procession of labourers, firemen and police,
officials, the mayor, and the maharaja, Geddes himself, and after
them, enthroned on a stately car, a new goddess evoked for the occa¬
sion, namely Indore City. Her banner bore the name of the city on
the one side, and on the other a city plan showing the proposed
 PATRICK GEDDES 189

changes to be made. Next came carts representing all the crafts, on

which craftsmen acted out their parts. Carts loaded with fruits and
flowers, which were distributed among the children, followed. The
last of these contained thousands of pots with seedlings of the tulsi
plant to be distributed among the households of Indore. This novel
procession passed through almost every part of the city, finally ending
at midnight in a public park where the giant replicas of the dirt and
rats of plague were burned in a great bonfire. After the symbolic
destruction of these enemies, the festival was brought to a close with
a grand display of fireworks.
The effect of the exercise was immediately apparent. A new enthu¬
siasm and confidence spread among the people to be clean and beau¬
tify their homes and surroundings. Above all, the plague came to an
end, partly because the city had been cleaned up, and partly, no doubt,
because the season was over. Geddes became a leading figure in
Indore. When people saw him, they now pointed at him and said
‘There’s the old Sahib that’s charmed away the plague’ (Boardman
1944:386-90).
Geddes demonstrated unquestioning faith in people’s support and
participation in any real improvement of their surroundings. To the
allegation, probably often made by administrators, that people did
not care for improvement, Geddes replied: ‘Everywhere in the slums
we see women toiling and sweeping, each struggling to maintain
her poor little home above the distressingly low level of municipal
paving and draining in the quarter. The fault does not lie with the
people and I have no fear that people of the cities would not respond
to improvements. The immediate problem is for municipal and
central government to understand what improvements really are
needed and desired’ (Geddes 1915: 82).

VIII. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Geddes combined several disciplines—biology, sociology, geography,

town planing—to develop his approach to the interaction between
human beings and their natural environment. He also combined
several activities—lectures, exhibitions, demonstrations, writings and
pageants—to propagate his ideas of civic reconstruction with total
190 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

devotion and indefatigable energy. Interestingly, his biographer

writes, his Tierce energy and wild enthusiasm’ was balanced by his
wife’s ‘calm level-headedness and a strong common sense’. While he
indulged in grandiose and expensive schemes, she took the res¬
ponsibility of working out the practical details on which their success
depended (Meller 1990: 7).4In this context, it is of interest to note
Geddes’ ideas on women, which he developed in his monograph
titled The evolution of sex, with J.A. Thomson. According to him,
women played a vital role in social evolution as wives and mothers.
‘Their nurturing tendencies shaped the economic and social environ¬
ment, creating ever higher levels of civilisation’ (Meller 1990: 83).
Such a view will not find much support today!
Geddes was essentially a crusader, acutely aware of the need for
transformation from the machine and the money economy of the
industrial age to one of life and civilisation. He asks the rhetorical
question: ‘May not the pursuit of personal wealth grow less exigent
as we gain a social well-being expressed in betterment of environment
and enrichment of life?’ (Geddes and Slater 1917: vii). He believed
that in the coming age of ‘life economy’, people will be creative in
proportion as two conditions are satisfied: the inner life of people
must be enriched and opportunities must be provided to all, ir¬
respective of class, rank, or sex, for the development of personality
through citizenship. The university is called upon to play a vital role
in the moral and intellectual transformation of the people, the city,
and the region. It must not only give rise to the new doctrine but
plan and aid its practical application, so that unity of thought and
purpose may develop together in a common citizenship (ibid.: xii).
Geddes and his collaborators dared to hope that the university may
hasten the coming of this dawn by preparing the translation of dream
into deed—the dream of creating utopia, fulfilling the high ideals of
the past, emancipation and renewal of lands, cities and people
(Branford and Geddes 1919: 377). Ironically, this was just what the

4 Meller also tells us that Geddes tried to keep alive the ‘romantic’ element in
his marriage by occasionally writing special love letters to his wife. Although
he started by professing undying affection, he always ended with a general dis¬
cussion of environmental problems (Meller 1979: 8).
 PATRICK GEDDES 191

English universities did not do. Geddes believed that with their
narrow-minded specialism and academism, sociology was not the
sort of thing they would promote.
Geddes’ interdisciplinary approach, his eclecticism, his attempt
to unite in himself the scientist and the artist, the academic and the
planner, the dreamer and the doer, made him and his ideas too com¬
plex for lesser mortals to comprehend. The fact that these ideas were
expressed through highly unconventional modes did not make it
any easier. He had his loyal friends and supporters, among them
many women, who promoted and propagated his work with much
zeal. But by and large, in his own time, as also subsequently, Geddes
did not enjoy the recognition that was his due. This was probably
because, in the days of high specialisation, Geddes tried to be a syn¬
thesiser of knowledge, believing that specialised knowledge was
inadequate to grasp the ever-increasing complexity of life. He be¬
longed to many disciplines, and each of them could claim him. While
this quality sometimes left his contemporaries bewildered, upset,
and even outraged, rendered his ideas somewhat confusing, and was
probably the reason why he did not fit into academia, it was also
undoubtedly his greatest strength. He traversed many arenas of the
natural and social sciences and was equally comfortable in the lecture
hall and with people on the street, giving everywhere his message of
the possibility and desirability of improvement of cities, regions, and
life itself.5
Lewis Mumford sees this as one reason why Geddes failed to make
an adequate impression on his contemporaries, although che was
one of the seminal minds of the last century’. Geddes shunned pub¬
licity, but more important, Mumford emphasises, 'he practised
synthesis in an age of specialism and stood for the insurgence of life
in a world that submitted even more fully to the gods of mechanised
routine’ (Mumford 1944b: viii). His most important insights were
never written down; he had distrust for what he called the modern

5 Official honours were given to Geddes for his contributions. In 1911, a

knighthood for ‘town planning’ was offered to Geddes, who turned it down for
‘democratic reasons’. Again, in 1932, just before his death, he was offered a
knighthood for his service to education. This he accepted.
192 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

habit of‘verbalistic empaperment’. And what was written was often

in a style difficult to take. But then, as Mumford points out, that was
not his main purpose:

Geddes coupled thought to action, and action to life, and life itself to
all the highest manifestations of sense, feeling, and experience. . . .Mans
existence did not stay at the biological level of organism, function and
environment, nor even at the tribal or folk level of folk, work, and place:
man perpetually renewed himself and transcended himself by means
of that heritage of ideal values, of self surpassing purposes, which are
covered by the terms polity, culture, and art. . . . For Geddes life had
more than its animal destiny of reproduction and physical survival: it
had a high destiny, that of revamping out of nature’s original materials,
with the help of nature’s original patterns a more perfectly harmonised,
a more finely tuned, a more balanced expression of both personality
and community. (Mumford 1944a: 384)

Mumford’s prophesy was that if our generation manages to live

down its automatisms and mechanisms and sadisms, its debilitating
financial parasitism and its fatal moral complacency—if it actually
escapes the necropolis it has prepared for itself—in short, if the forces
of life once more become dominant, the figure of Geddes will stand
forth as perhaps the central prophet of the new age. There could, in
his view, be no better symbol of Life Insurgent and Humanity Resur¬
gent than Patrick Geddes (Mumford 1944b: xiv).

REFERENCES

Abrams, Philip. 1968. The origins of British sociology—1834-1914. Chicago: Uni¬

versity of Chicago Press.
Abercrombie, Sir Patrick. 1933. Town and country planning. London: Oxford
University Press.
Boardman, Philip. 1944. Patrick Geddes: Maker of the future. Chapel Hill: Uni¬
versity of North Carolina Press.
Branford, Victor and Patrick Geddes. 1917. The coming polity (The making of
the future series). London: Williams and Norgate.
-. 1919. Our social inheritance (The making of the future series). London:
Williams and Norgate.
 PATRICK GEDDES 193

Ferreira, J.V. and S.S. Jha, eds. 1976. The Outlook Tower: Essays on urbanisation
in memory of Patrick Geddes. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
Fleure, H.J. 1953. Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). The sociological review (N.S.)
1,2.
Geddes, Patrick. 1915. Report on the towns in the Madras Presidency. Madras.
-. 1918. Town planning towards city development: A report to the Durbar
of Indore, vols. 1 and II. Indore: Holkar State Printing Press.
-. 1919. The temple cities. The modern review 25, 3.
-. 1965. Report on replanning of six towns in Bombay Presidency, 1915.
Bombay: Government Central Press.
-. 1968. Sociology as civics. In Philip Abrams, The origins of British socio¬
logy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-, and Gilbert Slater. 1917. Ideas at war (The making of the future series).
London: Williams and Norgate.
Guha, Ramachandra. 1992. Prehistory of Indian environmentalism: Intellectual
traditions. Economic and political weekly 27, 1&2: 57-64.
Halliday, R.J. 1968. The sociological movement: The Sociological Society and
the genesis of academic sociology in Britain. The sociological review 16, 3:
377-98.
Mairet, Philip. 1957. Pioneer of sociology: The life and letters of Patrick Geddes.
London: Lund Flumphries.
Meller, H.E. 1979. Urbanisation and the introduction of modern town planning
ideas in India, 1900-25. In K.N. Chaudhuri and Clive J. Dewey, eds, Economy
and society: Essays in Indian economic and social history, pp. 330-50. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Meller, Helen. 1990. Patrick Geddes: Social evolutionist and city planner. London:
Routledge.
Mumford, Lewis. 1944a. The condition of man. London: Martin Seeker and War¬
burg.
-. 1944b. Introduction. In Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes: Maker of
the future. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Roe, Bjorn. 1995. Look to Patrick Geddes—A contemporary guide for planners.
In Synthesis of tradition and modernity for a sustainable society. EDP 95,
CAAIWSE conference document. Bombay: Rudra Sansthapan Publication.
Summerson, Sir John. 1963. Urban forms. In Oscar Handlin and John Burchard,
eds, The historian and the city. Mass.: MIT Press.
Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline. 1947. Patrick Geddes in India. London: Lund Humphries.
Visvanathan, Shiv. 1987. On ancestors and epigones. Seminar, 330: 14-24.
 The Idea of Indian Society
G.S. Ghurye and the Making of
Indian Sociology1

Carol Upadhya

SOCIOLOGY WAS ESTABLISHED AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

in India during the late colonial period and developed rapidly after
independence with the growth of the university system and the
founding of research institutions. Unlike anthropology, which was
introduced into the country primarily as an adjunct of the colonial
state, sociology retained from its inception a degree of autonomy

1 I am very grateful to several people for their help at various stages in the
production of this essay. In particular, I have to thank Dr S. Devadas Pillai,
who generously shared with me his time and extensive knowledge of Ghurye’s
work and life and gave detailed comments on an earlier draft. I am grateful
also to Dr Manorama Savur for sharing the results of her own unfinished work
on the history of the Bombay University Sociology Department. Thanks also
go to Veronique Benei, Mahesh Gavaskar, Ramachandra Guha, Sujata Patel,
Kashi Ram, Nandini Sundar, and A.R. Vasavi for their advice and comments
on various drafts. The present essay draws on an earlier one on Ghurye presented
at the National Workshop on ‘Knowledge, institutions, practices: The formation
of Indian anthropology and sociology1 held at the Institute of Economic Growth,
Delhi, 19-21 April 2000, and on a presentation at the National Institute for Ad¬
vanced Studies in Bangalore in November 2001. I thank the participants of
both seminars for their comments. Remaining errors of fact and interpretation
are of course my own.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 195

Fig. 6: Portrait of G.S. Ghurye. (Photograph courtesy N.R. Pillai,

University of Bombay)

vis-a-vis political authority. This autonomy was reflected in the con¬

cerns of the first generation of Indian sociologists who, like other
English-educated intellectuals, were caught up in the political and
intellectual currents of their times, in particular the nationalist
196 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

movement. Their overriding preoccupation with the nation was re¬

flected in the ways in which sociology—as the discipline most con¬
cerned with understanding Indian society—defined itself. While
sociology started out with a nationalist agenda, it was later reshaped
by the postcolonial ideologies of economic development and national
integration. There has been some discussion of the ways in which
sociology was moulded by these dominant ideologies, but a deeper
investigation of the growth of the discipline and its key ideas within
the context of these overarching discursive regimes is still required.
Moreover, little attention has been paid to the structuring of sociolo¬
gical practices by the institutional contexts in which the discipline
became embedded and through which knowledge was produced and
reproduced.
In writing the history of sociology and social anthropology in
India, the institutions and personalities of the 'Bombay School’ must
find a central place. The Department of Sociology at Bombay Univer¬
sity was for many years the premier department in the country, and
the head of the department during this period (1924-59), G.S.
Ghurye, is often referred to as the 'father of Indian sociology’. Ghurye
is most remembered for his leading role in the institutionalisation
and professionalisation of the discipline in the country. He built up
the Bombay department practically from scratch, and during his
thirty-five years as head he produced a large number of PhD and
MA students, including several of the most prominent sociologists
of the next generation. He also founded and ran the Indian Sociologi¬
cal Society and its journal, Sociological bulletin. Although Ghurye’s
Indological or cultural historical approach to sociology was soon
superseded by structure-functionalism, he and his students left a
distinctive stamp on the way in which sociology is practised in India.
Much has already been written about Ghurye, and yet another
essay on this founding father requires some justification.2 First, most
of the work on him is biographical, cursory, or laudatory. Just as the

2 See Momin (1996), Narain (1979), Pillai (1997), Pramanick (1994), and
Venugopal (1986, 1993). In addition to the Ghurye centennial volume edited
by Momin, there have been two festschrifts for Ghurye—Kapadia (1954) and
Pillai (1976)—which include some discussion of his work.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 197

history of Indian sociology is yet to be written, there is no compre¬

hensive account of Ghurye’s place in that history or of his intellectual
development. Second, by taking a fresh look at the work of Ghurye
and his department, I hope not only to place on record some pre¬
viously unrecorded aspects of this chapter in the history of Indian
sociology, but also to reflect on the character of Indian sociology
and its representations of Indian society. An understanding of the
evolution of Ghurye’s thought may throw some light on how and
why Indian sociology became what it is today. The excavation of
sociology’s past should provide not only a better understanding of
the development of its key ideas, but also contribute to the develop¬
ment of reflexivity about the discipline and its role in the production
of knowledge about society. This task is all the more relevant given
that sociology in India is often characterised as being in a state of
crisis—mechanically reproducing stale ideas, producing third-rate
research, and unable or unwilling to address pressing contemporary
problems,3 Perhaps by historicising Indian sociology and its repre¬
sentations of Indian society, we can begin to understand the reasons
for this impasse and search for ways out.
In this essay I attempt to understand Ghurye’s place within the
history of Indian sociology by examining both the development of
his intellectual orientation and his role as institution builder and
teacher, for it is within institutions that his ideas have been concre¬
tised and disseminated. It is possible here only to touch upon some
of the significant points within these two broad issues. First, I attempt
to locate the roots of Ghurye’s ideas by situating him within the
context of early twentieth-century Maharashtra and examining his
education and other intellectual influences. I then trace the develop¬
ment and dissemination of his distinctive approach to sociology
through his work and that of his students, and its institutionalisation
through syllabi, examinations, and dissertations. Finally, I point to
how this history, especially the imbrication of sociology within
nationalist discourse, can provide some insight into the problems
and contradictions faced by the discipline today.

3 See Das (1993), Deshpande (1994), Rege (1994), and Uberoi (2000).
198 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

I. INTELLECTUAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS

OF THE BOMBAY SCHOOL

Ghurye and the Elphinstone Tradition

Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1893-1983) was born on 12 December

1893 in Malvan, a town in the Konkan coastal region of western India,
into a Saraswat Brahmin family.4 Ghurye’s family owned a trading
business, and although his great-grandfather had been prosperous
the family’s fortunes were on the decline by the time he was born,
Ghurye was believed to be a reincarnation of his grandfather, a deeply
religious man who had died shortly before his birth, and the young
Ghurye was expected to carry on the family traditions of worship
(Ghurye 1973: 3-8). The training he received in the performance of
rituals provided his first introduction to Sanskrit, the language that
was to become central to his sociological work.
From his earliest years Ghurye was a dedicated student, and he
recounts with pride in his autobiography (Ghurye 1973) his success
in various examinations. His perseverance brought him in 1913 to
Elphinstone College in Bombay, the oldest and most reputed college
in the city, founded in 1835. Elphinstone was a major source of the
new class of Western-educated intellectuals and professionals that
emerged from the middle of the nineteenth century in western India,
including several prominent leaders such as M.G. Ranade, Dadabhai
Naoroji, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (Ahmad 1998; Dobbin 1972).5 In
the nineteenth century the professors were predominantly British

4 The Saraswat Brahmins, a traditionally literate but non-priestly caste, were

by profession village accountants who acted as administrators under the
Marathas and became powerful under the Peshwas. With the establishment of
British rule, many Saraswats turned to English education and found employ¬
ment in Bombay and other towns of western India, forming part of the new
Western-educated elite of the region, along with Chitpavan Brahmins, Prabhus,
and Parsis (Dobbin 1972: 6, 31).
5 The first session of the Indian National Congress in Bombay was dominated
by Elphinstone intellectuals who had been active in previous decades in Bom¬
bay’s social and political associations—Naoroji, Telang, Mehta, Tyabji, Gokhale,
and others. On social reform and the emergence of nationalism in western
India, see Dobbin (1972) and Johnson (1973).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 199

and European, including many from Oxford and Cambridge (Ahmad

1998:400), who self-consciously sought to create an intellectual elite
by imparting a classical English education in the arts and sciences
and introducing students ‘to the habits of independent thought’
(ibid.: 405).6 Elphinstone was also a centre of intellectual and political
activity. The students learned not only the literature and history of
Europe but also the principles of English liberalism, and they were
encouraged to apply Western rationalist criticism to the social reform
of their society—a process that ended in a critique of colonial rule
itself.7 Exposure to European classical history led students to seek
parallel institutions and ideas in their own history: for instance,
Ranade’s desire to write the history of his own ‘nation’, the Maratha
empire (see Ranade 1961), was born during his student days. The
appointment of the first professor of Sanskrit in 1862 further stimu¬
lated students’ interest in India’s ancient past (Dobbin 1972: 75):
R.G. Bhandarkar, a renowned Sanskrit scholar, trained a generation
of Elphinstone students (Dandekar 1999).8 A greater awareness of
Indian history and Hindu thought fed into the emerging discourse
of social reform that constructed Indian society as an ancient

6 They also ‘required every statement or criticism advanced on any occasion

to be supported and verified by original reference to the text of the work itself,
to prevent mere second-hand opinion being mouthed’ (communication from
a professor to the principal, quoted in Ahmad 1998: 405), a pedagogical strategy
also typical of Ghurye, who required his students to substantiate every point
with original textual references.
7 The Students’ Literary and Scientific Society at Elphinstone, founded in
1848 to promote the discussion and dissemination of scientific and social topics,
spawned many of the educational and reformist associations that were later
established by Elphinstonians such as M.G. Ranade. See Ahmad (1998: 406),
Dobbin (1972: 53-5), and Naregal (2000: 48-9; 2001: 233-9). Naregal points
out that ‘[m]odern liberal ideas travelled to the subcontinent mainly through
the official project of education’ (2000: 18), and that access to these new
discourses was crucial to the hegemony of the new intelligentsia. Their ideologi¬
cal influence was far-reaching, including not only the formation of nationalism
but also a particular conception of Indian society that is reiterated in Ghurye’s
sociology.
8 On the reintroduction of Sanskrit as a literary language in higher education
in the 1850s, see Naregal (2001: 143-4).
200 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

civilisation with a glorious past that had become corrupted and re¬
quired reconstitution.
Although the heyday of the social reform movements and the in¬
tellectual ferment centred round Elphinstone were over by the time
Ghurye came to the college in 1913, much of the Elphinstone culture
remained, tempered by the rising tide of nationalism. There were
still several British professors in the college from whom he learned
European history, English literature, ethics, and philosophy (Ghurye
1973: 26), and he studied Sanskrit with S.R. Bhandarkar, son of R.G.
Bhandarkar. Ghurye does not indicate in his autobiography why he
chose the Sanskrit Elonours course for his graduation, but he does
mention that his choice of college fell ‘naturally5 on Elphinstone,
which was ‘well-known for its Sanskrit professors, Library and its
prestige with the Government5 (ibid.: 25).9 He writes: ‘The Library
hall. . . with the huge oil-paint portraits of Justice M.G. Ranade,
Principal Wordsworth and others . . . looking over the splendid
collection of books, well preserved in fine wooden cupboards with
glass panes . . . was an exciting experience to me5 (ibid.: 26). Ghurye
completed his BA examinations in 1916, winning the Bhau Daji Prize
for the best Sanskrit student (ibid.: 31). He was appointed Fellow of
the College and read Sanskrit and English for the MA examination
of 1918, in which he got a first class and won the Chancellor’s Gold
Medal (ibid.: 31,34). When he began to study law at Bombay Univer¬
sity after completing his MA, he was invited to join Elphinstone as
Assistant to the Lecturer in Sanskrit (ibid.: 35).
It is difficult to gauge the impact of the Elphinstone brand of
education on the young Ghurye. Although most scholars regard his
training in Sanskrit as the greatest influence on his thought prior to
his move to Cambridge, Ghurye also appreciated what he saw as the
achievements of modern Europe as well as of the other classical civil¬
isations—an attitude that may be traced to his Elphinstone ex¬
perience. According to Srinivas (1996: 6), Ghurye ‘believed that the
modern British were the successors to the culture of the ancient
Greeks . .. One of his favourite books was Clive Bells Civilisation . . .’.

9 At the time Ghurye was a student, the study of Sanskrit was considered to
be a matter of pride and hence not an unusual choice (Desai 1981: 15).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 201

Although he has been labelled an Anglophile (Narain 1996: 21; Sri-

nivas 1996:6), Ghurye was also a proud Indian—an apparent contra¬
diction perhaps not unusual in men of his background and gene¬
ration.

The Establishment of Sociology at Bombay

Ghurye turned from Sanskrit to sociology when in 1919 the Univer¬

sity of Bombay advertised scholarships for training in sociology and
economics abroad. The scholarships were intended to help fill posi¬
tions in the newly established School of Research in Economics and
Sociology, because ‘qualified persons with adequate research training
in Economics and Sociology were not easily available’ (Tikekar 1984:
121). Ghurye applied for the scholarship in sociology and was
selected, while C.N. Vakil won the scholarship for training in eco¬
nomics. Both men returned to Bombay after completing their studies
in England and were appointed to the faculty of the new University
School, Vakil in 1921 and Ghurye in 1924 as Reader in Sociology
(ibid.).
Because Ghurye’s training in sociology was made possible by the
Government of India’s decision to establish a School of Research in
Economics and Sociology at the university, the background to this
development is of some interest here. The proposal was first made
by the GO! in 1914 and the grant of Rs 12,000 was accepted by the
University Senate in the same year (Dongerkery 1957: 59). The ra¬
tionale for this decision is given in a letter from the Educational
Department of the Government of Bombay: ‘GOI considers there is
vast field for detailed investigation. ... [T]he aim of sociological
history of India would be to arrive at the conditions which have
made the politics, the religion and the general structure of Indian
society in its distinctive features . . .’ (letter no. 2677 dated 18 Sep¬
tember 1913, to Registrar of Bombay University, quoted in Savur
n.d.: 13). However, the scheme submitted by the Syndicate to the
Senate was approved only in 1918, with the understanding that the
School would be a research and not merely a teaching department
(Dongerkery 1957:242). The objective of establishing the School, in
the view of the University Senate, was ‘to promote the study of Indian
202 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

social institutions with reference to their effects on the economic

and industrial life of the people and to conduct research in economics
and sociology’ (from senate resolution, quoted in Setalvad 1946:211).
The government’s concern about the rising tide of nationalism may
have stimulated its interest in initiating sociological research in India,
and especially in Bombay, a centre of nationalist agitation. The autho¬
rities were also alarmed about the broader surge of radical political
activity’ at this time, especially the rise of trade unionism among
Bombay’s mill workers.10 Perhaps they believed that social research
on urban and industrial issues would help to formulate policies to
deal with the unrest. This was the view held at least by some members
of the university senate, who suspected the motives of the government
in introducing sociology. According to Ghuryefmany Senators look¬
ed at Sociology with a queer eye, particularly as the urge to its cultiva¬
tion had come from the anti-national British Indian Government at
the Centre’ (Ghurye 1973: 60). However, as discussed below, under
Ghurye’s guidance the Bombay Sociology Department played a very
different role from that envisioned by the government.
Patrick Geddes, who was already actively involved in town plan¬
ning activities in India, was appointed as the first Professor of Socio¬
logy (to which he added 'and Civics’) in 1919, while K.T. Shah was
appointed Professor of Economics in 1921 (Dongerkery 1957: 59).11
Geddes, a well-known urbanist and sociologist, must have seemed
the ideal choice as the first Professor and Head of Sociology at Bom¬
bay,12 but he did not leave a significant mark on the department.

10 This is Manorama Savur’s argument (n.d.). The Viceroy reported to the

Secretary of State in 1920 that Bombay was the ‘chief danger-point’ of social
unrest in India and that the city was experiencing ‘a sort of epidemic strike
fever’ (quoted in Hazareesingh 2000: 821).
11 Geddes first came to India in 1914 by invitation of the Governor of Madras
along with his Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. In 1915 he brought the
exhibition to Bombay and gave a series of public lectures on ‘The study of
Bombay’. Between 1916 and 1918 he produced his well-known series of town
surveys and also lectured in sociology at the University of Calcutta. Subsequently
he was offered the post of Professor of Civics and Sociology at the University
of Bombay, when he was 65. (See the preceding essay in the present volume.)
12 That the School was intended to concentrate on urban problems is
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 203

There were few students, and the terms of his contract allowed him
to be absent for six months of the year on his planning work. Geddes
left India in 1924 at the end of his five-year contract, possibly under
pressure.13
In his autobiography Ghurye gives little insight into his decision
to apply for the sociology scholarship, except to note: ‘My study of
the Manusmriti at the B.A. with its eight forms of marriage and the
dictum “woman does not deserve freedom” had excited my interest
in the study of some institutions’ (Ghurye 1973: 37). On the advice
of K. Natarajan, editor of the Indian social reformer, he studied
Westermarck’s History of marriage to prepare for the selection (ibid.).
He was called for an interview with Geddes, who asked him to start
reading sociology and attend his seminars. Ghurye was not impressed
by Geddes’ lectures: ‘I could get nothing more out of them than that
place created or dictated work and moulded the people who in their
turn conditioned their own work and both in the process modified
the place’ (ibid.: 38). He found more of interest in Geddes’ writings
and discussions on city planning. For the scholarship selection
Geddes prescribed an essay on ‘Bombay as an urban centre’; Ghurye’s
effort was approved and in 1920 he went to England as a research
scholar in sociology (Dongerkery 1957: 242; Ghurye 1973: 39).

supported by the fact that in 1922 the Syndicate appointed a committee to pre¬
pare a scheme for possible collaboration between the university and the city:
‘The committee, with the help of Professor Patrick Geddes. .. was trying to
visualize the future development of the University and the City which could be
brought about by close co-operation between businessmen, the civic leaders
and the University’ (Dongerkery 1957: 288-9).
13 According to Savur (n.d.: 25), Geddes was censured by the University Senate
in 1920. The reason is not mentioned, but perhaps it was because Geddes
managed to stir up public criticism of the Bombay municipal government’s
performance in tackling urban problems such as housing and sanitation; see
Hazareesingh (2000: 803-7). Ghurye also mentions that the university
authorities were not happy with the functioning ol the department under
Geddes (Ghurye 1973: 58). However, Geddes was already 70 years old when he
left Bombay, and it is likely that he did not want to renew his contract. For
more on Geddes, see Ferreira and Jha (1976) and Munshi (2000; also, this
volume).
204 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Ghurye's Cambridge Experience

Although Ghurye’s scholarship allowed him to study in any foreign

country (Ghurye 1973:41), he went to London because one 'naturally
went in those days to the London School of Economics’ (ibid.: 43).
Geddes had advised him to study under Sidney Webb, but when he
was not able to contact him he approached L.T. Hobhouse, Professor
of Sociology at the London School of Economics, a promi nent socio¬
logist of the evolutionist school and a New Liberal. While in London
Ghurye had some interaction with the LePlay House group—disci¬
ples of Comte, LePlay, and Geddes—but he was not attracted to this
brand of sociology, nor did he like the ‘atmosphere’ at the London
School. Ghurye had to write an essay on his proposed PhD topic for
Hobhouse, but by the time Hobhouse had accepted him as his student
he had decided to leave London (ibid.: 45).14 He wrote to A.C. Had-
don at Cambridge, whose visiting card Geddes had given him, and
through him met W.H.R. Rivers at a meeting of the Royal Society.
That meeting so impressed Ghurye that by the end of it he was ‘dead
certain’ that he would go to Cambridge to study under Rivers (ibid.:
46).
Ghurye does not provide any clues in his writings to explain why
he became disenchanted with Hobhouse and attracted to Rivers. He
*

writes only that he left London because he had ‘come to the conclu¬
sion that the anthropological approach to Sociology was the most
appropriate one’ (Ghurye 1973: 45), and that he was convinced that
he ‘could not get anything worthwhile’ (ibid.: 53) from Hobhouse
or London. Rivers was a famous scholar who had made his reputation
in comparative psychology and later in ethnology. He also had an
India connection, having conducted field research among the Todas
of the Nilgiri Hills in 1902, reported in his well-known book The
Todas (Rivers 1906). Ghurye’s admiration for Rivers is clear in his
autobiography, where he devotes several pages to his encounters with

14 Although Ghurye clearly found Hobhouse uninspiring, his first assign¬

ment as teacher of the young M.N. Srinivas was to require him to write a critical
review of Hobhouse’s Morals in evolution (Srinivas 1973: 136)—inflicted per¬
haps to test Srinivas’ dedication to the discipline.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 205

the great man; he wrote that it was a privilege to meet ‘such an intel¬
lectual luminary once a fortnight1 (Ghurye 1973:46), as was required
of students.
Rivers is remembered in anthropology primarily for his contri¬
butions to methodology: he was a pioneer of field research during
the Torres Straits expeditions, organised by Haddon, and invented
the genealogical method1 for studying kinship systems. He was largely
responsible for the major shift that took place in early-twentieth-
century anthropology from the ‘armchair1 to the ‘field1 (Stocking
1983).lD But by the time Ghurye met him, Rivers had been converted
to the extreme version of diffusionism advocated by G. Elliot Smith
(Kuklick 1991:127;Langham 1981: 119).16 Diffusionism had emerg¬
ed as a critique of late-nineteenth-century evolutionism and enjoyed
a brief but intense period of popularity in England during the period
1910-30. While evolutionism held that every society would eventually
advance towards civilisation, passing through definite stages of cul¬
tural development, diffusionists argued that culture was transmitted
mainly by the migration of different races, and that‘cultural diversity
within an area was prima facie evidence that its inhabitants were a
racially diverse collection of migrant settlers1 (Kuklick 1983: 67).
Following this logic, the leaders of the diffusionist school—Elliot
Smith, W.J. Perry, and Rivers—surmised that civilisation had been

15 In this move, anthropology followed the lead of the natural sciences as

they became professionalised: direct observation of species in their natural
surroundings by the scientist himself became a defining feature of scientific
research (Kuklick 1997). The fetishisation of direct experience through ‘field¬
work’ was to become a hallmark of professional anthropology, which also
became defined primarily as the study of‘primitive’ or non-Western society, in
contrast to sociology, which was more theoretically oriented and concentrated
on the ‘advanced’ societies of the West (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Significantly,
it was A.C. Haddon, a zoologist turned ethnologist, who introduced the term
‘fieldwork’ into anthropology.
16 According to Langham, Rivers had arrived at a diffusionist position inde¬
pendent of Smith, and after they became collaborators Rivers, Smith, and Perry
evolved their theories jointly. However it appears that Smith was the leader of
the group and the author of the most far-fetched ideas (1981:142). See Langham
(1981) for a detailed account of Rivers’ career and the diffusionism controversy.
206 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

invented only once, in ancient Egypt, from where it had been carried
by migrants who conquered and civilised the inferior races (ibid.:
68). This diffusionist argument was perhaps attractive to Ghurye
because it resonated with the established understanding of Indian
history—the Aryan invasion theory-—which traced the origins of
Indian civilisation to the incursion of Indo-Aryan peoples (see the
following section).
Intellectual appeal apart, Rivers was a charismatic personality who
inspired deep devotion among his students. Ghurye too became
attached to Rivers and largely adopted his diffusionist line. One of
the four papers he wrote as part of the PhD requirements, ‘Funerary
monuments of India’, was a test of Smith’s theory of the ‘heliolithic’
culture complex through a study of ‘megalithic’ sites in India.17 An¬
other PhD paper, subsequently his first published paper (1923b),
attempted to trace the ‘Egyptian affinities of Indian funerary practi¬
ces’. Several other early papers, such as ‘Disposal of human placenta’
(1937b), have similar themes. According to Srinivas, Ghurye defended
Rivers’ support of Elliot Smith and Perry on the Egyptian origin of
certain widely dispersed cultural phenomena (1973:135) and‘seems
to have been in the grip of diffusionist ideas even as late as the 1940s’
(Srinivas 1996:3). Ghurye’s dedication to Rivers continued through¬
out his life: he wrote that with the publication of Family and kin in
Indo-European culture (1955a) he had realised a long-standing‘intel¬
lectual dream’ and discharged a debt to his teacher, whose own work
had inspired the book (Ghurye 1973: 155-6).
Ghurye was deeply affected by Rivers’ sudden death in June 1922,
which he regarded as the ‘biggest tragedy’ of his life (Srinivas 1996:
3): ‘With Rivers’ death Cambridge had become a blank for me’
(Ghurye 1973: 53). A.C. Haddon, a key figure in the history of British
anthropology, became his guide, but Ghurye says little about him.
He finished the papers required for the PhD soon after Rivers’ death
and submitted them in January 1923, passed his oral examination
(conducted by the archaeologist William Ridgeway and the former
ICS officer and well-known amateur ethnologist William Crooke)
in February, and left for India in May, degree in hand. As he is careful

17 Reprinted in Ghurye (1973) as ‘Megalithic remains of India’.

 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 207

to inform us in his autobiography (1973: 54), he was the first Indian

in Bombay province to obtain a Cambridge doctorate, and the third
in India. Ghurye also left England with a contract from the publishers
Kegan Paul for his first book, Caste and race in India, an expanded
version of one of his PhD papers entitled ‘Ethnic theory of caste’, to
be published in the History of Civilisation series edited by C.K.
Ogden—a major achievement for a young scholar. He had already
submitted for publication two of his PhD papers, with the help of
Haddon (Ghurye 1923a, 1923b).18
Although Ghurye had been offered a year’s extension of his scho¬
larship to continue his studies in England or another country, he
decided to go to Calcutta, which he believed to be the centre of an¬
thropology in India. He spent most of his seven months there reading
in the Imperial Library (now the National Library). During this
period he applied for the post of Professor of Sociology at Bombay
University, which had been advertised after Geddes’ resignation early
in 1924.19 The other candidate was K.P. Chattopadhyaya, also a stu¬
dent of Rivers, who had earned an MSc in anthropology from Cam¬
bridge and who later joined the Department of Anthropology at
Calcutta University. Although there were two posts available, only
one Reader was selected—Ghurye—because, according to Ghurye,
the other post was ‘reserved’ for N.A. Thoothi, who was completing
his training at Oxford and who had good connections with several
members of the University Syndicate (Ghurye 1973: 59).20
After some debate in the University Senate, Ghurye was appointed
as Reader and Head of the Department of Sociology in June 1924.
S.N. Pherwani, University Librarian, who earlier had been appointed

18 His other two PhD papers were later published in India (Ghurye 1924,
1926).
19 Ghurye was miffed that the Registrar had not offered him the post or
even informed him about it: CI had earned the coveted PhD, acquiring special
exemption granted at most to Cambridge First Class graduates—Cambridge
First Classes then straight walked into a professor s post in any Indian Univer¬
sity . . .’ (1973: 56). He refers here to the exemption of three terms of the usual
nine terms of residence required at Cambridge for the PhD degree.
20 Thoothi had gone to England a year after Ghurye to study under J.L. Myres
and R.R. Marett (Ghurye 1973: 60).
208 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Assistant Professor of Sociology, retired, and Thoothi returned and

was appointed Reader in 1925. Ghurye and Thoothi remained the
only two sociologists in the university until 1943, when two new
positions for lecturers were created (Dongerkery 1957:243-4). While
Thoothi propagated the Geddesian style of sociology,21 Ghurye be¬
came the dominant figure in the department, and it was his brand
of sociology that became established in Bombay and later within
Indian sociology. Ghurye was appointed Professor in 1934 and re¬
mained as Professor and Head of the Department until his retirement
in 1959.22 The departments of economics, sociology, and politics
and civics (the latter established in 1948) formed a single unit within
the School of Economics and Sociology under one administrative
head until their separation in 1956.

II. FORMATION OF AN 'INDIAN SOCIOLOGY'

It is not possible to summarise here the substance of Ghurye s prolific

and diverse writings; this would require lengthy separate treatment
and has been done elsewhere.23 In this section I only point to several
themes that run through much of his work and that provide the key
to understanding the type of sociology that developed in Bombay
under his tutelage. Before discussing Ghurye’s work, it is useful to
outline the broader intellectual context within which he developed
his sociology of Indian civilisation.

Prehistory of Indian Sociology

Ghurye was not the first intellectual to attempt to trace the formation
of Indian society and understand its structure, nor was this quest
confined to sociology. Rather, he drew on an older tradition of social
thought that was deeply entangled in the politics of colonialism and
nationalism. From the nineteenth century onwards, English-educated

21 See Munshi (2000: 485, and this volume) and Srinivas and Panini (1973:
187).
22 Ghurye retired at age 65 but was appointed Emeritus Professor, the first
such appointment in the university.
23 For relevant references, see fn. 2.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 209

intellectuals had grappled with questions about Indian society and

its history that had been raised by the work of British and German
Orientalists and by the attacks on Indian social institutions launched
by English missionaries and Tndophobes’ (Trautmann 1997). Much
of this intellectual ferment was channelled into the social and reli¬
gious reform movements of the period, and later into the nationalist
movement. The early sociologists, like other intellectuals of the times,
were deeply concerned with the question of the ‘nation’ and its future,
and their understanding of Indian society was shaped by these broa¬
der discourses of social reform and nationalism.
Ghurye’s sociology drew heavily on the traditions of British and
German Orientalism that had emerged out of eighteenth-century
European debates on the nature and origin of ‘civilisation’ and the
West's fascination with what were thought to be the earliest civilis¬
ations—Greece and Egypt. The early British Orientalists sought to
reconstruct ancient Indian civilisation through the study of Sanskrit
texts, and they regarded it as one of the oldest and most highly deve¬
loped civilisations.24 The Orientalist discourse, which was‘dialogically
produced’ by European scholars through interaction with Brahmin
pandits, identified ancient Indian civilisation with Brahminical
Hinduism as embodied in Sanskrit texts and placed Brahmins at the
centre of the social order.25 The idea that contemporary society had
degenerated from a pristine and glorious Vedic past was derived from
both the Brahminical notion of kalyug and the Enlightenment con¬
viction that the highest civilisations lay in the ancient past. In this
discourse, Muslims were seen as foreign conquerors and despotic
rulers responsible for the destruction of a virtuous and enlightened
Indian civilisation. Moreover, these scholars regarded the ancient
texts as accurate guides to the organisation of the traditional Hindu
social order and even for contemporary society, as was done with
the codification of Hindu law (Cohn 1987: 143). The strong link

24 Scholars also searched for cultural and linguistic links between India and
other ancient civilisations: some believed that the culture of ancient Greece
had been transferred to India, while others regarded Sanskrit as the ‘pure
unchanged language of ancient Egypt’ (Trautmann 1997: 82)—an argument
that is echoed in early twentieth-century diffusionism.
23 See Cohn (1987), Irschick (1994), and Rocher (1994).
210 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

made by Orientalist scholarship between the ancient Hindu past and

the present has profoundly shaped the modern understanding of
Indian society and history (Rocher 1994: 242), including the socio¬
logy of Ghurye (as discussed below).
The construction of the Indo-European or ‘Aryan’ language family
through the work of comparative philologists in the early nineteenth
century brought the category of the ‘Aryan’ to the centre of Orientalist
discourse, culminating in the ‘Aryan invasion’ theory of Indian
history.26 According to this theory, India was invaded by civilised
‘Aryan’ tribes who conquered and then destroyed or assimilated the
‘dasas’, or indigenous non-Aryan dark races. The ‘noble stamp of
the Caucasian race’ is seen in the Brahmins, while the ‘lower classes
of Hindus consist of. . . aboriginal inhabitants’ (Muller, quoted in
Trautmann 1997: 175). The Aryan invasion theory, together with
the Orientalist construction of Hindu society, formed the discursive
basis of the various social and religious reform, revivalist, and
nationalist movements that proliferated in the second half of the
nineteenth century.27 This theory also underwrote Ghurye’s main
thesis that Indian civilisation was formed through the slow assimi¬
lation of non-Aryan groups to Aryan or Vedic culture (discussed
below).
The social reform movement that swept through western India
in the nineteenth century provided yet another major source of social
thought. The social reform debates in many ways prefigured socio¬
logy in constituting ‘society’ as an object of contemplation and action.

26 The originally linguistic categories of cIndo-Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ were

reshaped by late nineteenth-century race theory into racial categories,
producing what Trautmann terms the ‘racial theory of Indian civilisation (1997:
191) that was popularised especially by Max Muller. Muller argued that the
Aryan nations have become the rulers of history and it seems to be their mission
to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization and religion
(Muller, quoted in Chakravarti 1993: 40). Also see Bayly (1995).
27 The Orientalist glorification of the Vedas, ancient Indian society, and
Hinduism were also important elements in the construction of Hindu nation¬
alism from the 1870s onwards, culminating in the formation of the RSS and
allied organisations (Chakravarti 1993; Jaffrelot 1996; Thapar 1989). I have
discussed the parallels between these ideological currents and Ghurye’s concep¬
tion of Indian society in detail elsewhere (Upadhya 2002).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 211

Drawing upon nineteenth-century European intellectual trends,

including Comte’s positivism and the liberalism and utilitarianism
of Bentham, Mill, and Spencer, the early social reformers espoused
Western liberal values and argued that society should be based on
reason, justice, and equality.28 The discourse of reform was threaded
with the language of late-nineteenth-century sociology: for instance,
Ranade wrote that their aim was a change from ‘status to contract,
from authority to reason’ (quoted in Phadke 1989: 5). The reformers,
most of whom were Poona Brahmins, were intensely concerned with
understanding how Indian society came to be formed and how it
could be re-formed to adapt to the modern world while retaining its
essential difference. Their problem was to reconstitute Indian society
to make it both ‘modern’, by recognising universal rights, and ‘Indian’,
by preserving Hindu traditions and law.29 But the reform movement,
like sociology later, focused primarily on issues related to Brahminical
and patriarchal norms and kinship structures, such as the widow re¬
marriage and age of consent controversies, while largely ignoring
the question of caste. Intellectuals such as M.G. Ranade espoused a
liberal-reformist view of caste, arguing that the caste system had play¬
ed an integrative role in the past but had become ossified over time,
and that it would gradually disintegrate with the spread of education,
liberal ideas, and economic progress (Chakravarti 1998:104; Dobbin
1972: 75-6). The notion that caste belongs to ‘traditional’ society
but will disappear of its own accord after the achievement of self-
rule is echoed in Ghurye’s sociology and in the writing of several
sociologists who followed him (Upadhya n.d.).
By the 1880s social reform was giving way to religious reform and
revivalist movements as the intelligentsia turned to the study of
Sanskrit religious texts and the Indian past (Dobbin 1972: 248-9).

28 Comte’s positivism also inspired the formation of the Bengal Social Science
Association in 1867, which became a centre for discussions on sociology and
science (Prakash 2000: 58). Spencer’s Sociology was another influential text
among social reformers (Phadke 1989: 7).
29 On the social reform movement, see Chakravarti (1998), Dobbin (1972),
and Jagirdar (1963). For a broader discussion of the political and ideological
agendas of the Western-educated elite in nineteenth-century western India,
see Naregal (2000,2001). Also see Prakash (2000) on the cultivation of modern
science by the new elite and its relation to social reform and Hindu revivalism.
212 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Ranade, for example, ultimately rejected the utilitarian materialism

of his youth in favour of a notion of spiritual and moral progress
(Jagirdar 1963).30 By appropriating the discourse of science and ra¬
tionality and deploying it for the rejuvenation of religious tradition,
the Western-educated elite cgave ideological direction and force to
the emergence of an Indian modernity, and defined it in a predomi¬
nantly Hindu and Sanskritic idiom’ (Prakash 2000:85). This tendency
to move seamlessly from liberalism and rationalism to a conservative
religious understanding of Indian society is found in Ghurye’s
thought as well (as will be discussed below). Similarly, the social re¬
form discourse, with its focus on religion as a source of solidarity
and transformation and on the institutions of family and patriarchy
as repositories of Hindu tradition, and its attempt to reconstitute
tradition within modernity, shows striking parallels with Ghurye’s
sociology.31

Ghurye's Cultural-historical Sociology '

Ghurye developed a cultural-historical approach to sociology that

in many ways reflects how English-educated high-caste intellectuals
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries conceptualised

30 In 1885 Ranade wrote: cWe Hindus love Dharma more than our lives; and
whatever be the value of the opinions of Mill and Spencer to England, for India
they are of no use’ (quoted in Jagirdar 1963: 12). One manifestation of this
ideological shift was the founding of a theistic religious society, the Prarthana
Samaj, in 1867 by members of the English-educated Brahmin elite, including
Bhandarkar, Ranade, and Chandavarkar. The philosophy of the Samaj, which
had links to the Brahmo Samaj, was developed by Bhandarkar and Ranade and
drew upon both Western and Vedic philosophy. Although the Samaj claimed
universal appeal, all the leading members were Chitpavan or Saraswat Brahmins
who believed in gradual social reform based on religion (Dobbin 1972: 249-
52; Jagirdar 1963: 7-8).
31 Irawati Karve’s genealogy of sociology and anthropology in Maharashtra
begins with social reformers and nationalists such as Ranade, Tilak, and
Gokhale; see Nandini Sundar s essay, this volume. Yogendra Singh (1986: 5)
also argues that the first generation of sociologists were influenced by the ideo¬
logy of the nineteenth-century social reform movements as well as by national¬
ism, which foregrounded the question of cultural identity (1986: 11). See also
Srinivas and Panini (1973: 181).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 213

their society through social reform debates and the emergent ideology
of nationalism. His sociological perspective drew heavily on the
converging intellectual streams of diffusionism, acquired from Rivers,
and the Orientalist rendering of Indian history that he must have
absorbed earlier. As noted above, there is considerable overlap be¬
tween the diffusionist proposition that superior races transmit
civilisation through conquest and the Aryan invasion theory of Ind¬
ian history. Ghurye’s extensive utilisation of ancient texts is often
attributed to his academic training in Sanskrit, but judging from his
earlier education at Elphinstone and his list of favourite books,32 his
intellectual interests were also formed by the broader European
debate, located primarily within anthropology, about the origins and
development of civilisation. This intellectual orientation was rein¬
forced and structured by his Cambridge experience, where he found
in diffusionism a compatible theoretical framework.33 While his
sociology contains elements of Orientalism as well as diffusionism,
its basic orientation can be characterised as cultural nationalism.
Ghurye pursued the comparative study and history of all major civil¬
isations,34 but his primary interest was the reconstruction of Indian
society and history, through which he attempted to locate the sources
of contemporary social institutions in the distant past.
Ghurye’s sociology of Indian civilisation is clearly outlined in his
first book, Caste and race in India (1932), in which he attempts to
explain the origins and spread of caste through the examination of
extensive historical, archaeological, and anthropometric evidence.
The book essentially represents a refinement of the Aryan invasion

32 Apart from Bell’s Civilisation, Ghurye was influenced by A.N. Whitehead’s

Adventure of ideas, J.B. Bury’s Idea ofprogress, as well as the work of G.M. Treve¬
lyan and Bertrand Russell (Pillai 1996: 93-4). The remainder of his book col¬
lection (many were lost), now in the Bombay University Library, is eclectic. It
includes the usual anthropological and sociological classics, a number of stand¬
ard books of history and political philosophy, some English literature, several
Marathi novels, a few contemporary works by Indian sociologists such as
Radhakamal Mukerjee, and several sex manuals (perhaps collected for his re¬
search on Indian sexuality).
33 This argument is developed more fully in Upadhya (2002).
34 As seen for example in Culture and society (1947), Occidental civilisation
(1948), and Cities and civilisation (1962a).
214 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

theory. In brief, he argues that the Indo-Aryans were a branch of the

Indo-European stock who entered India around 2500 bc, bringing
with them the Vedic religion and the ‘Brahmanic variety’ of the Indo-
Aryan civilisation. The caste system, he suggests, originated in the
attempt by the Indo-Aryan Brahmins to maintain their purity by
keeping themselves apart from the local population through endo¬
gamy and ritual restrictions (Ghurye 1969: 125). Like earlier British
ethnologists, Ghurye also argues that caste derives from the varna
classification of the early Vedic age, which purportedly referred to
skin colour and differentiated the carya’ from the cdasa’. However, he
rejects the extreme racial theory of caste propounded by Risley and
other British ethnologists, and suggests that Brahminism and the
caste system spread throughout India as cultural traits rather than
through large-scale physical migration of Aryan Brahmins.35
In Caste and race Ghurye identifies Brahminism and the caste
system as the essential features of Indian civilisation and traces their
origin to the Indo-Aryan civilisation in the Gangetic plain. In subse¬
quent work, such as Family and kin in Indo-European culture (1955a),
Two Brahmanical institutions: Gotra and charana (1972), and Vedic
India (1979b), he extends this thesis by tracing the origins of several
institutions and cultural practices to the Vedic age. Ghurye’s usual
strategy in these books is to examine traditional knowledge systems,
religious practices, social organisation, and law as represented in
Sanskrit sources in tandem with a discussion of contemporary prac¬
tices, suggesting continuities between the present and the distant
past. In Gotra and charana (1972), for example, he investigates the
origin, history, and spread of these ‘Brahmanical institutions’ of
exogamy through an exhaustive study of Sanskrit literature and

35 Ghurye criticises specific features of Risley s (1908) theory and methodo¬

logy and argues that in all the linguistic areas apart from Hindustan/the physical
type of the population is mixed, and does not conform in its gradation to the
scale of social precedence of the various castes’ (1969:124). However, he accepts
the overall framework of racial categorisation as valid. The chapter on race
was dropped in the second and third editions (entitled Caste and class in India);
the fourth edition became Caste, class and occupation, and in the fifth edition
the chapter on race was restored along with the original title (Pillai 1997: 41).
On Ghurye’s critique of Risley, see Dirks (1997).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 215

inscriptions from different periods, ending with contemporary in¬

formation on exogamous practices in several communities. Similarly,
in Family and kin Ghurye argues that the Vedic-Aryan people had
the joint family, with four generations living under one roof and
sharing food and property (1955a: 47)—clearly suggesting that the
ideal Hindu family has its origin in ancient India.36
A central concern of Ghurye’s sociology was to demonstrate the
unity and antiquity of Indian civilisation. He believed that Hinduism
is at the centre of India’s civilisational unity and that at the core of
Hinduism are Brahminical ideas and values that are essential for
the integration of society (Pramanick 1994; Venugopal 1986). For
Ghurye, as for the early Orientalist writers, it was through religion
that Indian civilisation was formed, as diverse groups were assimilated
to Brahminical Hinduism and incorporated into the caste system.
He represented Indian culture as the product of acculturation be¬
tween Vedic-Aryan and pre-Aryan cultural elements, and Indian so¬
cial history as the history of the absorption of non-Hindu groups
into Hindu society. Ghurye’s historical sociology echoes not only
the Orientalist view but also that of late-nineteenth-century intel¬
lectuals such as Ranade, who believed that the Aryans were the chosen
race’ and that Brahminism was the Aryan faith that had united India
in ancient times (Chakravarti 1998: 102-4). In short, following the
Orientalist view and some streams of nationalist discourse, Ghurye
defined Indian society as essentially Hindu society and its cultural
and religious unity as the basis of the nation—a sociological view
that underwrote his later political writings.37
The influence of nationalism and Ghurye s desire to locate the
unity of the nation sociologically become most evident in his well-
known book, The aborigines, so-called and their future (1943, repub¬
lished as The scheduled tribes [ 1959]), in which he attacks the colonial
tribal policy of protectionism. Ghurye, like other nationalists,

36 The concept of the ‘Hindu joint family’, which originated in the formu¬
lation of Hindu personal law by the colonial state, became a major theme of
Indian sociology.
371 have discussed elsewhere (Upadhya n.d.) Ghurye’s political views as ex¬
pressed in his‘trilogy on Indian political society’ (Ghurye 1978: vii), three books
on current issues written after his retirement (Ghurye 1968b, 1974, 1978).
216 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

regarded the creation of ‘Excluded’ and ‘Partially Excluded’ tribal

areas as a colonial strategy of divide and rule. In Aborigines he criti¬
cises the view of anthropologist Verrier Elwin and several British
administrators that the Indian tribes are culturally distinct from caste
Hindus and that their way of life should be preserved through state-
enforced isolation from Hindu society. Unlike most anthropologists,
Ghurye also critiqued the tribe/caste distinction itself and regarded
tribals as ‘imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu society’ or ‘Back¬
ward Hindus’ (Ghurye 1959: 19) rather than aborigines. The basis
of this argument was his thesis—derived from the Aryan invasion
argument developed in Caste and race—that Indian civilisation has
been constituted by the slow incorporation of non-Aryan or non-
Hindu groups to brahminical Hinduism and the caste system. In
Ghurye’s view, the natural process of‘assimilation of smaller groups
of different cultures into larger ones’ (ibid.: xi) had been upset by
colonialism, and groups that had not been ‘properly assimilated’ ap¬
peared to be different from caste Hindus and were mistakenly labelled
by the colonial rulers as ‘tribes’. Accordingly, against the stance of
Elwin and other anthropologists, he advocated a policy of greater
integration of tribals into the ‘mainstream’ rather than protection of
cultural diversity.38
Apart from its historical orientation, a basic feature of Ghurye’s
sociology was its emphasis on what he identified as the fundamental
social institutions—family, kinship, and religion—because he
regarded them as central to social and cultural integration. In a lecture
delivered at the Gokhale Institute in Pune in 1938, entitled ‘The social
process’, Ghurye argued that the only institution that can create a
suitable environment for a smooth and harmonious relation between
the individual and society is the family (Pramanick 1994: 84).39 He

38 Ghurye’s views on the ‘tribal’ problem are discussed further in Upadhya

(n.d.). On the debate between Ghurye and Elwin, see Guha (1996, 1999) and
Singh (1996).
39 Ghurye’s interest in the family extended to questions of population as
well as eugenics. He believed, at least in his early writings, that marriage should
be organised so as to breed better individuals: ‘Appreciation of heredity and in¬
culcation of eugenic doctrines is perhaps best achieved through the importance
attached to the family group’ (Ghurye 1963b: 186).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 217

also believed that kinship terms help to identify the social obligations
and duties of the individual towards others in society (ibid.: 88).
This emphasis on institutions of family, kinship, caste, and religion,
usually in their Brahminical forms, which echoes the discourse of
social reform, was to become a hallmark of mainstream sociology
(see following sections).40
Because of the nature of most of his subject matter, Ghurye’s
method was primarily textual, but he was also an empiricist who
thought that the ‘facts’ would speak for themselves.41 His books are
loaded with information, often poorly organised, and short on
analysis and interpretation, making it difficult for the reader to dis¬
cern his argument. Ghurye advocated the collection of primary data
through field research but did not carry out much fieldwork himself,
mainly due to ill health. However, he encouraged his students to do
fieldwork and directed significant field-based studies of social change
in rural India and the impact of urbanisation (Ghurye 1960a, 1963a),
as well as an ethnographic study of the Mahadev Kolis (1957a).42
Ghurye probably imbibed this stress on empirical fieldwork from
his Cambridge training under Rivers. However, Rivers himself was
not a pure empiricist: his ‘conversion’ to diffusionism and his work
on the depopulation of Melanesia reflect his historical orientation.
Ghurye, like Rivers, never adopted wholesale the naturalism and em¬
piricism that became established in British social anthropology after
Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, which rejected historical and broad
comparative theorising in favour of small-scale, intensive, and syn¬
chronic studies (Stocking 1984, 1995). Instead, he attempted to

40 Although Ghurye had a long-standing interest in kinship, he did not pub¬

lish a book on the subject until Family and kin in Indo-European culture (1955a).
But according to Kapadia (1954: xiii), kinship systems dominated his lectures
on social institutions from the beginning of his career.
41 Whither India? (Ghurye 1974) begins with the following quotation from
Lord Bryce: ‘It is facts that are needed: Facts, Facts, Facts. When tacts have been
supplied, each of us can try to reason from them.’
42 His major field experience was an archaeological excavation in Sind in
1936 and Gujarat in 1937 (Ghurye 1973: 324-5). He also organised survey re¬
search, for example on the ‘Sex habits of a sample of middle class people ot
Bombay’(Ghurye 1938b) and the working life of Bombay suburbanites (1964).
218 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

combine older humanistic approaches to the study of human society,

through history, language, and literature, with the more ‘scientific’
or empirical approach of modern anthropology.
Ghurye’s publication output was steady, but thicker towards the
end of his life than during the early years of his career. His best-
known book, Caste and race in India, was published in 19 3 2,43 while
his second book, The aborigines so-called and their future, came out
in 1943. Between his appointment to Bombay University in 1924
and the publication of Aborigines, his work appeared primarily in
the form of articles in various journals—eighteen papers on topics
ranging from population to kinship to the sexual habits of the middle
class.44 After Aborigines he published nine books and a number of
articles up to his retirement in 1959; after retiring he produced an¬
other seventeen books, not including new editions of earlier books
(see list of references). Apart from the first edition of Caste and race,
all his books were published in India, and after his first two papers
that were published from Cambridge in British journals, Ghurye
never again published in foreign journals—a fact that he notes with¬
out explanation in his autobiography (1973: 109).45
It is difficult to gauge the direct impact of Ghurye s thought on
sociological theory and practice in India. Despite publishing thirty-
one books and forty-seven papers and other writings over a span of

43 Four revised editions and eleven reprints of Caste and race have appeared
subsequently.
44 Many of these early articles are collected in Anthropo-sociological papers
(1963b).
4:1 It is perhaps relevant to the history of the profession to note that after his
first book, published from London, Ghurye never had to go through a peer
review process in publishing his books. Early in his career he developed a close
personal relationship with the owners of Popular Book Depot, G.R. Bhatkal
and his sons, Sadanand and Ramdas, and almost all his books were published
by them (Popular Prakashan). The University Sociology Series was also distri¬
buted by them. Sadanand Bhatkal recalls that in ‘the sixties and the seventies
he gave us manuscripts at the rate of one book a year—a schedule which was
difficult for us to keep’ (Bhatkal 1996: 35). However, it should be noted here
that not only Ghurye but many other senior and well-known sociologists as
well were published without peer review. At that time perhaps only Oxford
University Press (OUP) had a consistent policy of peer review.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 219

fifty years, only his Caste and race in India and The scheduled tribes
have been extensively read and taught. As I argue below, it was prim¬
arily through research guidance and teaching that Ghurye was able
to institutionalise his brand of sociology in India. But through his
own writing as well as that of his students, sociology was expand¬
ed to encompass a wide variety of subjects and approaches. Ghurye
wrote on topics as diverse as caste (Ghurye 1932, 1969), family and
kinship (1923a, 1936a, 1955a, 1955b), population (1925a, 1925b,
1934,1938 [with A.P. Pillay]), archaeology (1936b, 1937a, 1939), tribes
(1943, 1957a, 1963c), the comparative study of culture and civilisa¬
tions (1947, 1948, 1960d, 1962a, 1965b), religion (1953c, 1962b,
1965a, 1979a), sexual behaviour (1938b, 1954,1956b), ancient India
and Indian cultural history (1955a, 1972, 1977, 1979b), Indian cos¬
tume (1951,1958a), urban studies (1953a, 1956a, 1960c, 1962a, 1963a,
1964), social change (1952c, 1960a, 1961), architecture (1968a), and
contemporary politics (1943, 1968b, 1974, 1978, 1980). While his
range of interests was extensive, with the passage of time he increas¬
ingly concentrated on religion and turned to Sanskrit texts for the
analysis of Indian culture. Although Ghurye’s approach was heavily
Indological, he was also a pioneer of sociological studies of religion
in India, exemplified in Indian sadhus, in which he analyses the social
and political roles of ascetics (Ghurye 1953c; Venugopal 1996).46
Ghurye interacted with several American and European socio¬
logists through correspondence, exchange of books and papers, and
participation in the International Sociological Association, but his
own practice of sociology was scarcely affected by external influ¬
ences.47 He was not oblivious to new theories, but he did not appre¬
ciate the functionalist revolution ushered into British social
anthropology by Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski because of its
neglect of history. He argued that Rivers’ approach was superior to
the new theories because it combined both historical and functional

46 In this book Ghurye reiterates Ranades thesis that Ramdas had a political
mission to fight the ‘Islamic onslaught that was threatening the Hindu culture
in Maharashtra at that time’ (1953c: 66).
47 In 1979 Ghurye said that he had worked out his plan of research and writ¬
ing in the first few years of his career and never deviated from it (Pramanick
1994: 14).
220 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

explanations (Pramanick 1994: 226). In this Ghurye was perhaps

ahead of his times. Diffusionism is often portrayed as an embarras¬
sing aberration in the history of anthropology, but as Joan Vincent
has argued, it also represented a broader historical and contextual
approach that attempted to trace historical links among peoples and
assess the effects of culture contact, especially between colonial pow¬
ers and dominated people (Vincent 1990: 116-23). With the triumph
of functionalism and fieldwork as the hegemonic theory and method
of British social anthropology, history—especially the history of
colonialism—was for many years banished from the discipline, only
to be rediscovered in the 1980s. Ghuryes imperviousness to changing
intellectual trends probably stemmed from his conviction (never
explicitly expressed) that he had already discovered an appropriate
framework for the study of Indian society, that a deep indigenous
knowledge of Indian society and culture (including Sanskrit) was a
necessity for such study, and that Indian sociology should not be
dependent on imported theories but should find its own path.

III. THE INSTITUTIONALISATION AND

PROFESSIONALISATION OF SOCIOLOGY

New forms of knowledge are likely to become historically significant

only when they become embedded in and reproduced and disse¬
minated through institutions. In this and the following section, I
examine the institutional mechanisms through which Ghurye’s
conception of sociology came to dominate the discipline for a num¬
ber of years. While the sociology that he invented was transmitted
through the medium of the syllabus, research guidance, and depart¬
ment publications at Bombay, the discipline became professionalised
largely through the establishment of the Indian Sociological Society.

Teaching of Sociology at Bombay

A review of changes in syllabi over time provides some indication of

how a discipline has developed. However, compared to the contemp¬
orary situation, the older syllabi available are usually short general
outlines of the prescribed course rather than detailed guides, sug¬
gesting that teachers had considerable freedom to mould courses
according to their inclinations. In the case of the Bombay University
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 221

Sociology Department, for many years there were only two teachers—
Ghurye and Thoothi—which must have imparted a high degree of
consistency to the course. This consistency was also reflected in the
syllabus, which was revised only twice during Ghurye’s tenure as
head.
The first traceable sociology syllabus of Bombay University (pre¬
sumably designed by Geddes) appears in the 1922—3 University hand¬
book. It included four papers that were to be combined with four
papers in economics for the MA degree: Nature and Scope of Socio¬
logy, Social Institutions, Indian Social Institutions, and an Essay.48
The original course incorporated some topics on the stages of cul¬
ture and civilisation—a subject not usually included in Anglophone
sociology. This is because, according to Ghurye, ‘Geddes’ Comtist
inclination led him to introduce the study of stages of culture and
civilisation in Sociology’ (1957b: 7). This syllabus apparently

48 The description of the papers in the syllabus is very brief, and there are no
prescribed readings:
Paper I: Nature and scope of sociology. Origin and progress of sociology;
social evolution; influence of physical, biological, and other factors on social
life; etc; prehistorical and historical periods.
Paper II: Social institutions. Topics include: (1) forms of social organisation
such as occupation, property, slavery, class; (2) ‘other forms of social organisa¬
tion’ including sex and family; descent; education; tribe, caste, race; nation
and state; village, town, city; etc; (3) religion; (4) social order and law.
Paper III: Indian social institutions. Village, caste, family, marriage,
depressed classes, etc; also includes topics such as‘foreign elements’/assimilation
and segregation’,‘influence of Mahomedans on Indian institutions’;‘effects of
British rule on Indian society’.
Paper IV: Essay.
This syllabus is taken from the Handbook of the University of Bombay, 1937.
Because I could not find an earlier handbook with the syllabus included, it is
not clear whether all these topics were spelled out in the earlier syllabi. However,
the paper titles mentioned in the Handbook remained the same from 1922 till
1940.1.P. Desai gives a somewhat different list of the four sociology papers of¬
fered when he was studying at Bombay University in the mid-1930s, when it
was still a combined course with Economics: I. Principles of sociology; II. Caste
rank, marriage and family; III. Pre-history, Indian ethnology, and archaeology;
and IV. Essay (Desai 1981: 17).
222 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

remained in force until 1945, which means that the original syllabus
designed by Geddes was taught by Ghurye and Thoothi for nearly
twenty years. However, the topics prescribed were very broad and
there were no prescribed texts, which suggests that Ghurye was able
to teach sociology according to his own inclinations even before the
first syllabus revision.
The syllabus was revised in 1945 in connection with the long-
awaited addition of two positions for lecturers, in social psychology
and sociology (Ghurye 1973: 109).49 With the syllabus revision, MA
Sociology was offered as a full course of eight papers for the first
time, although it was still possible to combine subjects. At this point
Ghurye introduced several new papers, including Culture and
Civilisation, Social Biology, Social Psychology, and Comparative
Social Institutions (ibid.), and retained versions of original papers
such as Social Institutions and Indian Sociology.50 The syllabus

49 It is not clear in which year the syllabus was actually revised: one source
gives 1943, another mentions 1940 (Savur n.d.: 23), while according to Ghurye
it was 1945. I have not been able to trace the University Handbooks for the
relevant years.
50 The eight papers in the revised M.A. (entire) course were:
Sociology. Paper I: General sociology. Nature and scope of sociology;
classification of sciences and arts; social sciences and arts; nature of society;
individual and society; groups and their inter-relations; race and society;
theories of society.
Paper II: Social biology. Biology and sociology; man—his descent and
ascent; ABC of genetics; heredity and environment; the development of man;
races of man; behaviour in evolution; nature-nurture, culture.
Paper III: Social psychology. Emergence of the psychology of society; the
psychology of society; general view of its place among humanistic studies;
psychologies of today; thus we are human; mind and society; character and
culture.
Paper IV: Indian sociology. Ashrams; marriage and family; caste; backward
classes.
Advanced Sociology. Paper I: Civilisation. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Europe,
China: Civilisation and culture.
Paper II: Social institutions (advanced study). Marriage, family, property,
rank.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 223

content betrays a strong emphasis on the study of social institutions,

especially those of kinship, family, and caste, as well as the compar¬
ative study of civilisations and culture. It also reflects Ghurye’s
empiricist bias in its wholesale neglect of theory and even research
methodology.51 Significantly, the revised syllabus retained much of
the old one, while the new papers incorporated the kind of anthro¬
pology that Ghurye had studied at Cambridge in the 1920s rather
than introducing contemporary debates or alternative theoretical
perspectives. Ghurye continued to teach mainly from classical texts,
including even nineteenth-century anthropology, rather than
contemporary work.52
A hallmark of Ghurye’s sociology syllabus was the inclusion of
topics and papers that are usually the province of anthropology,^3
especially the papers on the Archaeology and Ethnology of India
and Social Biology. The latter combined cthe significant data of Bio¬
logy, Ethnology, Demography, and Human Ecology under one head¬
ing’ (Ghurye 1957b: 12).54 This design reflected Ghurye’s conviction

Paper III: (a) Social problems (with special reference to India). Education,
crime, (b) Hindu and Muslim social thought.
Paper IV: Archaeology and Ethnology of India.
51 According to I.P. Desai, research methodology was not taught at Bombay
University in Ghurye’s time (1981: 197), and a paper on classical sociological
theory—now a standard part of sociology courses—was not introduced till a
decade after his retirement (Savur n.d.: 32).
52 Among the books recommended by Ghurye to his students in the 1930s
were Development of social theory by Lichtenberger, Westermarck’s History of
human marriage, Russell’s Marriage and morals, Trevelyn’s British social history,
as well as the work of Briffault and Elobhouse (Desai 1981: 17).
53 Ghurye argued that with the widening of scope of the subject, a new term
is needed for sociology; following Roger Williams he suggests ‘Humanics’, or
the science of human beings: ‘Humanics should be the department or know¬
ledge-system under which Criminology, Cultural Anthropology, Social
Anthropology, Social Biology, Social Psychology and Sociology may fittingly
be grouped’ (1957b: 15).
54 Ghurye taught the Social Biology paper and used it to acquaint students
with the question of nature vs. nurture, an important task in a caste-ridden
224 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

that in the Indian context the distinction between anthropology and

sociology is artificial. One reason for his controversial position on
this subject (other sociologists and anthropologists have argued for
a strict separation) may be the fact that anthropology in India had
come to be defined as the study of‘tribes’, while sociologists studi¬
ed the ‘civilised’ peoples of India. However Ghurye, as noted above,
contested the caste-tribe distinction itself and, by extension, the so¬
ciology-anthropology divide. He encouraged his students to pursue
the study of tribal groups and himself wrote on the ‘aboriginal’ issue
(Ghurye 1943).
Another distinctive feature of the syllabus was a paper on the
comparative study of world civilisations. Ghurye argued that an
anthropology or sociology course must include a paper on the ‘com¬
parative study of culture and another on comparative social institu¬
tions of pre-literate, ancient-civilized and modern nations’ (Ghurye
1935a: 102), as was done in the Civilisation paper.55 He wrote that
the study of early civilisations would benefit Indian students by
enabling them ‘to avoid a sense of inferiority or of complacency
whose manifestations are detrimental to our national integration’
(ibid.: 98). More broadly, this approach reflected his conviction that
the study of Indian society was by definition the study of Indian
civilisation in all its historical complexity. Ghurye taught the
Civilisation paper from 1924 to 1951, and his book Religious conscio¬
usness (1965a) was based on his illustrated lectures for this course
which were, according to him, ‘much liked by many students’
(ibid.: vi).

society. The paper was dropped after Ghurye s retirement (interview with S.
Devadas Pillai, 30 May 2001).
55 The comparative study of civilisations was not a usual topic in anthropo¬
logy courses in Britain or elsewhere, although Geddes had also advocated this
broad approach. By the 1920s anthropology had come to be defined narrowly
as the study of pre-literate peoples (in contrast to the work of nineteenth-
century proto-anthropologists such as Maine), and even the archaeology that
was taught within anthropology departments pertained only to prehistory, or
the study of non-literate and non-Western cultures, while classicists and
Orientalists studied ancient civilisations such as Egypt and Greece (Urry 1993).
See Ghurye (1935a).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 225

Perhaps because anthropology was already closely blended with

sociology in the sociology syllabus, a separate paper on anthropology
was not introduced at Bombay until after Ghurye’s retirement.
Moreover, a separate anthropology department was never established
in the university, again perhaps due to Ghuryes belief that anthro¬
pology and sociology should be combined.56 Ghurye did attempt to
expand the institutional base of anthropology in the university, but
he was not successful. For example, when the University Grants Com¬
mission asked for proposals for the academic development of Bom¬
bay University to celebrate its centenary, Ghurye submitted a plan
that included a reader’s post in anthropology and the ‘creation of a
Museum, illustrating [the] Cultural History of Mankind’ (Ghurye
1980: 51). The post of Reader in Anthropology was finally sanctioned
a few years after Ghurye’s retirement, but funds for the museum
were not forthcoming.
The syllabus was revised once more before Ghurye’s retirement,
in 1955, when the School was split into separate departments (Ghurye
1973: 151), but this was only a‘slight’modification (Ghurye 1957b:
7) made by the addition of two new papers—Industrial Sociology
and Urban Sociology (Ghurye 1973: 151). This tendency to carry on
with the same syllabus for many years is cjf course not unusual, as
it is an outcome of the academic structure of Indian universities
and the rules of the revision process. In addition, Ghurye himself

56 The members of the Bombay Anthropological Society, who took an interest

in this issue, also did not feel the necessity for a separate anthropology depart¬
ment in Bombay University; instead they encouraged the Sociology Department
to include social anthropology in the syllabus and to conduct research on tribal
problems (Rao 1974: xxvi-xxvii). The first anthropology department in the
country was established at the University of Calcutta in 1920, followed by Luck¬
now, where anthropology was taught in the Department of Economics and
Sociology from the 1920s (Rao 1974: xxiv-xxv). Bombay was the first university
in the country to offer a postgraduate course in sociology in 1919, followed by
Calcutta and Lucknow in 1921 (Pramanick 1994: 236; Rao 1974: xxxi-xxxii).
In 1956 Ghurye wrote: ‘It augurs well for India that if, in Bombay, sociology
includes social anthropology, in Calcutta, social anthropology is extended to
include sociology to some extent as perhaps the source of inspiration came
from the same teacher’ (1956c: 154, quoted in Pramanick 1994: 221-2). He is
referring to Rivers, with whom both he and Chattopadhyay studied.
226 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

complained that the combination of departments within the School

hindered the process of revision, because non-sociologists could take
decisions on departmental matters (ibid.). However, university rules
affect all departments equally, and sociology is often regarded as being
peculiarly prone to the rigid reproduction of received knowledge—
a tendency that was manifested even in the disciplines early years.
Ghurye’s sociology course exercised influence far beyond the
Bombay department, for the Bombay syllabus was widely adopted
by other universities in western India when they started teaching
sociology, and it remained the standard syllabus for a long time.5/
This was a major avenue through which sociology, as conceived by
Ghurye, became institutionalised within the discipline, at least until
the triumph of structure-functionalism. Another reason for the dis¬
proportionate influence of the Bombay school on the development
of the discipline is that it was the first university to offer a degree in
sociology and the first to introduce MA Sociology as a full course of
eight papers. Elsewhere, sociology continued for a longtime as part
of a combined course, usually with economics (Pramanick 1994:
244). Moreover, until 1950 there were only a half dozen departments
teaching sociology and anthropology, and Bombay was the only
centre of postgraduate research in sociology in the country (Srinivas
and Panini 1973: 194).

Ghurye's Research Programme

The colonial state’s original notion that the School of Economics

and Sociology at Bombay University would carry out useful social
and economic surveys was implemented more by the Economics
Department than by Sociology, whose only government-funded
project during Ghurye’s time was the study of the Mahadev Kolis

Although it was usual to copy the Bombay syllabus, when Srinivas joined
M.S. University in Baroda as Professor in 1951 he resolved not to teach this
syllabus because it ‘had not been revised for some years’ and he had his own
conception of Sociology’. He designed a new syllabus before starting the M.A.
programme, prescribing more up-to-date texts and topics, but, like Ghurye’s
syllabus, his focused on ‘Indian social institutions ... in a comparative context’
and combined anthropology with sociology (Srinivas 1998: 29).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 227

(Ghurye 1957a). Most of the research produced in the department

was in the form of MA and PhD dissertations and Ghuryes own
work. Although research guidance was a prominent feature of the
department, there were no collective departmental projects under
his stewardship, largely due to lack of funds.58
From 1927 Bombay University allowed students to submit a thesis
in one subject in lieu of the eight papers for the MA degree, although
the normal pattern was four papers in sociology combined with four
in either economics or history/politics. In the same year, four MA
theses were forwarded by Ghurye (1973:70), and from then on there
was a steady research output from his department. The PhD pro¬
gramme was started in 1936, and the first PhD in sociology was
awarded to G.R. Pradhan in the same year—the first PhD in the
university and the first PhD in sociology in all of India (Pillai 1997:
400). A total of about eighty theses (25 MA and 55 PhD) were
produced under Ghuryes supervision.59 Although those who fell out
with Ghurye (and there were many) paint a negative picture of his
personality, he must have had some positive qualities as a teacher
and research guide to be able to attract and sustain the productivity
of so many students, many of whom were devoted to him. According
to one close observer, Ghurye ran his department like a gurukul: he
treated his students like members of his family but expected from
them in return ‘not just reverence but total dedication5 (Bhatkal 1996:
36),
The hallmarks of Ghurye’s sociology—an Indological approach
to the study of Indian society combined with empiricism and an
emphasis on fieldwork—were reflected in the work of his students.
Students who knew Sanskrit analysed ancient and contemporary

58 The closest to a collective effort was a planned comparative study of Town -

country relations’ in Gujarat and Maharashtra, the former to be carried out by
K.M. Kapadia in Navsari and the latter by Ghurye in the hinterland of Pune.
Although the project was not completed, data collected by Ghurye were pub¬
lished in After a century and a quarter: Lonikand then and now (1960a) and
Anatomy of a rururban community (1963a).
59 This is the conclusion of Pillai’s efforts to compile a list of theses produced
under Ghurye and Ghurye’s own count; however, complete information is not
available (Pillai 1997: 400).
228 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

social customs and norms through the study of classical texts (Sri-
nivas 1973: 136), while the rest (the majority) were sent to various
regions of India to pursue rigorous fieldwork on a wide range of
topics, usually on a shoestring budget. Although Ghurye did little
fieldwork himself, from his chair he ‘directed a one-man ethnogra¬
phic survey of India’, as Srinivas put it (ibid.). He had students from
all over India, and he encouraged them to carry out documentary
and field research in their own regions where they had access to the
local language and social connections. One motivation for this enter¬
prise, as well as for his empiricist orientation, was Ghurye’s conviction
that British ethnologists had produced a completely skewed view of
Indian society that needed to be corrected, and that this could be
done only by thoroughly collecting ‘the facts’ about India’s cultural
and social landscape.60 According to Srinivas, Ghurye ‘laid the
foundations of anthropology and sociology in India by encouraging
his students to study every aspect and section of Indian society and
culture’ (Shah 2000: 634).
One of the main objectives of Ghurye’s research programme was
to document the cultural diversity of India, and at least twenty-six
theses produced under Ghurye’s guidance were socio-cultural or eth¬
nographic studies of specific communities or localities.61 Typical
thesis titles of this genre include M.N. d’Souza, ‘Indian Christian
community in Bombay’ (MA, 1927); Irawati Karve’s‘Chitpavan Brah¬
mins: A social and ethnic study’ (MA, 1928); L.N. Chapekar/Thakurs:
An ethnic study’ (PhD, 1949); G.S. Nepali, ‘Newars of Nepal’ (PhD,
1960); and K.B. Singh,‘Meities of Manipur’ (PhD, 1964). Such com¬
munity studies were being carried out by his students as late as the
1960s. Many of these dissertations echo standard British ethnology,
in which ‘culture’ is defined as ‘customs and manners’ and cultural
traditions delineate the community, as in ‘Customs and manners of
Central Punjab’ (Usha Rani Kanal, MA 1947),‘Manners and customs
of the Muslims of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh’ (S.M.
Haider, MA 1941), and ‘Sindhi culture’ (U.T. Thakur, PhD, 1944).

60 S.D. Pillai, interview 18 March 2000.

61 The information on dissertations is drawn from the list compiled by Pillai
(1997).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 229

Apart from these general cultural and community studies, many

of Ghuryes students focused on specific themes in their research,
but even here the emphasis was on collecting rather than analysing
data. The central themes of Ghuryes sociology—religious beliefs
and practices, social customs, and cultural norms—were expanded
upon by his students, who were guided to investigate how practices
and beliefs varied across communities and regions. Next to commu¬
nity studies, the largest number of theses focused on what Ghurye
had identified as the basic social institutions: religion (twelve theses)
and family, kinship, and marriage (eleven). There were seven theses
on social history, five on tribal communities, and four on urban
issues; the remaining addressed a wide variety of other topics (see
Pillai 1997: 395-400). Ghurye especially encouraged students who
knew Sanskrit to work on the history of social institutions—for
example, S.V. Karandikar’s MA thesis (1927) ‘Hindu exogamy’, and
K.M. Kapadia’s PhD thesis (1938) ‘Hindu kinship’, as well as Karve’s
work on early Hindu kinship. Ghurye believed that without Sanskrit
it was not possible to study Indian social history (Pramanick 1994:
220). Although most of his students followed his approach and
accepted his advice on the selection of topics, Ghurye welcomed new
ideas, and he guided research on relatively unexplored themes such
as education and communication (Dhanagare 1993:39). Several stu¬
dents took up completely novel topics, such as cinema (Panna Shah,
‘Social study of the cinema in Bombay’, PhD, 1949) and the media
(P.M. Shah, ‘Press and society in India’, MA 1938).62 Most notably,
A.R. Desai completed his well-known study of Indian nationalism

62 Savur suggests that Ghurye set his students to work on particular themes
to gather data for the development of various sub-disciplines within sociology.
Most of the students in the 1930s and 1940s did community studies or docu¬
mented variations in kinship, family, and marriage patterns, thus filling in the
‘mosaic’ of India. Post-independence, Ghurye’s students laid the groundwork
for industrial sociology by studying aspects of industry and labour: they in¬
cluded S.B. Chirde, ‘Industrial labour in Bombay: A socio-economic analysis’
(PhD, 1949); M.P. Makharia, ‘Social conditions of textile labour in Bombay
with special reference to productivity’ (PhD, 1959); and D.B. Unwalla, ‘Human
relations in factories’ (PhD, 1958). Subsequently, a paper in Industrial Sociology
was introduced in 1955 (Ghurye 1973: 151). Similarly, research work by
230 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

within a Marxist framework under Ghurye, a confirmed anti-com¬

munist.63
The work of Ghurye and his students touched on political and
economic issues such as labour relations and nationalism, but on
the whole these spheres came to be excluded from sociology as it
was practised at Bombay.64 In the historical context of sociology’s
early years, it is striking that the range of topics was so restricted. A
partial reason for this may have been the disciplinary structure of
the social sciences everywhere, which tends to confine sociology’s
subject matter to those spheres of social life excluded by economics
and political science. But in the case of Indian sociology, this narrow¬
ing of scope is also related to the discipline’s implicit project of
‘nation-building’. In Ghurye’s hands, sociology’s role was to define
the nation through the study of its history, culture, and social order,
rather than to elucidate relations of power, domination, or conflict
(Upadhya n.d.).

Ghurye's Students

There were two positions of research assistant in the Department of

Sociology, and several of Ghurye’s students worked for him while
completing their theses. M.N. Srinivas was his assistant from 1942
to 1944, in which capacity he toured Tamil Nadu and Andhra to col¬
lect data on folklore (Srinivas 1973: 138). Ghurye was apparently a

Ghurye’s students on cities and urban issues built up to a course in Urban

Sociology started at the same time (Savur n.d.: 47).
63 According to Pillai (1996: 93), Ghurye was a last resort for Desai, who had
been refused by guides in history and other disciplines. Although Ghurye was
far from being a Marxist, he gave Desai and other leftist students the freedom
to pursue their own inclinations. Desai has said that Ghurye even showed him
how to strengthen his argument.
64 Six of Ghurye’s students completed theses that can be classified under in¬
dustrial sociology (concerned with labour, technology, or industrial relations)
and two concerned specific occupational groups. Class relations were studied
directly only by Y.B. Damle in his ‘Social differentiation and differentiation in
emoluments’ (PhD thesis, 1950),and A.R. Desai in his thesis‘Social background
of Indian nationalism’ (PhD, 1945). It is perhaps significant that here also what
was actually a study of class structure was styled as ‘social background’.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 231

hard taskmaster: he sent his student assistants to look up references

and quotations in the library every day and even made them take
dictation for two hours a day—a process Srinivas describes as ca
tortuous sentence or two’ dictated by Ghurye followed by a ‘quote
from Russell, Whitehead or other Western intellectual1 (Srinivas 1996:
10). When Srinivas began to feel overburdened and asked Ghurye to
give him more time to work on his dissertation, he was summarily
relieved of the position.651.R Desai replaced Srinivas and was sent
to Bihar and Orissa to collect data for Ghurye’s project on Hindu
fasts, feasts, and festivals (Desai 1981: 23). In addition to employing
assistants to collect data, Ghurye used the work of his PhD students
as sources of information for his own projects. For example, he en¬
couraged his students to collect data on the religious beliefs and
practices of the communities they studied regardless of their topics

65 Srinivas and Ghurye had a‘troubled relationship’ (Srinivas 1996). Srinivas

later wrote of his feeling that under Ghurye he had become a ‘collector of discrete
ethnographical facts without being able to integrate them into a meaningful
framework’ (1973: 138). He also became dissatisfied with Ghurye’s historical
approach and converted to structure-functionalism under A.R. Radcliffe-
Brown’s influence at Oxford. Contending that Ghurye wanted him to study
the Coorgs because they had ancestral tombs, which he thought might be due
to the influence of ancient Egypt, he remarks: ‘I had started my career in socio¬
logy wanting to be a “theoretician” in sociology and I had ended up by becoming
a “conjectural historian’” (Srinivas 1996: 3). However, Srinivas’ criticism of
Ghurye is in part an ex post facto defence against Ghurye’s attack on him for
what he believed was Srinivas’ failure to properly acknowledge the source of
the data for his Oxford PhD thesis, subsequently published as The Coorgs (1952).
Srinivas completed his Bombay PhD in 1945 under Ghurye, and reworked the
same Coorg data for his Oxford thesis completed in 1947 under Radcliffe-
Brown. However, in the preface to The Coorgs (1952: xiii-xiv) he does not
mention the earlier thesis, an omission that deeply distressed Ghurye (1973:
117-18). Ghurye attempts to demonstrate Srinivas’ indebtedness to him by
quoting from letters written by Srinivas during his early weeks in Oxford
(Ghurye 1973: 114-19). These letters show that Srinivas resisted Radcliffe-
Brown’s functionalism at first and clung to Ghurye’s historical approach, and
that, contrary to the impression conveyed in his published remarks on Ghurye,
Srinivas became dissatisfied with Ghurye’s brand of sociology much after he
left Bombay and not while he was his student.
232 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

(Pillai 1996:79), and the information they gathered fed into Ghurye’s
own work on religion that culminated in books such as Gods and
men (1962b). Although he guided many students and helped them
to publish their research, he never collaborated or produced joint
publications with students, but pursued his research agenda alone
(Pramanick 1994: 245).
The roster of Ghurye’s students who became prominent sociolo¬
gists of the next generation includes M.N. Srinivas, I.P. Desai, K.M.
Kapadia, Irawati Karve, A.R. Desai, M.S.A. Rao, and Y.B. Damle, as
well as several others who are less well known but who made
important contributions to the field. Given the large number of theses
produced under Ghurye’s guidance and the important positions
attained by several of his students in the university system, it is not
surprising that the themes identified by Ghurye as central to socio¬
logy—religion, caste, family, kinship—became staples of the disci¬
pline. There are marked continuities between the work of Ghurye
and that of his most prominent students in their research interests,
if not theoretical orientation: Irawati Karve worked on kinship and
physical anthropology, M.N. Srinivas on caste, village, religion, and
social change, I.P. Desai on family, kinship, and education, K.M.
Kapadia on marriage and family, and M.S.A. Rao on urbanisation.66
With regard to methodology also, Ghurye’s influence showed in his
students: Karve and Kapadia drew upon Sanskrit texts and other
historical sources, combined with large-scale social surveys; I.P. Desai
and Damle also carried out systematic, multidimensional survey
research; and M.S.A. Rao developed a macrosociology of urbani¬
sation (Mukherjee 1979:68-9). Srinivas, in his teaching and practice,
always emphasised the importance of empirical fieldwork for socio¬
logy—an orientation that he probably absorbed from Ghurye even
prior to his exposure to Radcliffe-Brown. Also like Ghurye, Srinivas
advocated the unity of sociology and social anthropology in the
Indian context and stressed the study of social institutions (Panini
2000).

66 Only A.R. Desai broke away from this tradition: as a Marxist theoretician
and political activist, his research focused on nationalism, labour, agrarian
sociology, and peasant struggles. See Sujata Patel’s essay, this volume.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 233

Although a comprehensive history of sociology in India is yet to

be written, it is safe to assume that its basic orientation and concepts
were formed in the few original teaching and research departments,
from where they were dispersed as students moved into faculty posi¬
tions in other departments and transmitted their knowledge through
the medium of syllabi, examinations, and research guidance. In this
process Ghuryes influence as head of the Bombay University depart¬
ment was surely crucial. With the expansion of the university system
in the 1960s and the consequent increase in teaching posts, and with
the development of the social sciences under the Nehruvian planning
regime, the younger generation of sociologists easily found positions
in teaching and research. Several of Ghuryes students founded and
developed new departments: Srinivas started the department at
Baroda University, which I.P. Desai joined, later succeeding as head;
Srinivas later started the department at the Delhi School of Eco¬
nomics as well, which M.S.A. Rao joined; Karve headed the An¬
thropology Department at Deccan College (Pune University), and
Damle joined her until he started the Sociology Department at Pune
after it split from Anthropology; Kapadia and later A.R. Desai and
D. Narain took over at Bombay, and so on. Indeed, at one time almost
every sociology department in the country was headed by a Ghurye
product (Pillai 1997: xiii).67 As a result, Ghurye’s students were ins¬
trumental in shaping and consolidating the discipline in the 1960s
and 1970s.

Academic Politics and Institution Building

The department that Ghurye built was the major sociology depart¬
ment in the country for many years. He did not accomplish the task
without a struggle. Indeed, in view of Ghuryes notoriously difficult
personality and the viciousness of university politics, it is surprising

67 Other Ghurye students who went on to become heads or senior professors

in other universities include: K.N. Venkatarayappa (Bangalore University), K.C.
and Jalloo Panchanadikar (Baroda), A. Bopegamage (Pune), M.G. Kulkarni
(Pune, then Shivaji University, Aurangabad), C. Rajagopalan (Bangalore), V.A.
Sangave (Kolhapur), and G.S. Nepali (Benaras, North Bengal University, and
Kathmandu). I thank S.D. Pillai for this information.
234 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

that he accomplished as much as he did. While a detailed account of

Ghurye’s political and personal conflicts within the university and
the profession may seem unnecessary and trivial, it does reveal some¬
thing about the ways in which the discipline has been shaped by its
institutional framework.
As noted above, the Sociology Department remained part of the
School of Economics and Sociology until 1956, a situation that
Ghurye intensely disliked. From the beginning of his career he was
embroiled in factional politics, even when the School was very small.
For a number of years there were only four members: in Economics,
Professor K.T. Shah and C.N. Vakil, who was appointed Assistant
Professor in 1921 after he returned from England with an MSc degree
from the London School of Economics; and in Sociology, Ghurye
and N.A. Thoothi, who joined in 1925. The administrative affairs of
the school were managed through a committee of which K.T. Shah,
as seniormost, was chairman (Ghurye 1973: 63). Ghurye and Vakil,
both strong personalities, were intense rivals who headed opposite
factions, with Thoothi supporting Vakil against Ghurye and K.T.
Shah (Srinivas 1996:7). Although Ghurye was by far the more visible
and active member of the Sociology Department, Thoothi was more
astute in university politics and managed to create problems for
Ghurye throughout his tenure (Narain 1996: 18). The factional con¬
flict sharpened when Vakil was made professor before Ghurye and
became head of the School. In 1930, after the new University Act
came into force and teachers had to be reappointed, K.T. Shah was
ousted for political reasons and Vakil, who had many supporters in
the University Senate, was appointed Professor, while Ghurye was
only reappointed as Reader (Dongerkery 1957: 243). Thus Vakil be¬
came the ‘defacto Head of the School’ (Ghurye 1973: 80) and subse¬
quently the official director.68
After Vakil’s ascendancy, the Economics Department expanded
more rapidly than Sociology in terms of funding and teaching
positions. Internal politics delayed Ghurye’s appointment as pro¬
fessor until 1934, and although he was perhaps the best-known

68 Ghurye was apparently very bitter about this development; he remarked

sarcastically,‘While the London School of Economics had Sir William Beveridge
as its Director the Bombay School, not only of Economics but also of Sociology,
got Professor C.N. Vakil!’ (1973: 80).

W
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 235

sociologist in India at the time, the proposal for his professorship

was passed by just one vote in the Senate (Ghurye 1973:90). The ap¬
pointment of K.M. Kapadia (whom Ghurye favoured over Srinivas)
to the Reader’s position vacated by Thoothi in 1950 met with similar
difficulties, as the selection committee’s recommendation was
rejected by the Syndicate due to political manoeuvring (ibid.: 127—
9). For these and other reasons, Ghurye felt that Sociology was being
overshadowed by the Economics Department and wanted to split
the school. When this was finally done, he counted it as one of his
greatest achievements.69 This move enabled Ghurye to ‘retire with
the utmost satisfaction of a fulfilled academic career and not with
the distress of a frustrated one, which would otherwise have been
my lot!’ (ibid.: 155). In spite of the political wrangling, Ghurye man¬
aged to enter the university power structure: at the time of his retire¬
ment he was a member of all the important bodies, including the
Syndicate, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Narain 1996: 25).
The growing imbalance between the Sociology and Economics
departments was not due merely to interpersonal politics but also
to a broader shift in academics stemming from the advent of planned
development after Independence. State patronage heightened the
visibility and resources of economics and facilitated the expansion
of the Economics Department at Bombay, possibly at the expense of
Sociology.70 Contrary to what is commonly supposed, Ghurye was
not averse to the participation of sociologists in policy-making: he
was apparently responsible for introducing sociology as a subject in
the IAS examinations, and he complained that sociology was not

69 S.D. Pillai, interview 30 May 2001. Ghurye credits the new vice-chancellor,
John Matthai, with pushing the proposal through the Syndicate in 1955 in the
face of tough opposition from Vakil and his supporters (1973:155), thus freeing
the Sociology Department from its ‘bondage to the Department of Economics’
(1973: 154). The actual separation took place in 1956.
70 This was not unique to Bombay; at the Delhi School of Economics as well,
Srinivas’ new Department of Sociology tended to be overshadowed by the larger
and more aggressive Department of Economics (Beteille 2000:20). In Bombay,
the disparity is illustrated by the fact that the ISS never had any infrastructure
in the university and was run from Ghurye’s office, while the Indian Economics
Association had an office in the Economics Department and two paid assistants
(S.D. Pillai, personal Communication).
236 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

given its due place on the Planning Commission and other gov¬
ernment bodies. But he did not seek out research projects with a
policy slant, nor did he sit on high-powered government commit¬
tees—as did many economists and even some sociologists. Compared
to younger sociologists such as Srinivas, Ghurye was not successful
in attracting funding or in promoting sociology to the government
as a discipline relevant to policy-making and planning.
The disparity between economics and sociology was exacerbated
in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of foreign aid along with the
Torrential flow of Ford Foundation American experts’ into India
(Ghurye 1973:137). Sociology became temporarily popular with the
government under the influence of Douglas Ensminger, Director of
the Ford Foundation in India from 1951 to 1970, and sociologists
found plenty of work with the government and foreign-funded pro¬
jects under the Community Development Programme/1 But none
of the development-related research funding that came to the
Economics Department in abundance through the influence of Vakil
reached the Sociology Department at Bombay. Even when there was
a social dimension to a proposal, foreign and government projects
were monopolised by the Economics Department.72 Although it is
commonly believed that Ghurye did not want to accept foreign fund¬
ing, he was not averse to it in principle: at least once he submitted a
research proposal (the Town-Country Relations project) to the Ford
Foundation at the request of the vice-chancellor, but the project was
not funded (ibid.: 159). Flowever Ghurye did not pursue foreign-
funded projects because he believed that they were never true colla¬
borations and that Indian scholars were not given sufficient respect
and independence by their foreign partners.73 Fie was especially scath¬
ing towards what he referred to as the lFord Foundation occupation
of New Delhi’ (ibid.: 164) and criticised foreign scholars for not col ¬
laborating with local sociologists.74 Ghurye also argued that the
relations between Indian and foreign scholars are always one-sided,

71 See Srinivas (1994: 11) and Srinivas and Panini (1973: 198).
72 S.D. Pillai, interview, 30 May 2001.
73 Ibid.
74 Pillai (personal communication) recalls an incident when Ghurye directly
attacked Carl Taylor, chief of the Community Development Programme, when
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 237

the foreigners always being the ‘visitors’ and the Indians the ‘visited’,
which he regarded as a form of‘colonialism in embryo’ (ibid.: 163).
When requested by the vice-chancellor to respond to a query from
W. Norman Brown regarding collaboration on a project, he replied
to the university authorities with a long story about a Rockefeller
Foundation representative who had expressed interest in funding a
project but had never contacted him again, even after ‘four years
and nine months’ (ibid.: 160). His discussions with Brown were
equally unproductive (ibid.: 162): perhaps in both cases the repre¬
sentatives who met Ghurye, a notoriously forthright and acidic man,
realised that he would not be malleable enough for their purposes.75
Ghurye’s apparent intention in relating these incidents in his auto¬
biography is to highlight the untrustworthiness of foreign institutions
and the arrogance of foreign scholars who came to do research in
India with little background knowledge and even less humility. But
Ghurye was not rigidly anti-American: he maintained an informal
panel of American sociologists who acted as thesis examiners, includ¬
ing Merton, Mclver, Ogburn, Mandelbaum, and Nimkoff.76
Rather than chasing after prestigious government and foreign-
funded research projects, Ghurye pursued his research agenda

his lecture at Bombay took on a patronising tone. Ghurye was famous for asking
visitors pointed questions. When the well-known sociologist Tom Bottomore
was commissioned to write a sociology textbook for South Asia and visited
Bombay in that connection, Ghurye asked him why the sponsoring agency
could not find an Indian to do the job. And when Edward Shils came to carry
out his study of Indian intellectuals, Ghurye asked him whether any such study
had been made in America (Ghurye 1973: 164). Thus he gained a reputation
for being jingoistic and anti-American.
73 Ghurye refused to work even on the project statement as requested by
Brown without prior clarification about what was expected of him and his
department. Brown and his colleagues did not pursue the matter (Ghurye 1973:
159-62).
76 Ghurye also recommended American textbooks to his students. While
Kapadia and A.R. Desai were furious about the influx of cheap American books
courtesy PL-480 funds, Ghurye appreciated the fact that Indian students could
now afford such books but thought that there should be subsidies for Indian
books as well (Pillai, personal communication).
238 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

through his students and his own work: he published prolifically

and actively encouraged the publication of his students’ work. In
1944 he suggested to the university authorities that they bring out a
sociological series in view of the large number of theses being pro¬
duced in the department. Two such series were started—one in
sociology, with Ghurye as general editor, and one in economics. The
first book published in the series was his own Culture and society
(1947; Ghurye 1973: 114). Nine books were brought out up to 1959,
but after Ghurye’s retirement the series stopped. Four books were
authored by department members—Ghurye’s Family and kin in Indo-
European culture (1955a), K.M. Kapadia’s Marriage and family in
India (1955), A.R. Desai’s Social background of Indian nationalism
(1948), and D. Narain’s Hindu character—while the rest were PhD
theses by Ghurye’s students—L.N. Chapekar (Thakurs of Sahyadri,
1957), U.T. Thakur (Sindhi culture), K.N. Venkatarayappa, and
A. Bopegamage.77 From 1931 to 1962 Ghurye was also involved in
bringing out the fournal of the University of Bombay (JUB), started
in 1931. He was a member of the Editorial Board and of the Sociology
Committee, Managing Editor of the History, Economics, and Socio¬
logy sections, and Managing Editor of the journal from 1957 to 1962.
Ghurye published at least nine papers as well as book reviews in the
IUB between 1933 and 1961,78 as did several of his students.79

The Indian Sociological Society

Apart from establishing the Bombay University Sociology Depart¬

ment on a solid foundation, one of Ghurye’s most important
contributions to the institutionalisation of sociology in India was
the formation of the Indian Sociological Society (ISS), which was
registered in December 1951 in Bombay with 107 founder members.

771 have not been able to find full references for some of these titles.
78 These include Ghurye (1934, 1935b, 1936a, 1936b, 1937a, 1937b, 1937c,
1939, 1941, 1960b, 1960d).
79 Irawati Karve published at least three articles in the journal (1932, 1933,
1937). Although Ghurye was not active in running the journal after 1962, he
was still shown as Chairman of the Editorial Board up to 1963-4. After 1964
the journal became defunct (Ghurye 1973: 194).
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 239

Before starting the ISS, Ghurye was active in two other associations
in Bombay, the Bombay Anthropological Society (BAS)—which had
mainly non-academic members—and the Bombay Branch of the
Royal Asiatic Society (or BBRAS, as the Asiatic Society of Bombay
was then called). Ghurye was a member of the BAS Council as well
as president from 1942 to 1948. In 1946 he revived the society’s de¬
funct journal (Ghurye 1973:107), although apparently he published
only one article in it himself (Ghurye 1946). In 1926 Ghurye was
elected to the Managing Committee of the BBRAS (1973: 86), but
he contributed only book reviews to its journal.80
Although the ISS was intended to be a national association and
sociologists from other parts of the country were included as founder
members, until 1966 it functioned primarily as a regional association,
closely controlled by Ghurye and with its membership drawn mainly
from the Bombay school (Patel 2002).81 The Bombay-centric nature
of the society was partly due to the long-standing rivalry between
Ghurye and sociologists at Lucknow and Calcutta: Ghurye told Pra-
manick that when he started the Sociological bulletin ‘the whole of
North India was against it excepting D.P. [D.P. Mukerji] ’ (Pramanick
1994: 249, n. 109).82 Ghurye’s major aim in. starting the society was
to bring out a journal, the biannual Bulletin, which he did with
clocklike regularity for fifteen years, beginning with the first issue in
1952. Other members of the editorial board in the first few years

80 Apparently, there was an undercurrent of tension between Ghurye and

the eminent Indologist P.V. Kane, who was also a member of the Managing
Committee of the BBRAS (Narain 1996:27). Kane did not appreciate the intru¬
sion of sociology into areas that he considered the province of Indology, such
as the study of gotra. His attitude may explain why the Asiatic Society library
did not subscribe to the Sociological bulletin until very recently, in spite of Ghurye
being a member of the Managing Committee. However, Kane was the main
speaker at a farewell function held for Ghurye in 1959 (S. D. Pillai, personal
communication).
81 This account draws heavily on Patel (2002).
82 This rivalry is evident in the fact that when Ghurye was made a member
of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association in
1951, Radhakamal Mukerjee made a formal protest (Ghurye 1973:131). Ghurye
was a member of the ISA executive twice, from 1950 to 1952 and 1953 to 1956.
240 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

included D.P. Mukerji (the only non-Bombay person on the board),

J.V. Ferreira, and B.R. Agarwala (Ghurye’s former student who was
very active in organising the ISS). From 1956 K.M. Kapadia and
D. Narain took the place of the last two. Ghurye continued as editor
of the journal and president of the society until 1966, although after
his retirement in 1959 Kapadia became the de facto editor (Ghurye
1973: 134).
The articles published in the Bulletin during Ghurye s tenure
reflect his emphasis on the study of social institutions and culture as
well as his empiricism and indicate the extent to which Ghurye’s ap¬
proach to sociology was becoming entrenched. Of the 173 articles
published between 1952 and 1966, the largest number were on the
theme of family, marriage, or kinship (48 total, or more than one-
fourth), followed by urban issues, mainly concerning Bombay (17),
caste/social stratification (15), and social change (15). Other common
themes include theory and methodology (12), and personality and
behaviour patterns, village/community studies, and economic
development and migration (7 each). Surprisingly there are only
5 articles on religion.83 Most of the contributions are descriptive and
empirical, with only 4 articles reflecting on the state of the discipline
(by M.N. Srinivas, D.P. Mukerji, Ramkrishna Mukherjee, and A.K.
Saran, the last three all of the Lucknow School).
That the Bulletin was primarily a Bombay forum and a Ghurye
production is shown in the fact that the proceedings of the depart¬
mental symposia held each year in March/April were published in
the journal.84 The in-house nature of the journal is also reflected in
the authors: during Ghurye’s reign, frequent contributors include

83 These data are based on an unpublished analysis of the contents of the

Sociological bulletin compiled by Aradhya Bhardwaj (2000). I thank her for
sharing her work.
84 I thank Sujata Patel for pointing this out to me. Five such symposia were
published as theme issues: Our present discontent and frustration (vol. 2, no. 1,
1953); Social conditions and creative activity (vol. 3, no. 2,1954); Caste and the
joint family (vol. 4, no. 2, 1955, including papers by I.P. Desai, M.S.A. Rao, A.
Aiyappan, and others); Rural-urban relations (vol. 5, no. 2, 1956, with papers
by M.N. Srinivas, K.M. Kapadia, and others); and Nature and extent of social
change in India (vol. 11, no. 1,1961). The last was the proceedings of the Decen¬
nial Celebrations of the Society, held at Mysore, which Ghurye did not attend
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 241

I. P. Desai, K.M. Kapadia, Victor d’Souza, M.S.A. Rao,M.N. Srinivas,

J. V. Ferreira, and A. Bopegamage—all associated with Ghurye and
the department in some way. The first research work of several of
his students is also published in this journal, for example, S.M. Haidar
(1957) and K.C. Panchnadikar (1952). But the most frequent
contributor to the journal was Ghurye himself, with eleven articles
between 1952 and 1965, plus an entire issue devoted to his Vidyas:A
homage to Comte and a contribution to the sociology of knowledge
(1957b). Before the founding of the ISS, most of his articles were
published in the JUB, but after 1952 the Bulletin was the major vehicle
for his writing, and it was only after retirement that he published
most of his work in the form of books.85 Many of the articles pub¬
lished in the Bulletin prefigured books brought out later; for instance,
the argument in ‘Cities: Their natural history’ (1956a) is expanded
in Cities and civilization (1962a), and Ascetic origins’ (1952a) anti¬
cipates Indian sadhus (1953c). Ghurye’s work was famously wide-
ranging, and in his Bulletin papers he deals with such disparate topics
as city and town planning (Ghurye 1953a, 1956a, 1960c), friendship
(1953b), and the ‘Sexual behaviour of American female’ (a critique
of the Kinsey Report, 1954). After 1966, when the ISS shifted out of
Bombay, no paper by Ghurye appeared in the journal.
In 1966 the All India Sociological Conference (AISC) merged with
the ISS and the association shifted out of Bombay, Ghurye having
resigned as president. The AISC, established in 1955 by sociologists
of the Lucknow School—D.P. Mukerji, R.K. Mukerjee, D.N. Majum-
dar, and R.N. Saksena—was the only other national-level professional
sociological organisation in the country, and its main activity was to
hold conferences.86 The significance of the merger can be understood
against the background of the expansion of higher education and of
sociology as a discipline, and the establishment of the department

due to ill health, and includes papers by Ramkrishna Mukherjee, Kapadia, M.S.
Gore, and others.
85 See the list of references. The Bulletin articles are: Ghurye 1952a, 1952c,
1953a, 1953b, 1954, 1955b, 1956a, 1960c, 1961, and 1964.
86 D.P. Mukerji attempted to bring Ghurye into the second conference in
1956 by making him President, but the other members of the AISC objected
and chose the Mysore-based sociologist A.R. Wadia instead (Patel 2002).
242 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

at the Delhi School of Economics in 1959, headed by M.N. Srinivas.

Several other sociology departments had been started in North India,
notably at the Institute of Social Sciences in Agra in 1956, Chandigarh
in 1959, and Jaipur in 1962, developments that tended to diminish
the influence of both the Lucknow and the Bombay schools. Another
significant factor was the growing influence of structure-function¬
alism, which tended to undermine the legitimacy of Ghuryes histori¬
cal/cultural approach and swayed even several of Ghurye s prominent
students (Patel 2002). When Ghurye came to know in mid-1966 that
the merger was being mooted behind his back, he put in his resig¬
nation just a few days before going abroad to visit his son. Srinivas
took over as president of the society and editor of the Bulletin in
1967.87
The merger of the AISC and ISS represented a decisive break with
the past and marked the waning of Ghurye s influence in the world
of sociology. In 1967 the first all-India conference of the ISS after
the merger was held at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in
Bombay (whose director, M.S. Gore, was from the Bombay Depart¬
ment), cohosted by the sociology departments of Bombay University
(headed by A.R. Desai) and SNDT Womens University (headed by
Neera Desai) (Narain 1968). Ghurye inaugurated the conference,
but he left the venue immediately after his address without meeting
anyone.88 This was perhaps Ghurye s last major public appearance.

87 There are different versions of this story. According to S.D. Pillai, Kapadia,
then head of the Bombay Department, agreed to the merger proposed by R.N.
Saksena because he believed that the ISS would remain in Bombay and that he
would become the president. However, A.R. Desai and M.S. Gore, who were
discussing the matter with Saksena, knew that Saksena wanted to take over
and move the ISS to Agra. When the merger was finalised and Kapadia came to
know he would not be president, he was furious. Ghurye got wind of the dis¬
cussions and diplomatically resigned, without getting involved in the politics
of the merger. In his autobiography he says nothing of these events, only that
he felt the need to pass on the leadership of the society to younger scholars,
and that when he decided to visit his son in March 1966 he took the opportunity
to resign (Ghurye 1973: 134). In 1970 Saksena succeeded Srinivas as president.
88 The anti-Hindi agitations and caste politics in Tamil Nadu were the subject
of Ghurye’s address, which he used as an additional chapter (Chapter 13,‘Caste
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 243

With his retirement in 1959 and Kapadia’s premature retirement soon

after, and with the loss of the ISS, Bombay lost its status as the premier
sociology department in the country and became more a regional
centre.89

IV. LEGACY OF GHURYE'S NATIONALIST

SOCIOLOGY

The substance and practice of Indian sociology as an academic disci¬

pline has been deeply marked by Ghurye’s legacy. Under his guidance,
sociology came to be defined as the study of Indian (i.e., Hindu)
civilisation and of the history and structure of its basic social institu¬
tions—family and kinship, caste, and religion—through textual and
empirical fieldwork methods. In Ghuryes view, Indian society was
produced by the spread of Brahminical Hinduism and it has been
held together by its unique cultural traditions and social institutions.
His sociology reproduced Indological and nationalist notions of what
constitutes Traditionaf Indian society (the patriarchal joint fami¬
ly, the caste system) and Indian culture or civilisation (Brahminical
Hinduism with its roots in the Vedic past) but invokes the tools of
anthropological field research and scientific methodology in order
to substantiate these images. The teaching and research programme
that he led at Bombay University, the contents of the Sociological
bulletin, as well as his own work, all reveal the shape of this sociology.
While Ghurye s refusal to bow to international intellectual fashions
or to become an adjunct to foreign research agendas is laudable, his
nationalist sensibility also led to inbreeding: a core set of ideas became
institutionalised in sociology and was mechanically reproduced

and politics in Tamil Nadu) in the fifth edition of Caste and race (1969). At the
same conference he is reported to have made some remarks in support of the
Shiv Sena, which had emerged in Bombay in 1966, but there is no written record
of this.
89 After the ISS moved out of Bombay, a new association called the Bombay
Sociologists was started by several of Ghuryes former students including Mabel
Fonseca and B. Agarwala. Ghurye attended these meetings occasionally but
was not actively involved, and the association became defunct fairly soon
(Narain 1996: 32, n.21; S.D. Pillai, personal communication).
244 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

through established channels of teaching, research, and publication.

After Ghurye’s reign, sociology opened out to a large extent, but the
understanding of‘Indian society5 that is still taught in sociology cour¬
ses in a number of universities retains his distinctive stamp.
The traditions of the Bombay School are still visible in sociology
in other ways as well. First and most obviously, sociology has tended
to concentrate narrowly on the study of social institutions such as
family, kinship, caste, and religion while neglecting the economic
and political dimensions of social life—a thematic focus that has
persisted even after the triumph of structure-functionalism and
subsequent theoretical shifts. Although sociology today is much more
diverse (and even Ghurye wrote on a wide range of issues), the
tendency to avoid the subject matter of other social sciences such as
economics has stifled the development of alternative theoretical
frameworks and discouraged interdisciplinary work, both of which
might enable sociology to tackle new questions.
Second, as has often been pointed out, sociology’s obsession with
institutions, cultural traditions, and social norms has served to pri¬
vilege unity, continuity, and harmony over change and conflict. For
instance, traditional sociological analyses of caste have highlighted
the stability of the caste system and its roots in religious values and
ritual practices while glossing over relations of oppression and
conflict. Sociologists have also retailed the Brahminical/reformist
view of caste as a system that had a functional logic in the past but
which is breaking down (or should be) under the pressures of mod¬
ernity (Upadhya n.d.). Similarly, feminist scholars have shown how
conventional sociological understandings of family and kinship have
masked structures of inequality and oppression within the family.
A third significant feature of mainstream sociology is its ahistori-
cism. Although Ghurye’s work appears to be historical in that he at¬
tempts to locate the origins of social institutions in the past, it lacks
a concept of historical agency and tends to isolate cultural history
and change from other historical processes.90 ‘Social change’ in
mainstream sociology refers primarily to incremental shifts in social
customs and cultural forms, and the motors of change are identified

90 This notion of history is very different from that which was incorporated
into the sociology of A.R. Desai or Surajit Sinha, for example.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 245

as abstract processes such as ‘modernisation’ or ‘sanskritisation’.

Indian sociology’s neglect of history and its tendency to lift social
processes out of time is symptomatic of the urge to define the nation
or Indian society as timeless.
Finally, the discipline has been allergic to engagement with social
theory, a shortcoming that derives from its positivist heritage.
Ghurye’s insistence on ‘getting the facts’ is echoed in the empiricism
of most sociological writing that does not reflect upon the nature or
production of its data. This empiricism is in turn related to socio¬
logy’s self-representation as an objective arbiter of knowledge about
society and its refusal to recognise its imbrication within other
discursive practices and ideological formations.
While it would be overstating the case to lay all of sociology’s
problems at Ghurye’s door, he dearly played a major role in the insti¬
tutionalisation of a sociology that reproduced his vision of the nation
or Indian society as constituted by certain basic social institutions
and rooted in Hindu tradition. In this Ghurye was not alone. As
Yogendra Singh (1986) has argued, nationalism provided an ideologi¬
cal basis for the thought of most of the first generation Indian socio¬
logists who attempted, in different ways, to demonstrate the organic
unity of Indian society. Ghurye’s sociology provides a prime example
of this quest. His thought was shaped by the experience of colonia¬
lism, the constructed memory of India’s ‘past glory’, and the nation¬
alist project of future emancipation, and his perspective reflected a
complex mix of nationalist, Orientalist, and reformist ideas, reworked
through the diffusionist and empiricist framework of early-
twentieth-century anthropology. Placed against this background,
Ghurye’s understanding of Indian society—his conception of the
nation as essentially one, unified by a common religion and culture
and structured by the basic social institutions of caste, kinship, and
family—appears almost inevitable.
Sociology did not just draw upon existing discourses about Indian
society, it also contributed to the reproduction and refinement of
certain dominant representations. It is beyond the scope of this essay
to explore the ideological role of the discipline, but it should be
pointed out that, through the work of Ghurye and his students, socio¬
logy became closely implicated in the nationalist project of defining
and manufacturing the nation. The nationalist ‘awakening’ involved
246 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the discovery of India’s past as the source of the emerging Indian or

Hindu nation, but also gave rise to debates about how Indian society
should be reconstituted to make it both modern enough to deserve
independence and‘traditional’ enough to retain a separate identity—
the model of modernity of course being the West. The reconstruction
or reinvention of ‘tradition’ within the framework of the modern
nation-state continued to be a concern of post-colonial elites
struggling with the problem of‘national integration’ and devoted to
the goals of economic development and modernisation. The socio¬
logical study of social institutions and cultural practices contributed
to this process of redefinition by marking certain social forms as
authentically ‘Indian’ and ‘traditional’ (the family system, ‘Indian
cultural values’—the ‘good’ traditions) in opposition to their ‘West¬
ern’ counterparts and to ‘bad’ traditions such as caste, and by defining
other ‘non-traditional’ arenas not as ‘Western’ but as neutrally‘mod¬
ern’ (the state, modern technology).91
Similarly, Ghurye’s sociological project of mapping India’s cultural
diversity while identifying a common source of national culture
validated the nationalist rendering of the nation as a ‘unity in diver¬
sity’. The documentation and categorisation of India’s various com¬
munities on the basis of their cultural characteristics was not a
colonial practice alone, but was uncritically adopted by nationalist
sociology and anthropology as well. In this notion of diversity, com¬
munities are distinguished by their cultural differences rooted in
‘tradition’ and represented as internally homogeneous and demar¬
cated by fixed boundaries (Upadhya 2001). Ghurye, like many nation¬
alists, identified a common thread running through this cultural
diversity in the Vedic past and the spread of Hinduism, and its social
unity in the history of assimilation of diverse groups to Brahminism

91 In a sense, even modern technology and science were subsumed within

Indian ‘tradition’ through the nationalist recovery of ancient Indian science
(Prakash 2000). Prakash (2000: 201—3) points to a central contradiction of
Indian nationalism—that the realisation of an authentic national community
and a ‘different modernity’, defined through a critique of Western civilisation,
were premised on the appropriation of the modern state and modern science
and technology for ‘development’.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 247

through the caste system. He believed that the same sources of cul¬
tural unity and social integration would be the basis for building a
modern Indian nation (Upadhya n.d.).
From its inception, sociology in India has been engaged, in diverse
ways, with the problem of the nation, just as nationalist imaginings
have been tied up with visions of Indian, society and of a future
revitalised Hindu community. Indeed, it could be argued that the
major problem for sociology (as for history) in the post-Independ¬
ence period was to invent or reconstitute the nation, which in socio¬
logical terms was rendered as ‘Indian society’. But as this account of
Ghurye suggests, in attempting to break free of colonial hegemony
the discipline became trapped within the nationalist terms of dis¬
course, and as a consequence has been slow to develop a reflexive
understanding of itself. Perhaps much more research on the history
and practice of sociology will be needed before it can begin to recons¬
titute itself as a discipline capable of producing a truly critical pers¬
pective on Indian society.

REFERENCES92

Ahmad, Naheed F. 1998. The Elphinstone College, Bombay, 1827-90: A case

study in nineteenth-century English education. In Mushirul Hasan, ed.,
Knowledge, power and politics: Educational institutions in India, pp. 389-
429. New Delhi: Roli Books.
Bayly, Susan. 1995. Caste and ‘race’ in the colonial ethnography of India. In
Peter Robb, ed., The concept of race in South Asia, pp. 163-218. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Beteille, Andre. 2000. M.N. Srinivas. Economic and political weekly 35, 1 & 2:
18-22.
Bhardwaj, Aradhya. 2000. Sociological bulletin 1952-98: A statistical outline.
Unpublished manuscript.

92 The list of Ghurye’s publications included here, though not complete, is

fairly exhaustive. I have included several references not referred to in the main
text. Some references are incomplete because I have not been able to locate the
original articles. Some of the references are drawn from Pillai’s Dictionary
(1997), which has a complete bibliography but in which some references are
also incomplete.
248 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Bhatkal, Sadanand. 1996. Dr G.S. Ghurye. In A.R. Momin, ed., The legacy of
G.S. Ghurye: A centennial festschrift, pp. 34-8. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
Chakravarti, Uma. 1993. Whatever happened to the vedic dasi? Orientalism,
nationalism and a script for the past. In K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds, Recasting
women: Essays in Indian colonial history, pp. 27-87. New Delhi: Kali for
Women.
-. 1998. Rewriting history: The life and times of Pandita Ramabai. New
Delhi: Kali for Women.
Chapekar, L.N. 1957. Thakurs of Sahyadri. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1987 [1968]. Notes on the history of the study of Indian
society. In Bernard S. Cohn, An anthropologist among the historians and
other essays, pp. 136-71. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dandekar, R.N. 1999. Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar and the academic
renaissance in Maharashtra. In N.D. Wagle, ed., Writers, editors and reform¬
ers: Social and political transformations of Maharashtra, 1830-1930, pp. 130—
9. New Delhi: Manohar.
Das, Veena. 1993. Sociological research in India: The state of crisis. Economic
and political weekly 28, 23: 1159-61.
Desai, A.R. 1948. Social background of Indian nationalism. Bombay: Oxford
University Press.
Desai, I.P. 1981. The craft of sociology and other essays. Delhi: Ajanta Publications.
Deshpande, Satish. 1994. Crisis in sociology: A tired discipline? Economic and
political weekly 29,10: 575-6.
Dhanagare, D.N. 1993. Themes and perspectives in Indian sociology. Jaipur: Rawat
Publications.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 1997. Recasting Tamil society: The politics of caste and race
in contemporary southern India. In C.J. Fuller, ed., Caste today, pp. 263-
95. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dobbin, Christine. 1972. Urban leadership in western India: Politics and com¬
munities in Bombay City, 1840-1885. London: Oxford University Press.
Dongerkery, S.R. 1957. A history of the University of Bombay, 1857-1957.
Bombay: University of Bombay.
Ferreira, J.V. and S.S. Jha. 1976. Introduction to The Outlook Tower: Essays in
urbanization in memory of Patrick Geddes, pp. i-xiii. Bombay: Popular
Prakashan.
Ghurye, G.S. 1923a. Dual organization in India Journal of the Royal Anthropo¬
logical Institute.
-. 1923b. Egyptian affinities of Indian funerary practices. Anthropos 4:
420-30.
-. 1924. The ethnic theory of caste. Man in India 4: 33-77.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 249

-. 1925a. Civilizations and fecundity. Man in India 5: 1-21.

-. 1925b. Growth of population in India and elsewhere. The Indian
economist. Reprinted in Ghurye (1973), pp. 281-6.
-. 1926. Funerary monuments of India. Man in India 6: 100-39.
-. 1932. Caste and race in India. London: Kegan Paul.
-. 1933. Untouchable classes and their assimilation in Hindu society. The
Aryan path 4, 2. Reprinted in Ghurye (1973), pp. 316-23.
-. 1934. Fertility data of the Indian census of 1931. The journal of the
University of Bombay 3, 1: 114-46.
-. 1935a. Anthropology and our educational system. Man in India 15, 2
& 3: 93-107.
-. 1935b. Review of The jealousy of the gods and criminal law at Athens by
Svend Ranulf. The journal of the University of Bombay 3, 4: 86-8.
-. 1936a. A note on cross-cousin marriage and dual organization in
Kathiawar. The journal of the University of Bombay 5, 1: 88-90.
-. 1936b. Account of an exploratory tour in certain parts of Sind in search
of prehistoric culture. The journal of the University of Bombay 4.
-. 1936c. Marriage and widowhood in India .Marriage hygiene. Reprinted
in Ghurye (1963b).
-. 1937a. Buddhist site near Khairpur. The journal of the University of
Bombay 6.
-. 1937b. Disposal of human placenta. The journal of the University of
Bombay 6, 1: 1-65.
-. 1937c. Review of The story of Indian civilization by C.E.M. Joad. The
journal of the University of Bombay 6, 1: 135-7.
-. 1937d. Some problems in Indian ethnic history. Proceedings of the All
India Oriental Conference, Trivandrum.
-. 1938a. Census contribution to the racial analysis of India, a valuation.
Quarterly journal of the mythic society 17, 3&4.
-. 1938b. Sex habits of a sample of middle class people of Bombay. In
G.S. Ghurye and A.P. Pillay, eds, Indian population problems. Bombay: Ind¬
ian Population Conference. Reprinted in Ghurye (1973), pp. 287-305.
-. 1938c. Social work and sociology. Servants of India.
-. 1939. Two old sites in Kathiawar. The journal of the University of Bombay
8, 1:3-12.
-. 1941. Salary and other conditions of work of clerks. The journal of the
University of Bombay 9.
-. 1943. The aborigines, so-called and their future. Bombay: Popular Book
Depot.
250 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

-. 1946. Some kinship usages in Indo-Aryan literature. Journal of the

Bombay Anthropological Society.
-. 1947. Culture and society. Bombay: Oxford University Press.
-. 1948. Occidental civilization. Bombay: International Book House.
-. 1949a. Indian unity, a retrospect and a prospect. In M.B. Nanvati, ed.,
Group prejudices in India. Bombay.
-. 1949b. Samaj-Shastra (Marathi).Poona: Arya Samskriti Mudranalaya.
-. 1951. Indian costume. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1952a. Ascetic origins. Sociological bulletin 1, 2: 162-84.
-. 1952b. Race relations in Negro Africa. Bombay: Asia Publishing House.
-. 1952c. Social change in Maharashtra. Sociological bulletin 1,1: 71 - 86
&3, 1:42-60.
-. 1953a. Cities of India. Sociological bulletin 2,1: 47-80.
-. 1953b. Friendship as a category of social relations. Sociological bulletin
2, 2: 143-60.
-. 1953c. Indian sadhus. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1954. Sexual behaviour of the American female. Sociological bulletin
3,2:158-83.
-. 1955a. Family and kin in Indo-European culture. Bombay: Popular
Prakashan.
-. 1955b. Nomenclature of kin. Sociological bulletin 4, 1: 45-84.
-. 1956a. Cities: Their natural history. Sociological bulletin 5, 1: 51-78.
-. 1956b. Sexual behaviour of the American female. Bombay: Popular Pra¬
kashan.
-. 1956c. Teaching of sociology, social psychology and social anthro¬
pology. In Teaching of social sciences in India. New Delhi: UNESCO.
-. 1957a. The Mahadev Kolis. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1957b. Vidyas: A homage to Comte and a contribution to the sociology
of knowledge. Sociological bulletin 6, 2: 1-88.
-. 1958a. Bharata Natya and its costume. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1958b. Values and society. Elphinstone College centenary volume.
Bombay.
-. 1959. The scheduled tribes. Bombay: Popular Book Depot (first pub¬
lished as The aborigines: ‘So-called’—and their future, 1943).
-. 1960a. After a century and a quarter. Lonikand then and now. Bombay:
Popular Prakashan.
-. 1960b. Indian tradition. The journal of the University of Bombay
28,4.
-. 1960c. Prolegomena to town and country planning. Sociological bulletin
9, 2: 73-91.
 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 251

-. 1960d. Style and civilization. The journal of the University of Bombay

28,4.
-. 1961. Sociology of innovation and mobility. Sociological bulletin 10,1:
1-26.
-. 1962a. Cities and civilization. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1962b. Gods and men. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1963a. Anatomy of a rururban community. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1963b. Anthropo-sociological papers. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1963c. The Scheduled Tribes. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1964. Bombay suburbanites: Some aspects of their working life. Socio¬
logical bulletin 13, 2: 73-83 & 14, 2: 1- 8.
-. 1965a. Religious consciousness. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1965b. Shakespeare on conscience and justice. Bombay: Popular Praka¬
shan.
-. 1968a. Rajput architecture. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1968b. Social tensions in India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1969. Caste and race in India. 5th edn. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1972. Two Brahmanical institutions: Gotra and char ana. Bombay: Popu¬
lar Prakashan.
-. 1973.1 and other explorations. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1974. Whither India? Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1977. Indian acculturation: Agastya and Skanda. Bombay: Popular Pra¬
kashan.
-. 1978. India recreates democracy. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1979a. Legacy of the Ramayana. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-—. 1979b. Vedic India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1980. Burning cauldron of North-East India. Bombay: Popular
Prakashan.
-. and S.R. Deshpande. 1926. Some village studies. Indian journal of eco¬
nomics.
Ghurye, G.S. and A.P. Pillay, eds. 1938. Indian population problems. Bombay:
Indian Population Conference.
Guha, Ramachandra. 1996. Savaging the civilized: Verrier Elwin and the tribal
question in late colonial India. Economic and political weekly 31,35-7:2375-
90.
-. 1999. Savaging the civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological locations:
Boundaries and grounds of afield science. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
252 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Haidar, S.M. 1957. Social organisation of the refugees in Bhopal state. Socio¬
logical bulletin 6, 1: 61-71.
Hazareesingh, Sandip. 2000. The quest for urban citizenship: Civic rights, public
opinion, and colonial resistance in early twentieth-century Bombay. Modern
Asian studies 34, 4: 797-829.
Irschick, Eugene F. 1994. Dialogue and history: Constructing South India, 1795-
1895. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1996. The Hindu nationalist movement in India, 1925 to
the 1990s. New Delhi: Viking.
Jagirdar, P.J. 1963. Studies in the social thought ofM.G. Ranade. Bombay: Asia
Publishing House.
Johnson, Gordon. 1973. Provincial politics and Indian nationalism: Bombay and
the Indian National Congress, 1880 to 1915. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer¬
sity Press.
Kapadia, K.M. 1955. Marriage and family in India. Bombay: Oxford University
Press.
-. ed., 1954. Professor Ghurye felicitation volume. Bombay: Popular Book
Depot.
Karve, Irawati. 1932. The Parasurama myth. The journal of the University of
Bombay 1,1: 115-40.
-. 1933. The ethnic affinities of the Chitpavans. The journal of the Uni¬
versity of Bombay 1,4: 383-400 & 2,1: 132-58.
-. 1937. The normal asymmetry of the human body. The journal of the
University of Bombay 6, 1: 66-74.
Kuklick, Henrika. 1983. Tribal exemplars: Images of political authority in British
anthropology, 1885-1945. In G. Stocking, ed., Observers observed: Essays
on ethnographic fieldwork, pp. 59-82. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
-. 1991. The savage within: The social history of British anthropology, 1885-
1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-. 1997. After Ishmael: The fieldwork tradition and its future. In Akhil
Gupta and James Ferguson, eds, Anthropological locations: Boundaries and
grounds of afield science, pp. 47-65. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fangham, Ian. 1981. The building of British social anthropology: W.H.R. Rivers
and his Cambridge disciples in the development of kinship studies, 1898-1931.
Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Momin, A.R., ed. 1996. The legacy of G.S. Ghurye: A centennial festschrift.
Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
Mukherjee, Ramkrishna. 1979. Sociology of Indian sociology. Bombay: Allied
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 THE IDEA OF INDIAN SOCIETY 253

Munshi, Indra. 2000. Patrick Geddes: Sociologist, environmentalist and town

planner. Economic and political weekly 35, 6: 485-91.
Narain, Dhirendra. 1968. Report on conference of Indian sociologists. Socio¬
logical bulletin 17, 1: 91-9.
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The legacy of G.S. Ghurye: A centennial festschrift, pp. 13-33. Bombay: Popu¬
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colonialism. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
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1, 1:45-9.
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ed., The legacy of G.S. Ghurye: A centennial festschrift, pp.74-96. Bombay:
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256 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Search for Synthesis

The Sociology of D.P. Mukerji1

T.N. Madan

I was trained to think in large terms. It made me . . . search for the

wood behind the trees.—D.P. Mukerji, Diversities

The value of Indian traditions lies in the ability of their conserving

forces to put a break on hasty passage. Adjustment is the end product
of the dialectical connection between the two. Meanwhile [there] is
tension.—D.P. Mukerji, Diversities

Myself wars on myself. . .—Y.B. Yeats, Deirdre

IN THIS ESSAY ON DHURJATI PRASAD MUKERJI (1 894-1961 ), ONE

of the founders of sociology in South Asia, I will first briefly try to

locate him in his intellectual setting in Calcutta and in Lucknow. I
will then recall, again briefly, my personal impressions of him as a
teacher in the last days of his active life in the early 1950s. Finally, I
will discuss at some length his contributions as a scholar, with par¬
ticular reference to his later work (from the early 1940s onward), in
which the search for synthesis—in both the unfolding of the historical
process and the most fruitful way of its study—was highly salient. It
was his considered judgment, I think, that the most fruitful way to

1 In writing this essay, 1 have drawn on two earlier articles (Madan 1977,
1994b), but included newly written material also.
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS

Fig. 7: First All India Sociological Conference, Dehra Dun, December 1954-January 1955.
(Photograph courtesy T.N. Madan.) For further information, see p. 289.
257
258 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

‘read’ history was to focus on the dialectic embedded in it and investi¬

gate it from an interdisciplinary perspective (combining history, eco¬
nomics, psychology, and sociology).

I. THE SETTINGS: CALCUTTA AND LUCKNOW

The Bengali intelligentsia of the 1890s—the decade of D.R Mukerjis

birth—were participants in a new phase of the renaissance that had
been ushered in earlier in the century by the leaders of a nascent
middle class, from among whom Rammohan Roy (1772-1833) is
the best remembered and even considered the father of modern India.
Among the defining characteristics of this new awareness one could
mention, first, a fine-tuned receptivity towards the ethical precepts
of Christianity and the intellectual, literary, and artistic achievements
of the West; and then, in a kind of‘second movement’, a resurgent,
redefined Hinduism alongside a rediscovered Sanskrit literary tradi¬
tion. More than any others, perhaps, Rabindranath Tagore (1861—
1941) and Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) compelled attention,
and not among intellectuals alone.
After the turn of the century came the partition of Bengal in 1905
and the Swadeshi movement. The latter, and an upgraded Calcutta
University with provision for postgraduate studies under the dynamic
leadership of Asutosh Mookerji, were the critical components of the
intellectual setting in which D.R Mukerjis generation completed their
higher studies. Among Mukerjis nearest contemporaries, who also
contributed to the making of sociology in India as an academic disci¬
pline, mention should be made of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949:
see Bhattacharyya 1990), Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968; see
Singh 1956), G.S. Ghurye (1893-1983: see Pramanick 1994), and
K.P. Chattopadhyay (1897-1963). Of these, Sarkar, Mukerjee, and
Chattopadhyay were graduates of Calcutta University, and Ghurye
of Bombay University.
DP (henceforth I will refer to him, as he was most widely known,
by his initials) was born on 5 October 1894 in a Brahmin, middle-
class family that had a fairly long tradition of intellectual pursuits.
After his ‘Entrance’ examination, he opted for the social instead of
the natural or biological sciences, the latter being preferred by the
brightest students of those days. One such student, Satyen Bose, who
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 259

was to become a famous physicist, later recalled DP as a warm and

friendly fellow student, a gifted conversationist and a lover of books
and Indian music (see Mukerji 1972). In the event, DP took the Mast-
ers degrees in economics and history: needless to add, he did so
with distinction.
DP opted for a career in teaching which began at Bangabasi Col¬
lege, Calcutta. He also began to write and publish in both Bengali
and English, and soon acquired a reputation as a brilliant young
man with broad intellectual interests and sound critical judgement.
As Satyen Bose recalled, ‘his critical appreciation and his judgment
on the aesthetics of music were held in high regard by alf (see Mukerji
1972). He published in Sabuj Patra and Parichaya and his writings
attracted the notice of Rabindranath Tagore, Pramatha Chaudhury
(founder-editor of Sabuj Patra), and the novelist Saratchandra Chat-
terji. He wrote not only on music and literary topics, but also on
such themes as democracy, capitalism, and anti-intellectualism.
Sociology those days, DP used to tell us (in the early 1950s), was of¬
ten mistaken by the general reading public for social reform, social¬
ism, or sanitised sex a la Marie Stopes (author of the best selling
Married love)\ And this in spite of the fact that already, in the late
nineteenth century, many Calcutta intellectuals honoured Auguste
Comte at an annual festival: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838—
94), for one, was familiar with both his and Herbert Spencer’s views.
A studio portrait of DP taken around this time (the early 1920s)
shows him seated in a large cane chair, dressed in a Western-style
suit and shoes, with a stiff collar shirt and necktie. A felt hat rests on
a small pile of books on the nearby ornate table. His facial expression
already has the intensity that I was to become familiar with thirty
years later.
DP joined the newly founded University of Lucknow as a lecturer
in economics and sociology in 1922 at the invitation of Radhakamal
Mukerjee. Mukerjee himself had graduated from Presidency College,
Calcutta, with Honours in history and literature, and then specialised
(MA, PhD) in economics. After short stints as a teacher and researcher
in Bengal and Punjab, he began his long innings at Lucknow Uni¬
versity in 1921, as Professor and Head of the Department of Eco¬
nomics and Sociology, from ‘the very day the university started to
work’. He introduced, as he himself later described it,‘an integrated
260 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

approach in economics, sociology and anthropology in both research

and teaching’ (1956: 10).
It may be of interest to note here the scope of Mukerjee’s lectures
as these set the tone for what he expected his colleagues to do. A
prolific writer, he published a book in 1925, Borderlands of economics,
which comprised the substance of these early lectures. The topics
that he spoke and wrote about included economic behaviourism
and the institutional and anthropological perspectives on it; the canti-
intellectualism’ of economics and its humanisation; the relevance of
biology, ecology, human geography, sociology, psycho-analysis,
ethics, and even physics to economics; and so on. In a forward-look¬
ing concluding paragraph, Mukerjee wrote: lThe acquisitive and pos¬
sessive impulses which have been so much exaggerated in the last
few decades will be duly limited in vital modes of association, and
the separation between the intrinsic or final and instrumental or
economic ends, which has threatened to corrode social life, will warp
no longer the feeling and judgement of peoples’ (1925: 270).
Although economics (and the other social sciences) did not deve¬
lop exactly the way Mukerjee expected, he remained steadfast in his
holistic vision. He wrote thirty years later: A true general theory of
society is the corpus of theories, laws, and explanations of social re¬
lations and structures derived from all the social sciences; it is a body
of integrated and co-ordinated knowledge relating to society as a
whole. For society is not divisible. Only the social sciences for
the sake of analysis and specialization are fractionalized’ (Mukerjee
1956: 19).
Mukerjee’s approach was too loosely eclectic and evasive to be ef¬
fective in working out the terms of synthesis among the social scien¬
ces. Howsoever fuzzy and problematic it was, he held firmly to his
vision of holism. It was in the pursuit of his programme of interdisci¬
plinary and comparative teaching and research that Mukerjee
brought DP to Lucknow (in 1922), and then, in 1928, D.N. Majumdar
(1903-60), one of the first holders of the Master’s degree in anthro¬
pology (from Calcutta University) in India. Apart from lecturing on
the economic life of the so-called primitive societies, and on the
intermeshing of the economic, ritual, and social aspects of society,
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 261

Mukerjee asked Majumdar to also teach a course on aspects of mone¬

tised economies. Majumdar’s energies were, however, devoted prim¬
arily to teaching and research in cultural and physical anthropology
and prehistory. He gradually worked out his own intellectual agenda
(see Madan 1994a: 24-36).
Besides Mukerjee, DP, and Majumdar, there were other scholars
in the department, mostly economists, but these three clearly were
the leaders, and it is they that those who speak or write about the
‘Lucknow School’ have in mind. The three ‘Ms’ did indeed share cer¬
tain basic assumptions about social reality and about its study, but
their perspectives were also marked by significant differences. There
really was no ‘School’, formally proclaimed, nor did the faculty share
a common approach to teaching and research.
This is not the place to go into details. I will confine myself to
noting that, although the three ‘Ms’ subscribed to social realism and
empiricism, they did not have a common conception of the character
of social reality or of the methods of its investigation. For Mukerjee,
the human was ultimately the divine and the social was inseparable
from the cosmic. Consequently, his empiricism was tempered with
intuitive understandings. For DP, dialectical materialism and the
historically situated human agent were the source of the dynamics
of human history. Empirical research uninformed by a sense of hist¬
ory and deductive reason, he maintained, could only be superficial.
For Majumdar, human creativity (‘the works of man’) in its material
and non-material expressions was grounded in the interaction of
geographical, biological, and cultural endowments. The totality and
its elements were best studied empirically through fieldwork and in
the laboratory. In his conception of anthropology as a unified
‘science’, clinical theory was preferable to abstract thought.
Although all three scholars were committed to the ameliorative
potential of the social sciences, they had different conceptions of
what this entailed. Their basically different attitudes to the processes
of socio-economic development and secularisation in the wake of
Independence were marked by considerable concern about the loss
of tradition on the part of Mukerjee (see Mukerjee 1951); caution
about change, even if planned, without a clear vision of the new
262 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

society (‘hasty passage’) on the part of DP (see Mukerji 1958: 28-

76); and immense enthusiasm for ‘applied anthropology’ as a means
of solving immediate problems on the part of Majumdar (1956-7:
130-43). One of their most distinguished students, A.K. Saran (MA,
1946), questioned the perspectives of all three of his teachers (see
Saran 1959, 1965), and rejected both a positivistic conception of a
social science as well as a Wittgensteinian alternative to it (see Saran
1962a, 1964).
On the institutional side, an independent Department of
Anthropology, headed by Majumdar and providing courses in
cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, and prehistory was
created in 1951. Soon afterwards the Institute of Ecology and Human
Relations was established under the directorship of Mukerjee himself.
And then a Department of Sociology too came into existence in 1954,
with Professor Sushil Chandra as its head, completing the process of
formal dispersal of the three groups of scholars (anthropologists,
economists, sociologists) and their relocation, in just four years.

II. D.P. MUKERJI AS A TEACHER

Let us now get back to D.P. Mukerji. His career as an intellectual in¬
cluded, most prominently, his contributions as a teacher. In fact,
there would be general agreement among those who knew him
personally (as students, colleagues, or friends), and who have also
read his written work, that he had a much greater and abiding in¬
fluence on others through the spoken rather than the written word.
The freedom that the classroom, the coffee house, or the drawing
room gave him to explore ideas and elicit responses was naturally
not available via the printed page. Moreover, the quality of his writing
was uneven, and not all that he wrote could be expected to survive
long.
When I became his student, DP was already in his late fifties. Lean
of build, intense in expression, and stylish by appearance (long-
sleeved white cotton shirts, the tails tucked in, and white trousers in
summer; suits or tweeds in winter; dhoti-kurta—always—at home),
he cut an elegant figure. He usually began his lecture on a formal
note (he spoke very softly, at times in whispers), but would soon
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 263

spice it with stories, insightful observations, fascinating asides, and

witticisms. One could never be wholly sure what DP would speak
about on a particular day—the topic addressed on the previous
lecture-day, a book he had read since then (he literally devoured
books, pencil in hand, at an incredible pace), a concert he had been
to or a movie he had seen the previous evening, or a news item in
the mornings papers. There was a significant continuity, he seemed
to want to tell us, between the classroom and the world outside. If
one did not explore this relationship, one was a born loser, and un¬
suited to the scholarly life. DP did not wholly disown the ivory tower,
for he valued the view from afar, but deprecated insularity
DP took an interest in our political views, in the books we read
and the music we heard (the Lata phenomenon had just begun and
he was amused!), in the clothes we wore (it took him long to reconcile
to the bush-shirt), and so on. His emphasis upon aesthetic values
elevated them to the level of the ethical. The students who joined
him in the quest for knowledge and the making of a meaningful life
became a personal concern to him, as scholars in-the-making and as
human beings. He aroused their intellectual curiosity, guided their
reading, stimulated their thinking, and watched over them with care
and even affection. DP once told me that the best thing about being
a teacher was to see eager eyes brighten and young minds blossom.
I discovered many years after his death that the well-known bookseller
of Lucknow, Ram Advani, had offered to let me buy books on credit
when I was still a student without an income, because, as he told me,
DP had suggested that he do so. I can recall many other similar acts
of personal kindness.
What matters more, perhaps, is that DP conveyed to his students
the judgment that the life of scholarship and intellectual quest was
a life of daring, and indeed a life very much worth living. It was so¬
cially useful no less than personally satisfying. It was a life for the
sceptical and the restless, not for the contented and the lazy. The life
of the intellectual was honourable and intellectuals were the very
salt of the earth. DP had himself once been persuaded to step outside
‘the grove of Academe’ but had not found the experience particularly
exhilarating. In 1938, he had been prevailed upon to become Director
of Information to the government after the Congress had formed
264 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the ministry in (as it was then) the United Provinces. He was reputed
to have discharged his duties with rare ability and distinction. Among
his noteworthy initiatives was the establishment of the Bureau of
Economics and Statistics. He quit three years later, as soon as the
Congress relinquished office, and returned to the university, happy
to be back where he truly belonged. His only other involvement with
the government was membership of the Uttar Pradesh Labour En¬
quiry Committee in 1947.
DP’s reputation as a teacher was not confined to students of eco¬
nomics and sociology, but was generally acknowledged in the uni¬
versity. His lectures on the history of economic and social thought,
and on historical sociology (‘culture and civilisation’), were particu¬
larly appreciated during the days of my studentship. Outside the
curricula, his radio talks and newspaper articles covered the graphic
arts, music, cinema, literature, and politics. I remember two erudite
lectures on the social foundations of epic poetry, and,impromptu
discussions of many new books (including Carr’s New society, Soro¬
kin’s Social philosophies of an age of crisis, Hauser’s Social history of
art, and Nirad Chaudhuri’s The autobiography of an unknown Indian),
and films (such as ‘Death of a Salesman’, ‘Snakepif, and ‘Rashomon’).
I also remember many articles in the National Herald, ranging from
a discussion of Nehru’s personality (the type that prefers ‘merger’ to
‘emergence’) to a lament on state-organised cultural ‘shows’, and an
appreciation of Faiyaz Khan’s gayaki (musical style).
I have heard DP criticised for having been a dilettante, a non-
serious amateur. I guess his dilettantism may be admitted, but it
would have to be acknowledged as a love of the fine arts and a thirst
for knowledge that had range and purpose. It would take wide reading
and a discriminating mind, not to mention the rare art of conversa¬
tion, to make a dilettante of DP’s calibre. In an obituary, his colleague,
S.K. Narain (of the Department of English), described his conversa¬
tions as ‘rich and varied and wise and scintillatingly brilliant’. The
economist Ashok Mitra recalls DP’s ‘wit’ and ‘magnetism’, and how
he would tease curious visitors from Calcutta, saying that their inte¬
rest in him was a part of their sightseeing in Lucknow (see Avasthi
1997: 261)!
After twenty-odd years as a lecturer, DP was made a reader in
1945. Those days, Indian universities followed the principle of a single
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 265

professor in the department. In 1949, Acharya Narendra Deva, the

vice chancellor, broke with tradition when he bestowed a personal
professorship on DP—a gesture that was widely hailed in the univer¬
sity and amidst intellectuals in the city. Today’s university teachers
will find it hard to believe that it was only when DP became a pro¬
fessor, at the age of 55, that he was allotted an office room to himself—
‘life space!’ he called it with gentle glee. The writing desk in the room,
he proudly said, had come as a gift from his devoted student, A.K.
Saran, who was by then his colleague.
Compared to Radhakamal Mukerjee, DP was hardly known out¬
side India. While Mukerjee travelled abroad fairly frequently for
conferences and lectures, particularly to England and the USA, DP’s
first overseas trip came as late as in 1952, when he visited the USSR.
The following year he went to the Netherlands as a visiting professor
at the Institute of Social Sciences, invited there by the invitation of
the well-known Dutch anthropologist Professor Hofstra. Retirement
at Lucknow University was due in 1954. Dr Zakir Hussain, vice chan¬
cellor of Aligarh Muslim University and an economist (he later
became President of India), invited DP to AMU as Professor of Eco¬
nomics for as long as he wished to stay there. Intellectuals of DP’s
calibre, Zakir Hussain let it be known, enriched the quality of intellec¬
tual and social life at a university by their presence, for the presence
of such persons was never a mere physical fact. DP accepted the
invitation without great enthusiasm, for his life had been a rich tale
of two cities, Calcutta and Lucknow, both famous for their differently
crafted cultural traditions. In Lucknow, DP’s admirers felt deeply
deprived: his long-time friend M. Chalapathi Rau, editor of the
National Herald and no mean intellectual himself, spoke for virtually
everybody when he asked why Lucknow was letting Aligarh ‘take
away one of its glories’.
As it turned out, DP’s stay at Aligarh lasted only a couple of years.
In 1956, his persistent sore throat was diagnosed as cancer. He under¬
went major surgery in Switzerland which saved his life but left him
physically and mentally shattered. The skilled Zurich surgeon just
saved his voice, but DP could never again talk long or sufficiently
audibly. Lor a man who relied heavily on the spoken word, this was
a cruel blow. He continued at Aligarh for three more years and then
retired to live in Dehra Dun (where he had made his last major public
266 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

appearance at the Sociological Conference in 1955 as its president)

in the summers, and in Calcutta in the winters, with occasional visits
to Lucknow. It was in Lucknow that I last met him in the spring of
1961, at the home of his younger colleague and former student, V.B.
Singh. The scene was familiar: friends and colleagues sat out in the
lawn in a circle to talk with him. He made me sit by his side so that
I might hear him better (he knew I had a hearing problem). Every¬
thing was as it used to be, but he was not what he used to be.
DPs last piece of writing was a short memoir of his colleague and
friend, D.N. Majumdar, who had died suddenly in 1960. He prepared
it at my request for inclusion in a memorial volume. He wrote to me
to say that the piece was shorter than he would have wished. ‘You
wanted me to do it. But it could not be long. As you know, I am too
ill for all that’ (Mukerji 1962). Like everything else that DP ever wrote,
this memoir too was in longhand, and he had such a fine handwriting.
Exactly four months later, on 5 December 1961, he died in Calcutta.
As A.K. Saran (1962b) noted in an obituary, DP died of physical ex¬
haustion and intellectual loneliness.

III. D.P. MUKERJI AS SCHOLAR-AUTHOR

There are two misconceptions about DP, and I would like to comment
on these. The first, and more common of these, is that midway in his
intellectual career he became a Marxist but was never able to master
the theory and method of Marxism; or that he was a Marxist. Second,
he has been described as basically a Hindu intellectual, a conservative
who was only superficially modern.
Aware of the first characterisation, but scornful of it, DP used to
jestingly say that the most that he could be described as was a
‘Marxologisf! He had discovered Marx (and Hegel) fairly early, but
at no stage was he an uncritical Marxist. His deepest interest was in
the Marxian method (see Mukerji 1945) rather than in any dogmas
or norms. In a short paper entitled ‘A word to Indian Marxists’, in¬
cluded in his Views and counterviews (1946: 166), he had warned
that the ‘unhistorically minded’ young Marxist ran the risk of ending
up as a ‘fascist’, and Marxism itself could ‘lose its effectiveness in a
maze of slogans’. Nevertheless, it would not be misleading to say
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 267

that DP did indeed favour Marxism in various ways, ranging from a

theoretic emphasis upon the economic factor (‘mode of production)
in the making of culture to an elevation of practice to the status of
a test of theory, and that this preference is prominent in his later
works. It was a close but not altogether comfortable embrace.
As for his being a Hindu, he was of course a Brahmin by birth
and upbringing, and not apologetic about it. He retained a lifelong
interest in classical Indian thought, which he considered essentially
dynamic. ‘Charaiveti, charaiveti' (forward, forward!)’ from the Aita-
reya Brahmana, was one of his favourite aphorisms. In the making
of the mosaics of medieval and modern Indian cultures, he consi¬
dered the centrality of Hindu contributions a historical fact. By be¬
coming a part of the pattern, however, it had ceased to be exclusive.
(More about this below.) As for Brahminical religious belief and
ritual, he rejected these quite early in his own life. Actually, he took
a broadly Marxist view of religion as an epiphenomenon, but casti¬
gated Indian textbook Marxists for their failure to examine closely
the reasons why religion was the social force that it apparently was
in India. (As is well known, Marx himself had posed a similar question
to Engels.) At the same time, DP rejected what he considered a
Western fiction, namely, that the Indian mind was ‘annexed and
possessed’by religion (see Mukerji 1948: 6). The Charvaka theses on
states of consciousness being purely physical fascinated him. It could
be that DP failed to squarely face the difficulties that his triple loyalty
produced; his Brahminical intellectualism, liberal humanism, and
Marxist praxis could not be built into a single, rigorously worked-
out theoretical framework. As in the work of Radhakamal Mukerjee,
DP’s quest for synthesis remained elusive. And he was aware of this,
perhaps more acutely than he cared to let others know.
Being an intellectual meant two things to DP. First, discovering
the sources and potentialities of social reality in the dialectic of
tradition and modernity, and, second, developing an integrated per¬
sonality through the pursuit of knowledge. Indian sociologists, in
his opinion, suffered from a lack of interest in history and philosophy
and in the dynamism and meaningfulness of social life. In his presi¬
dential address to the first Indian Sociological Conference (1955),
he had complained: ‘As an Indian, I find it impossible to discover
268 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

any life-meaning in the jungle of the so-called empirical social re¬

search monographs’ (Mukerji 1958:231). Western sociological theory
generally, and its Parsonian version in particular, did not satisfy him
because of its overweening accent on the ‘individual’, or the dyad
‘actor-situation’. Paying attention to specificities in a general frame¬
work of understanding was a first principle he derived primarily
from Marx, and from Weber too. He developed this methodological
point in an important essay on the Marxist method of historical in¬
terpretation (Mukerji 1945).

Early Works: The Nature of Social Science

Let me now turn to DP’s major published works. It is interesting

that he considered his first two books, Personality and the social
sciences (1924) and Basic concepts in sociology (1932), ‘personal docu¬
ments’—the early fruits of his endeavour to formulate an adequate
concept of social science. About the first book, he avowed that it was
written with ‘the sole purpose’ of clarifying his ‘attitude towards sys¬
tematised knowledge of society and life in general’. For this purpose
he organised his ideas around the notion of ‘personality’. He took
up the position that the abstract individual would be a narrow focus
of social science theorisation: a holistic, psycho-sociological approach
was imperative. It was this ‘synthesis of the double process of indi¬
viduality and the socialization of the uniqueness of individual life,
this perfect unity’ that he called ‘personality’ (1924: ii). It remained
a core concept in his thinking. Towards the end of his life he returned
to its clarification when he distinguished the holistic idea of purusha
from the Western notion of the individual (vyakti). The relationship
of purusha and society, free of the tension that characterises the rela¬
tionship of the individual and the group, was, DP maintained, the
key to understanding Indian society in terms of tradition (1958:235).
At the very beginning of his intellectual career DP committed
himself to a view of knowledge and of the knower. Knowledge was
not, as he put it, mere ‘matter-of-factness’, but ultimately, after taking
the empirical datum and the scientific method for its study into
account, philosophic (1932: iv-v). Economics (he used to tell us thirty
years later) had to be rooted in concrete social reality, that is, it had
to be sociological; sociology had to take full cognizance of cultural
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 269

specificity, that is, it had to be historical; history had to rise above a

narrow concern with the triviality of bygone events through the
incorporation in it of a vision of the future, that is, it had to be phi¬
losophical. Given such an enterprise, it is obvious that the knower
had to be a daring adventurer with a large vision rather than a timid
seeker of the safety of specialisation. He pointedly asked in the mid-
1940s:

We talk of India’s vivisection, but what about the vivisection of know¬

ledge which has been going on all these years in the name of learning,
scholarship and specialization? A‘subject’ has been cut off from know¬
ledge, knowledge has been excised from life, and life has been amputated
from living social conditions. It is really high time for Sociology to come
to its own. It may not offer the Truth. Truth is the concern of mystics
and philosophers. Meanwhile, we may as well be occupied with the
discipline which is most truthful to the wholeness and the dynamics of
the objective human reality. (Mukerji 1946: 11)

Basic concepts in sociology, a product of DP’s engagement with

Western social thought, discusses the notions of‘progress’, ‘equality’,
‘social forces’, and ‘social control’. His exposition of these concepts is
marked by both a positive attitude to the Western liberal outlook as
also a lack of ease with the prevailing sociological theories, which he
considered excessively ethnocentric and mechanistic. DP emphasised
the importance of comparative cultural perspectives and of the hist¬
orical situatedness of social reality. ‘It may be urged against the above
point of view that every systematic body of knowledge assumes all
these. But when we assume, we forget.’ Above all, he stressed the role
of reason (‘Practical and Speculative Reason’) as a faculty—the intel¬
lectual ability to deduce or infer—as the primary source of know¬
ledge. Moreover, knowledge was, he believed, ‘most intimately related
to better living as the Greeks realized and others forgot. . . . The only
justification of these pages is to help to the best of one’s ability in
this installation of Reason in the heart of the subject’ (1932: xvi).
The ultimate objective was not merely understanding but ‘the deve¬
lopment of Personality’ (ibid.: x).
Rejecting the evolutionist notion of‘progress’ as a natural pheno¬
menon, DP stressed the element of ‘purpose’ in the life of human
beings. Development is not growth, he maintained, but the broader
270 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

process of the unfolding of potentialities (in this he followed Hegel

and Marx though he did not say so explicitly), and added that the
‘emergence of values and their dynamic character’ must receive ade¬
quate consideration (1932: 9). Further:

Progress can best be understood as a problem covering the whole field

of human endeavour. It has a direction in time. It has various means
and tactics of development. Fundamentally, it is a problem of balance
of values. The scope of the problem is as wide as human society, and as
deep as human personality. In so far as human values arise only in con¬
tact with human consciousness at its different levels, the problem of
progress has unique reference to the changing individual living in a
particular region at a particular time in association with other indivi¬
duals who share with him certain common customs, beliefs, traditions,
and possibly a common temperament. (Ibid.: 15)

It seems to me permissible to derive from the foregoing.statement

the conclusion that ‘modernisation’ was the special form which
‘progress’ took for peoples of the Third World in the second half of
the twentieth century. If this is granted, then the following words
need to be pondered over:

Progress ... is ... a movement of freedom .... What is of vital signi¬

ficance is that our time-adjustments should be made in such a way that
we should be free from the necessity of remaining in social contact for
every moment of our life. This is an important condition of progress.
In leisure alone can man conquer the tyranny of time, by investing it
9

with a meaning, a direction, a memory and a purpose. Obstacles to

leisure, including the demands of a hectic social life, often mistaken for
progress, must be removed in order that the inner personality of man
may get the opportunity for development. This is why the Hindu philo¬
sopher wisely insists on the daily hour of contemplation, and after a
certain age, a well-marked period of retirement from the turmoil of
life. The bustle of modern civilization is growing apace and the need
for retirement is becoming greater. (Mukerji 1932: 29-30)

The above passage has a contemporary ring; and it is very relevant.

If we paraphrase it, using words and phrases that are more familiar
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 271

today, we get a succinct reference to the unthinking craving for and

the human costs of modernisation, including alienation, to the values
of individual freedom and human dignity, and to social commitment.
For DP progress was, as I have already quoted him saying, a problem
of the balancing of values; and so is modernisation. When we intro¬
duce values into our discourse—and the rationalist perspective that
he recommended will have it in no other way—we are faced with
the problem of the hierarchy of values, that is, with the quest for
ultimate or fundamental values. For these DP turned to the Upani-
shads, to shantam, shivam, advaitam, that is, harmony, welfare, unity.

The first is the principle of harmony which sustains the universe amidst
all its incessant change, movements and conflicts. The second is the
principle of co-ordination in the social environment. The third gives
expression to the unity which transcends all the diverse forms of states,
behaviours and conflicts, and permeates thought and action with
ineffable joy. .. . On this view, progress ultimately depends on the deve¬
lopment of personality by a conscious realization of the principles of
Harmony, Welfare and Unity. (Ibid.)

This appeal to Vedanta, while discussing the Western notion of

progress, is a disconcerting characteristic of DP’s thought through¬
out. He sought to legitimise it by calling it ‘synthesis’, which itself he
described as a characteristic of the historical process, the third stage
of the dialectical triad. He thus evaded, it seems to me, a closer exa¬
mination of the nature and validity of synthesis. Its existence was
assumed and self-validating. One’s disappointment and criticism of
DP’s position is not on the ground of the civilisational source of this
trinity of values but on the ground that Harmony, Welfare, and Unity
are too vague and esoteric within their elusive appearance in his
discourse; and he does not show how they may be integrated with
such values of the West as are embodied in its industrial civilisation.
On the positive side, however, it must be added that DP’s preoccupa¬
tion with ultimate values should be assessed in the light of his deep
distrust of the installation of Science as the redeemer of mankind
and of Scientific Method (based on a narrow empiricism and ex¬
clusive reliance on inductive inference) as the redeemer of the social
sciences.
272 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

DP, it would seem, was always deeply sensitive to the social en¬
vironment around him. To the extent that the society in which he
lived the life of a scholar was undergoing change, there was a discern¬
ible shift in his intellectual concerns also, and he was conscious of
this. He even wrote about it later: Tn my view, the thing changing is
more real and objective than change per se’ (1958: 241). He was a
very sensitive person, and many who knew him intimately will recall
how a turn in events—whether of the university, the city, the country,
or the world—would cast a gloom on him or bring him genuine joy.
He had an incredible capacity for intense subjective experience: it
perhaps killed him in the end. (One of his favourite books was Goe¬
the’s Werther.) In all his writings he addressed himself to his
contemporaries: he had an unstated contempt for those who write
for posterity with an eye on personal fame and some kind of immort¬
ality, and I think he was right in this attitude. As R.G. Collingwood
put it in his famous autobiography: good writers always write for
their contemporaries (Collingwood 1970: 39).
It would seem that what DP was most conscious of in his earlier
writings was the need to establish links between traditional culture,
of which he was a proud though critical inheritor, and modern liberal
education, of which he was a critical though admiring product. The
two—Indian culture and modern education—could not stay apart
without each becoming impoverished—as indeed had been happen¬
ing—and therefore had to be synthesised in the life of the people in
general and of the middle classes and intellectuals in particular. In
this respect, DP was a characteristic product of his times. He was
attracted by the image of the future which the West held out to tradi¬
tional societies and, at the same time, he was attached to his own
tradition, the basis of which was the Hindu heritage. The need to
defend what he regarded as the essential values of this tradition thus
became a compelling concern, particularly in his later writings.
Dualities never ceased to interest DP, and he always sought to
resolve the conflict implicit in persistent dualism through transcen¬
dence. This transcendence was to him what history was all about—
or ought to be. But history was not for him a tablet already inscribed,
once for all, and for each and every people. Hence his early criticism
that, in the hands of Trotsky, Lenin, and Bukharin, Marx’s materialist
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 273

interpretation of history had degenerated into ‘pure dialectic’ (1932:

184). This criticism was repeated by him again and again. In 1945,
he complained that the Marxists had made the ‘laws of dialectics’
behave like the ‘laws of Karma—predetermining every fact, event
and human behaviour in its course; or else, they are held forth as a
moral justification for what is commonly described as opportunism’
(1945: 18).
For DP historiography was meaningless unless it was recognised
that the decision to ‘write history’ entailed the decision to ‘act history’
(1945: 46). And history was being enacted in India in the 1930s, if it
ever was during DP’s lifetime, by the middle classes and, under their
leadership, by the masses. What they were doing increasingly
bothered him, for history had not only to be enacted but to be enacted
right. The question of values could not be evaded. The middle classes,
whose intellectual life was his concern in his earlier work, were also
his concern in his later work, but now it was their politics that ab¬
sorbed him. In this respect DP’s concern avowedly with himself was
in fact sociological, for he believed that no man is an island unto
himself, for he is embedded not merely in his class but also in his
larger socio-cultural environment. The focus was on modern Indian
culture and the canvas naturally was the whole of India.

Modern Indian Culture

The year 1942 saw the publication of Modern Indian culture: A socio¬
logical study. A second revised edition was completed in 1947, the
year of Independence, but also of Partition. It was written under the
impending shadow of the partition of India; inquiry and anguish
are the mood of the book. The problem, as he saw it, was first to ex¬
plain why the calamity of communal division had befallen India,
and then to use this knowledge to shape a better future. Sociology
had to be the interlocutor of history and this was no mean role;
indeed, it was an obligation. His analysis led him to the conclusion
that a distortion had entered into the long-established course of Ind¬
ian history and crippled it. The happening responsible for this was
British rule. But let me first quote DP’s succinct statement of the
character of modern Indian culture:
274 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

As a social and historical process . . . Indian culture represents certain

common traditions that have given rise to a number of general attitudes.
The major influences in their shaping have been Buddhism, Islam, and
Western commerce and culture. It was through the assimilation and
conflict of such varying forces that Indian culture became what it is
today, neither Hindu nor Islamic, neither a replica of the Western modes
of living and thought nor a purely Asiatic product. (Mukerji 1948: 1)

In this historical process, synthesis had been the dominant organis¬

ing principle and the Hindu, the Buddhist, and the Muslim had
together shaped a worldview in which, according to DP, The fact of
Being was of lasting significance’. This meant that there had developed
an indifference to The transient and the sensate’ and a preoccupation
with the subordination of The little self’ to, and ultimately its disso¬
lution in, The Supreme Reality’ (1948: 2). This worldview DP called
The mystical outlook’. He maintained that Islam could have shaken
Hindu society to its very roots upon its arrival in India, but that
Buddhism served as a cushion. Buddhism itself had failed to tear
Hindu society asunder and had succeeded only in rendering it more
elastic. Muslim rule was an economically progressive force but, on
the whole, it brought about only a variation in the already existent
socio-economic structure (ibid.: 65-7), and provided no real alter¬
natives to native economic and political systems. ‘The Muslims just
reigned, but seldom ruled’ (ibid.: 24).
British rule, however, did prove to be a real turning point in as
much as it succeeded in changing the relations of production, or, to
use DP’s own words, The very basis of the Indian social economy’
(1948: 24). New interests in land and commerce were generated; a
new pattern of education was introduced; physical and occupational
mobility received a strong impetus. Overshadowing all these develop¬
ments, however, was the liquidation of an established middle class,
and The emergence of a spurious middle class’, ‘who do not play any
truly historical part in the socio-economic evolution of the country,
remain distant from the rest of the people in professional isolation
or as rent receivers, and are divorced from the realities of social and
economic life. . . . Their ignorance of the background of Indian
culture is profound. . . . Their pride in culture is in inverse proportion
to its lack of social content’ (ibid.: 25).
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 275

It was this middle class which helped in the consolidation of Bri¬

tish rule in India but later challenged it successfully; it was also the
same middle class which brought about the partition of the country.
Its rootlessness made it a counterfeit class’ and therefore its handi¬
work (whether in the domain of education and culture, in the poli¬
tical arena, or in the field of economic enterprise) had inevitably
something of the same spurious quality. ‘The politics and the culture
of a subject country’, DP wrote, ‘cannot be separated from each other’
(1948: 207). To expect such an ‘elite’ to lead an independent India
along the path of genuine modernisation, DP asserted with remark¬
able prescience, would be unrealistic. He warned that before they
could be expected to remake India, modernise it, the elite themselves
must be remade. And he wrote a forthright, if not easy, prescription
for them: ‘conscious adjustment to Indian traditions and symbols’
(ibid.: 215), for‘culture cannot be “made” from scratch’ (ibid.: 214).
It is important to understand why he made this particular recom¬
mendation, why he wanted the withdrawal of foreign rule to be
accompanied by a withdrawal into the self which, let me hasten to
add, was quite different from a withdrawal into the past or plain
inaction. DP was not only not a revivalist, he was keenly aware of the
imminent possibility of revivalism and its fatal consequences. He
noted that it would be the form that political hatred, disguised as
civil hatred, would take after Independence. But he was not hopeless,
for he fondly believed that revivalism could be combated by giving
salience to economic interests through a ‘material programme’ that
would cut across communal exclusiveness. He envisaged India’s
emancipation from the negative violence of the constrictive primor¬
dial loyalties of religion and caste through the emergence of class
consciousness (1948: 216). He was silent on class conflict, however,
and his critics may justifiably accuse him of not seeing his analysis
through to its logical conclusion. His optimism was the sanguine
hope of an Indian liberal intellectual rather than the fiery conviction
of a Marxist revolutionary.
In any case, we know today, half a century after DP’s expression
of faith on this score, that class does not displace caste in India. Nor
do class and caste coexist in compartments: they combine but they
do not fuse. DP’s vision of a peaceful, progressive India born out of
the ‘union’ of diverse elements, of distinctive regional cultures, rather
276 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

than out of the type of ‘unity’ that the British imposed from above
(1948: 216), however, remains eminently valid even today. The ac¬
commodation of various kinds of conflicting loyalties within a na¬
tional framework, rather than national integration, is the strategy
which new African and Asian states, faced with cultural pluralism,
are finding both feasible and advantageous. We all know how Pakistan
broke up in 1971.
DP’s plea for a reorientation of tradition was, then, of a positive
nature—an essential condition for moving forward, restoring hist¬
orical dynamism, and reforging the broken chain of the socio-cultural
process of synthesis. Employing Franklin Giddings’ classification of
traditions into primary, secondary, and tertiary (1948: 34), he sug¬
gested that by the time of the British arrival, Hindus and Muslims
had yet not achieved a full synthesis of traditions at all levels of social
existence. There was a greater measure of agreement between them
regarding the utilisation and appropriation of natural resources and
to a lesser extent in respect of aesthetic and religious traditions. In
the tertiary traditions of conceptual thought, however, differences
survived prominently.
It was into this situation that the British moved, blundering their
way into India, and gave Indian history a severe jolt. As is generally
believed, they destroyed indigenous merchant capital and the rural
economy, pushed through a land settlement based on alien concepts
of profit and property, and established a socially useless educational
system. Such opportunities as they did create could not be fully uti¬
lised, DP said, for they cut across India’s traditions, and ‘because the
methods of their imposition spoilt the substance of the need for
new life’ (1948: 206).

The Making of Indian History

At this point it seems pertinent to point out that while DP followed

Marx closely in his conception of history and in his characterisation
of British rule as uprooting, he differed significantly not only with
Marx’s assessment of the positive consequences of this rule but also
with his negative assessment of pre-British traditions.
It will be recalled that Marx had in his articles on British rule in
India asserted that India had a long past but ‘no history at all, at least
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 277

no known history’ that its social conditions had‘remained unaltered

since its remotest antiquity’; that it was the British intruder who
broke up ‘the Indian handloom and destroyed the spinning-wheel’,
that it was ‘British steam and science’ which ‘uprooted, over the whole
surface of Hindustan, the union between agriculture and manufac¬
turing industry’. Marx had listed England’s crimes in India and pro¬
ceeded to point out that she had become ‘the unconscious tool of
history whose actions would ultimately result in a ‘fundamental
revolution’. He had said: ‘England had to fulfill a double mission in
India: one destructive and the other regenerating—the annihilation
of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of
Western society in India’ (Marx and Engels 1959: 31). Thus, for Marx,
as for so many others since—including Indian intellectuals of various
shades of opinion—the modernisation of India had to be its western¬
isation.
As has already been stated above, DP was intellectually and emo¬
tionally opposed to such a view of India’s past and future, whether
it came from Marx or from liberal bourgeois historians. He refused
to be ashamed of or apologetic about India’s past. The statement of
his position was unambiguous: ‘Our attitude is one of humility to¬
wards the given fund. But it is also an awareness of the need, the
utter need, of recreating the given and making it flow. The given of
India is very much in ourselves. And we want to make something
worthwhile out of it. . . .’ (1945: 11). Indian history could not be
made by outsiders: it had to be enacted by Indians. In this endeavour
they had to be not only firm of purpose but also clear-headed:

Our sole interest is to write and to act Indian History. Action means
making; it has a starting point—this specificity called India; or if that
be too vague, this specificity of the contact between India and England
or the West. Making involves changing, which in turn requires (a) a
scientific study of the tendencies which make up this specificity, and
(b) a deep understanding of the Crisis [which marks the beginning no
less than the end of an epoch]. In all these matters, the Marxian
method ... is likely to be more useful than other methods. If it is not,
it can be discarded. After all, the object survives. (Mukerji 1945: 46)

‘Specificity’ and‘crisis’ are the keywords in this passage: the former

points to the importance of the encounter of traditions and the latter
278 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

to its consequences. When one speaks of tradition, or of ‘Marxist

specification’, one means, in DP’s words, ‘the comparative obduracy
of a culture-pattern’. He expected the Marxist approach to be ground¬
ed in the specificity of Indian history (Mukerji 1945:45,1946:162ff.),
as indeed Marx himself had grounded it by focusing on capitalism,
the dominant institution of Western society in his time. Marx, it
will be said, was interested in precipitating the crises of contradictory
class interests in capitalist society (Mukerji 1945: 37). DP, too, was
interested in movement, in a release of the arrested historical process,
in the relation between tradition and modernity. He asked for a socio¬
logy which would ‘show the way out of the social system by analysing
the process of transformation’ (1958: 240). This could be done by
focusing first on tradition and only then on change.

The first task for us, therefore, is to study the social traditions to which
we have been born and in which we have had our being. This task
includes the study of the changes in traditions by internal and external
pressures. The latter are mostly economic. . . . Unless the economic force
is extraordinarily strong—and it is that only when the modes of pro¬
duction are altered—traditions survive by adjustments. The capacity
for adjustment is the measure of the vitality of traditions. One can have
a full measure of this vitality only by immediate experience. Thus it is
that I give top priority to the understanding (in Dilthey’s sense) of tradi¬
tions even for the study of their changes. In other words, the study of
Indian traditions . . . should precede the socialist interpretations of
changes in Indian traditions in terms of economic forces. (Ibid.: 232)

This brings us to the last phase of DP’s work. Before I turn to it,
however, I should mention that Louis Dumont has drawn our atten¬
tion to an unresolved problem in DP’s sociology. He points out that
‘recognition of the absence of the individual [in the modern Western
sense] in traditional India’ obliges one to ‘admit with others that
India has no history’, for ‘history and the individual are inseparable’;
it follows that‘Indian civilization [is] . . . unhistorical by definition’
(Dumont 1967:239). Viewed from this perspective, DP’s impatience
with the Marxist position regarding India’s lack of history is difficult
to understand. It is also rather surprising that, having emphasised
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 279

the importance of the group as against the individual in the Indian

tradition, and of religious values also, he should have opted for a
Marxist solution to the problems of Indian historiography (see ibid.:
231). DP hovered between Indian tradition and Marxism, apparently,
but not perhaps really, or without much strain. His adherence to
Marxist solutions to intellectual and practical problems gained in
salience in his later work, which was also characterised by a height¬
ened concern with tradition. His was a classic case of the ‘opposed
self’.

Modernisation: Genuine or Spurious?

For DP the history of India was not the history of her particular
form of class struggle because she had experienced none worth the
name. The place of philosophy and religion was dominant in the
history, and it was fundamentally a long-drawn exercise in cultural
synthesis. For him ‘Indian history was Indian culture’ (1958: 123).
India’s recent woes, namely communal hatred and Partition, had
been the result of the arrested assimilation of Islamic values (ibid.:
163); he believed that ‘history halts unless it is pushed’ (ibid.: 39). In
other words, people make their own history, although (as Marx point¬
ed out) not always as they please.
The national movement had generated much moral fervour but,
DP complained, it had been anti-intellectual. Not only had there
been much unthinking borrowing from the West, there had also
emerged a hiatus between theory and practice, as a result of which
thought had become impoverished and action ineffectual. Given his
concern with intellectual and artistic creativity, it is not surprising
that he should have concluded: ‘politics has ruined our culture’ (1958:
190).
What was worse, there were no signs of this schism healing in the
years immediately after Independence. When planning arrived as
state policy in the early 1950s, DP expressed his concern, for instance
in an important 1953 paper on ‘Man’ and ‘Plan’ in India (1958: 30-
76), that a clear concept of the new man and a systematic design of
the new society were nowhere in evidence. As the years passed by, he
came to formulate a negative judgment of the endeavour to build a
280 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

new India, and also diagnosed the cause of the rampant intellectual
sloth. He said in 1955: T have seen how our progressive groups have
failed in the field of intellect, and hence also in economic and political
action, chiefly on account of their ignorance of and unrootedness in
India’s social reality’ (ibid.: 240).
The issue at stake was India’s modernisation. DP’s essential stand
on this was that there could be no genuine modernisation through
imitation. A people could not abandon their own cultural heritage
and yet succeed in internalising the historical experience of other
peoples; they could only be ready to be taken over. He feared cultural
imperialism more than any other. The only valid approach, according
to him, was that which characterised the efforts of men like Ram-
mohun Roy and Rabindranath Tagore, who tried to make The main
currents of western thought and action . . . run through the Indian
bed to remove its choking weeds in order that the ancient stream
might flow’ (1958: 33).
DP formulated this view of the dialectic between tradition and
modernity several years before Independence, in his study of Tagore
published in 1943, in which he wrote:

The influence of the West upon Tagore was great. . . but it should not
be exaggerated: it only collaborated with one vital strand of the
traditional, the strand that Ram Mohan and Tagore’s father. . . rewove
for Tagore’s generation. Now, all these traditional values Tagore was
perpetually exploiting but never more than when he felt the need to
expand, to rise, to go deeper, and be fresher. At each such stage in the
evolution of his prose, poetry, drama, music and of his personality we
find Tagore drawing upon some basic reservoir of the soil, of the people,
of the spirit and emerging with a capacity for larger investment. . . .
(1972: 50).2

2 DP drew an interesting and significant contrast between Bankim Chandra

Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore. He wrote: ‘[Bankim] was a path-finder
and a first class intellect that had absorbed the then current thought of England.
His grounding in Indian thought was weak at first; when it was surer . .. [it]
ended in his plea for a neo-Hindu resurgence. Like Michael Madhusudan Dutta,
Bankim the artist remained a divided being. Tagore was more lucky. His satu¬
ration with Indian tradition was deeper; hence he could more easily assimilate
a bigger dose of Western thought’ (emphasis added, 1972: 75-6).
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 281

This crucial passage holds the key to DP’s views on the nature
and dynamics of modernisation. It emerges as a historical process
which is at once an expansion, an elevation, a deepening, and a
revitalisation—in short, a larger investment—of traditional values
and cultural patterns, and not a total departure from them, resulting
from the interplay of the traditional and the modern. DP would
have agreed with Michael Oakeshott, I think, that the principle of
tradition ‘is a principle of continuity’ (Oakeshott 1962: 128).3 From
this perspective, tradition is a condition of rather than an obstacle
to modernisation; it gives us the freedom to choose between alternat¬
ives and evolve a cultural pattern which cannot but be a synthesis of
the old and the new. New values and institutions must have a soil in
which to take root and from which to imbibe character. Modernity
must therefore be defined in relation to, and not in denial of, tradi¬
tion.4 Conflict is only the intermediate stage in the dialectical triad:
the movement is towards coincidentia oppositorum. Needless to
emphasise, the foregoing argument is in accordance with the Marxist

3 Marx, it will be recalled, had written (in 1853) of the ‘melancholy’ and the
‘misery’ of the Hindu arising out of the ‘loss of his old world’ and his separation
from ‘ancient traditions’ (Marx and Engels 1959: 16). The task at hand was to
make the vital currents flow. That this could be done by re-establishing mean¬
ingful links with the past would have been emphasised, however, only by an
Indian such as DP. I suspect DP would have sympathised with Oakeshott’s
assertion that the changes a tradition ‘undergoes are potential within it’ (1962:
128).
4 Many contemporary thinkers have expressed similar views. For example,
Popper writes: £I do not think we could ever free ourselves entirely from the
bonds of tradition. The so-called freeing is really a change from one tradition
to another. But we can free ourselves from the taboos of tradition; and we can
do that not only by rejecting it, but also by critically accepting it. We free
ourselves from the taboo if we think about it, and if we ask ourselves whether
we should accept it or reject it.’ (1963: 122). Shils puts it somewhat differently:
‘One of the major problems which confronts us in the analysis of tradition is
the fusion of originality and traditionality. T.S. Eliot’s essay, ‘Tradition and
Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood, said very little more than that these two
elements coexist and that originality works within the framework of tradi¬
tionality. It adds and modifies, while accepting much. In any case, even though
it rejects or disregards much of what it confronts in the particular sphere of its
own creation, it accepts very much of what is inherited in the context of the
282 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

dialectic which sees relations as determined by one another and

therefore bases a‘proper’ understanding of them on such a relation¬
ship.
The synthesis of opposites is not, however, a historical inevitability.
It is not a gift given to a people unasked or merely for the asking:
they must strive for it self-consciously, for ‘Culture is an affair of
total consciousness (1958: 189), it is a ‘dynamic social process, and
not another name for traditionalism’ (ibid.: 101-2). History for DP
was a ‘going concern’ (1945: 19), and the value of the Marxist ap¬
proach to the making of history lay in that it would help to generate
‘historical conviction’ (1958:56), and thus act as a spur to fully awak¬
ened endeavour. The alternative to self-conscious choice-making is
mindless imitation and loss of autonomy and, therefore, dehumanis¬
ation, though he did not put it quite in these words.
Self-consciousness, then, is the first condition, or form, of mod¬
ernisation. Its content, one gathers from DP’s writings of the 1950s,
consists of nationalism, democracy, the utilisation of science and
technology for harnessing nature, planning for social and economic
development, and the cultivation of rationality. The typical modern
man is the engineer, social and technical (1958: 39-40). DP believed
that these forces were becoming ascendant:

This is a bare historical fact. To transmute that fact into a value, the first
requisite is to have active faith in the historicity of that fact. . . . The
second requisite is social action ... to push . . . consciously, deliberately,
collectively, into the next historical phase. The value of Indian traditions
lies in the ability of their conserving forces to put a brake on hasty pas¬
sage. Adjustment is the end-product of the dialectical connection
between the two. Meanwhile [there] is tension. And tension is not merely
interesting as a subject of research; if it leads up to a higher stage, it is
also desirable. The higher stage is where personality is integrated through
a planned, socially directed, collective endeavour for historically
understood ends, which means ... a socialist order. Tensions will not
cease there. It is not the peace of the grave. Only alienation from nature,

creation. It takes its point of departure from the “given” and goes forward from
there, correcting, improving, transforming’ (1975: 203-4).
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 283

work and man will stop in the arduous course of such high and strenu¬
ous endeavours. (1958: 76)

In view of this clear expression of faith (it is that, not a demonstra¬

tion or anticipation of the inevitable, if that could be possible), it is
not surprising that he should have told Indian sociologists (in 1955)
that their ‘first task’ was the study of‘social traditions’ (ibid.: 232),
nor that he should have reminded them that traditions grow through
conflict.
It is in the context of this emphasis on tradition that DP’s specific
recommendation for the study of Mahatma Gandhi’s views on
machines and technology, before going ahead with ‘large scale techno¬
logical development’ (ibid.: 225), was made. It was no small matter
that, from the Gandhian perspective, which stressed the values of
wantlessness, non-exploitation, and non-possession, the very notions
of economic development and under-development could be ques¬
tioned (ibid.: 206). But this was perhaps only a gesture (a response
to a poser), for DP maintained that Gandhi had failed to indicate
how to absorb ‘the new social forces which the West had released’
(ibid.: 35). Moreover, ‘the type of new society enveloped in the vul¬
garized notion of Rama-rajya was not only non-historical but anti-
historical’ (ibid.: 38). But he was also convinced that Gandhian
insistence on traditional values might help to save India from the
kind of evils (for example, scientism and consumerism) to which
the West had fallen prey (ibid.: 227).
The failure to clearly define the terms and rigorously examine the
process of synthesis, already noted above, reappears here again, and
indeed repeatedly, in DP’s work. In fact, he himself recognised this
when he described his life to A.K. Saran as ‘a series of reluctances’
(Saran 1962b: 169). As Saran notes: DP ‘did not wish to face the di¬
lemma entailed by a steadfast recognition of this truth’, that the three
worldviews—Vedanta, Western liberalism, Marxism—which all
beckoned to him ‘do not mix’.5 One wonders what DP’s autobiogra¬
phy would have been like.

5 It may be noted though that in his earlier writings DP had shown a greater
wariness regarding the possibility of combining Marxism with Hindu tradition.
Referring to the ‘forceful sanity’ of the exchange of rights and obligations’ on
284 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Theories of Modernisation

I hope to have shown in this necessarily brief presentation that,

despite understandable differences in emphasis, there is on the whole
a remarkable consistency in DP’s views on the nature of modernis¬
ation. Not that consistency is always a virtue, but in this case it
happens to be true. Genuine modernisation, according to him, has
to be distinguished from the spurious product and the clue lies in its
historicity. The presentation of the argument is clear, but it is not
always thorough and complete, and may be attacked from more than
one vantage point.
Saran (1965), for instance, has pointed out that DP does not sub¬
ject the socialist order itself to critique and takes its benign character
on trust, that he fails to realise that a technology-oriented society
cannot easily be non-exploitative and not anti-man, that the tradi¬
tional and the modern worldviews are rooted in different conceptions
of time, that traditional ideas cannot be activated by human effort
alone, that given our choice of development goals we cannot escape
westernisation, and so forth. It seems to me that DP’s principal prob¬
lem was that he let the obvious heuristic value of the dialectical ap¬
proach overwhelm him and failed to probe deeply enough into the
multidimensional and, indeed, dynamically integrated character of
empirical reality. He fused the method and the datum.
I want to suggest, however, that DP’s approach had certain advant¬
ages compared to those others that were current in modernisation
studies of his time. An examination of those modernisation theories
is outside the scope of this essay; I will therefore make only a rather
sweeping generalisation about them. They seemed to fall into two
very broad categories. There were, first, what one may call the £big
bang’ theories of modernisation, according to which tradition and
modernity were mutually exclusive, bipolar phenomena. This
entailed the further view that before one could change anything at

which Hindu society was organised, he had written (1932: 136): ‘before Com¬
munism can be introduced, national memory will have to be smudged, and
new habits acquired. There is practically nothing in the traditions on which
the new habits of living under an impersonal class-control can take root.’
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 285

all, one had to change everything. This view is, however, unfashion¬
able now, and to that extent sociology has moved forward.
Secondly, there were what we may call the ‘steady state’ theories
of modernisation, according to which modernisation was a gradual,
piecemeal, process, involving the compartmentalisation of life and
living; it was not through displacement but juxtaposition that
modernisation proceeded. As a description of empirical reality, the
latter approach was, and is, perhaps adequate, but it creates a serious
problem of understanding, for it in effect dispenses with all values
except modernity, which is defined vaguely with reference to what
has happened elsewhere—industrialisation, bureaucratisation,
democratisation, etc.—and almost abandons holism.
By this latter view, one is committed to the completion of the
agenda of modernisation, as it were, and hence the boredom, the
weariness, and the frustration one sees signs of everywhere. The gap
between the ‘modernised’ and the ‘modernising’, it is obvious, will
never be closed. No wonder, then, that social scientists already speak
of the infinite transition—an endless pause—in which traditional
societies find themselves trapped. Moreover, both sociology and
history teach us, if they teach us anything at all, that there always is
a residue, that there always will be traditional and modern elements
in the cultural life of a people, at all times and in all places.
The virtue of a dialectical approach such as DP advocated would
seem to be that it reveals the spuriousness of some of the issues that
the other approaches give rise to. At the same time, it may well be
criticised as an evasion of other basic issues. I might add, though,
that it does provide us with a suggestive notion, one which we may
call ‘generative tradition’, and also a framework for the evaluation of
ongoing processes. All this of course needs elaboration, but the
present essay is not the place for such an undertaking. Suffice it to
say, the notion of generative tradition involves a conception of
‘structural’ time more significantly than it does that of‘chronological’
time. ‘Structural’ time implies, as many anthropologists have shown,
a working out of the potentialities of an institution. Institutions have
a duration in ‘real’ time, but this is the surface view; they also have
a deeper duration which is not readily perceived because of the
transformations they undergo.
286 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

IV. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Looking back at the published corpus of Radhakamal Mukerjee and

D.P. Mukerji, we have to note that it has all but disappeared from the
sociology curricula of Indian universities and even from the libraries.
Most of their books are out of print. Moreover, most of the Indian
universities offering sociology courses were established after the death
of these two scholars. Three of DPs books (Modern Indian culture,
Diversities, and An introduction to Indian music) were reissued in
2002, but I doubt this is a result of any serious revival of interest in
his contributions. It would not be incorrect to say that Mukerjee’s
work, despite its many shortcomings, has left a deeper mark than
DP’s. As a pioneer, Mukerjee was a man in a great hurry, who wrote
a great deal on a wide variety of subjects, but did not go deeply into
any of them. He did, however, contribute to laying the foundations
of a number of new fields of study, including economic anthropology,
institutional economics, social ecology, the sociology of values, and
socio-economic studies of rural life and the Indian working class.
DP’s scholarly output was, by comparison, meagre. He wrote regu¬
larly in the newspapers and periodicals, notably National herald and
The economic weekly (the editorial of the inaugural issue of the latter
publication was from his pen), on subjects that were usually only of
topical interest.
As far as I know, there is no book-length study of the contributions
of either scholar.6 A festschrift in honour of Mukerjee (see Singh 1956)
bears witness to his work being relatively well known, particularly in
the USA. Among others Pitrim Sorokin, Talcott Parsons, Carl Zim¬
merman, Emory Bogardus, and Manuel Gottleib contributed papers
to it. Two memorial volumes dedicated to DP (see Singh and Singh
1967; Avasthi 1997) are more an expression of respect than a

6 D.N. Majumdar has fared no better. Only one of his books, which is an
undergraduate-level text (see Majumdar and Madan 1956), is in print. At a
birth centenary conference held in Lucknow in February 2003, under the aus¬
pices of the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society (of which he was the founder
in 1947), several speakers recalled their close association with him, but no paper
devoted to an assessment of his scholarly work was presented. Majumdar’s
lasting contribution, it seems, is the journal The eastern anthropologist, which
is now (in 2007) in its sixtieth year of publication. See Madan 1994a.
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 287

discussion of his work. It is noteworthy that the Avasthi volume con¬

tains a number of tributes to DP as a teacher and lover of books.
Several essays or discussions, published in the latter book and else¬
where, have been devoted to aspects of DP’s work (see Joshi 1986;
Madan 1977, 1994b; Mukherjee 1965; Nagendra 1997; Saran 1965),
but an extended evaluation is yet awaited. I do not know whether
the considerable body of DP’s published work in Bengali has fared
better. It includes notably, I understand, an early work on social dis¬
tance, a volume comprising correspondence with Tagore about
literature and music, and a fiction trilogy in which he employed the
stream of consciousness technique, apparently for the first time in
Bengali literature. What I do know is that there is no one among
Indian sociologists today who can put us in mind of D.P. Mukerji.
The times have changed and, doubtless, Indian sociology too has
moved forward. I only wish there was better-informed and critically
nuanced appreciation of what the founders strove for and achieved.7
The present volume is therefore very welcome. More welcome is the
fact that it is a result of the initiative of a new generation of scholars,
none of whom knew the pioneers personally.

REFERENCES

Avasthi, Abha. 1997. Social and cultural diversities: D.P. Mukerji in memoriam.
Jaipur: Rawat.
Bhattacharyya, Swapan Kumar. 1990. Indian sociology: The role of Benoy Kumar
Sarkar. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan.
Collingwood, R.G. 1970.An autobiography. London: Oxford University Press.
Dumont, Louis. 1967. The individual as an impediment to sociological com¬
parison in Indian history. In Baljit Singh and V.B. Singh, eds., Social and
economic change: Essays in honour of Professor D.P. Mukerji, pp. 226-48.
Bombay: Allied Publishers.

7 Actually, there has been quite some misrepresentation of DP’s work. Nearly
every statement in the two paragraphs devoted to it in a fairly long essay (Srinivas
and Panini 1973), is either factually incorrect or otherwise misleading. It is
indeed surprising that the authors should suggest that DP Viewed the process
of change under British rule as similar to changes under earlier alien rulers’,
and that they should think he changed his views about ‘synthesis’ in his later
writings. His concern with the cultural ‘specificity’ of India is misrepresented
as an emphasis on ‘uniqueness’.
288 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Joshi, P.C. 1986. Founders of Lucknow School and their legacy: Radhakamal
Mukerjee and D.P. Mukerji: Some reflections. Economic and political weekly
21,33: 1455-69.
Madan, T.N. 1977. The dialectic of tradition and modernity in the sociology of
D.P. Mukerji. Sociological bulletin 26,2:155-76. Reprinted in: Social science
information 17, 6: 777-99, and T.N. Madan, Pathways: Approaches to the
study of society in India, pp. 3-23, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.
-. 1994a. D.N. Majumdar on the diversity of cultures. In T.N. Madan,
Pathways: Approaches to the study of society in India, pp. 24-36. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
-. 1994b. D.P. Mukerji 1894-1961: A centenary tribute. Sociological bul¬
letin 43,2: 133-42.
Majumdar, D.N. 1956-7. What the sociologists can do, what they must do, and
how they should do it. The eastern anthropologist 10, 2: 130-43.
-and T.N. Madan. 1956. An introduction to social anthropology. Bombay:
Asia.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1959. The first Indian war of independence.
Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Mukerjee, Radhakamal. 1925. Borderlands of economics. London: Allen 8c Unwin.
-. 1951. The Indian scheme of life. Bombay: Hind Kitabs.
-. 1956. A general theory of society. In Baljit Singh, ed., The frontiers of
social science: In honour of Radhakamal Mukerjee, pp. 21-74. London:
Macmillan 8c Co.
Mukerji, D.P. 1924. Personality and the social sciences. Calcutta: The Book Com¬
pany.
-. 1932. Basic concepts in sociology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
8c Co.
-. 1945. On Indian history: A study in method. Bombay: Hind Kitabs.
-. 1946. Views and counterviews. Lucknow: Universal.
-. 1948 [ 1942]. Modern Indian culture: A sociological study. Second edition.
Bombay: Hind Kitabs. Reprinted as Indian culture: A sociological study. New
Delhi, Rupa 8c Co., 2002.
-. 1958. Diversities. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House.
-. 1962. Majumdar: Scholar and friend. In T.N. Madan and Gopala
Sarana, eds, Indian anthropology: Essays in memory of D.N. Majumdar,
pp. 8-10. Bombay: Asia.
-. 1972 [1943]. Tagore: A study. Calcutta: Manisha.
-. 2002. Indian music: An introduction. New Delhi: Rupa. Originally pub¬
lished in 1945 under the title An introduction to Indian music. Bombay:
Hind Kitabs.
 SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS 289

Mukherjee, Ramkrishna. 1965. Role of tradition in social change. In Ramkrishna

Mukherjee, The sociologist and social change in India today, pp. 185-213.
New Delhi: Prentice-Hall.
Nagendra, S.P. 1997. D.P. Mukerji as a sociologist (Centenary shradhanjali). In
Abha Avasthi, ed., Social and cultural diversities: D.P. Mukerji in memoriam,
pp. 147-66. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
Oakeshott, Michael. 1962. Rationalism in politics and other essays. London:
Methuen.
Pramanick, S.K. 1994. Sociology of G.S. Ghurye. Jaipur: Rawat.
Popper, Karl. 1963. Conjectures and refutations. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Saran, A.K. 1959. India. In Joseph S. Roucek, ed., Contemporary sociology,
pp. 1013-34. London: Peter Owen.
-. 1962a. Some aspects of positivism in sociology. Transactions of the Fifth
World Congress of Sociology, Washington, D.C. vol. i: 199-233.
-. 1962b. D.P. Mukerji: An obituary. The eastern anthropologist 15, 2:
167-9.
-. 1964. A Wittgensteinian sociology? Ethics 75: 195-200.
-. 1965. The faith of a modern intellectual. In T.K.N. Unnithan et al,
eds, Towards a sociology of culture in India, pp. 119-49. New Delhi: Prentice-
Hall.
Shils, Edward. 1975. Tradition. In Edward Shils, Centre and periphery: Essays in
macro-sociology, pp. 182-218. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Singh, Baljit, ed. 1956. The frontiers of social science: In honour of Radhakamal
Mukerjee. London: Macmillan & Co.
-. and V.B. Singh, eds. 1967. Social and economic change. Bombay: Allied
Publishers.
Srinivas, M.N. and M.N. Panini. 1973. The development of sociology and social
anthropology in India. Sociological bulletin 22, 2: 179-215.

Group photograph: Meeting of the First All India Sociological Conference, Dehra Dun,
December/January 1954/55 (see p. 257): Seated: 3rd from left, Professor R.N. Saxena,
Principal, DAV College, Dehra Dun; next to him, Professor D.N. Majumdar, Head of the
Department of Anthropology at Lucknow University; Professor D.P. Mukerji, Head of the
Department of Economics at Aligarh Muslim University and General President of the Con¬
ference; 7th from left, Professor Raja Ram Shastri (who introduced sociology at the Kashi
Vidyapeeth); and beside him, I.P. Desai (Baroda). Standing, first row: 2nd from left, Brij Raj
Chauhan (Udaipur); K.N. Sharma (IIT, Kanpur, the first teacher of sociology at an IIT); 8th
from left, Sachchidananda (Patna); 11th from left, V.B. Damle (Poona, who introduced
American Sociology in India); Prabhat Chandra (Jabalpur). Standing, second row: 2nd from
left, A.P. Barnabas (Delhi); 4th from left, Khaliq Naqvi (who did his PhD with D.P. Mukerji
in Lucknow on the concept of class); Gopala Sarana (Lucknow); 9th from left, G.S. Bhatt
(Dehra Dun). Standing, back row: 1st from left, Giri Raj Gupta (Lucknow); 5th from left,
K.P. Gupta (Lucknow); 7th from left, K.S. Mathur (Lucknow).
 8

The Anthropologist as
‘Scientist’? Nirmal Kumar Bose*

Pradip Kumar Bose

I. THE MAKING OF AN ANTHROPOLOGIST

HE CALLED HIMSELL A PARIBRAJAK, A WANDERER. HIS FRIENDS

and admirers knew him as a scholar of wide-ranging interests, an
indefatigable fieldworker, a person with immense creative energy,
and a great nationalist.1 The only child of Bimanbihari and Kiran-
sashi, Nirmal Kumar was born at Calcutta on 22 January 1901. Since
his father, a doctor by profession, had a transferable job, Bose went
to various schools in Bihar and Orissa. In 1917 Bose joined Scottish
Church College, Calcutta, for the Intermediate Science Course. For
his BSc degree he studied geology at Presidency College, Calcutta,
and it was as a student of geology that he was first initiated into the
excitement of fieldwork. He graduated with honours in 1921 and
joined Presidency College for an MSc in Geology. The Non-coopera¬
tion movement was making a considerable impact on the student
community in Calcutta, and Bose too came under the influence of

*1 am grateful to Manaswita Sanyal and Gautam Bhadra for lending me

books by Nirmal Kumar Bose from their personal collection. These were not
easily available elsewhere, and this essay could not have been written without
their generous help.
1 Most of the biographical details presented in this section have been taken
from Surajit Sinha (1986) and Purnima Sinha (2001).

T
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 291

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Photograph courtesy‘Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Archives’

Gandhian politics. We get an idea of Bose s response to this move¬

ment from his diary:

In our national life we feel the arrival of a great period! The Non¬
cooperation Movement is being implemented all around us. Students
are leaving their schools, colleges and universities. In all these moves
292 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

there are concurrent streams of sentiments and reason. ... I do not

know whether we are going to attain swaraj within a year only on account
of leaving schools and colleges. But it appears to me that these move¬
ments are going to arouse our national consciousness and life and many
of us would wake up and start thinking. (Sinha 1986: 8)

Convinced that social emancipation in India should go hand in

hand with political emancipation, Bose decided to abandon his stu¬
dies to join the Non-cooperation movement. Moving to Puri with
his mother, he also, around this time, developed an interest in the
architecture and sculptures of the temples of Orissa. Soon he started
giving lectures on the temples and their architecture to visitors. Asu-
tosh Mukherjee, then vice chancellor of Calcutta University, was pre¬
sent at one of these lectures and was very impressed with the clarity
of Bose’s exposition. He persuaded Bose to come to the university,
suggesting that he begin with courses at the new department of
anthropology then being built up. He pointed out to Bose that, with
his training in geology and knowledge of temple architecture, he
would find the course challenging. Mukherjee emphasized that Bose
should not equate Calcutta University with a government depart¬
ment. Bose joined the Department of Anthropology in 1923 for a
postgraduate degree, graduating in 1925. His thesis on ‘The spring
festival of India’ investigates the diffusion of cultural traits in India
and remains an important paper (discussed later). This was followed
by a research fellowship to study the Juangs of Pal Lahara. He was,
however, unable to work in the field for long because of a severe
attack of malignant malaria. In a Bengali article, ‘Bidyar bvabhar
(Use of knowledge), Bose reflects on his dilemmas in the field, when
he found that all Juangs were undernourished and suffering from
malaria:

I have to admit that I had not really accepted them as fellow human
beings like me. If my own relatives had been affected by similar poverty
and disease or could not fully utilise the scope for better form of culti¬
vation due to lack of knowledge, I could not have gone on just measuring
heads, and collecting information about the local cults, cults of the
womenfolk or mortuary rites for writing a research paper. I would have
tried to apply all my knowledge to come to their rescue. What should
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 293

be my duty under [such] circumstances? This question started stirring

my mind. I have to regretfully admit that I could not properly resolve
the problem. (Bose 1949 [1930]: 18-19; Sinha 1986: 13)

Bose s experience with the Juangs convinced him that academic

research alone was not enough, and that knowledge must be used
for social welfare. In 1930 he left the university to join Gandhis salt
satyagraha movement and set up a night school and a Khadi Sangha
in a largely dalit slum near Bolpur, Santiniketan. He was arrested in
1931 for joining the salt satyagraha and was imprisoned first in Suri
jail, being later transferred to Dum Dum special jail. During this
time, Bose began a serious study of Gandhian literature, spending
part of his time in jail thinking and writing about Gandhi, an experi¬
ence which later culminated in Selections from Gandhi (Bose 1934).
Bose had had no opportunity to meet Gandhi in person; he met
him for the first time in November 1934. The meeting left a deep
impact. Bose decided to devote himself full-time to the study and
propagation of Gandhis ideas. Bose continued his association with
the Khadi Sangha of Bolpur all through this time, while writing proli-
fically in Bengali and English on the caste system, Gandhian thought,
temple architecture, and various aspects of Bengali society and cul¬
ture. He engaged himself in social reconstruction and learnt firsthand
about the human condition in which most Indians lived, stepping
clean out of disciplinary boundaries and the comforts of a metro¬
politan lifestyle.
In 1937 Syamaprasad Mukherjee, then vice chancellor of Calcutta
University, persuaded Bose to join the Department of Anthropology
as Assistant Lecturer. Bose taught prehistoric archaeology to under¬
graduate and postgraduate classes. A great believer in fieldwork, in
1939 he arranged for his students to be involved in archaeological
excavations at Kuliana in Mayurbhanj. He was soon able to build up
a large collection of palaeolithic tools for the prehistory unit of the
department. During this period he wrote about prehistoric research
in Mayurbhanj (Bose 1940a), as well as on Gandhi (Bose 1940b). As
a teacher, Bose believed in encouraging students to voice their doubts
and ask questions. In a Bengali article entitled ‘Bigyan sikshaker abhi-
gnata (Experience of a science teacher), Bose (1949 [1930]: 28-33)
pointed out that if lectures merely transmitted the opinions of
294 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

established scholars, anthropology would never emerge as a scientific

discipline and remain merely a historical narrative of received theo¬
ries. On the other hand, lectures based on facts and on an open spirit
of enquiry, lectures comparing the interpretations of various scholars
of the same set of facts and trying to assess which of these opened
new areas of enquiry and observation, would generate in the class¬
room a healthy spirit of self-confidence and endeavour.
In August 1942, when the Quit India movement was launched,
Bose was arrested again. He was released only in 1945, after three
and a half years. Upon his release he regained his old job as Assistant
Lecturer in the Anthropology Department. In 1946 he was offered a
lecturership in human geography at the Department of Geography.
Soon after, in August 1946, communal riots broke out in Calcutta,
followed by another series of riots in Noakhali district in East Bengal.
When Gandhi came to Sodepur in the aftermath of the riots, Bose
was instructed to interview refugees from Noakhali in the various
camps at Calcutta and gather eyewitness information of the actual
events. Summaries of these interviews were placed before Gandhi
almost every day. Eventually Gandhi requested Bose to accompany
him on his tour of Noakhali: CI want you if you can and will to be
with me wherever I go and stay while I am in Bengal. The idea is that
I should be alone with you as my companion and interpreter. This
you should do only if you can sever your connection with the Univer¬
sity and would care to risk death, starvation, etc.’ (Bose 1974: 44).
Bose wrote in great detail about this critical phase of Gandhi’s life in
My days with Gandhi (Bose 1974). In the preface to this book he says
he had long planned to write four books on Gandhi: a book of selec¬
tions from Gandhi’s English writings which would serve as a sum¬
mary of his thoughts on various subjects; an outline of his economic
and political ideas; a book on his personality and practices; and finally
a critical account of various satyagraha movements. Bose completed
the first three; illness presented him finishing the fourth.
Leaving Gandhi’s team in 1947, Bose returned to the Department
of Geography at Calcutta University. Though primarily attached to
the Geography Department, he continued his association with the
Anthropology Department and also taught Sociology in the Depart¬
ment of Political Science. In 1951 he took up the editorship of Man
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 295

in India, the first professional journal in anthropology in the country,

which had been founded by Sarat Chandra Roy. Bose continued as
its editor for some twenty years, till his death. In 1959 he was invited
to join the Anthropological Survey of India as Director and Anthro¬
pological Advisor to the Government of India. He immediately ini¬
tiated a study of the distribution of cultural traits in India, resulting
in Peasant life in India: A study in Indian unity and diversity (Bose
1961). After retiring from the Anthropological Survey in 1964, he
was asked to join a study team for the Hill District of Assam under
the chairmanship of Shri Tarlok Singh, as a special invitee. In 1967
he was assigned by the governor of Assam to prepare a report on the
educational problems of the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA)
(now Arunachal Pradesh), and in the same year accepted the statutory
position of Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes. Bose took up this job with his characteristic enthusiasm, tra¬
velled extensively, and prepared several reports which bear his dis¬
tinctive stamp.
In 1970, at the end of his three-year term as commissioner, Bose
returned to Calcutta, continuing at the ripe old age of seventy to
work with the same energy and dedication that he had shown all his
life. He even began learning Urdu from a maulavi for half an hour
every morning. However, from 1971 Bose began showing signs of
illness and was found to be suffering from cancer. Even during his
illness, when he was virtually confined to bed, he continued his
writing and participated in a number of important meetings and
discussions. He died in October 1972.

II. THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS SCIENTIST?

In 1946 when Bose was accompanying Gandhi on his tour of riot-

torn Noakhali, ‘an interesting conversation’ took place between the
two:

He called me . . . and asked me if I did not at all believe in God. I con¬

fessed that the problem whether God existed or not, or what was the
primal cause of the universe, had never seriously come into my life. I
did not concern myself with the question of such ultimates.
‘Don’t you believe in anything?’ he asked.
296 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

I said, ‘Yes, as a scientist, I do believe in truth. For, in the laboratory

or in our scientific investigations, we undoubtedly try to discover the
truth by observation and experiment. Unless we believe that there is
something worth striving for, why should we engage in the chase at all?
Truth may be like a carrot dangling before a donkeys nose, but it is
there all the same?
Gandhiji said, ‘that will do’. (Bose 1974: 49-50)

A few days later, when similar questions cropped up, Bose says: ‘I
told him how scientific research was my true vocation (swadharma),
while serving in the political campaign, even when it was by intellect,
was no more than an emergency duty (apadharmaY (Bose 1974: 67).
Bose’s conviction that he was engaged as a scientist in a scientific
pursuit also reflects his understanding of anthropology, which he
always considered a branch of science. Surajit Sinha, one of Bose’s
former students and a close acquaintance, writes: ‘As a younger
anthropologist who had been in touch with Professor Bose for over
twenty years I have often felt that he was a little too obsessed with
presenting himself as a “scientist”’ (Sinha 1986: 45). It is no surprise
that Bose shared in the twentieth-century discourse of anthropology
as a science, emphasising a limited subject focus, in-depth fieldwork,
codified data accumulation, and cautiously restricted inferences. He
was deeply influenced by Franz Boas and considered him one of his
gurus in anthropology (Sinha 1973: 1). Unlike earlier evolutionary
theorists, who had emphasised overall cultural similarities, Boas
stressed the differences and particularity of each culture as a result
of its specific and divergent historical development. It is well known
that Boas was critical of the tendency in anthropology towards pre ¬
mature generalisation and speculative history, arguing in favour of
the meticulous collection (‘total recovery’) of ethnographic data be¬
fore generalisation could be attempted. Anthropology, Boas believed,
must ultimately discover some laws, just as any proper science must,
but such laws could not be discovered until all the evidence was in.
Since all the evidence would never be in, the anthropologist, now a
kind of ‘connoisseur of chaos’, had best stick to particularities and
defer concern for pattern or general lawfulness. What impressed Bose
most about Boas, he told Sinha, was his inductive natural history
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 297

approach which kept the mind open to unexpected discovery: ‘Boas

started with observations and then moved towards classification and
generalisation rather than starting with a deductive hypothetical
model1 (ibid.). This is the characteristic claim of the science of empiri¬
cism, in which induction is considered the indispensable foundation
of all factual knowledge.
By implication here, ethnography is a neutral, tropeless discourse
that renders and recovers in a ‘scientific1 language other realities
‘exactly as they are1. This language somehow bypasses values and
interpretive schema. The language of science has traditionally exclud¬
ed certain expressive modes from its repertoire, such as subjectivity
(in the name of objectivity), rhetoric (in the name of‘plain1, transpar¬
ent signification), and fiction (in the name of fact) (Clifford 1986a:
5). The qualities eliminated from science were localised in the cate¬
gory of‘literature1. Whatever may have been the case in other sciences,
in ethnography the crucial problem was to reconcile the‘contradic¬
tion . . . between personal and scientific authority1, a contradiction
that had taken an acute turn ‘since the advent of fieldwork as metho¬
dological norm1 (Pratt 1986:32). James Clifford says: ‘Anthropological
field work has been represented as both a scientific “laboratory11 and
a personal “rite of passage11. The two metaphors capture nicely the
discipline’s impossible attempt to fuse objective and subjective
practices1 (Clifford 1986b: 109). It has been argued that ethnographic
texts are not simply objective descriptions of reality but are consti¬
tuted in terms of a set of problematic links between ethnographic
authority, personal experience, scientism, and literary style. Personal
experiences of fieldwork, often narrated at the beginning of the text,
produce a kind of authority that is located in the subjective experience
of the ethnographer (Pratt 1986:27-50). However, a formal text has
to conform to the rules of a scientific discourse whose authority de¬
mands that the speaking and the experiencing subject be effaced.
Tensions between these competing authorities are inscribed in all
ethnographic texts. As Pratt points out, ‘There are strong reasons
why field ethnographers so often lament that their ethnographic
writings leave out or hopelessly impoverish some of the most
important knowledge they have achieved, including the self-know¬
ledge1 (ibid.: 33).
298 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

We witness a similar tension in Bose’s writings, exacerbated by

his claims to being a scientist, even as he was aware of the sensuous
and experiential side of his fieldwork. Bose was never only an anthro¬
pologist, he wrote on social history, art, politics, temple architecture,
archaeology, geology, human geography, education, social work,
nationalism, and Gandhism. He also wrote prolifically in Bengali:
many of his Bengali essays are in the form of travelogues, autobiogra¬
phical sketches, personal narratives, and social portraitures anchored
in personal experience. These were published in journals like Prabasi,
Desk, Sanibarer chithi, and Sahitya Parisad patrika, and later included
in two remarkable collections, Paribrajaker diary (Diary of a wand¬
erer) (Bose 1982 [1940]) and Nabin o prachin (New and old) (Bose
1949 [1930]). In these writings we find personal accounts, at the
time considered inconsequential and trivial, occupying a privileged
place. In these accounts Bose sets himself free, as it were, from the
objectifying demands of scientific discourse and establishes his
personal authority on the texts. Here the narrator is not self-effacing,
nor simply a hand that writes—as is expected in formal-scientific
description. We witness in these expressive and literary writings an
anthropologist who is subverting his own ‘science’. I argue later
(section VII) that this is particularly related to the vernacularisation
of ethnography, in which Bose played a pioneering role. Before that,
however, it is essential to present a general outline of Bose’s anthro-
pology.

III. CULTURE AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Bose’s early anthropology was influenced by Boas and Kroeber’s

cross-cultural analysis. This type of analysis samples the available
data within a specified region, enabling controls to be exercised for
geographical, linguistic, and environmental relations. Early studies
of this kind by Kroeber and his students took societies as the units
of analysis, and compared inventories of traits in order to elaborate
‘cultural similarity matrices’. Bose was particularly attracted to this
approach because he believed that a proper understanding of Indian
civilisation would require anthropologists to go beyond the study of
tribal communities. In the culture area approach, and in theories of
diffusion and cross-cultural comparison, the concept of the cultural
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 299

trait, which Bose discusses in great detail with numerous Indian

examples, is of central importance. His early work on the spring
festival of India, an important study of the diffusion of cultural traits,
defines the geographical area covered by this cultural trait at any
period in its history as extending from the eastern provinces of India
to Europe (Bose 1927: 112-55). In this very richly illustrated essay,
Bose argues that one of the festivals chief centres of dispersal lay in
eastern India, where the original form of the festival was perpetuated
by the Nagas, Kandhs, and Oraons, and is observed in its purest form
in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and among the Gonds of the Central Pro¬
vinces. Bose later applied the theory of the diffusion of cultural traits
to his work on temple architecture and material culture in rural India.
Andre Beteille points out that, much before Dumont and Pocock,
Bose realised the importance of combining ethnology and Indology
in the study of Indian society (Beteille 1975). But for him an anthro¬
pology of tribes that merely confirmed the Indological perspective
was not sufficient, since tribal society had changed following the
advent of colonialism. Thus, Bose attempted to integrate history into
his scheme, not only to enhance the analysis of social change but
also for social reconstruction. His book on cultural anthropology
begins:

The social structure which we have inherited from the past was built in
answer to the challenge of certain problems of life, many of which are
now out of action. A new set of problems has arisen in the course of the
last twenty years, and it is no longer possible to live according to the
old ways under modern conditions. A determined effort should
therefore be made to adapt our cultural heritage to present day needs
and requirements. In this work of reconstruction, many thinkers believe
the social sciences will be of great service to humanity. (1953 [ 1929]: 1)

This particular idea of social science resembled in many ways the

practices of applied science. Bose believed that this science could
help in understanding the ‘mechanics of the working of human hist¬
ory’ in the same way as diagrams and charts help an engineer under¬
stand the structure and operations of an engine. As a science,
anthropology is not capable of building up hope in man or regene¬
rating faith where none exists; but, in a limited fashion, anthropology
300 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

can always analyse a society’s present in terms of its past, draw out
the factors responsible for change, and enable both scientific deve¬
lopment and social reconstruction. This view of anthropology
developed later in the post-War years as applied or development
anthropology, whose practitioners accepted the need and desire for
change in the developing world. In this apolitical view, focused on
cultural differences, the national political structure is basically
benevolent. Such a view obscures the fact that it is often structures
of social and politico-economic dominance which create develop¬
mental problems. Bose’s view of the role of anthropology in mould¬
ing reconstruction and development is similarly problematic, as we
shall see.
Bose’s central emphasis was on culture, which he understood in
terms of cultural traits. Though cultural traits can be classified into
a number of groups, they are intimately related to one another, and
change in one produces change in all the other groups. For Bose, the
outward form of culture was conditioned by human experience, and
changed with time. In his analysis of culture he attempted to classify
Indian culture in terms of a three-fold dharma, namely artha-
dharma, kama-dharma, and moksha-dharma. Each of these dharmas,
he explained, acts in four phases, namely (i) vastu or material object;
(ii) kriya or habitual action; (iii) samhati or social grouping; and
(iv) tattva or knowledge. Further, tattva can again be sub-classified
into two groups depending on whether the knowledge is vichar-
mulaka, i.e. based on criticism, or viswasmulaka, based on faith. He
followed a similar course in describing the religious culture of Bengal
and characterised one of the principal religious cults of Bengal,
namely Vaishnavism, in terms of various bhavas (attitudes), such as
sakhya (friendship), dasya (service), sanskara (convention), and vari¬
ous gunas (Bose 1953 [1929]: 13-20).
Subsequently, Bose applied his cultural analysis to demarcate the
cultural zones of India, attempting to show that the regions or states
of India, though separated by differences of language, share many
elements of material as well as high culture. He attributed this to
diffusion. From a culturalist perspective, India emerges in Bose’s
writings as a place where a superior order of cultural unity prevails:
‘Thus, in spite of the fact that languages of India are many, and there
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 301

are well marked differences between one regional culture and another,
yet there is an overall unity of design which makes them all members
of one family. . . . The details might vary from place to place . . . yet
the sameness of traditions on which all of them have been reared
cannot be overlooked’ (Bose 1967: 9).
Bose summarised his thematic approach to cultural anthropology
in the following manner: first, institutions are crystallised manifesta¬
tions of the behaviour of communities. Second, persons adapt
themselves to their ‘cultural inheritance—or social structure, as some
would prefer to call it’ and in the process alter that structure as well.
‘And it is this interplay between life and culture which maintains
culture in a state of dynamic equilibrium’ (Bose 1967: v). Hence, for
Bose, the human element is an important operative factor in cultural
evolution. It is here that Bose differed in important ways from Kroe-
ber’s influential ideas about ‘the superorganic’, which involved the
complete subordination of the individual to his cultural milieu
(Kroeber 1971: 163-213). Bose, on the other hand, believed that at
certain moments in history creative and deviant individuals may be
the starting point of change (Sinha 1973: 2).
Since both history and change remained two very important
constituents of Bose’s thinking on anthropology, he appropriated
anthropological theories only after suitable modification. Bose’s Cul¬
tural anthropology was published a few years after the functionalist
ethnographies of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, but before func¬
tionalism had emerged as a coherent body of theory. Though one
also finds mention in his work of the ‘adaptive function of culture’,
Bose’s understanding of function was not ahistorical in nature (Bose
1953 [1929]: 8-12). On the contrary he focused on adaptation in
the context of historical change. He believed that historical develop¬
ments were associated with a number of unresolved problems. If the
cultural heritage was found inadequate in serving these needs, certain
modifications—characterised as ‘adaptive functions’—were bound
to occur. It must be remembered that, within early-twentieth-century
anthropology, there were two approaches: a broadly geographical
approach, which was concerned with migration, cultural diffusion,
and the classification of peoples and objects; and what was generally
called the sociological approach, which dealt with the development
302 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of social institutions, such as caste. The former sort of anthropologists

tended to be more descriptive and particularistic, while the latter were
more comparative and theoretical. Bose was an exponent of both
varieties of anthropology. He continued to rely on some form of
diffusionism, expressed in the careful historical-geographical analysis
of the relationships between cultures and culture areas. And he
employed his sociological ideas productively in one particular field
within which he remains a pioneer, namely, studies of architecture.

IV. ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE

Even today there are relatively few explorations of the relationship

between architecture and anthropology, despite the fact that this is
a field of great potential interest for the anthropologist, representing
as it does an interface between ideology and technology. Human
dwellings and settlements reflect both the needs and constraints
imposed by the environment and the mode of subsistence, and the
society’s concept of individual, family, and communal life. From his
early days, Bose showed keen interest in the architecture of the land,
especially the architectural style of tribals and peasants. Architectural
design both reflects and shapes people’s expectations of the environ¬
ment and the use of its resources. Among people with relatively little
technological development, dwellings and communities may be more
impermanent than in a modern city, but they display the dynamic
interplay between materials, environment, and man’s ideal models
of family and social life. In his early work, Bose makes this careful
observation about Bengal architecture:

West Bengal has an original style of domestic architecture. The roof of

the cottage is thatched with straw and the outline of the ridge-pole and
caves is convex. The shape of the thatches is also slightly spherical in
appearance, and they are not flat and straight as in Orissa or East
Bengal. . . . Although temples in West Bengal are not made of earth like
the cottages but of bricks, yet there is a resemblance between the two in
form. The temples are sometimes made more elaborate by placing two
roofs side by side or by putting them one over another with a short
height of wall interposing between them. A further development takes
place when turrets are set at each corner of the roof. The Bengali style
of architecture is thus distinct in its individuality. If we travel from
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 303

Bengal towards Chotanagpur, the Bengali type of hut becomes rarer as

we proceed on our journey westward. Near Jhalda, which lies between
the headquarters of Manbhum and Ranchi, the number of typical
Bengali huts is evenly matched with the tiled huts of Bihar. A few stations
farther west, the curved and thatched roof disappears altogether to give
place to the straight and tiled type of cottages. Then again, in
Chotanagpur, one rarely meets with the Bengali types of temples. (Bose
1953 [1929]: 16-17)

Though Boses principal interest in commenting on domestic

architecture was to demonstrate the distribution of cultural traits,
his meticulous description also illustrates how ethnoarchitectural
principles reflect important social and cultural categories and
relationships, for example, the symbolism that identifies a house with
a lineage, and so on. In an essay on the Birhors, Bose showed how
the Birhors maintained a distinctive house-building style, with a
circular ground plan and a conical roof. He related this pattern to
the migratory lifestyle of the Birhors, who find it easier to build a
conical hut with no separate walls. But he complicated the issue by
pointing out that many low castes of Andhra Pradesh, near Waltair,
had circular houses with conical roofs, while at least three castes of
northern Gujarat, namely Rewari, Mer, and Waghri, built completely
circular, mud-wall huts, surmounted by a pointed, conical thatched
roof (Bose 1967: 172). Bose was continuously drawing attention to
such details of domestic architecture and seeking explanations.
This interest in domestic architecture developed out of his interest
in temple architecture. When Bose left Presidency College in 1921 in
response to Gandhis call, and began living in Puri, he became inte¬
rested in the architecture and sculptures of the temples of Puri,
Konarak, and Bhubaneswar and began enquiries about the basic
architectural principles of these temples. He met a group of silpis,
the traditional stone carvers and temple builders, and through them
came across certain manuscripts which he translated with anno¬
tations in the book Canons of Orissan architecture (Bose 1932). He
also wrote a number of articles and a book in Bengali on this theme,
Konaraker bibaran (Bose 1960a [1926]). Bose distinguished his ap¬
proach from a standard architectural one by pointing out that
Western scholars and their Indian disciples were trained in European
304 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

schools of architecture and never looked at Indian buildings from

the Indian craftsman’s perspective. ‘They did not know how buildings
and temples were classified by the builders themselves, what
distinctions were drawn between different varieties of temples, which
were considered the finer points in building-technique and so forth’
(Bose 1932: 1). This also shows Bose’s unwavering interest in cons¬
tructing a form of knowledge in terms of indigenous categories. He
studied the categories of Oriya architecture with the help of local
craftsmen and supplemented this by fieldwork in the different parts
of Orissa. Thus, Bose writes: ‘A workable restoration of the science
of architecture in Orissa has been secured. When similar restorations
are available for other provinces in India and the existing examples
of architecture studied in their light, it will be possible to reconstruct
the history of Indian architecture with some degree of certainty’ (Bose
1932:4).
What must have interested Bose in these canons is not simply
that these texts presented the craftsmen’s perspective, but also that
they displayed a cultural holism by employing the same cultural
categories as found in other spheres. One illustration from the text
will exemplify the point. The first step for a builder is to classify the
soil, and soils are classified into four groups: Brahmin soil which is
white in colour, Kshatriya soil which is blood red, Vaisya soil which
is yellow, and Sudra soil which is black. The text then says if a man
lives on the soil of his own caste, he will be happy. But a Brahmin
can live on any one of the four classes of soils, a Kshatriya can live on
three, a Vaisya on two, and a Sudra on only that which belongs to his
caste. ‘If, through temptation, a man lives on soil which belongs to
a caste higher than his own, then surely destruction shall follow him.
The place where his house stands shall be converted into a waste,
and jackals shall fill the place with their cries even during the daytime’
(Bose 1932: 12-13). He used the insights gained from these texts
and his own study of Oriya temples to formulate his theories of
Indian civilisation. In Konaraker bibaran, Bose (1960a [1926]) refers
to an expansive and confident phase of Indian civilisation. In a larger
perspective, Bose considered Oriya civilisation no different from
other civilisations in being made up of elements derived from many
tribes and many lands. He illustrates this through the sculptures on
temple walls.
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 305

Bose took up the problems of dating Indian temples in his presi¬

dential address to the Anthropology and Archaeology Section of the
Indian Science Congress in 1949 (Bose 1967: 85-104). He suggested
that archaeology could benefit from anthropology because anthro¬
pology also sought to arrange a huge mass of undated facts in proper
order. Initially, from the time of Tylor, evolutionary theory was emp¬
loyed for this purpose, but it failed to devise any means of verifying
its findings with the help of independent evidence. This theory was
rejected by the 'Historical School of America, led by Boas, Wissler,
Lowie, Goldenweiser and Kroeber’, and it was later replaced on the
Continent by what was termed the 'Cultural Historical Method in
Ethnology1 (ibid.: 85). Bose then points out:

Among these, as far as I know, Kroeber not only applied the Diffusion
Method with great skill in unravelling the history of a primitive religion
in aboriginal America, but also tried to corroborate the findings by
means of independent evidence obtained from excavation. It is the
purpose of the present paper to suggest a similar procedure with regard
to the problem of dating, and suggest how future research can be plan¬
ned so that the validity of the proposed method can be reliably tested.
The particular field of culture from which data will be drawn will be
that of Indian architecture, and we can thus hope that workers in both
archaeology and anthropology can co-operate with chances of being
of real service to one another. (Bose 1967: 85)

Taking his cue from anthropological research, Bose was critical

of early historians who depended primarily on a unilinear theory of
evolution for dating temples and therefore lacked adequate means
for checking their results. He pointed out that the anthropological
evidence suggests that different elements of culture do not follow
the same rate of diffusion—'They, in fact, display different ranges of
variability at the same point of time, and also variable rates of dif¬
ferentiation and of secondary elaboration in course of time’ (Bose
1967: 96). He argued that in temples ornamental elements, for
instance, may have followed one line of evolution, while structural
elements like the height, curvature, or techniques of balancing the
weight of the structure, may all have followed completely different
rates of change. He did not rule out the contribution of personal
genius, which may have been responsible for certain modifications.
306 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Bose argued that if structural elements were not taken into account
for the preparation of the scale, then an injustice would be done to
the very object of the study. He therefore first considered the space
variations suggested by Fergusson,2 and then employed the Distri¬
bution Method for rearranging the elements in a time scale.
Bose maintained that a proper scientific method of dating would
require employing a uniform method to analyse the structural ele¬
ments for all temples. After collection of sufficient data, distribution
maps of significant elements should be prepared to draw inferences
about the course of evolution. He pointed out, however, that the
evolutionary scale thus constructed for one state may have limited
value in another; hence, in each state the dated temple should be
employed to build up another local series. This would be a device to
check the findings of the distribution method and, if necessary, to
supplement it in the local context: ‘By this effort we should also be
able to raise our science to higher levels of reliability’ (Bose 1967:
104).
The principal relationship between anthropology and archaeology
was mediated and constituted by the paradigm of science. Bose was
not particularly interested in prehistoric archaeology, but rather in
the traditions of classical archaeology and its relation to the study of
civilisations. Through his study of temple architecture, he attempted
to demonstrate the multiple links between anthropology and archa¬
eology both in theory and method, in order to evolve a scientific
practice distinct from the received traditions of the West. As with
his essays on other subjects, in this particular case, also, Bose framed
his methodology on the basis of extensive observation and detailed
knowledge. This is reflected in another of his consistent and enduring
concerns, namely, analysis of the castes and tribes of India.

V. ANTHROPOLOGY OF CASTES AND TRIBES

In one of his Bengali essays published in 1935 and entitled ‘Bharate

nritattva charchar ekti adhyay (A chapter in the anthropology of

2 lames Fergusson (1808-83) was considered an authority on Indian archi¬

tecture, especially temple architecture. He was Vice President of the Royal
Asiatic Society, London, and wrote a number of books on the history of Indian
and Eastern architecture.
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 307

India), Bose traced the history of research on the castes and tribes of
India. He pointed out that in the early phase the tendency was to
construct an ethnography for India as a whole. When this was found
inadequate, ethnographers concentrated on individual provinces,
and it was only when even this was found deficient that the focus
shifted to the study of individual castes and tribes (Bose 1935: 63-
5). Bose concluded his essay by stating that proper ethnography for
the whole of India would require the meticulous collection of
information for about twenty years through the collective efforts of
various institutes and universities. A quarter century later, while
writing a foreword to the book Data on caste in Orissa, published by
the Anthropological Survey of India (of which he was then the
director), Bose wrote:

It is the purpose of the present series, entitled Data on Caste, to

supplement the current information on changes in rank as ascertained
by changes in interaction by an examination of castes’ own mechanism
for the regulation of internal and external affairs. Data alone are
presented from Orissa. These will be followed by other data from Bengal,
Madras, etc. On the whole, no generalisation will be attempted; for that
can profitably be undertaken when comparative material has been
accumulated from all parts of India. (Bose 1960b: vii)

Though the project was never completed, the statement shows Boses
keenness to collect detailed and comprehensive information on the
castes (and tribes) of India and his conviction that only once this
was done could any theoretical proposition be attempted.
Nevertheless, Bose did have some definite ideas on caste in India.
Caste, he believed, was mainly governed by the principles of economic
organisation: ‘just as capitalism is one way of organising production,
caste in India is another way of organising production and distri¬
bution’ (Bose 1960b: v). However, there were certain important differ¬
ences as well, for instance, entry into the profession was hereditary
in the caste system; caste denied freedom of enterprise; and as a
system it was interlaced by reciprocal ties of duties and obligations.
According to Bose, the persistence of the caste system could be attri¬
buted to the economic and cultural security provided by the non¬
competitive, hereditary, vocation-based productive organisation
308 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

which operated in self-sufficient village communities. He did not,

however, present caste in idyllic terms, pointing out the unjustifiable
legal discrimination against the Sudras and their economic exploit¬
ation within caste society. While caste assured employment and
security, it simultaneously preserved the dominance of privileged
groups, and this prevented the full and unhampered growth of those
who ranked low in the hierarchy.
An interesting feature of Bose’s account of caste is the way he
located the system within the overall cultural and civilisational norms
of Hindu society. He attempted to show that though there was res¬
tricted economic freedom under caste, there was a very large measure
of cultural freedom. Cultural freedom arose out of the Hindu belief
that ‘each culture is suited to the particular people who profess it’
(Bose 1967:223). Bose related this attitude to the idea of the freedom
of the individual, which, according to him, was held to be the supreme
good. Cultural freedom ensured in many ways the growth of the
individual to the fullest potential without impediment. Bose thus
characterised the Indian respect for cultural autonomy in terms of
Gandhis dictum: ‘There are as many religions as there are individuals.’
Anticipating Louis Dumont’s interpretation of renunciation, Bose
argued that regimentation was necessary for the sake of collective
economic and social welfare, but that simultaneously arrangements
were made for releasing the individual from all forms of social
obligation if he so desired. ‘Thus, although, Hindu society suppressed
the individual under normal conditions, yet the restriction took on
a voluntary character, as he could escape from its rigours through
the backdoors of the institution of Sannyasa. . . . And thus, in a way,
this special arrangement for safeguarding the individual’s freedom
acted like a compensation against the totalitarian character of the
system of caste. Each helped to render the other more stable and
permanent’ (Bose 1967: 225). Dumont, in exactly similar fashion,
called this renouncer an ‘individual-outside-the-world’ who leaves
his social role in order to adopt a role that is both universal and
personal (Dumont 1970 [1966]: 184-8). Society and the renouncer
thus made a whole, consisting of two different things, namely, a world
of strict interdependence where the individual had no place, and an
institution which transcended interdependence by inaugurating the
individual.
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 309

A firm believer in pluralism, Bose regarded certain elements in

India’s social culture as contributing permanently to human civilis¬
ation, for instance, the democracy of cultures, and ‘the safety valve
which India created in the form of Sannyasa\ by providing the indi¬
vidual with an option ‘when the authoritarian character of the social
structure proved too oppressive for him personally’ (Bose 1967:233).
In the last part of his Bengali book Hindu samajer garan, Bose showed
how the structure of Hindu society, which remained unaltered during
several centuries of Muslim rule, was transformed by colonialism.
He explained the stability of Hindu society with reference to its basic
design, wherein castes remained integrated by the provisions of eco¬
nomic security and cultural autonomy: ‘The stability of Indian civil¬
isation was made possible only by the stability of the economic centre
of gravity of the caste system. It is most important to understand
this fundamental truth’ (Bose 1975 [1949]: 167). This productive
system was thrown into disorder, according to Bose, by the onslaught
of colonialism. In the economic field, caste was seriously weakened
by the intrusion of a system of production and economic relations
which was foreign to it. Bose believed that, in the final analysis, the
caste system was a judicious combination of social interdepend¬
ence—the idea that man was subservient to society alongside a cater¬
ing to the needs of the individual. While accepting that Western
capitalism released economic energies among a people, Bose
cautioned his readers about the damage capitalism had caused
through an excess of individualism. He believed society needed a
proper combination of rights and obligations, and in this there was
still something to be learnt from the caste system. In the concluding
pages of Hindu samajer garan Bose writes: ‘When we encounter what
is offensive in the traditional caste system, we should not spare it.
But if we find something valuable in the ancient system of production
and of social solidarity, or of regulating the relationship between
man and society, something which we may be able to put to use, we
should certainly accept it’ (Bose 1975 [1949]: 170).
Bose pursued the same argument in relation to tribes and their
relationship to Hindu society, claiming that just as Hindu civilisation
had recognised jati (caste), it had also recognised jana (tribe), and
that both had coexisted in India for several millennia. Continuing
with his logic that Hindu society provided both economic security
310 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

and cultural autonomy to various groups, Bose argued for the recog¬
nition of a special kind of acculturation process, which he called the
Hindu method of tribal absorption. The distinctiveness of this
method was that it accommodated tribals within the Hindu fold
without requiring them to abandon their cultural practices. Beteille
quite rightly points out that Bose believed that the two modes of
social organisation, which may loosely be described as the ‘Brah-
minical’ and the ‘tribal’, had coexisted in India for a very long time
(Beteille 1975: 5-6). The first mode was more complex, much larger
in scale, and had a technological base superior to the second. Marginal
communities were attracted to Brahminical civilisation not because
of its political power but for its technical efficiency and the rights
that these communities enjoyed to practise their distinctive customs
even when they were arranged in a hierarchy. In Hindu samajer garan
(1975 [1949]) Bose demonstrated, through his analysis of various
types of oil presses in India, how the technology of oil presses was
associated with caste ranking and intercaste relationships.
He argued that Hindu society had built up a social organisation
on the basis of hereditary, monopolistic, non-competitive guilds and
guaranteed monopoly in particular occupations to tribals who came
within its fold. He illustrated this with the example of the Juangs of
Pal Lahara. The Juangs, who at one time had lived by hunting and
collecting, gradually shifted to bamboo-based crafts and earned their
living by selling articles to neighbouring people: ‘Thus, instead of
being economically more or less self-contained, they have now been
tagged on to the larger body of Hindu society; they now form only
one cog in the wheel of the advanced productive machinery of the
Hindus. In the matter of this manufacture of bamboo articles, the
Juangs enjoy virtual monopoly in the state of Pal Lahara, and no
other caste would willingly engage in that manufacture for fear of
losing its own social position’ (Bose 1967: 204-5).
The history of acculturation, according to Bose, followed the
model of‘sanskritisation’, and in the process tribes emerged as castes
or subcastes. This particular strategy of tribal absorption had two
major implications for Indian society. First, the accommodation of
impoverished tribals within the fold of the more successful pro¬
ductive organisation of Hindus had been easy; and second, this pre¬
vented the possibility of revolt by the tribes despite their being
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 311

relegated to a lowly position within Hindu society. Bose concluded

his analysis of the Hindu mode of acculturation by observing that
economic relations played a crucial role in the sphere of social and
cultural relations, as culture flowed from a politically and econo¬
mically dominant group to a subservient one: ‘From this, we may
venture to suggest with regard to current problems in our national
life, that if we wish to set the Juang, the Munda or the so-called
untouchable castes on an equal footing with ourselves in a democrati¬
cally organised society, we should make sure of economic reorganis¬
ation first if we want to build the new social order on a permanent
basis’ (Bose 1967: 215).

VI. ANTHROPOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT

Both as a professional anthropologist and later as Commissioner

for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Bose deliberated quite
intensely on the question of the welfare of tribals and lower castes:
The ‘General Review’ sections of the Report by the Commissioner
bear testimony to Bose’s dedication. One can detect in these reviews
the imprint of a nationalist social thinker, a Gandhian deeply
sympathetic to the ‘weakest among the weak’ (Bose 1972).
In the Hindu mode of acculturation, when a tribe passed from its
independent status to membership within the caste system, this
transference, according to Bose, was merely from one form of‘total¬
itarian culture’ to another. He associated the process of tribal
disintegration in his times with the growth of individualism under
the new economic dispensation. ‘The chief point to which attention
is being drawn’, he writes, ‘is that individualism in an exaggerated
form is responsible for a rapid disintegration of tribal cultures in a
way ... which [had] never before occurred in the history of India’s
cultural evolution’ (Bose 1972: 51). He advocated toning down this
enthusiasm for individualism and its substitution by a new sense of
social cooperativeness in an enlarged sphere to arrest the ‘corrosive
action’ to which tribal cultures had been subjected. Bose’s
prescription for the development of the tribals and lower castes basi¬
cally consisted of finding ways to integrate them within the modern
economic structure, so that caste-based occupational specialisations
were eliminated. In the General Review section he writes:
312 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Although a very large proportion of the scheduled castes and scheduled

tribes are now engaged in agriculture, it is necessary either to take some
of them to workshops, or to bring various forms of industries into the
villages which can be practised by artisans, or farming families in their
spare time. One of the suggestions made by the Commissioner’s
organisation has been that, as far as practicable, scheduled castes in
particular should be taken away from caste-based occupations to those
which have no association with caste. This will, at least, loosen the
ranking system which holds in the case of caste based industries in rural
India. (Bose 1972: 166)

Bose thus preferred a path of development that would eventually

avoid the pitfalls of individualism engendered by economic mod¬
ernisation and the vices of hierarchy in Indian society.
In his plans for action Bose repeatedly emphasised the need for
better education, health, hygiene, sanitation, and consciousness of
their rights among scheduled tribes and scheduled castes. These ac¬
tions, however, would have to be initiated by the state, and in Bose’s
thinking the state and the national political structure appear as basi¬
cally benevolent, devoted to the minimisation of clashes of values
between different cultural elements and to the creation of a more
positive relationship between the ‘underdeveloped’ and the ‘deve¬
loped’. Bose was an active participant in Gandhian politics and, as a
student of Indian society, not unaware of unequal power relations
within society. However, being a cultural anthropologist and focusing
on cultural differences, he often tended to obscure the fact that it is
the structures of social and politico-economic dominance which
create development problems. If one adopts a deconstructionist
approach to Bose’s ideas about development, one notices that certain
key constructs he used, namely equality, participation, needs,
restructuring of rural social relations, poverty, etc., originated in the
West, being later used and transformed in Third World development
discourse. Contemporary development theory has exposed the
arbitrary character of these concepts, their cultural and historical
specificities, and the dangers that their use represents in the context
of the Third World. Bose’s anthropology also overlooked the ways
in which development operated as an arena of cultural contestation
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 313

and identity construction. Though his ideas about welfare and deve¬
lopment were Gandhian, the scientist in him also believed in certain
modernist concepts which he thought had universal application. A
sympathetic examination of Bose’s anthropology, however, leads to
the realisation that Bose was sensitive towards the idea of culture as
interactive and historical, even though he was unable to work out
the full implications of his conceptual scheme.
For the proper welfare of tribals, he advocated an objective, im¬
partial, and scientific assessment of the actual state of affairs as the
first necessity. In his essay on anthropology and tribal welfare, Bose
began by noting that anthropology was not ‘a science of curiosities’,
and in a place like India, where a vast amount of work in the field of
tribal welfare remained to be done, cone must make a special endea¬
vour [to prevent] the science from being misshapen either by the
spirit of curio-hunting or by an unbalanced, romantic concern for
the hitherto neglected tribes inhabiting our land’ (Bose 1967: 191).
Fie warned that if anthropologists failed to do this ‘there is a likeli¬
hood of social anthropology being distorted by our inner sympathies’
(ibid.: 197), a failure to fulfil its duties and responsibilities. In working
for the tribals ‘we must be extremely cautious not to encourage
separatist tendencies, and thus ultimately defeat the very purpose of
an all-round freedom, such as the Government of India have resolved
to attain’ (ibid.). Contemporary thinking in theoretical anthropology
suggests that all anthropological intervention is based implicitly or
explicitly on ideological and political criteria. Bose’s strategy of inter¬
vention reflects an ideology which views the state as benevolent and
welfare programmes as paternalistic extensions of a benevolent state.
Consequently, applied anthropology as imagined by Bose lacks sensi¬
tivity both to the political implications of the discipline and to the
possible conflicts of interest which may become focused upon an
anthropological intervention.
In fact, even during Bose’s lifetime the scientific anthropology
that he represented and which presumed the ethnographer’s tran¬
scendental right to cultural objectification were being called into
question, not because the tribes were dying out but because they
were increasingly becoming subjects of their own history and readers
of their own ethnographies. The epistemological illusions on which
314 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

classical anthropology was based, and the claims to scientific trans¬

parency (fieldwork as a simple device for recording pre-existing social
data), had begun to wear. As current research shows, governmental
intervention in social restructuring and cultural reconstruction, ad¬
vocated by anthropologists earlier in the name of development, often
resulted in subversive social and symbolic micro-processes of
'resistant adaptation.

VII. NATIONALISM AND NATION-BUILDING

As an active member and observer of the nationalist movement, Bose

believed in India as a unifying idea and concept. In an essay on the
problems of Indian nationalism, he began by observing: 'Today, India
is passing through a period of great strain, and there are some people
who see in it the signs of complete political dismemberment of the
country in future. There is one school of thought which emphasises
the view that India was never a single country in the past. When
others talk about the cultural unity of India, this school ridicules
the idea, and says that such unity lies only in the fond imagination
of nationalistically minded sentimentalists. Personally, 1 do not share
the pessimism of this school' (Bose 1969:1). He considered the ques¬
tion of national unity at three levels—the political, the economic,
and the cultural—and argued that it was the economic structure,
governed by the organisation of caste, that had brought about
‘uniformity’ in India’s economic structure. As discussed earlier, Bose
viewed caste as a system which reduces conflict and competition
and guides economic life by a ‘moral code’ in which sectional
demands are subordinated to the welfare of the local community.
The strength of the caste system, according to Bose, was that the
unit of inter-caste co-operation could be reduced to a very small
territorial dimension in case of an emergency, and that was how the
system had endured even during periods of acute political distur¬
bance.
This was a typical nationalist argument—which considered caste
an essential element of Indian society and which distinguished caste
as an empirical-historical reality from the ideal of caste. In this context
Partha Chatterjee points out:
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS ‘SCIENTIST’? 315

This enormously influential nationalist argument has been addressed

at different levels. Gandhi used to argue that the empirical reality of
caste discrimination and even its sanction in the religious texts had
‘nothing to do with religion’ The ideal fourfold varna scheme was meant
to be a noncompetitive functional di vision of labour and did not imply
a hierarchy of privilege. This idealism found a metaphysical exposition
in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who asserted that the varna scheme was a
universal form of organic solidarity of the individual and social order.
Since then, successive generations of Indian sociologists, working with
increasingly detailed and sophisticated ethnographic materials, have
propounded the idea that there is a systematic form to the institu¬
tionalised practices of caste, that this system is in some sense fundamen¬
tal to a characterisation of Indian society, and that it represents a way
of reconciling differences within a harmonious unity of the social order.
(1995: 174)

At the political level, Bose had no doubt that India had been suc¬
cessful in creating an integrated nation-state thanks to the British
legacy of administration. But, in spite of a common political struc¬
ture, Bose was seriously concerned about the development of sec¬
tional interests putting an enormous strain on national unity. For
him, the real issue was to promote integration at the economic level,
which he felt had suffered corrosion with the dismantling of the
caste system. The promotion of cultural unity was not so important
because traditionally India had always encouraged cultural diversity
so long as people strictly followed the economic organisation of caste
and more or less conformed to the Brahiminical code of laws and
morals. ‘Lokachara, desachara and kulachara were preserved, encour¬
aged and even honoured’ (Bose 1969: 6). That is why he was opposed
to the propagation of a national language for the whole of India as
a solution to the threat of disintegration: ‘This seems to be like
covering by means of a clean white shroud the body of a dangerously
sick patient which is full of festering sores. Such a belief in the magical
powers of linguistic unity is unfortunately not likely to lead us
very far in the solution of problems which our nationalism is facing
today’ (ibid.). He advocated objective historical analysis in some detail
to diagnose the problem. In his historical analysis of social and
316 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

economic disintegration, Bose observed that social change had been

unequal in the various parts of India. A growing population, rising
expectations, and limited resources had exacerbated this inequality
and produced new problems. One such problem, according to Bose,
was Hindu-Muslim relations. He points out that, historically, both
Hindu and Muslim upper or middle classes had kept away from the
political movements of peasants and the tribes and were unable to
reap any political benefit out of these:

If the Hindu middle classes became loyal to British rule when it offered
them peace and new opportunities of advancement through a new
economic order, the Moslem aristocracy shunned that order and tried
to restore itself to power by unifying all the Moslems of India under
the banner of a purified Islamic culture. The educated Hindu thus pro¬
gressively became secularised as he tried to reform Hindu society, as in
Bengal, by a re-orientation of his beliefs so as to render him fit to parti¬
cipate in the new order. In contrast the Moslems shed their ‘contami¬
nation’, accepted Western education only at its worldly level, and hardly
permitted it to operate at the social and cultural levels, and tried to be¬
come more firmly entrenched in Islam. In other words, the Moslem
became more Moslem, while the Hindu became less of a Hindu in so
far as orthodoxy in rituals was concerned; and thus the distance between
the two went on increasing. (Bose 1969: 17)

Bose dwelt at considerable length on the history of numerous

attempted solutions to the Hindu-Muslim problem, and on how
political leaders failed to realise that appeasement alone would not
be able to bring about a satisfactory solution to a vexed issue. He
argued that, in addition to the communal problem, which was prim¬
arily related to the question of Muslim identity and backwardness, a
new notion of backwardness had emerged in pre-independent India,
based upon language and birth. This he characterised as basically
communal in nature:

Ever since that fateful day (in 1939) when the Working Committee de¬
cided that representation in legislatures and services should be in
proportion to the population of various ‘communities’, India has been
led by progressive steps into the dreary sands of provincialism, linguism
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 317

and casteism. Of course, it all began with the communal representation

of the Moslems, when representation on a territorial or functional basis
gave way to communal considerations. Just as, under Gresham’s law, a
bad coin drives out the good from circulation, one political step which
could have brought about a deeper sense of national integration was
progressively replaced by another which led more and more towards
weakening of the bonds of nationalism. (Bose 1969: 34)

According to Bose, the political leadership did not properly coun¬

teract these separatist tendencies in the post-Independence era. He
argued for the promotion of associations based on the unities of
territorial, economic, civic, and cultural interest rather than caste,
language, and religious identities. In other words, he believed that
the social base for reforms in democratic participation had been
weak to begin with. Adult franchise, which he thought of as a reform
of the right kind, coupled, however, with concessions made to com¬
munities, had led to sharpened cleavages rather than to the promo¬
tion of national solidarity.
The leading ideas of the nationalist elites at Independence can be
summarised in terms of sovereignty, unity, order, secularism,
democracy, economic self-sufficiency, and the need for social and
cultural reforms. However, Bose believed that there was a massive
contradiction between the rhetoric of Indian public discourse and
the reality of political practice. Indeed, he did not conceal his anti¬
pathy for every kind of divisiveness promoted by political practice,
advocating instead the development of civil-social associations based
on secular identities:

One argument in favour of separatist patronage lies in the claim that

the more neglected communities have to be specially looked after in
order to save them from exploitation. Our contention however is that
each community in India is divided into exploiters and exploited. . . .
If exploitation has to be ended, which is one of the objectives set forth
in our Constitution, then it would be far more desirable for all those
who live within a limited territory to become combined into one for its
eradication. Any sectional treatment of the disease of exploitation is
likely to encourage communal separatism rather than serve the interest
of national unity. (Bose 1969: 35)
318 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

This overriding concern for ‘national unity’ in Boses writings

reproduces the nationalist discourse of unified India, in the process
neglecting the views of those situated at different locations in Indian
society who have their own distinctive conceptions of the nation.
The introduction of democracy in a developing country is not a
‘solution to growing power conflicts; rather, demands for more con¬
trol and power by various identities are characteristic of multicultural
democracies, especially developing country democracies. Boses
solution to the vexed problem of nation-building argues for unity
in the economic domain and pluralism in the cultural sphere, though
the cultural conditions prevailing in developing countries (local
identities and attachments, hierarchical authority structure, preva¬
lence of community norms, etc.) often forge new identities which,
though identified as ‘non-national’, have nevertheless been able to
challenge the dominant nationalist discourse.

VIII. CITY AND SOCIETY

The major cities of post-colonial India are either directly creatures

of colonialism or have emerged in response to it. While cities enabled
more regular contacts between elites and allowed individuals to con¬
ceive of themselves as members of a single, large community, the
enumeration and classification of individuals into categories of caste
and religion and the introduction of electorates divided along com¬
munal lines simultaneously solidified exclusionary identities. In the
West, the city was a domain of freedom which liberated the individual
from traditional ties; colonial cities, however, reinforced contrary
tendencies in Indian society. Bose conducted a social survey in 1962
to investigate selected aspects of social life in Calcutta: for instance,
the distribution of linguistic groups, voluntary institutions,
occupations, religious divisions, and so on (Bose 1968). He character¬
ised Calcutta as a ‘premature metropolis’ and summed up his findings
thus:

It can be said, therefore, that the diverse ethnic groups in the population
of the city have come to bear the same relation to one another as do the
castes in India as a whole. Actually, the superstructure that coheres the
caste under the old order seems to be re-establishing itself in a new
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS ‘SCIENTIST’? 319

form. Calcutta today is far from being a melting pot on the model of
cities in the US. In Calcutta the economy is an economy of scarcity.
Because there are not enough jobs to go around, everyone clings as
closely as possible to the occupations with which his ethnic group is
identified and relies for economic support on those who speak his langu¬
age, on his co-religionists, on members of his own caste and on fellow
immigrants from the village or district from which he has come. By a
backwash, reliance on earlier modes of group identification reinforces
and perpetuates differences between ethnic groups. (Bose 1965: 102)

One of the subjects of Boses investigation was the working of

voluntary institutions belonging to various linguistic groups. Bose
pointed out that these voluntary institutions were mostly community
based, and there were only a few in which several communities could
meet to satisfy their common civic or cultural needs. In this context
he made some interesting observations on Bengali networking,
observing that Bengalis had a strong sense of what he called ‘local
patriotism; The range of their social networking was also small,
culminating in the building up of a library, a club, or a sports or so¬
cial service organisation. Since these formations did not have any
deeper ideology they tended to split when differences arose: ‘A Bengali
seems to feel happier in the company of those with whom he closely
agrees, rather than in the company of others with whom he may
have points of difference. Unities are not stressed; differences are
not easily tolerated. This subjects some institutions to repeated forces
of fission’ (1968: 79).
Bose noted that even though communities may have lived in a
neighbourhood for a considerable length of time, separateness per¬
sisted, and he attributed the causes of such exclusive identities to the
lack of cultural overlap, and to the inability of classes to abolish
linguistic and regional ties or obliterate cultural differences. In
moments of crisis, he observed, class unities did not hold and com¬
munities fell back upon their regional, linguistic, or religious iden¬
tities.
Immigrants, according to Bose, tended to re-create their local,
cultural and social environment in the city. Thus, in the city of
Calcutta there was a situation of cultural pluralism, with different
320 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

linguistic and regional immigrant communities living in their own

cultural worlds. In this context, voluntary institutions acted as
adaptive mechanisms and helped create a familiar environment in
an alien or strange urban situation by assuming cultural and welfare
functions. Due to restricted job opportunities in Calcutta, there was
little labour mobility, ensuring that a job seeker would rely on his
community ties for a placement rather than compete in the open
market: ‘Thus social identities which ought to have dissolved if
employment opportunities had been constantly on the increase,
became reaffirmed. This was basically not the fault of the Indian
social system, but the fault of a native capitalism which tried to thrive
under the shadow of a colonial economy. It drove men into retaining
even in the city some of the features of their small scale rural culture’
(Bose 1968: 83). Of course, it has been argued by some that Indian
cities and villages are governed by the same structural features of
caste and kinship, and are parts of the same civilisation (Pocock 1960:
63-81). Thus, if caste and kinship are considered primary in society,
their presence in the city is no more surprising than elsewhere. Over-
hasty correlation of urban with Western values and influences seems
untenable.
One of Bose’s recurring interests was the future of caste in India
in the context of occupational change. In Hindu samajer garan he
dwelt at length on census figures to assess the relationship between
caste and occupational change; for Orissa he did a similar exercise
(discussed above), and for Bengal he compiled data from various
regions of Bengal in 1942 in a book entitled Biallisher Bangla (Bose
1971). For the city of Calcutta, too, he investigated the structure and
organisation of caste among its residents, concluding: ‘There is some¬
thing like caste in the residential concentration of language groups
as well as in their preference for particular ways of making a living.
In spite of [the] growth of classes, Calcutta has thus developed a
kind of rural arrangement which is strongly reminiscent of caste in
the villages’ (Bose 1968: 83).
Bose related this city structure to another of his favourite themes,
namely, cultural pluralism. As discussed, caste according to Bose had
traditionally encouraged pluralism. He pointed out that this super¬
structure of cultural pluralism had persisted in the civic commun¬
ity of Calcutta and helped indirectly in maintaining communal
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 321

differences: precisely for this reason, he characterised the city as an

imperfect metropolis.
We must remember that colonial cities like Calcutta and Bombay
were different from the traditional cities of India and discontinuous
with India’s own rich urban life. They were imperfect to begin with,
the colonial power administering the public space in accordance with
its alien concepts, creating cities more as showpieces designed to
display the superior rationality and power of the colonial state appa¬
ratus, but rendering them deficient in productive capacities. The
grandeur of the colonial city remained external to the life of local
society. In other words, the contrary tendencies that Bose portrayed
in his study of Calcutta were reinforced by colonial policies, and,
instead of free individuals, caste and religious groups began to emerge
as collective actors in the city. Bose assumed the model of the Western
city as his desired model for Calcutta and when he characterised
Calcutta as an imperfect metropolis he did not conceal his expecta¬
tions for the city in terms of Western standards. What he discounted
in the process was the distorted origins of the colonial city and the
specificities of the colonial imagination associated with it.

IX. VERNACULARISATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Bose, who always called himself a scientist, said science was his swa-
dharma. He had a firm faith in the efficacy of scientific research, not
simply for the discovery of truth but also towards formulating correct
social policies. He conceived of anthropology as primarily a field
science: the training of an anthropologist as a scientist was accom¬
plished in the field. He was not particularly interested in developing
any abstract conception of science but believed in the efficacy of
science through practice. As Beteille points out, lBose was well aware
that the scientific tools with which he worked were rough-hewn and
home made, and he was perhaps a little proud of this. In all matters
he sought to be self-reliant and he felt that if he spent all his energies
in the endless refinement of his scientific tools, the wider purpose
of his enquiry will be defeated’ (1975: 16). In the true spirit of an
empiricist, he considered himself a field scientist and believed that
simple scientific truths could be elicited from the empirical world.
For Bose, this science was objective, based on a disinterested analysis
322 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of ‘facts’. Knowledge consisted of the marshalling of facts, their

objective analysis and presentation. He regarded fieldwork-based
accounts of caste, tribe, etc., as contributing to the accumulation
and expansion of factual (read true) knowledge about India.
It is well known that Bose was an indefatigable fieldworker; he
called himself a paribrajak, a wanderer, and like a medieval wanderer
he was always attempting to discover and propagate truth. He wrote
extensively in Bengali to propagate the truth to non-professionals,
explaining society and history. In this, he was following the nine¬
teenth-century Bengali tradition of making knowledge available in
the vernacular, to a non-specialist but interested public, an outlook
that emerged partly in response to so-called colonial modernity.
Many societies for the ‘acquisition of knowledge’ were founded in
the nineteenth century, and members of these societies discussed
and published in Bengali what they thought of as useful knowledge.
Rajendralal Mitra (1822-91), in his journal Bibhidhartha sangraha
(1862-74), regularly published short pieces containing descriptions
of ethnic communities in India and abroad, e.g. the Todas, Santals,
Tibetans, Kukis, Australian aborigines, and Polynesians—their
marriage rites, customs, manners, and so on (Bose 1998). Like his
predecessors, Bose believed that the fruits of knowledge should be
made widely available and not restricted within narrow professional
confines.
Bose had no confusion about the public role of both the discipline
and its practitioners. He inherited an intellectual tradition which
tried to combine professional pursuits with active involvement in
the process of national transformation. He was an indefatigable
fieldworker partly because of his training but also because of his
Gandhian convictions, which made him believe that ideas were
nothing if they were not tested through experience. As a professional
he believed that his public role required him to build and develop
indigenous institutions, and thus he hardly published anything
abroad. Even in India, besides those in professional journals, many
of his writings were published in popular and semi-popular perio¬
dicals in English and Bengali. His most influential work Hindu
samajer garan (Bose 1975 [1949]), was first published in serial form
in the popular Bengali literary magazine Desk.
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 323

While recent anthropological critiques have pointed to the use of

various literary tropes to frame facts culled from the field even in
so-called scientific ethnographies, in vernacular anthropology this
is a selfconscious part of ethnographic practice, designed to produce
a text that is attractive and readable for the lay person. Scientific
narration or documentation takes a back seat, and the language itself
imposes control over the text. After all, as Roland Barthes puts it, the
text is always ‘held in language’, existing ‘only as discourse’ (Barthes
1977). Many of Bose’s ethnographic accounts and fieldwork experi¬
ences were written in Bengali as personal accounts. They are not
considered ‘social science’ in terms of formal disciplinary norms,
and are often mistakenly seen as trivial and inconsequential. However,
these self-reflexive personal accounts subvert the paradigm of anthro¬
pological science. As Pratt points out:

Even in the absence of a separate autobiographical volume, personal

narrative is a conventional component of ethnographies. It turns up
almost invariably in introduction or first chapters, where operating nar¬
ratives commonly recount the writer’s arrival at the field site, for ins¬
tance, the initial reception by the inhabitants, the slow, agonising process
of learning the language and overcoming rejection, the anguish and
loss at leaving. Though they exist on the margins of the formal ethno¬
graphic description, these conventional opening narratives are not
trivial. They play the crucial role of anchoring that description in the
intense and authority-giving personal experience of field work. (Pratt
1986: 31-2)

Bose often made this shift to personal narrative, especially but

not exclusively in his Bengali writing. In an essay on the planning
of a field investigation, Bose points to the distinction between a
traveller’s account and proper scientific observation: ‘A traveller may,
of course, gather a large assortment of materials which may, in future,
be of service to various classes of scientific men. But planned field
investigation is different from a traveller’s observation; it is compar¬
able to experimental observation in a laboratory rather than to the
varied observations of a naturalist’ (Bose 1953 [ 1929]: 255). However,
a clear continuity with travel writing is evident in the opening narrat¬
ive of Hindu samajer garan, a popular book in which Bose attempted
324 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

to provide a scientific analysis of the structure of Hindu society by

combining history, Indology, and anthropology. He began the book
with a personal narrative:

In early 1928 I spent a few weeks in a village called Kantala, inhabited

by Juangs and Savaras, in the state of Pal Lahara. A visit from [the]
outside world is generally a cause of alarm among the Juangs. They
thought at first that I had come with some sinister intention, perhaps
to investigate for the Forest Department of the Government the col¬
lections they made surreptitiously of the forest produce. But when I
offered worship to the presiding deity of the village and, after sacrificing
two cocks, invited all the villagers to a full meal of rice, the Juangs gave
up all their hesitation to accept me as a friend. (Bose 1975 [1949]: 32)

The self of the anthropologist is not effaced in this text. The anthro¬
pologist is not merely a scientist-observer, but assumes a multifaceted
identity, participating, observing, and writing from multiple, cons¬
tantly shifting positions.
Vernacular anthropology allowed Bose to emerge from the self-
imposed restrictions of scientific anthropology. In Paribrajakar diary,
Bose (1982 [1940]) presented an anthropology of people, culture,
and tradition, but in a style that was personal, autobiographical, con¬
fessional, and anecdotal, and which also depicted his own transition
and personal growth in the field. By Boses own standards the essays
fail as science, but it is difficult to exclude them from the domain of
anthropology. In these essays Bose deplored urban life, celebrated
nature, tribal life, the figure of the sannyasi, and expressed his per¬
sonal joys and sorrows, using the Bengali literary style with great
felicity.

X. CONCLUSION

Nirmal Kumar Bose had a universalist notion of science, believing

that anthropology, like other ‘scientific’ disciplines, must engage in
the progressive discovery of more and more objective knowledge.
This was a view shared by early anthropologists in India, inscribed
in the discursive practices of the discipline, and rooted in the scientific
ideology and methodology of empiricism, positivism, and scientism.
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 325

In his writings on the anthropological method he repeatedly stressed

the necessity for field surveys, for the gradual accumulation of facts,
and for rational inferences. From the very beginning, the early Indian
anthropologists were aware of a weak information base for any kind
of social analysis. G.S. Ghurye, Bose’s contemporary at Bombay
University (see Upadhya, this volume) also stressed the objective and
disinterested compilation of facts, and discouraged hasty theorisation
(Bose 1996). The ‘truth’ of society was thus linked to the sovereign
power of the empirical gaze that turned the obscurity of darkness
into light.
The ‘facts’ on which Bose relied so much were produced by meth¬
ods that could not be said to be specific to India. They were produced
under the Enlightenment rubric of objective and ‘value-free’ science.
This apparently detached epistemology recognised every new addi¬
tion to knowledge about India as a new scientific discovery, whose
veracity was attested to by the scientific standards of the day, indepen¬
dent of any subjective will. If we take the study of caste as an example,
Bose’s insistence on the collection of data on caste had close parallels
with the attempts of colonial administrators to represent India. As
Bernard Cohn says:

In the first instance a caste was a ‘thing’, an entity which was concrete
and measurable; above all it had definable characteristics—endogamy,
commensality rules, fixed occupation, common ritual practices. There
were things which supposedly one could find out by sending assistants
into the field with a questionnaire and which could be quantified for
reports and surveys. . . . This way of thinking about a particular caste
was useful to the administrator, because it gave the illusion of knowing
the people; he did not have to differentiate too much among individual
Indians—a man was a Brahmin, and a Brahmin had certain character¬
istics. (Cohn 1971: 154)

This was the empirical climate in which information and ‘facts’

about caste developed into knowledge. A new privilege was accorded
to observation and classification. The new and detailed ‘objective’,
‘scientific’ scheme was prompted not simply by a desire for knowledge
but also by a search for new ways of connecting things, both in the
social world and in discourse: a new way of making history.
326 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

At a more concrete level, as we have seen, Bose located caste in

the overall framework of the cultural and civilisational norms of
Hindu society. In other words, Bose’s description of caste was orga¬
nised and systematised according to certain normative ideals of
Hinduism which were typically Brahminical in nature. This parti¬
cular idealised model of Hinduism was viewed as an ‘acculturative
model’ for other social groups. However, though Bose, at least theore¬
tically, believed in diffusion and acculturation, his views on caste do
not imply acculturation, for acculturation implies a two-way process
or reciprocity. On the contrary, Bose’s depiction of Hinduism des¬
cribes a process which vertically integrates various groups into a social
structure administered and guided by Brahminical ideals and values.
The same vision of the absorptive power of Hinduism explains his
argument that tribals were successfully assimilated into the Hindu
fold (Bose 1967: 203-15). In a way Bose, like early Orientalist writers,
projected Indian social history as essentially the history of Hinduism,
or of the assimilation of non-Hindu groups into Hindu society.
As noted above, when Bose argued that the caste system in its
ideal form sought to harmonise mutually distinct units into a stable
and harmonious social order, he was in fact iterating the nationalist
assertion that caste in its ideal form was not oppressive, and that it
was not inconsistent with the aspirations of individuality (see Chat-
terjee 1995:173-99). It is this view of caste and of‘the unity of Indian
society’ which prompted Bose to rely on the authority of the state to
restructure society after Independence. This is a view that not only
failed to recognise conflict, oppression, and hegemony, but also un¬
derplayed or completely ignored the role of‘non-national’ identities
situated at different locations in Indian society. This presumption
of a single shared sense of India—a unifying idea and concept of the
Indian collective subject based on the trope of‘unity in diversity’—
has now all but lost credibility.
In his written texts Bose also attempted to demonstrate the unity
of various disciplinary perspectives. Though he never tired of
reiterating the importance of scientific investigation, methodology,
and analysis for social knowledge, he himself did not particularly
follow the more rigorous scientific prescriptions for anthropology
 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 327

that emphasised a limited subject focus, in-depth fieldwork, codified

data accumulation, and cautiously restricted inferences. In his
writings and analyses Bose preferred the earlier style of classical en-
cylopedism, the comparative method, intuitive hypothesising, and
generic conceptualising. Thus, in spite of his scientific proclamations,
Bose remained a classical scholar searching for interdependence
between the various branches of knowledge. For him social analysis
remained a comprehensive, totalising activity combining history,
anthropology, Indology, sociology, and related subjects. His Bengali
essays, which he wrote in a relatively open style, appear almost con¬
temporary in flavour, very similar to the contemporary, humanistic
mode of anthropological writing, resembling literary criticism. In
writing these essays Bose perhaps anticipated that openness, rather
than scientific closure, would one day become an inevitable feature
of the discipline.

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-. 1982 [1940]. Paribrajaker diary. Calcutta: Drupadi.
Bose, Pradip Kumar. 1996. A narrative on caste: Ghurye on caste and race in
India. In A.R. Momin, ed., The legacy of G.S. Ghurye: A centenary festschrift,
pp. 61-73. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
-. 1998. Samayiki: Purono samayikpatrer prabandha sankalan. Calcutta:
Ananda.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1995. The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial
histories. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Clifford, James. 1986a. Introduction: Partial truths. In James Clifford and George
E. Marcus, eds, Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography,
pp. 1-26. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-. 1986b. On ethnographic allegory. In James Clifford and George E.
Marcus, eds, Writing culture: The poetics of ethnography, pp. 98-121.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1971 .India: The social anthropology of a civilization. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
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plications (trans. Mark Sainsbury). Delhi: Vikas.
Kroeber, A. 1971. The super-organic. American anthropologist 19: 163-213.
Pocock, David F. 1960. Sociologies: Urban and rural. Contributions to Indian
sociology 4: 63-81.
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 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS 'SCIENTIST'? 329

Sinha, Purnima. 2001. Nirmal Kumar Bose. Calcutta: Paschimbanga Bangla

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-. 1986. Nirmal Kumar Bose: Scholar wanderer. New Delhi. National Book
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 Between Anthropology
and Literature
The Ethnographies of Verrier Elwin*

Ramachandra Guha

The book is a comparatively light one and is not likely to please the
anthropological pundits, but it might go down all the better with
the public for that very reason.—Verrier Elwin to his publisher,
25 September 1947.1

Dr Verrier Elwin s popularity with the ordinary reader has probably

suffered because of his high reputation as an anthropologist; an¬
thropology being associated with eight hundred pages of small type
and smaller photographs, each duller than the last.—Reviewer in
the Illustrated weekly of India, 31 July 1955.2

*An earlier version of this essay was published in The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute [JRAI], vol. 4, no. 2, June 1998. Republished here by
permission of the JRAI. The research for this article was undertaken while I
held a Senior Fellowship of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New
Delhi. I am grateful to Rukun Advani, Nicholas Boyle, and Anjan Ghosh for
encouragement, and to the editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Thanks are also due to the archives and libraries where the materials used in
this article are lodged: the Oriental and India Office Collection, London; John
Murray, London; the National Library, Calcutta; Oxford University Press,
Mumbai; and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
1 Letter in File E9, Oxford University Press (OUP) Archives, Mumbai.
2 CR.N.’, reviewing Verrier Elwin’s The religion of an Indian tribe, in Illustrated
weekly of India, Bombay, 31 July 1955.
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 331

Fig. 9: Verrier Elwin (Photo by Sunil Janah)

VERRIER ELWIN IS THE J.G. FRAZER OF INDIAN ANTHROPOLOGY,

a man of letters who strayed into a discipline which likes to think it

is something of a science. Both men are regarded by their peers as
fine writers but mediocre scientists, propagating wrong or misleading
ideas through arresting prose and the indiscriminate accumulation
of facts. While Frazer is no more than a footnote in some histories
of anthropology, The golden bough is one of the best-known books
in the English language, continually in print since its first publication
332 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

more than a hundred years ago. Elwin too is not always taken seriously
by the professors, but there continues to be a keen interest in his
work in the wide world beyond, as witness the repeated republication
and brisk sale of several of his books.3
The discrepancy between Frazer’s popular influence and his
scholarly reputation is the point of departure for Robert Ackerman’s
biography, an elegant and persuasive exercise in rehabilitation (Acker¬
man 1987). This essay, likewise, hopes to rescue Verrier Elwin from
the enormous condescension of the academy. Elwin was not formally
trained as an anthropologist and he never held a university position,
two reasons why some disciplinary histories do not so much as
mention his name (e.g. Madan 1982; Saberwal 1983). However, Elwin
was quite possibly the most influential anthropologist to work in
India, and certainly the most prolific (cf. Mandelbaum 1965). He
was also in many ways an exemplary figure through whose work and
reception we can track the shifting fashions in twentieth-century
anthropology.

I. LIFE AND WORKS

Unlike Frazer, who rarely left his desk in Trinity College, Cambridge,
Elwin enjoyed an extraordinarily varied life. Born in 1902, the son
of the Bishop of Sierra Leone, he had a brilliant career in Oxford,
taking two first-class degrees in English and Theology. In 1926 he
was ordained and joined the Anglican seminary, Wycliffe Hall, as its
vice principal. Offered a fellowship at his old college, Merton, he de¬
cided instead to go to India and join the Christa Seva Sangh (CSS)
in Pune. The CSS was an offshoot of the Church of England which
hoped to ‘indigenise’ Christianity. Its members wore the khadi advo¬
cated by Gandhi, ate vegetarian food, and devised a new liturgy incor¬
porating elements of Indian music, art, and architecture.
After coming to Pune in September 1927 Elwin quickly threw in
his lot with the Indian National Congress, winning Gandhi’s affection
and becoming a camp follower and occasional cheerleader of the

3 Books reprinted by Elwin’s publishers, Oxford University Press (India), in

the last decade are Elwin (1936,1942,1943a, 1946,1949 and 1964). The present
article, however, has relied upon and cites the original editions.
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 333

growing popular movement against British colonial rule. Seeking

fuller immersion in the ‘toil, the suffering, the poverty of India’,4 the
young priest resolved to make his home among the Gond tribe. In
1932 he moved with his friend Shamrao Hivale to a remote village
in the forests of the Mandla district of the Central Provinces. He was
to spend some twenty years in Central India, a one-man pressure
group for the rights of the tribals.5 In January 1954, Elwin became
the first foreigner to become an Indian citizen. In the same year, he
was appointed anthropological adviser to the Indian government,
with special reference to the hill tribes of the north-east frontier.
Moving to Shillong, he served for a decade as the leading missionary
of what he liked to call lMr Nehru’s gospel for the tribes’. He died in
February 1964, a greatly esteemed public figure in his adopted land,
the recipient of the Padma Bhushan,6 and numerous other medals
and awards (cf. Elwin 1964; Guha 1999; Hivale 1946; O’Connor 1993).
This Englishman, missionary, Gandhian, social worker, activist,
bureaucrat, and Indian was always and pre-eminently a writer, a man
whose richness of personal experience illuminates an oeuvre of truly

4 Elwin to Sorella Amata, 31 May 1931, Mss. Eur. D. 950/7, Elwin Papers,
Oriental and India Office Collections, London (hereafter OIOC).
5 The concepts of‘tribe’ and ‘tribals’, as used in contemporary India, refer to
communities more or less distinct from Elindu and Muslim society These in¬
clude hunter-gatherers and swidden cultivators, as well as some communities
of pastoralists and plough agriculturists, generally resident in upland and forest
regions. Taken together, these groups make up approximately 8 per cent of the
Indian population; they are listed, individually, in a separate Schedule of the
Constitution of India. These ‘Scheduled Tribes’ can avail of affirmative action
in government jobs and parliamentary seats, as mandated by the Constitution.
Whereas the tribes of Central India have maintained closer links with main¬
stream, especially Hindu, civilisation, the tribes of the north-east have, until
very recently, been quite distinct from this ‘mainstream’. The exact nature of
the distinctiveness varies from tribe to tribe and from region to region. However,
the concept itself is politically uncontentious and, in common parlance, to
speak of a tribe or a tribal does not have the pejorative connotations that it
might have, say, in some parts of Africa.
6 The Padma Bhushan is India’s third highest civilian honour. Elwin himself
described it as roughly equivalent to a ‘knighthood, but a good knighthood, a
GCSI or a GCB’. Elwin to his sister, 1 February 1961, Mss. Eur. D. 950/6, OIOC.
334 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

staggering proportions. A reasonably comprehensive bibliography

compiled by Fuji! (1987) runs to thirty closely printed pages—it lists
some forty books and four hundred articles.7 As impressive as the
quantity is the variety, for Elwin worked in a whole range of genres.
He wrote and published poetry, religious tracts, polemical pamphlets,
novels, anthropological monographs, folklore collections, official
reports and manuals, reviews, editorials, and travelogues. His last
work was an autobiography that is generally regarded the finest of
all his books.
While the trajectory of Elwin’s life was marked by a series of de¬
partures, the pattern of his writing career was shaped by his time in
Oxford. In his college, Merton, he came under the influence of two
mentors of quite different persuasions (cf. Elwin 1964: 19-24). The
first was his English teacher, H.W. Garrod, an authority on Keats and
Wordsworth and a bachelor who played chess and drank with under¬
graduates. The second was his theology teacher, F.W. Green, who had
once been a slum-priest in London’s East End; he was also a radical
in politics who deplored the excesses of capitalism and imperialism
without going quite so far as to call himself a socialist. Elwin revered
both Garrod and Green, and the influence of his teachers is manifest
in the creative tension that runs through all his work, the tension be¬
tween aesthetics and politics, between beauty of expression and the
claims of social relevance.
While he published some poetry at Oxford, Elwin’s first full-length
works were written while he was with the CSS. At a time when reli¬
gious traditions tended to talk past each other, he published two
precocious studies exploring the parallels between Christian and
Hindu mystical traditions. These works (Elwin 1930a; 1930b) cele¬
brated what he called 'the bhakti movement in fifteenth century
Europe’ (Elwin 1930b: ch. 1), the example of the European mystics
who carried religion to the people much as the Indian bhakti poets—
Kabir, Mira, Tukaram, and others—had done. Elwin’s books were
attentively read by Indian Christians (cf. Studdert-Kennedy 1990),

7 These include half-a-dozen articles published in Man between 1937 and

1945, articles that were spun off from his larger works. See Fujii (1987) for de¬
tails.
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 335

searching themselves for points of convergence between a foreign

faith and spiritual traditions native to Indian soil. His next work,
Christ and satyagraha, presented to the same audience the theological
case for joining Gandhi. It argued that Christians could claim biblical
sanction for offering civil disobedience to the Raj, for ‘the campaign
initiated by Mahatma Gandhi, both in its method and spirit, is more
in accordance with the mind of Christ than any other similar cam¬
paign that the world has ever seen (Elwin 1930c: 17).
Elwin was now completely identified with Gandhi and the Cong¬
ress Party. The Congress was aware of the propaganda value of having
an articulate Englishman on their side, and made full use of his rich
talents as writer and speaker. The priest conducted several inqui¬
ries on their behalf into police repression of non-violent resisters
(cf. Elwin 1931; 1932a). He also wrote eulogies of the Indian freedom
movement, published in England and aimed at a public insufficiently
convinced of the justice of Gandhis cause (Elwin 1932b; Winslow &
Elwin 1931). As in his later anthropological work, Elwin saw himself
as a man poised between two worlds and well placed to interpret
one to the other. Thus, the attempt to make Hindus cognizant of the
other side of Christianity, and thus, too, the wish to make his fellow
Englishmen recognise the illegitimacy of their rule in India.
After he went to the Gonds in 1932, Elwin moved away from poli¬
tics towards social work and, in time, anthropology. The more he
lived with tribals the more he came to see the world through their
eyes, a process confirmed and consolidated by his marriage, in April
1940, to a Gond girl. (They were divorced in 1949, after his wife be¬
gan another relationship; Elwin later married another tribal.) Going
Gond led to the overthrow of older and, as it now seemed, incompat¬
ible allegiances. When his bishop refused to renew his licence unless
he proselytised the tribals, Elwin resigned holy orders and later left
the Church itself. But he also became disenchanted with Gandhism,
whose credo of puritanical reform (asceticism, vegetarianism, and
prohibition) he found too restrictive for communities who liked their
liquor, their sex, and their hunting (cf. Hivale 1946: chs 5 and 6).
These shifts in loyalty are captured in Leaves from the jungle (1936),
Elwin’s diary of his early years in Mandla. The book provides reve¬
lations, through flashes of irony and wit, of his growing rejection of
336 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Gandhi and Christ: as in a description of a khadi mosquito net which

‘though utterly patriotic and highly mosquito proof, appears to admit
no air whatsoever’, or a confession that he spent a day of rest reading
Agatha Christie ‘though aware it would be more suitable for me to
employ my leisure reciting the Penitential Psalms’ The protective
instincts of the anthropologist had replaced the improving agenda
of the social worker. ‘There are many elements in the Gond ethos
which should be conserved’, writes Elwin, ‘their simplicity and free¬
dom, their love of children, the position of their women, their inde¬
pendence of spirit. .. their freedom from many of the usual oriental
inhibitions.’ The tribal, indeed, ‘has a real message for our sophisti¬
cated modern world which is threatened with disintegration as a
result of its passion for possessions and its lack of love’ (Elwin 1936:
37-8, 59, 158).
Between 1936 and 1939 the Tondon publisher John Murray
brought out, each year, a book by Elwin. Leaves was followed by
Phulmatofthe hills (Elwin 1937), a novel about a tribal beauty stric¬
ken by leprosy and abandoned by her lover. The narrative is replete
with poems, riddles, and stories from tribal folklore, interspersed
with straight dialogue. This is an early ‘ethnographic novel’, its plot
held together by the focus on the fate of its central character. In the
next year Elwin published another novel, A cloud that's dragonish
(Elwin 1938), a whodunit about tribal witches and witchcraft that is
less convincing.
A generous tribute to Elwin’s tribal diary and novels was offered
in the journal Man by the first Indian anthropologist of any stature,
Sarat Chandra Roy. Leaves from the jungle and Phulmat of the hills,
wrote Roy, provided ‘vivid glimpses of Gond life’. Written with ‘inti¬
mate knowledge and deep sympathy’, they showed how successfully
the writer had sought ‘to identify himself in spirit with the state of
soul-evolution of the people he studies’ (Roy 1938:150). Something
of the same spirit is also present in Elwin’s first work of ethnography.
This was the The Baiga, published in 1939, a massive monograph
about a tiny tribe of swidden cultivators whose economy was being
destroyed by the expropriation of their forests by the state, and who
had been forced, much against their will, to take to the plough.
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 337

‘The pen is the chief weapon with which I fight for my poor’,
wrote Elwin to an Italian friend in July 1938, while completing The
Baiga.8 That book was the first in a series of ethnographies and essays
through which Elwin fought for his poor, the voiceless tribal. While
his colleague Shamrao Hivale focused on social work (cf. Elwin 1964:
105-6), Elwin conducted fieldwork in many districts of the present-
day Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. Between 1940 and
1942 he lived in Bastar, a large, isolated, and heavily forested chiefdom
with a predominantly tribal population. From 1943 to 1948 he spent
several months each year in the uplands of the eastern province of
Orissa. Anthropologist at large, roaming through the forests in search
of tribes to study and to protect, Elwin accumulated a huge store of
facts, poems, and stories that found their way into a series of weighty
but always readable monographs.
TheAgaria (1942) told a melancholy tale of the decline of a com¬
munity of charcoal iron-smelters ruined by taxation, factory iron,
and official apathy. Maria murder and suicide (1943a) explored the
causes of homicide in a tribe that was the exception to the Indian
aboriginals otherwise deserved reputation for being both kindly and
pacific. The Muria and their ghotul (1946) presented an enchanting
picture of the amorous life of a tribe tucked away in the deep recesses
of the chiefdom of Bastar; it focused on the dormitory, or ghotul,
where boys and girls first learnt the arts and poetry of sex. Bondo
highlander (1952) studied the personality of a highland Orissa tribe
and the tension between individualism and co-operation in their
life. The religion of an Indian tribe (1955), also set in Orissa, covered
all aspects of Saora ritual and belief; it was praised as ‘the most de¬
tailed account of an Indian tribal religion that ever flowed from an
anthropologists pen’ (Furer-Haimendorf 1957: 602-3). All these
works were published by the Indian branch of the Oxford University
Press, as were a pioneering study of Tribal art in Middle India (Elwin
1951), and five folklore collections (Elwin 1944; 1949; 1953; Elwin &
Hivale 1944; Hivale & Elwin 1935) appearing under the running title,
Specimens in the oral literature of Middle India.

8 Letter in Mss. Eur. D. 950/8, OIOC.

338 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Of all these books, it was those on the Baiga and the Muria that
attracted the most attention. Both studies drew on the intimacy which
came from long residence with the tribe; both showcased vivid life
histories borne of the novelist’s interest in character over social struc¬
ture; both challenged criticism with their bulk, each book running
to more than 600 pages; and both were lightened by literary allusions,
the author being as likely to invoke Shakespeare or Blake as Malin¬
owski or Firth. More pertinent than any of these reasons for the
books’ fame (and notoriety) was their documentation and indeed
joyous celebration of sex in the life of the tribes.
Ancient India was 'rich in sexological literature’, remarked Elwin,
but recent writers ‘have generally been too much under the influence
of the prevailing Puritan conventions to treat the subject freely’.
Science called him to break the taboo, for the Baiga, he found, were
ruled not so much by the forest guard and the police constable as by
the raging fires of sexual desire. In their lives ‘celibacy is unheard of,
continence is never practised’. Their children were apparently born
with a ‘complete equipment of phallic knowledge’. Baiga knowledge
of each other’s bodies was extraordinarily attentive to detail: the men,
for instance, could distinguish between twelve kinds of breasts, rank¬
ing them (almost) in precise order of attractiveness. Even Baiga gali,
or abuse, was rich in sexual suggestiveness (Elwin 1939: preface, 239,
241-4, 263-7, etc.).
The book on the Muria ghotul, likewise, presented a detailed, can¬
did, evocative account of pre-marital sex, of the role of touch and
smell in arousing a partner, the use of love-charms in winning a
reluctant lover. Sex was fun: the ‘best of ghotul games . .. the dance
of the genitals ... an ecstatic swinging in the arms of the beloved’.
But it was not, among the Muria, disfigured by lust or degraded by
possessiveness or defiled by jealousy. More strikingly, the sexual
freedom of the ghotul was followed by a stable, secure, serenely happy
married life. In the process of growing up, the ‘life of pre-nuptial
freedom’ ended in a ‘longing [for] security and permanence’. In any
married couple, neither was a virgin absolutely: but both were virgins
to each other. Before and after marriage, concluded the anthropolo¬
gist, ‘Muria domestic life might well be a model and example for the
whole world’ (Elwin 1946: 614-16, 620, 633, 655-6, etc.)
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 339

In fact, Elwin was much more (and perhaps much less) than a
specialist on sex. A chapter on the topic, it is true, was the centrepiece
of The Baiga, but it was both preceded and followed by an elaborate
account of how the state had impoverished the tribe by forbidding
the practice of swidden cultivation. The material concerns of tribals
were always a priority for the anthropologist, whose works pay close
attention to the loss of tribal land, the restrictions on their previously
untrammelled use of the gifts of the forest, and their exploitation by
non-tribal moneylenders and petty officials. His bestselling pam¬
phlet, The aboriginals (Elwin 1943b), emphasised the economic meas¬
ures required to safeguard the integrity of the tribes, which, in his
view, included the restoration of their forest rights, protection of
their lands, and a careful regulation of contact with the world outside.
In July 1952, having just sent his study of Saora religion to press,
Elwin wrote to his friend and fellow anthropologist W.G. Archer,
saying he found it ‘difficult to start again the whole weary business
of writing another monograph’. ‘The poetry field is very fully exploit¬
ed’, he added, ‘and I am dubious now how far any more treasures are
to be found. Tribal art is virtually dead.’9 After a decade and a half of
prodigious work, Elwin had reason to be tired. The religion of an
Indian tribe (1955) was his sixth book on a tribe, following on eth¬
nographies of the Baiga, the Agaria, the Maria, the Muria, and the
Bondo. Yet this was a man with no professional training in social
anthropology whose scientific researches were continually interrupt¬
ed by spells of social work and pamphleteering.
In one of those paradoxes in which the history of colonialism
abounds, it was this former Oxford scholar who most effectively
brought to wider attention the culture and condition of a large group
of Indians neglected or despised by Hindu society. But Elwin did
not regard himself merely or even primarily as a scholar: all his books
were written in the hope that they might help forestall, or at least
delay, the degradation and exploitation of the tribes.‘I take a utilitar¬
ian view of anthropology’, he once remarked: ‘The scholar’s work
must lead to administrative reform and an improvement in the living
conditions of the people or it has failed, however technically brilliant

9 Elwin to Archer, 31 July 1952, Mss. Eur. F. 236/266, Archer Papers, OIOC.
340 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

it maybe.’10 Recalling what A.E. Housman wished for The Shropshire

lad—that it would one day stop a bullet aimed at a soldier’s heart—
Elwin said his hope, for his books, was that they may help protect
the aboriginal ‘from some of the deadly shafts of exploitation, inter¬
ference and repression that civilization so constantly launches at his
heart’ (Elwin 1946: preface).
This self-appointed spokesman and protector of the tribals was,
however, accused by some of wishing to isolate them in their moun¬
tain fastness, backward and undeveloped, deliberately kept apart from
the mainstream of Indian nationalism and from the emerging Indian
nation. Through the 1940s and 1950s Elwin engaged in a series of
lively polemics with critics. One debate was with Indian anthropolo¬
gists who accused him of artificially separating tribals from Hindu
society; he answered that despite a partially shared pantheon, tribals
were marked out from Hindus through their community spirit, the
absence of caste, their closeness to nature, and the equality among
them of the sexes. A second debate was with social reformers who
wished to bring in prohibition and forbid tribal dances; Elwin
attacked them as insolent killjoys completely lacking any appreciation
of cultures other than their own. This lapsed priest also quarrelled
with Christian missionaries who believed that a change of religion
was the swiftest way of bringing tribals into the modern world, for
he held Christian reformers to be as aggressive as Hindu ones, as in¬
tolerant of tribal art, culture, and dance, and likely if successful to
break up community spirit and maim new converts by making them
ashamed of their traditions (cf. Elwin 1941; 1943b; and for an extend¬
ed treatment of these controversies, Guha 1996; 1999).
Elwin was always controversial among Indian intellectuals and
politicians. While some bitterly attacked his work, others praised it
lavishly. ‘Verrier Elwin and Tribal India’, remarked the distinguished
anthropologist S.C. Dube,‘were terms of instantaneous association:
one could not be thought of without the other’ (1964: 134). Among
Elwin’s admirers was the most important Indian of all, Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru. At Nehru’s recommendation he was appointed,
in 1954, an adviser on tribal affairs to the Government of India, his
chief sphere of operation the north-east.

10 Circular letter of 4 January 1940, Mss. Eur. D. 950/4, OIOC.

 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 341

In his years as an official Elwin continued to write prodigiously.

Much of what he wrote was for restricted circulation, and almost all
of it focused on policy, on what the state could or might do to protect
the interests of the tribes. Books for public consumption included A
philosophy for NEFA (1957) and A new deal for tribal India (1963),
both widely read in their day. He had also been working steadily on
his autobiography. But so varied had been his life and so versatile his
achievements that when he asked his publisher for a title, the man
came up with twenty-five alternatives.11 They finally settled on The
tribal world ofVerrier Elwin, to mark his primary loyalty and identi¬
fication. The book was sent to the press in 1963 and appeared in
May 1964, too late for the author to see it, Elwin having died in Feb¬
ruary.
The tribal world ofVerrier Elwin obtained the prestigious Sahitya
Akademi award for the best book in English. The citation called it
an ‘outstanding contribution to contemporary Indian writing in
English’, written ‘with sincerity, courage and charm, revealing a mind
in which Western and Indian idealism were uniquely blended’.12 The
circumstances of his life made Elwin a privileged interpreter of cul¬
tures (or more accurately, perhaps, across cultures). In his autobiogra¬
phy, as in all his works, one can sense the passionate desire to make
one adversary see the truth in the other—to show Hindus the mystical
side of Christianity, for example, or the British the justice of the
Indian demand for freedom, or the ‘civilised’ world what it might
learn from the tribes, or anthropology what it might learn from lite¬
rature.

II. THE METHODS OF A FREELANCE

ANTHROPOLOGIST

‘You cannot observe mankind from the howdah of an elephant’, re¬

marks Elwin in the preface to one of his early books, ‘there is no
substitute for field-work. There is no substitute for life in the village,
among the people, staying in village houses, and enduring the physical
distress as well as the possible misunderstandings that may arise.’ He
speaks here in the voice of Malinowski, the man who made intensive

11 Cf. correspondence in File E10, OUP Archives, Mumbai.

12 Citation in archives of the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.
342 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

fieldwork the differentia specifica of social anthropology, the research

method which moved the discipline beyond the casual inquiries of
the colonial official or missionary and the library-based speculations
of Frazer and his ilk. Indeed, the statement just quoted is prefaced
by a swipe at some younger Indian scholars, among whom Elwin
noticed a ‘tendency to scamp personal investigation on the spot,
to make brief visits of a fortnight or less to a District and then write
about it, to conduct inquiries from the veranda of a government rest
house’ (Elwin 1942: xxi). Ten years later, he had noticed little prog¬
ress: ‘There has been more shoddy and second-rate work done in
[anthropology] in India than in any other country in the world. “Tip-
and-run” anthropologists visit an area for two or three weeks, take
hundreds of hurried and inaccurate measurements, ask a lot of
leading questions, and retire to their Universities to write pompous
articles about what they have failed to observe.’13
No one could accuse Elwin of this: he lived for long periods among
the people he wrote about. His first ethnographies, on the Baiga and
the Agaria, dealt with his own neighbours, so to speak, for both com¬
munities were closely linked to the Mandla Gonds with whom he
made his home. While his Bastar and Orissa researches were based
on careful prior planning, there too he lived for extended spells with
the tribals. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘For me anthropology did not
mean field-work, it meant my whole life. My method was to settle
down among the people, live with them, share their life as far as an
outsider could and generally do several books together . . . This
meant that I did not depend merely on asking questions, but know¬
ledge of the people gradually sank in till it was part of me’ (Elwin
1964:142). However, Elwin’s research methods are to be distinguished
from those of his professional peers in at least two ways. Where,
from Malinowski onwards, the anthropologist has laid great stress
on ‘speaking like a native’, it was only in his early studies that Elwin
could dispense with an interpreter. The Baiga and the Agaria spoke
the one Indian language he himself had familiarity with, the Chattis-
garhi dialect of Hindi. But elsewhere, as in Orissa, he had sometimes
to use two sets of interpreters, one to translate from the tribal langu-

13 See Illustrated weekly of India, 25 November 1952.

 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 343

age (e.g. Saora) to Oriya, the second to render Oriya into English or
Hindi—a process in which much meaning and nuance would have
been lost in translation. It is true that he ranged over a large territory
and encountered dozens of different communities, but it must also
be acknowledged that he was a poor linguist. Again, while studying
a tribe Elwin liked to make numerous visits of a few weeks each,
spread out over several years and many villages, in preference to the
single-site, continuous fieldwork more typical of the professional
anthropologist.
A fascinating description of Elwin’s field methods is contained in
an unpublished account by an officer of the Royal Air Force. In Jan¬
uary 1946, Warrant Officer Harry Millman, along with a timber con¬
tractor H.V. Blackburn, accompanied the anthropologist on a trip
to the Bondo country.14 The visit had been timed to coincide with
‘Pao Parab', the Bondo’s annual festival of the full moon, which had
never been described before. The three Englishmen were preceded
by Elwin’s research assistant, Sunderlal Narmada, who prepared the
ground for their arrival. From the roadhead it was a steep climb to
the Bondo villages. En route, Elwin badly bruised his toe. He was
climbing barefoot, as was his custom, and had what ‘appeared to be
his usual argument with a projecting rock’. They finally reached the
village of Bodopalle, where they pitched camp. The anthropologist
then played his gramophone and handed out cigarettes to the Bondos.
Even the womenfolk came out to listen to the music, but then, to his
fury, Elwin heard that the villagers had postponed the festival. The
‘official’ explanation was that the first crop of millet had not yet
been gathered, but the visitors had an uncomfortable suspicion that
the real reason was their own presence, as outsiders. When ‘all the
blandishments and bribery’ they could muster ‘were met with smiles
and inaction’, there was little they could do but move on to the next
village, Bodopada.
Here, too, the English trio put on the gramophone, then chased
and fought each other to amuse the villagers. Later, Elwin showed

14 The following paragraphs are based on a handwritten, untitled narrative

in File 64, Elwin Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi
(NMML).
344 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

photographs taken on his last visit and the Bondos excitedly identified
themselves. But in the evening he was again very depressed, as ‘he
thought this village also was deliberately holding up the moon festi¬
val, because they had not yet made the special food known as Kirim-
tor’, a kind of vegetarian sausage made of rice flour and boiled pulses.
Then, at nightfall, came the welcome news that the Bondo were
at last making Kirimtor. Ritual fights and drinking preceded the glori¬
ous full-moon dance. Overcome with joy, the anthropologist got
drunk and after one dance passed out and was carried to bed. He
woke up later, ‘said “Good Heavens”, got up and went out to the
dance, still a bit tight and full of joy. He got a great ovation, as it was
now 4 a.m.’
The lack of discipline characteristic of his field methods also spills
over into his books, for Elwin was a marvellously evocative but un¬
disciplined writer, quite unable to subedit himself. Perhaps the essay
or pamphlet was the genre best suited to his skills, bringing out, as
it did, his gift for vivid metaphors and comparisons and his polemical
edge, while masking a lack of ability to sustain or structure an argu¬
ment over the length of a monograph. Considered strictly as literary
products, his two most satisfactory books are Leaves from the jungle
(1936) and The tribal world of Verrier Elwin (1964). Both these books
are primarily about himself, and he was a special character. By con¬
trast, his ethnographic works, about other people and other contexts,
all contain a huge store of original information, not always presented
in the most coherent or convincing manner.
Behind these rich but unwieldy books lie the contending claims
of literature and science. On the one side, his monographs are enliv¬
ened by the sharp characterisations of a novelist, exemplified in the
evocative life histories and the abundance of songs, riddles, and
poems. His use of literary allusions, which is as frequent as his citation
of anthropological studies, makes for the most arresting compari¬
sons—as when Bhimsen, the mighty warrior of legend, is called the
‘Falstaff of Baiga mythology’, or when Muria life is described as having
‘in its pre-nuptial period many of the features of Huxley’s Brave
New World, but in its post-nuptial period the atmosphere of the
poems of Tennyson’ (Elwin 1939: 59, 1946: ix).
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 345

More often, though, gaiety and irreverence are subordinated to

the claims of exactitude and comprehensiveness. Elwin’s ethnogra¬
phies reveal an uncommon interest in material culture; they contain
thorough descriptions of dress, housing, agricultural implements,
food and food materials, and hunting and fishing techniques—this
as a counterpoint, perhaps, to the prevailing tendency of representing
tribal life as all ritual and religion. Less understandable are the extend¬
ed parallels he likes to draw between an institution he is studying
and similar institutions or practices reported by other ethnographers.
The book on the Muria, for instance, surveys at length and in a special
chapter the evidence on village dormitories from all parts of the
world, an exercise here bereft of any systematic or sustained compari¬
son.
Where other anthropologists emphasised the functional inter¬
relatedness of all parts of a social system, Elwin liked to highlight
one key trait or institution which for him defined the essence of a
culture—be it bewar or swidden cultivation for the Baiga or the gho-
tul for the Muria. A recurrent theme in his writing is the destruction
of tribal integrity by the violation, at the hands of outsiders or outside
forces, of this defining institution: the enforced lacerating of Mother
Earth among the Baiga, the ban on human sacrifice among the Konds
(cf. also Padel 1995), the puritan attack on the Muria ghotul, the tax
on their furnace for the Agaria. Here functionalism was imaginatively
allied with polemic, providing a theoretical justification for the de¬
fence of the aboriginal against the shafts of civilisation.
Elwin once called himself a ‘devoted disciple’ of the Malinowski
school of functionalism, but his own applications of that theoretical
approach betray the inclinations of the novelist.1S He was a published
novelist (and privately published poet) before he turned to anthropo¬
logy, and returned to literature after he had finished with anthropo¬
logy. On finishing his last major study, on the Saora, he turned with
relief to an essay on Charles Lamb. As he told his mother, ‘I greatly
prefer writing about literature to anthropology.’16

15 In a circular letter of 25 June 1936, Mss. Eur. D. 950/3, OIOC.

16 Letter of 13 July 1952, Mss. Eur. D. 950/4, OIOC.
346 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

In the papers Elwin left behind for posterity are two unpublished
murder mysteries written under the pseudonym Adrian Brent, as
well as notes for a third, unwritten novel centred on the life of expa¬
triate Englishmen and their Brown Sahib friends in Calcutta.17 These
themes are far removed from the tribal novels he had once published
and provide further evidence of his lingering, if largely unfulfilled,
literary ambitions. We might therefore have no quarrel with an Indian
newspaper’s description of Elwin as ‘not an anthropologist in the
academic sense of the term’but a ‘man of letters who is fundamentally
interested in human beings’ (Dutta 1956); or indeed with a British
weekly’s observation that Elwin was an anthropologist ‘by grace’
rather than ‘by profession’, and ‘primarily a lover rather than a student
of mankind’.18
Elwin’s uncertain location between literature and science is pin¬
pointed in an exchange of letters with W.G. Archer, another poet
and man of letters drawn willy-nilly into anthropology In response
to criticisms of his earlier books, in the Bondo highlander Elwin had
stuck in figures and genealogies so as to give his personal impressions
‘rather more of a scientific air’. Reading the manuscript in August
1951, Archer dismissed the new techniques as ‘just a piece of bluff
and phoney science’ and foreign to Elwin’s more usual method of
basing himself on the widest possible personal inquiries and impres¬
sions, which could not (and need not) be validated by statistics.19
The criticisms went home. Weeks later, Elwin was writing dis¬
paragingly of the anthropological books reaching him from Engiand
which, like the work of Tommy Tupper, were ‘distinguished mainly
for their rectitude, exactitude and appalling dullness.’ The day when
an anthropologist could inspire a ‘Waste Land’ was far behind, for
‘the thrill of Tylor, Frazer and Jane Harrison has departed: there was
life there, poetry, drama, loveliness, turns of phrase like a flashing of
a sword, chapters with stars at elbow and foot’. The field had now
passed into the hands of the ‘serologist, genealogist, the utterly dreary
folk’, men (and one woman) for whom Elwin proposed this

17 See Files 70 and 148, Elwin Papers, NMML.

18 Times Literary Supplement, 9/12/1939 (anonymous review of The Baiga).
19 Archer to Elwin, 4 August 1951, Mss. Eur. F. 236/266, OIOC.
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 347

anthropo-Dunciad, naming the most famous British anthropologists

of his generation:

Where Evans-Pritchard, Fortes and the rest

Suck social facts from Audrey Richards’ breast,
And should you ever see me really bored
I’m trying to read a book by Daryll Forde
Though, I confess, of thousands who get me down,
There’s no one to compare with Radcliffe-Brown,
There’s only one good thing to say for Marret
And that is, he’s as dead as Browning (Barrett)
If from pre-history you’d me deter
Just show me moribund Professor Fleure.20

III. A BRIEF RECEPTION HISTORY

In a report on the manuscript of Elwin’s study of the Baiga, a referee

for the publishing house of John Murray called it: ca curious mix¬
ture—on the one hand a piece of very valuable, thorough and appar¬
ently reliable research, and on the other a collection of weird, amusing
and bawdy stories. The author frequently changes his style to suit
the subject; at one time he writes in the cold and technical jargon of
science, and at another in plain (and almost cheerful) English, and
in the latter instance the book is always entertaining, though often
unsavoury, reading.’ Presented as an anthropological monograph,
This was beneath the surface ... [a] most human and delightful book.
The author does not regard the Baiga tribes as laboratory specimens;
it is quite evident that he loves and respects them, and often succeeds
in making the reader share his feelings.’ Thus the work’s ‘scientific
thoroughness is enhanced, as it were, mellowed by a thoroughly hu¬
man anci sympathetic approach to the subject.’21

20 Elwin to Archer, 29 August 1951, ibid. This poem was not, of course,
written for public consumption. The historian can take the liberty of printing
it so many years after it was composed, safe in the knowledge that the poet and
all his subjects are dead.
21 Reported by Alan Watts, dated 12 May 1938, File DG 40, John Murray
Archives, London.
348 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

The referee was Alan Watts, not himself an anthropologist but a

philosopher and mystic, an enthusiast for Zen and writer of books
on the wisdom of the East. But contrast this appreciation of Elwin’s
first major monograph with the review of his last, which appeared
in the Times Literary Supplement in December 1955. The religion of
an Indian tribe, wrote the critic, fell short of the ‘standards [of] pro¬
fessional social anthropology’. While the texture of tribal life was
conveyed with sympathy, Elwin’s analysis, or rather lack of it, made
it ‘difficult to arrive at a more objective understanding of the funda¬
mental facts of Saora society.’22
Although the TLS review was by custom anonymous, its criticisms
found echoes in reviews written of the same book by two of the
rising stars of British anthropology. In the Manchester Guardian the
Africanist Victor Turner acknowledged the author’s ‘vivid and elegant
prose’, the ‘aesthetic fastidiousness of his photography and illustra¬
tions’, while regretting the ‘omission of a prior analysis of the social
and political structure’—that is, of the rules of property and inherit¬
ance, as well as the rights and obligations of different segments of
Saora society (Turner 1955). Writing in Man, F.G. Bailey, himself an
ethnographer of Orissa, deplored the fact that Elwin was ‘resolutely
uninterested in the sociological aspects of religion’. Bailey’s review
ended with this distinctly two-edged compliment: ‘The book is writ¬
ten with a flowing pen. The style is discursive and the Saora people,
their way of life and their beliefs are portrayed with a skill found
more often in a novel than in a work of analysis. But the easy style
and the full reporting descend at times to sentimentality1 (Bailey
1957).
In an unpublished reader’s report for the Oxford University Press,
Meyer Fortes likewise felt that Elwin’s ethnography worked as litera¬
ture, not always as science. Fortes was commenting on the manuscript
of Bondo highlander: he found here that the genealogies were casually
done, the myths and legends not related to the culture, the account
of love and marriage an ‘effusive personal interpretation’ which one
would consider ‘to be good journalism, but inadequate ethnography’.
Here and there ‘Mr Elwin is carried away a bit by his imagination’,

22 Times Literary Supplement, 16 December 1955 (emphasis supplied).

 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 349

remarked Fortes, whereas ‘better acquaintance with modern anthro¬

pological theory would have led to more satisfactory analyses’. The
book, concluded the Oxford anthropologist, ‘can be regarded as a
very graphic but in some parts superficial description of Bondo cul¬
ture from a rather personal angle of observation. [It is] vividly written
and has an attractive gusto. It must be added, though, that there is a
great deal of Mr Elwin himself in the book. He does not conceal his
prejudices, in particular his distaste for the advance of a higher culture
among the Bondo.’23
British anthropologists found fault with Elwin’s ignorance of the
latest trends, and with the fact that he would not remove himself
from his books. To adapt the terms of Clifford Geertz, the problem
was that at a time when science mandated that ethnographies be
‘author-evacuated’, Elwin’s books were ‘author-saturated’, and
occasionally even ‘author-supersaturated’ (Geertz 1988). On the other
side of the Channel, however, sentimentality and authorial presence
are both allowed their place. It is thus not surprising that a distingu¬
ished Parisian anthropologist found Elwin’s romanticism ‘a small
price to pay for his deep identification with the people being studied,
to which we owe so many perceptive descriptions, autobiographies
and confessions’. But the French are also more theory-conscious;
the same reviewer (Louis Dumont) characterised Elwin’s book on
the Saora as ‘exhaustive but not complete’—lacking a ‘systematic at¬
tempt to relate religion to social organization’, or a structural pers¬
pective which might link individuals and individual deities to the
matrix of human relations. In the end, the French scholar concurred
with the assessment of his British colleagues—this was good reading
but bad science (Dumont 1959).
The years between 1939 (when TheBaiga was published) and 1955
(when The religion of an Indian tribe appeared) precisely mark the
period when professional social anthropology came of age in Britain.
With decolonisation the university-trained ethnographer was rapidly
replacing the colonial civil servant or missionary as the source of
authentic information about ‘other cultures’. Oxford and Cambridge

23 Report on ‘Verrier Elwin: The Bondo highlander’, in File 534, OUP

Archives, Mumbai (emphases supplied).
350 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

expanded their departments of anthropology, while new and influen¬

tial centres came up at Manchester and Edinburgh. (The London
School of Economics, where Malinowski had been based, was a pio¬
neer in this regard, an established leader in anthropological research
and training by the 1930s.) Dozens of students flocked to these centres
of learning to acquaint themselves with the latest theoretical trends
before going out into the field.
In this climate, the British reviews of Elwin’s Saora book reflected
a more general distrust of the gifted amateur within a profession
rapidly gaining in power, prestige, and—or so it liked to believe—
precision of analysis. The shifting contours of the discipline might
even be mapped by the reviews of Elwin s books that appeared in
Man. Some of the early reviews were written by Elwin s friends, such
as the anthropologist-administrators J.H. Hutton and W.V. Grigson.
Yet it was not friendship alone which led them to single out, in their
praise, the meticulousness of detail and the passion for aboriginal
rights that were the hallmarks of his work. By the late 1940s, though,
the professionals were firmly in control of the journal. For them, an
excess of detail was no substitute for rigour of analysis, and the de¬
fence of tribal culture an exercise in sentimentality not science—at¬
titudes reflected in the reviews of Elwin s later books which appeared
in Man.24
In the eyes of the professional anthropologist Elwin was a diligent
fieldworker and a writer of exceptional sensitivity whose theories,
alas, were both inadequate and hopelessly out of date. A decade after
his review of The religion of an Indian tribe, Turner returned to the
book in a long essay commissioned for a research primer on The
craft of social anthropology. He complained that Elwin ‘does not write
as a social anthropologist but as an eclectic ethnographer, and where
he interprets, he uses the language of a theologian’. In an essay addres¬
sed to the aspiring anthropologist, Turner provides pointers to the

24 This shift can be traced by comparing the following reviews in Man: of

The Baiga by W.V. Grigson (March-April 1941, pp. 38-40); of The Angaria by
C. von Fiirer Haimendorf (November-December, 1943, pp. 140-1); of The
Muria and their ghotul by Edmund Leach (November 1949, p. 130); of the Bondo
highlander by Barbara Lawson (February 1952, pp. 27-8); of Maria murder
and suicide (second edition) by Irawati Karve (February 1952, p. 27); of The
religion of an Indian tribehy F.G. Bailey (May 1957).
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 351

kind of ‘sociological analysis of the structural relationships within

and between Saora villages’ that could have provided ‘an indispens¬
able introduction to Elwin’s study of Saora ritual’. Elwin’s study lack¬
ed, in Tu rner’s view, a careful delineation of the modes of succession
and inheritance, the magnitude and mobility of villages, the forms
of conflict, the social composition of households and hamlets, and
the links between kinship, residence, and marriage. Instead of ‘the
systematic collection of this kind of data’, all Elwin had provided
were bare ‘morsels of sociological information’ interpolated in des¬
criptions of religious customs (Turner 1967: 181-204).
The criticisms have a sharp sting, for the scientific social anthropo¬
logist makes an example of the eclectic ethnographer. In Turner’s
presentation, Elwin’s study stands out as a paradigm of how not to
collect data in the field, how not to write up your material. The
amateur had admittedly an eye for the interesting problem, but not,
it appeared, the nerve or the technique to work towards its successful
resolution.25 In contrast to their colleagues across the Atlantic, Ameri¬
can anthropologists were, by and large, less judgmental. In light per¬
haps of the extinction of aboriginal cultures in their own land, they
particularly welcomed Elwin’s collections of tribal myth and folklore,
‘a landmark in the exploration of the intellectual history of mankind’
(Smith 1950: 535; see also Smith 1948). Oscar Lewis, like Elwin a
writer disparaged by scientific anthropologists, was unequivocal in
his praise of The religion of an Indian tribe, for him a ‘scholarly and
well-written book’, ‘a valuable contribution to the ethnography of
tribal India’ and‘of special worth to students of comparative religion’
(Lewis 1956: 753-4). But the verdict of the British professionals was
resoundingly confirmed, in a review of TheAgaria in the American

2d A younger anthropologist, inspired by both Turner and Elwin, has since

carried out a re-study of the practice of shamanism among the Saora (Vitebsky
1993). This is but one of a series of recent re-studies of Elwin’s tribes and themes
by professional anthropologists (cf. Gell 1992; Nanda 1994; Srivastava 1991).
In each case, the scholar has been inspired by Elwin to do fieldwork among a
tribe he studied, to provide a fuller and more scientific account of the
community and its institutions. By revisiting sites studied by Elwin in the hope
of proving him wrong, such professionals are paying rich tribute to the amateur.
Cf. also Padel 1995 and Sundar 1997, two works of historical anthropology
which make extensive reference to and abundant use of Elwin.
352 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

anthropologist by a younger scholar, George Devereux. He allowed

that the data were ‘rich, detailed, authoritative’; what was lacking
was systematic conceptual analysis. With Elwin flitting back and forth
between ‘the card-index pattern, Frazerian comparisons, function¬
alism [and] psychiatry’, the book had ‘neither internal or external
order’. But behind these symptoms lay a deeper cause: quite evidently
Elwin had spent ‘too much time in the field’. What he needed ‘most
at this .juncture is a refresher, a plunge in the Pieran spring of the
London School of Economics, or one of the progressive departments
of anthropology in the United States’. Devereux hoped that ‘in the
interests of science some foundation [would] stake this most distin¬
guished field-worker and scholar to such a venture’ (Devereux 1946:
110-11).
If someone like J.G. Frazer was derided for never having left the
academy, Elwin was criticised for never having entered it: one had
done no fieldwork, the other apparently too much of it. Devereux’s
comment brings to mind M.N. Srinivas’s later formulation of the
‘three births’ of an anthropologist. For Srinivas, an anthropologist is
‘once born’ when he goes to the field for the first time, thrust abruptly
into an unfamiliar world. He is ‘twice born’ when, on living for some
time among the community, he is able to see things from their pers¬
pective—a second birth akin to a Buddhist surge of consciousness,
for which years of study or mere linguistic facility do not prepare
you. But an anthropologist is truly ‘thrice born’ only when he moves
back to the university, his fieldwork completed. Here he reflects on
his material and situates it in a theoretical context, while being alerted
to competing subjectivities by colleagues returning from their field
sites and communities. The allegiance to one tribe can never be en¬
tirely abandoned, but with the third incarnation the anthropologist
can hope to achieve a least a partial objectivity: the mark of a scholar,
as distinct from propagandist (Srinivas 1987).
In his own way Elwin anticipated this formulation, for in one of
his books he beautifully describes the second birth of an anthropolo¬
gist. ‘In every investigation of a civilization not one’s own’, he writes,
‘there comes—usually only after months or years of routine in¬
vestigation, tedious checking and the patient accumulation of facts—
a moment of sudden glory when one sees everything fall into place,
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 353

when the colours of the pattern are revealed, and one finds oneself
no longer an alien and an outsider, but within’ (Elwin 1946: viii-ix).
Could one say, then, that Elwin remained forever in this stage of
twice-hornness, always and invariably seeing things only from the
perspective of the community he studied and identified with? A third
birth would have required a move to the London School of Econo¬
mics or equivalent institution, a move he was not willing to make. It
was not so much that no foundation would have been willing to
sponsor him, but rather that in contrast to the professional anthro¬
pologist Elwin had come to the field without a return ticket to the
Senior Common. Room. Eighteen years after urging Elwin to leave
the forest for the graduate seminar, George Devereux wrote him a
letter that, in effect, completely withdrew his earlier remarks. ‘I think
you are a very enviable person’, wrote Devereux,

who has laid out for himself a much wiser and much more gratifying
course in life than most of us. Perhaps you do not have a grand piano
in your sitting room, nor a Cadillac or a Rolls Royce in your garage—
instead, you have chosen to live with people and to work among and
with them. I rather think that your human horizons are wider than
those of most of us.
I speak of this with some feeling since, in 1935, when I could choose
between staying forever among the mountain people of Indochina—
who, as you know, are very much like your Gonds and your Nagas—
and going back to the hurly-burly of so-called civilization, I under¬
went a very real inner struggle—and probably chose the wrong solu¬
tion.26

IV. PREMODERN AND POSTMODERN

The high noon of professional social anthropology has now passed.

In the emerging, postmodern’ anthropology, the founders of the
discipline are being roundly condemned for their scientific preten¬
sions, their insensitivity to the power-laden context of their research
and their indifference to the fate of the people they studied (cf. Clif¬
ford 8c Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988; Mangarro 1990; Marcus 8c Fisher
1986).

26 Devereux to Elwin, 3 July 1959, Elwin Papers, NMML.

354 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Elwin can, with little difficulty, be extricated from such strictures.

Take, for instance, his acknowledgment of the unequal relationship
between the ethnographer and the community. The Saora, he noted
in an ironic aside, were unsure of where precisely to place him in the
hierarchy of those who wielded power over them. Was he bigger than
the Deputy Commissioner or the Forest Officer, they asked, or was
he but a little higher than the lowly Sub-Inspector of Police? (Elwin
1955: 84). Or take his awareness of the unavoidably intrusive nature
of anthropological research, to which he draws our attention by a
characteristic inversion. On a field trip to the Juangs, he found them
Tull of interest about my way of life, invading the tent at all times,
and even peeping into my bathroom to study my technique of ablu¬
tion! I often felt that I was a museum specimen and the Juangs mem¬
bers of an ethnological committee investigating a creature of the
absurdest habits’ (Elwin 1950b).
So in fact it turns out that Elwin can be seen as both a premodern
and a postmodern anthropologist, a scholar simultaneously out of
date as well as before his time. The strengths and weakness of Elwin’s
brand of ethnography are signalled in two assessments offered shortly
after his death by the two pre-eminent Indian anthropologists of
their generation. M.N. Srinivas, writing anonymously, was empha¬
tic in his praise of the individual—‘a gifted, sensitive and dedicated
man, in [whose] death India and Britain have lost a bridge-builder’—
but rather more ambivalent about his scholarship. He allowed that
‘Elwin wrote so well that he made anthropology popular among the
general public’, but added that This popularity was also partly due to
a focussing of attention on marriage, sex and art, and to the neglect
of subjects of serious professional concern such as kinship, econo¬
mics, law and politics.’ With the increasing professionalisation of
the discipline, wrote Srinivas in conclusion, Elwin would rank as
one of the last and most distinguished amateur-anthropologists’
(Anon. 1964).2/ A bridge-builder in cultural terms, but very much a
transition figure intellectually: there is a faint note of condescension
in this appreciation, the ‘last’ and ‘amateur’ serving to cancel out the
‘most distinguished’.

2/ M.N. Srinivas identified himself as the author of this notice in a letter to

me.
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 355

In the heyday of scientific social anthropology, Elwin’s work was

indeed regarded as slightly suspect, and on several counts. There
was his lack of interest in theory, his reluctance to interpret or specu¬
late, and his way of broadening the discussion—this usually done
by invoking some other author writing about a vaguely similar rite
in an altogether different social situation. When he moved from des¬
cription to analysis, Elwin worked like an encylopaedist rather than
a theorist, content to pile fact upon fact rather than uncover relation¬
ships between different social phenomena. There were also his hapha¬
zard field methods: rather than live round the year and round the
clock with a community or in a single village, he relied on visits of
a few weeks or a few months at a time, these interspersed with his
other commitments as social worker and polemicist. Finally, and
perhaps most tellingly, there were his linguistic deficiencies: the fact
that in all but his earliest fieldwork he was very heavily reliant on
other people’s understanding of the context and language.
That, so to say, is one side of the balance sheet. Now contrast Sri-
nivas’s highly qualified judgment with that offered by his close con¬
temporary S.C. Dube:

Elwin was not a dry-as-dust technician; he was a poet, an artist, and a

philosopher. ... His love, his human sympathy, and his sense of won¬
der sometimes detract from objectivity and neutrality required in sci¬
entific writing, but no one ever seriously questioned the facts. . .. His
critics may have made a few valid points here and there in showing the
drawbacks in Elwin’s type of anthropology, but they themselves rarely
produced work which could have been said to have matched Elwin’s
contribution. By his individual efforts, Elwin has produced more and
better research work than many of the expensively staffed and large
research organisations in the country. (Dube 1964: 135-6)

With Dube we may also underline the volume of Elwin’s corpus,

his massive empirical contributions to the anthropology of India.
He wrote, too, in accessible and often eloquent prose, treating the
subjects of his research as individuals and not as mere components
of a social structure, successfully reaching out to a wider public other¬
wise little interested in anthropology and ignorant about the culture
and predicament of the tribes. And while he may have neglected
some subjects of ‘serious professional concern’, Elwin broke new
356 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

ground in other areas, alerting the profession of which he was never

wholly part to themes and topics it had ignored. Thus, his sensitivity
to the lives of women, as witness his descriptions of their dreams,
dresses, and menstrual practices in The Muria and their ghotul, and
the very full account of the Saora woman as shaman in The religion
of an Indian tribe. From both scientific and sentimental motives,
Elwin made women visible for the first time in Indian anthropology.
Then again his alertness to nature and the place of the natural world
in tribal life (especially marked in his books on the Baiga and the
Agaria) distinguish him from other anthropologists of India, so cons¬
picuously indifferent to their ecological contexts (cf. Guha 1994). In
both these respects Elwin was to anticipate future trends and concerns
in anthropology. And alongside women and nature, Elwin helped
focus attention on crime, disease, and art, all previously neglected
subjects of research in Indian anthropology.
The range of his work, its sheer bulk, the manifest sympathy with
his subjects, and the grace with which this was communicated—all
these make Elwin a figure of rather more than antiquarian interest,
a scholar who cannot easily be slotted into the ‘prehistory of the dis¬
cipline’. At this point, perhaps, the analogy with J.G. Frazer breaks
down, for the Trinity man can more fairly be regarded in that light.
In the academy and outside it Elwin will be read, indeed is being
read, not just because he is closer to our time than Frazer, but also
because he has left these vivid and deeply empathetic accounts of
cultures being rolled over by the wave of ‘progress’. If, as Needham
(quoted in Haimendorf 1985:12) has said, the ‘prime business of an
anthropologist is to record the varieties of social life’, this was a busi¬
ness Elwin made emphatically his own.
The last word on Elwin the anthropologist can be that of his fellow
student of tribal life in India, von Ftirer Haimendorf:

Elwin contributed more to our knowledge of India’s aboriginal popu¬

lations than any other scholar, living or dead, and his monographs on
such tribes as Baigas, Muria Gonds, Bondos and Saoras will be valued
as documents of a vanished pattern of life when many theoretical works
by professional anthropologists will be long forgotten. (Haimendorf
1965: 647-4)
 BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE 357

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African and Oriental Studies 28: 647-8.
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Unwin.
 10

In the Cause of Anthropology

The Life and Work of Irawati Karve1

Nandini Sundar

T will pay my debt to society through research in my subject. And

beyond this, I owe no other debt to society.’ Having resolved this,
she took the road of research and traveled it to the very end. However
tired, she went on.—Vidyadhar Pundalik (1970)

IRAWATI KARVE WAS INDIA’S FIRST WOMAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

at a time when anthropology and sociology were still developing as

1 I am grateful to several people without whom this essay could not have
been written. Narendra Bokhare generously shared with me his extensive
collection of writings by and on Irawati Karve. Jai Nimbkar, A.D. Karve, Y.B.
Damle, K.C. Malhotra, U.B. Bhoite, S.M. Dahiwale, and T.K. Oommen gave
me extended interviews. K.C. Malhotra’s bibliography of Irawati Karve’s work
was an invaluable resource in locating her writings, and I am grateful to Sujata
Patel for sending me this. Anand Kapoor, Anil Awachat, B.S. Baviskar, Carol
Upadhya, Leela Dube, Patricia Uberoi, Shashi Shankar, Sujata Patel, Veena
Naregal, and Vidyut Bhagwat helped in various ways, by providing contacts,
references, and hospitality in Pune. Pushpa Sundar helped me with translations
and reading Marathi. I am grateful to Patricia Uberoi, Carol Upadhya, Satish
Deshpande, Sujata Patel, Ramachandra Guha, Anjan Ghosh, K.C. Malhotra,
B.S. Baviskar, Jai Nimbkar, A.D. Karve, and Narendra Bokhare for their
comments and suggestions on the first draft. The remaining mistakes are my
sole responsibility.

"A
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Fig. 10: Irawati Karve: Family Portrait c. 1960. Front row, seated: D.D. Karve (husband);
Maharshi D.K. Karve (father in law); Irawati Karve’s mother, Mrs Karmakar; Irawati Karve;
Back row, standing: Bon Nimbkar; Jai Nimbkar, and Gauri Deshpande (daughters).
361

(Photograph courtesy Jai Nimbkar)

362 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

university disciplines.2 She was also the founder of anthropology at

Poona (now Pune) University an Indologist who mined Sanskrit
texts for sociological features, an anthropometrist, serologist, and
palaeontologist, a collector of folk songs, a translator of feminist
poems, and a Marathi writer and essayist of no mean repute whose
book Yuganta transformed our understanding of the Mahabharata.
Her career (1928-70) spanned both the early period of institutional¬
isation of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology in colonial
India and their professionalisation in the post-Independence
period.3
Yet, although Karve was very well known in her time,4 especially
in her native Maharashtra, and gets an honourable mention in stand¬
ard histories of sociology/anthropology (see Mukherjee 1979; Vidyar-
thi 1978), she does not seem to have had a lasting effect on the disci¬
plines in the way of some of her contemporaries, such as Bose,
Ghurye, Elwin, and Dumont. In part, perhaps, this is because fashions
in social anthropology were changing even as she began her career—
from diffusionism and a four-field approach to functionalism and
specialisation—and the shift seemed to have escaped her almost com¬
pletely. Throughout her life, she retained classical anthropology’s
preoccupation with the question of human origins, as applied to
the Indian social context, asking ‘What are we as Indians, and why
are we what we are’ (Malhotra 1971: 26). In part, too, this is due to
the imbalances in academic prestige between regional centres like
Pune and metropoles like Delhi and Bombay within the country,
and between Indian academics and scholars of India abroad (see
also Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 27). There may also have been other

2 I will use the terms sociology and anthropology interchangeably, except

when a point needs to be made regarding their differences, because the bulk of
Indian sociology tended to be anthropological, and Karve herself used the terms
interchangeably (see her article, Manavshastra va samajshastra (Anthropology
and sociology) (Karve n.d.).
3 I have selected the year when she got her MA degree as the start of her
career in sociology. Her career was brought to an end only with her death in
1970.
4 For instance, she gave the Presidential Address to the section of
anthropology and archaeology at the Indian Science Congress in 1947 (Karve
1947b).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 363

reasons, such as her choice of publishers,5 or the fact that few of her
approximately twenty-five PhD students were able to establish
themselves in the university teaching of social anthropology and take
her work forward.6
Of late there has been something of a revival of interest in her
work/ However, the range of subjects covered and the variety of
methods used is often forgotten—Karve’s work stretched from
mapping kinship and caste (underpinned by anachronistic anthro¬
pometric and linguistic surveys) to surprisingly contemporary sur¬
veys of the status of women using census data, urbanisation, weekly
markets, dam-displaced people, and pastoralists. Equally, perhaps,
it is her life as an unconventional woman of letters and her dedication
to scholarship, her cosmopolitanism as well as immersion in a
particular regional context, that will continue to be of interest. This
is particularly so in a context where almost all histories of the disci¬
pline begin and end with the ‘Western metropole’, as if the places
that anthropologists studied had no traditions of scholarship or

5 Her first two major books, Kinship organisation in India (1953b) and Hindu
society—An interpretation (1968a/[ 1961 ]), were both published by the Deccan
College, where she worked, rather than by leading commercial publishers like
Oxford University Press and Routledge/Kegan Paul (who had published Elwin,
Srinivas, and Dube). However, this was probably Deccan College policy,
especially given the passionate interest the director, S.M. Katre, took in its
publication series (Sankalia 1978: 36).
6 Compare this to Ghurye, whose approach to sociology was similar to
Karve’s, but several of whose students became well known and headed
departments of anthropology/sociology all over India (see Upadhya, this
volume). It is possible that Karve is more widely read in departments of physical
anthropology in India.
7 This is so particularly in the study of kinship (see Trautmann 1995; Uberoi
1993), but also in the study of Maharashtrian culture and society (Zelliot and
Berntsen 1988), and ecology (see Gadgil and Guha 1992, which is dedicated to
the memory of Verrier Elwin, Irawati Karve, D.D. Kosambi, and Radhakamal
Mukherjee). A conference and exhibition organized by Narendra Bokhare, at
the Museum of the Department of Anthropology, Pune, 14-15 March 1991,
generated considerable interest. Bokhare planned at the time to bring out a
critical annotated edition of her collected works in Marathi and English. A
Karve birth centenary seminar was organised at Deccan College in 2005, titled
‘Anthropology for archaeology’.
364 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

scholars of their own, and where the history of women anthropolo¬

gists is conspicuous by its relative absence.8
There are other reasons, however, for examining Karve’s life rather
than merely trying to redress an imbalance which time and location
have created. While historians of the discipline in India calibrate its
chronology differently, most seem to agree that Irawati Karve belong¬
ed to the period when anthropology had taken root in the university,
and needed nurturing; or, in other words, the phase of consolidation.9
Examining Karve’s oeuvre not just as an abstract product of her intel¬
lect or the concerns of the discipline, but as the product of a particular
institutional context and social constellation, will perhaps help us
understand the manner in which sociology and anthropology were
established as professional research fields within the university. In
this essay, the term ‘professionalisation’ is used loosely to refer to the
manner in which the disciplines came to acquire a distinct identity
and membership, and be seen as a potential career. We need to under¬
stand what this professionalisation meant for the discipline in terms
of subject matter and research practice, and how this affected the
relations between sociology and society at large in the Indian context.
The fragile professionalism—in terms of research standards—of
social science disciplines in India today gives this question contempo¬
rary resonance. On the one hand it is important to assert the need
for ‘science as a vocation or to maintain the neutrality of social
science research in the face of growing political partisanship in schol¬
arship (cf. Weber 1970 [1918]. The demands of a professional disci¬
pline, including criticism from one’s peers, can often modify the

8 See, for instance, the absence in the History of Anthropology volumes edited
by George Stocking (University of Wisconsin Press) of female ancestors other
than Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.
9 Vidyarthi (1978) divides the development of the discipline into three phases:
the formative period (1774-1919), the constructive (1920-49), and the
analytical (1950 onwards), while Mukherjee (1979) prefers to use the terms
‘pioneers, modernizers, pace-makers and nonconformists’—though roughly
in the same time frame. While Vidyarthi places Karve among the constructivists,
Mukherjee places her as part of the ‘perennial stream’ of Indian anthropology/
sociology which flowed from pioneers like Ghurye, Chattopadhyay, and D.P.
Mukerji, rather than among modernisers like M.N. Srinivas and S.C. Dube.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 365

more extreme views that develop through ones personal political or

social inclinations. This is evident, for example, in the changes that
Karve’s views underwent—from a strident Hindu nationalism to an
emphasis on diversity and tolerance. On the other hand, faced with
the perceived irrelevance of much university-taught or professional
sociology and anthropology in India—with its focus on the origins
of the caste system, kinship, and village studies—to contemporary
social problems,10 many would argue that the way sociology has been
institutionalised in the country (the demarcation of disciplines and
subject matter) is fundamentally flawed. In addition, most of the
scholar-pedagogues have been upper caste and upper class and the
manner in which they have approached subjects like caste has reflect¬
ed this bias. The linguistic conditions for professionalism—writing
in English, publishing in professional journals—also tend to exclude
a large majority. ‘Neutrality’, in this context, can be a way of suppres¬
sing social contradictions, and internalizing‘disciplinary concerns’—
a way of excluding lived experience. Perhaps, then, by uncovering
some of these social origins and understanding how certain subjects
came to be the staple subject of anthropological enquiry, we can
begin to address the warp in the sociological profession.11

I. THE PRAXIS OF RESEARCH

From Puneri Brahman to Professional

Anthropologist

Recent histories of the introduction of‘Anglo’ education in western

India note that, rather than representing the greater universalisation
of access to education, colonial educational policies in fact helped
to consolidate a small group of upper castes, particularly Brahmans,
in new professions like the civil services, law, journalism and teaching

10 Unlike, say, economics in post-Independence India, which has been seen

as having immediate practical relevance, or sociology in Europe and America
(see Hawthorne 1976).
11 See Bourdieu (1996) for the way in which the emphasis on certain kinds
of knowledge and ‘academic manners’—academic habitus—enables scholars
to performatively recreate structures of class even while, as individuals, they
simply uphold ‘standards’ in scholarship.
366 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

(Chakravarti 1998: 60-2; Naregal 2001).12 Prominent among these

upper castes were the Chitpavan Brahmans who had dominated
social and political life under the Peshwas and now moved to restore
their position from the relative decline they had suffered after the
initial establishment of British rule (Chakravarti 1998: 64; Masselos
1974: 25).
Access to English education also structured other social divisions,
such as that between ‘reformers’ and the orthodox’. The former, who
advocated social reforms like widow remarriage and the abolition
of child marriages, were mostly drawn from Bombay colleges such
as Elphinstone, but exercised considerable influence through their
spread as primary schoolteachers and college lecturers. ‘Social reform’
was the major issue in Pune—unlike industrialised Bombay, which
was developing a radical working-class politics. However, as Masselos
shows, the gap between the reformers and the orthodox was consider¬
ably overplayed since both were generally upper caste, and the former
tended to work through caste and community structures in order to
gain acceptability, thereby often strengthening the hold of caste
(Masselos 1974; 30; see also Zavos 2000: 39-44). Gender, as Chakra¬
varti points out, was critical to both the reformists and the orthodox,
each of whom identified the ‘real’ Hindu tradition with their parti¬
cular stance on gender and quoted from the shastras to prove this.
While the orthodox upheld Brahmanical patriarchy, the reformers
merely sought to moderate it with ‘paternalist humanism’, among
other things, in order to make women into suitable helpmates for
the new class of educated men (Chakravarti 1994: 6). Gender was
also critical in marking off upper-caste reform activity from lower-
caste protest—while lower caste reformers emphasised caste as the
major source of oppression, upper-caste reformers took up gender-
based oppression, with some convergences as in the person of Jyotiba

12 While lower castes did attempt to access this education through missionary
schools, or by exploiting the space between different fractions of the upper-
caste elite (reformers vs. modernizers) to demand access to government
education, the new professions were predominantly upper caste. In fact, as late
as the 1930s, Brahmans continued to be prominent in educational institutions
in Maharashtra, particularly Poona (see Chakravarti 1998: 110, fn 53).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 367

Phule.13Correspondingly, womens education received more grants

from the colonial government than schools for the lower castes
(Naregal 2001: 96).
In this general atmosphere of reform and women’s education,
and coming from a professional Chitpavan family, neither getting a
education nor going into a profession like teaching would for some¬
one like Irawati Karve have been particularly novel. The bitterest
battles in this field had been fought a generation earlier. Yet merely
possessing this social and cultural capital does not by itself account
for the course that Karve charted; even for her, pursuing a career in
anthropology was not easy. She was born in 1905 and named after
the Irawaddy river in Burma where her father, Ganesh Hari Karmar-
kar, worked in the Burma Cotton Company. At seven she was sent to
the Huzur Paga boarding school for girls in Pune. One of her class¬
mates at the school was Shakuntala Paranjapye, daughter of R.P.
Paranjapye, Principal of Fergusson College. Shakuntala s mother, so
the family story goes, saw Irawati at the school and wanted to bring
her home as a second child.14 Photos of the time show two neatly
dressed girls in long white frocks and white bows in their hair
standing demurely behind R.P. Paranjapye and his wife.15 At the intel¬
lectual and atheist ‘Wrangler’ Paranjapye’s house, Irawati was intro¬
duced to a variety of books as well as to visitors like Judge Balakram,
whose own interest in anthropology rubbed off on her.
Irawati studied philosophy at Fergusson College, graduating in
1926. She then got the Dakshina Fellowship to work under G.S.
Ghurye, head of the Department of Sociology at Bombay Univer¬
sity.16 In the mean time, she married the chemist Dinakar Dhondo

13 Kosambi (2000a), Naregal (2001: 96). See also Naregal (2001: 227) for
how this move to social reform followed a distancing from egalitarian principles
after 1857.
J4 This account of her life relies on Kalelkar (1973) and an interview with
her daughter Jai Nimbkar at her home in Phaltan, 26 April 2001.
15 Reproduced in Paranjapye (1995). The Paranjapyes and Karves,both well-
known and progressive Brahman families in Pune, have been close relations
and friends over several generations.
16 The Dakshina awards were instituted by the Peshwas to promote Sanskrit
learning and support pandits. While the awards were continued under the
368 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Karve, a friend and tennis companion of her brothers, apparently

much to the disappointment of her wealthy father, who was unim¬
pressed by the social distinction of the Karve family and who had
wanted her to marry a sansthanik (ruler of a princely state) rather
than a mere college teacher.17
D.D. Karve was the second son of Dhondo Keshav Karve, one of
the pioneers of widow remarriage and womens education in Maha¬
rashtra. Unlike Justice M.G. Ranade, who campaigned for widow
remarriage but married a young girl of 11 as his second wife, Mahar-
shi Karve (as D.K. Karve later came to be known), had himself marri¬
ed a widow, Godubai, a remarkable woman in her own right who
was Pandita Ramabai’s first student at the Sharada Sadan.18 When
the Sharada Sadan became ‘notorious’ as a ‘breeding ground for
Christian conversion, Maharshi Karve, working very much within
the upper-caste reformist mode, started the Hindu Widows’ Home
at Hingne, outside Pune (D.K. Karve 1963; Chandavarkar 1958). He
later set up the Women’s University in Bombay (with public contribu¬
tions on the lines of the Japanese Women’s University), which was
renamed the SNDT Women’s University after a substantial donation
from the industrialist Sir Vithaldas Thackersay. While the Karves
initially suffered much social opprobrium from orthodox Brahmans,
the family eventually became well known and feted in nationalist
and reformist circles. While Godubai, Karve’s wife, and her sister,
Parvati Athavale, were involved in collecting contributions for the
Widows’ Home, Maharshi Karve’s eldest son Raghunath extended
the family tradition by giving up a job as a maths lecturer in Wilson
College, Bombay, to campaign for birth control.

British, they were vastly reduced and eventually directed towards the cultivation
of the vernacular and native education (see Naregal 2001: 80-9 on the Dakshina
funds). By the late 1920s, the new colonial intelligentsia had obviously surpassed
the traditional intellectuals, as evident from the award of the Dakshina
Fellowship to study a modern discipline such as sociology.
17 Interview, Jai Nimbkar, 26 April 2001.
18 For the importance of Pandita Ramabai as a feminist and campaigner for
widow remarriage, see Chakravarti (1998); see also Kosambi (2000b).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 369

Being married into such a family brought some advantages to

Irawati Karve,19 yet Maharshi Karve’s liberal encouragement of
women in public did not necessarily extend into an equal recognition
of or support for women in his own family. A sense of this comes
through in her essay, ‘Grandfather’, about Maharshi Karve, where
she describes his opposition to her studying in Germany:

After I received my M.A., Dinu (my husband) decided to send me to

Germany for further studies. He informed Grandfather about the plan,
but Grandfather did not approve. What was the point in further studies!
It would be very expensive; I could easily get a job in the Women’s Uni¬
versity without it. But Dinu would not hear of it. He was confident of
getting the necessary finances. After that Grandfather left Poona and
<

we went ahead with our preparations. When the date of my departure

was fixed, Dinu wrote a letter to his father telling him the date of de¬
parture and asking for his blessings. Grandfather promptly sent a reply
saying that he had already stated that he was not in favour of the plan.
No blessings—nothing more. For a long time after that, I was rather
bitter about this episode, especially as he had enthusiastically sponsored
further education in foreign countries for some other women who were
not particularly good at their studies in India. (Karve 1963d: 93-4)

Irawati Karve goes on to describe how she reconciled herself to his

attitude, realising that ‘(h)is heart, which is insulated against humans,
is given unstintingly to his institutions’ (Karve 1963d: 94). The idea
that reformers and revolutionaries are often hardest on those closest
to them comes through again in her conclusion to the essay, ‘How
fortunate I am that I am the daughter-in-law of such a man! And
how still more fortunate that I am not his wife’ (ibid.: 104; see also
Anandibai Karve 1963).20

19 In Karve’s essay Paripurti, where she describes, albeit ironically, the way
she was introduced at a public function, one gets a glimpse of the importance
of such family connections (Karve 1949). See also infra, fn. 50.
20 Another example of stricter standards for Maharshi Karve’s own family
that seems to have rankled for a long time is the fine Karve was made to pay
when she broke her contract with SNDT to join Deccan College. Only a short
while earlier, someone else in a similar position had been let off. Karve had to
370 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

As for Karve herself, she decided early on that the sacrifices in¬
volved in social reform were not for her and her only debt to society
was her research (Pundalik 1970). Upadhya (this volume) argues
that the nineteenth-century social reformers had already cast society
as an object of study—perhaps a further distantiation from social
reform, even if not purposely undertaken for this reason, was neces¬
sary in order to ‘professionalise1 the discipline.21 At any rate her
husband, Dinakar Karve, too, appears to have shared her views, con¬
fining himself to teaching chemistry. He later became Principal of
Fergusson College.
While Dinakar Karve may not have been a public proponent of
social reform or womens rights like his father, his daughters argue
that he was the perfect supportive husband, recognising his wife’s
exceptional intellectual abilities and doing his best to encourage
her.22 Having done his own PhD in organic chemistry in Germany
just after World War I, Dinakar Karve persuaded his wife to go there
as well. They borrowed money from the Gujarati Congressman Jivraj
Mehta, and Irawati Karve left alone for Germany in November 1928,
at the age of 23, returning two years later after finishing her PhD.
Gauri Deshpande, her daughter, describes coming across a diary,
years after her father’s death, in which he described his married life
with Irawati much in the meticulous way he kept his accounts: every
major event, every success or failure in her life was noted, whereas
there was very little on his own life. He took on several household
responsibilities so that she would have time for research—always
ensuring there was petrol in her scooter and some money in her
purse.23 Irawati and Dinakar Karve shared a somewhat unconven¬
tional relationship for the times in other ways too. It was common

sell her gold bangles—the only jewellery she inherited from her mother when
she married—to pay the fine (Jai Nimbkar, letter to me, 4 February 2002).
21 On the other hand, there were anthropologists like N.K. Bose and K.P.
Chattopadhyay who were involved in the freedom struggle, and others who
came later, like A.R. Desai, whose research was a part of radical politics.
22 Jai Nimbkar, letter to me, 4 February 2002; Deshpande 2001.
23 Deshpande 2001. It is worth noting that accounts about successful women
must dwell at length on the role played by their husbands, while in the case of
successful men the wife’s support is simply assumed.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 371

in Maharashtra for a wife to avoid using her husbands name and

address him in the plural. Not only did Irawati and Dinakar call
each other ‘Iru’ and ‘Dinu’, their children called them by those names
as well. This was often a source of amusement or surprise to the
children’s friends, as was Irawati Karve’s refusal to wear any of the
signs of a married Hindu woman, such as the kumkum or the mangal-
sutra.24 She was also the first woman in Pune to ride a scooter.25 Her
appearance was evidently an important factor in the overall myth of
her persona—almost everyone who wrote about her or who des¬
cribed her to me emphasised how imposing she was—‘tall, fair and
well-built’ (Dube 2000: 4041). By all accounts she seems also to have
been both an exciting and difficult person—taking instant likes and
dislikes to people, often rude or so frank as to appear rude, with a
tendency to shout at students who disturbed or angered her, etc.
However, she was also warmly hospitable to those she liked and took
a keen interest in people’s lives.26 She made a deep impression on
the sociologist Leela Dube: ‘What was truly infectious was her intense
curiosity about diverse customs, her readiness to admit of her lack
of information about some of them, and a “could not care less” atti¬
tude about “impression management” in scholarly circles’ (ibid.).
Despite her disregard of convention, Irawati Karve’s was essentially
a middle-class Hindu life, her interests and scholarship made possible
by a particular Hindu reform mindset. Reformist Pune Brahmans
retained a sense of‘tradition’, a way of introducing a Maharashtrian
audience to the wider world through a middle-class sensibility.
Despite Dinakar Karve’s ardent atheism and her children’s teasing
about her ‘boyfriend’, Irawati Karve portrayed her frequent visits to
the shrine of Vitthoba at Pandharpur as part of a secular upholding
of tradition, of doing what many had done before her, and being
part of‘the spirit of Maharashtra’.27 This ‘spirit of Maharashtra’ was,
however, understood in purely Hindu terms. While she had learnt
Sanskrit at school, as all educated children did in those days, she

24 Interviews, Jai Nimbkar, 26 April 2001 and Anand Karve, 27 April 2001;
A.D. Karve (1970); Deshpande (1970).
25 Interview, B.S. Baviskar, April 2001.
26 Desai (1970); Nimbkar (1970); interview, K.C. Malhotra, 17 April 2001.
27 See her essays,‘On the road5, and ‘Boyfriend’, in Zelliot and Berntsen (1988).
372 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

used it not just for research but also for leisure-time reading. One
of her prized possessions in later life, a gift from her father, was the
18-volume critical edition of the Mahabharata in Sanskrit, brought
out by the Bhandarkar Oriental Insitute. Her book Yuganta, which
won the important Sahitya Akademi literary prize for the best book
in Marathi in 1967, and is based on the Mahabharata, concludes: CI
am indeed fortunate that I can read today a story called Jaya, which
was sung three thousand years ago and discover myself in it’ (1969b:
217). On the other hand, her feminist and critical humanist reading
of characters, noted one obituarist, ‘hurt the sentiments of many
lovers of Mahabharata . . . some have even resented giving awards
to this book which subjected the superhumans in this epic, whom
the Indians have venerated for ages, to devastating scrutiny’ (Kavadi
1970: 27).
While Sanskrit epics like the Mahabharata or Ramayana or the
poems of the Marathi bhakti poets Tukaram and Dnyaneshwar
figured large in her reading,28 Karve’s tastes were eclectic, and includ¬
ed Sartre, Camus, and the pulp thriller writer Alistair Maclean. In
her obituary on her mother, Jai Nimbkar says ‘she read Heidegger’s
“Being” with as much interest as a recipe in the women’s magazine,
Femina (Nimbkar 1970:25,28). But that she read most prodigiously
as an anthropologist is evident from her personal library (which now
occupies three shelves of the Deccan College library). This contains
the usual anthropological suspects—ITooton, Lowie, Kroeber, Firth,
Vidyarthi, A.R. Desai, Dumont (in French), Baur, Fischer, and Lenz
(in German)—Hindu texts like the Vedas and Upanishads, as well
as books on juvenile delinquency, tropical childhood, ancient Juda¬
ism, and Aristotle’s Politics.
Would Irawati Karve’s work have been different if she had been a
male anthropologist? I shall discuss her‘feminism’ later, but certainly
her life would have been less full—while men like K.P. Chattopadhyay
and N.K. Bose combined a life of activism with research (see Bose,
this volume), and others like Elwin and Srinivas have written novels
and short stories (Guha 1999; Madan 2000), the mundane tasks of

28 A radio talk she gave on the books and authors that had influenced her
includes Oliver Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Kalidas, and above all the Mahabharata
.(Karve 1953c).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 373

home that take up so much of a woman’s daily life rarely figure in

male biographies or autobiographies.29 By contrast, several des¬
criptions of Irawati—by her daughter Jai, her son Anand, her student
Pundalik, and her colleague Damle—focus on the passion with which
she engaged the people around her and their problems, her enthu¬
siasm for baking, knitting, smocking, gardening, or just plain conver¬
sation. In her case these were joys and not the constraints that have
silenced many others; she had servants, a caring husband, and an
office away from home where she did all her work. Yet, as Tille Olsen
notes of women who write: lWe who write are survivors, “onlys”.
One-out-of-twelve’ (Olsen 1994: 39). Whatever the feminisation of
sociology and anthropology today (see Beteille 1995 vs. John 2001
and Rege 2000), over the time she worked Irawati Karve was one of
the few survivors.

The Guru-Shishya Tradition in Anthropology

Tracing the intellectual antecedents of a scholar can be a hard and

somewhat speculative task. In Karve’s case there appear to be at least
four major influences on her work. The first was an Indological
tradition to which both her MA supervisor, G.S. Ghurye and she
subscribed. The second was an ethnological tradition which mani¬
fested itself in surveys of castes and tribes within India, and had
broad affinities with what later came to be called diffusionism (Vin¬
cent 1990: 83). The third influence was that of a German physical
anthropology tradition which attempted to provide a genetic basis
for the existence of a variety of groups, which she imbibed during
her PhD in Germany (1928-30): in her case, fortunately, this was
shorn of its racist implications. Finally, her own curiosity and passion
for fieldwork led her to take up new areas of research like socio-eco¬
nomic surveys, or archaeological explorations with Sankalia.
In an article written in Marathi, Karve provides her own version
of the genealogy of sociology and anthropology in and on Maharash¬
tra (and presumably thereby the influences on her work or the work

29 See, for instance, the differences between Margaret Mead and Gregory
Bateson in Catherine Bateson’s (1984) perceptive and moving account of her
parents; and Dube’s (2000) delicate account of how she negotiated her
professional interests within the home.
374 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

she thought important). This starts with the social writings of the
nationalists Ranade, Tilak, and Gokhale, followed by Enthoven s
Tribes and castes of Bombay and Russell and Hiralals Tribes and castes
of the Central Provinces. She advises readers to look at three Marathi
works in particular: Atre’s Gaongada, Goles Hindu religion and
reform, and N.G. Chapekars Badlapur (Our village). Goles book
looks at the effect of English education on Brahman society, and the
manner in which the old society was giving way to the new. Atre’s
and Chapekars books are on changes in rural life. The bulk of Karve s
essay is devoted to Ghurye, followed by a para on Ambedkar’s writings
on caste. Sociology in Maharashtra is brought up to date with a men¬
tion of Durga Bhagwat,30 as well as her own ongoing work in Deccan
College with her colleague Y.B. Damle (Karve n.d.).
Ghurye’s influence is apparent in much of Karve’s work—they
shared a common belief in the importance of family, kinship, caste,
and religion as the basis of Indian society, a broad equation of Indian
society with Hindu society, and an emphasis on collecting empirical
facts which would speak for themselves (see Upadhya this volume;
Uberoi 2000a: 50, fn4). Many of these concerns, e.g. with the family
or caste, stemmed from the upper-caste social reform tradition exem¬
plified by people like Ranade, Tilak, and Maharshi Karve and were
common currency, as was the emphasis on knowledge of Sanskrit
(or Persian) as the hallmark of good scholarship (Dandekar 1999;
see also the autobiographies of Ghurye [1973] andSankalia [1978]).
The Indological tradition that Karve subscribed to was of a very
different order from Dumonts in that there was no attempt at build¬
ing or eliciting an underlying model of social relations. Instead, she
was an Indologist in the classical Orientalist sense of looking to an¬
cient Sanskrit texts for insights into contemporary practice (Cohn

30 Durga Bhagwat was a PhD student of Ghurye’s but later dropped out.
However, she continued to do research in philology, philosophy, and folklore.
She and Irawati Karve were seen as the two major intellectual Marathi women
of their time. Her essay on Irawati Karve (in Athavle Thase/As I remember it),
written towards the end of Bhagwat’s life, and after Karve had died, contains a
number of accusations against the latter, including charges of plagiarism,
careerism, manipulation of persons, suppressing the work of others, etc.
(Bhagwat n.d.). Whatever the truth of these charges, the essay does Bhagwat
little credit.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 375

1990:143). In the post-Independence nationalist version of this Indo-

logy there was also an emphasis on the unity-in-diversity aspect: the
notion that while physical and cultural differences between castes
represented diversity, India’s unity lay in overarching Sanskrit texts.
This kind of Indology had clear affinities with ethnology and dif-
fusionism, and, though tracing all the details is outside the scope of
this essay (see instead Chakrabarti 1997; Trautmann 1997), the com¬
mon substratum was the European discovery of Sanskrit as part of
an Indo-European language stream and the influence of the Aryan
invasion theory on the classification of Indian populations (Traut¬
mann 1997:131-5). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu¬
ries, ethnological surveys were being conducted in both Britain and
India to map the distribution of races. In Britain this took the form
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Ethno¬
graphic Survey of the British Isles (Urry 1984), conducted mostly
through local and amateur natural history, archaeological, and folk¬
lore societies. The association’s desire for an Imperial Bureau of
Ethnology for Greater Britain was never met (ibid.: 97), though a
similar organisation was set up in its colony—this being the Anthro¬
pological Survey of India. In India, gazetteers and censuses recorded
the cultural and physical traits of the multiple castes and tribes of
India. A major push towards equating caste with race came with
Risley, Census Commissioner in 1901, who introduced anthropo¬
metric measurements, particularly nasal indices, to the study of caste.
The ethnological enterprise of mapping racial variations helped
support diffusionism. In what is a standard, if somewhat linear, hist¬
ory of British anthropology (Kuklick 1991: 121-2), nineteenth-cen¬
tury evolutionism (the idea that all cultures originated independently
and must pass though the same stages) gave way in the early-twentieth
century to diffusionism, with its emphasis on migration and conquest
in the spread of culture. One of the most well known exponents of
this school was W.H.R. Rivers. After the First World War diffusionism
was in turn replaced by functionalism under the impetus of Mali¬
nowski and Radcliffe-Brown.
As against the independent invention of culture by different races,
diffusionists believed that culture originated only under certain
favourable conditions and was then spread. In its more extreme
forms, as practiced by Elliot Smith and W.J. Perry, all civilization
376 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

was thought to have originated in Egypt.31 The diffusionists, who

were primarily medical men, understood Mendelian genetics to im¬
ply that cultural traits were a product of biological traits, and these
in turn were transmitted in stable fashion through generations. One
of the political implications of this was that cultural diversity within
an area was prima facie evidence that its inhabitants were a racially
diverse collection of migrant settlers’ (Kuklick 1991: 261). The diffu-
sionist belief that cultural progress occurred as a result of inferior
races copying the superior upon contact or conquest also fitted well
with the Orientalist theory of an Aryan conquest of Dravidians (ibid.:
263).
Through Ghurye, who was a student of Rivers at Cambridge, Karve
internalised the understanding of cultural variation in society as a
result of the migration of different ethnic groups, and a ‘historical’
approach. Her book Hindu society begins by noting ‘the bewildering
variety of behavioural patterns found in it’ (Karve 1968a [1961]: 1)
and goes on to attribute it to the endogamous kin group which she
called caste and which, through her anthropometric and blood group
surveys, she showed to be often distinct from each other: ‘it is the
caste which is mainly responsible for the variety in behavioural pat¬
terns found in India’ (ibid.: 10). The basic character of Hindu society
is seen as agglomerative: ‘a loose coming together of many separate
cultural entities’ (ibid.: 127).
Two other instances of the Rivers influence are Karve’s emphasis
on kinship terminology as a marker of cultural regions, and her style
of fieldwork. For Rivers, ‘the elemental social structure of any group
would be systematically revealed in its kinship terminology’ (Stocking
1992: 34). This in turn is derived from Morgan (1871). Much like
the kind of fieldwork Rivers propagated (Kuklick 1991: 139), Karve
carried out intensive surveys of different groups within particular
regions.
The MA degree in sociology at Bombay University could be gained
either through regular papers or through a research thesis. In those
days MA theses were expected to be substantial and original pieces

31 For a while even Ghurye seems to have been interested in the Egyptian
connection (see Srinivas 1997).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 377

of work.32 Karve’s thesis, on her own caste, ‘The Chitpavan Brah¬

mans—An ethnic study’, is a classic example of physical anthropology
(eye colour measurements) combined with an Indological discussion
of caste origins in the form of the Parasurama myth drawn from
popular versions and the Puranas, written in the speculative style of
gazetteers (Karve 1928). Curiously, however, one finds glimmers of
an emerging ecological reading in her discussion of the Parasurama
myth (later published: Karve 1932), and an ability to bring together
diverse facts and sources, from local accounts to geological texts, to
the Puranas and theMahabharata (see Karve 1933a, 1933b). Accord¬
ing to one version of the myth, Parasurama, a Brahman who had
sworn to destroy all Ksatriyas, came to the Western Ghats, where he
begged the sea to retreat and make some room for him. He needed
Brahmans to help him with his religious rites, so he made Brahmans
out of fourteen men who were washed ashore. In a close discussion
of the myth, Karve concludes that it contains both a semi-historical
tradition and an explanation for the recedence of the sea, which was
geologically known to be true (Karve 1932: 118). Chapter 3 of the
thesis presents the data derived from examining eye pigmentation
of 3097 individuals from four towns—Poona, Nasik, Satara, and Wai.
She describes the use of eye colour as a mark of differentiation used
by Ripley for classifying European communities as a ‘new technique
in India’, since Risley’s Ethnographic Survey had hitherto used only
facial and head measurements.33
The thesis also demonstrates the lenses through which she viewed
Indian society—as a patchwork of castes, physically and culturally
differentiated—a view she was later to develop somewhat differently

32 The copy of her MA thesis in Bombay University contains examiners’

queries in the margins on the meaning of particular Sanskrit terms and the use
of primary sources. There are notes in two different handwritings, and in a
couple of instances one reader (presumably Ghurye) seems almost as absorbed
with scoring points off the other as correcting the student’s thesis, judging by
the caustic comments addressed to ‘Comrade Thoothi’, the only other sociologist
in the department at the time. Thoothi seemed somewhat uncomfortable with
the speculative portions of the thesis.
33 In fact, eye and hair colour data had been used by Beddoe in his survey of
British races as early as 1885 (Urry 1984: 85).
378 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

in Hindu society (1968a [1961]), but never fundamentally change.

See for instance, her views in her MA thesis: ‘Separating and living
in isolation seems to be the genius of India. It is easier for communi¬
ties to split and live apart for centuries than to unite, but in the present
instance the cause of holding off from each other seems to be rooted
in the temperament of the two people (Deshastha and Chitpavan
Brahmans). ... In addition to these temperamental peculiarities,
popular opinion recognizes some physical differences between these
two communities’ (Karve 1928: 3) and the similarity of these views
to those expressed in Kinship organisation in India on the segmentary
structure of India: ‘If one may draw an analogy, the Hindu society
with its autonomous semi-independent structures like the family,
the caste and the polythesistic religion has an organisation compar¬
able to that of worms, where each segment, though linked to the
others, is yet semi-independent and possessed of or capable of cre¬
ating organs needed for survival’ (Karve 1953b: 299). Fortunately,
the naive references to temperamental differences were dropped.
To decipher society as a congeries of different castes, Karve added
a genetic approach derived from her German training. Apart from
the fact that Dinakar Karve went to Germany to study, that country
was at the time a choice as naturally equal as the US or UK for anyone
bent on a scientific career, as also for one with a background in Sans¬
krit. Pollock notes that in terms of the ‘size of investment on the
part of the German State in Indological studies throughout the nine¬
teenth and first half of the twentieth centuries . . . and the volume
of the production of German Orientalist knowledge . . . Germany
almost certainly surpassed all the rest of Europe and America com¬
bined’ (Pollock 1993: 82; see also Mukherjee 1979: 30; Trautmann
1997: 189). In terms of physical anthropology, human heredity, and
race science, too, Germany was a leading player, and several German
institutes, such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology,
Eugenics and Human Heredity, where Karve studied (1928-30), were
funded by American foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation
(Kuhl 1994; see also Proctor 1988, fn 157 and Barkan 1988 on the
international legitimacy of German physical anthropology).
German anthropology at the time was dominated by a ‘physicalist
tradition’ owing to the fact that anthropology was generally studied
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 379

as a branch of medicine (Proctor 1988).34Rudolph Martins three-

volume Lehrbuch der Anthropologie, published in 1914, was widely
regarded as state of the art in physical anthropology. Its goal was ‘to
differentiate, to characterize and to investigate the geographical distri¬
bution of all recent and extinct forms of hominids with respect to
their physical characteristics’ (cited in Proctor 1988:142). For Martin,
race was distinct from culture, and indeed the latter was for him not
the subject of anthropology. By the mid- 1920s, however, this anthro¬
pometric tradition in physical anthropology had given way to a gene¬
ticist approach, and there was an attempt to redefine anthropology
as the ‘science of human genetic differences.’35 Along with this, there
was a reorientation of German anthropology towards racial hygiene
(rassenhygiene) or the improvement of the human race.
One of the leading figures in the rassenhygiene or eugenics move¬
ment was Karve’s German supervisor, Eugen Fischer, who founded
the Gesselschaft fur Rassenhygiene in Freiburg in 1910. Bolstered by
Mendelian genetics (as was diffusionism), the movement argued for
the heritability not just of physical characteristics but of ‘a broad
range of human diseases and dispositions’ (Proctor 1988: 147). In
other words, now both physical and cultural characteristics were be¬
lieved to be biologically inherited. As ‘Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Eluman Heredity in Berlin,
as head of Germany’s two leading anthropological societies, and as
editor of several of Germany’s foremost anthropological journals’,
Fischer was ‘universally acknowledged as Germany’s premier anthro¬
pologist’ (ibid.: 139). Some of this support waned when, in 1933, he
declared his support for the Nazis. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute train¬
ed SS physicians in ‘genetic and racial care’ and Fischer personally
served as a judge in Berlin’s Appellate Genetic Health Court, the
purpose of which was to determine who would be sterilized (ibid.:
157, 160; see also Kuhl 1994).

34 For this section, I am drawing almost entirely on Proctor (1988).

35 Lenz 1914, cited in Proctor (1988: 147). The Bauer, Lenz and Fischer book,
Human heredity (Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhy¬
giene, 1921) was the leading book on the subject at the time, and Karve also
owned a copy.
380 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Although she studied zoology, Sanskrit, and philosophy as allied

subjects in Berlin, Karves PhD thesis was on ‘The normal asymmetry
of the human skulk She examined the skulls of different racial groups
to see if there were differences in the asymmetries found between
the left and right side of the body. This was seen as a question of
great importance to physical anthropologists because their conclu¬
sions about racial differences depended on physical measurements,
and, if there were major differences, the measurements would have
to be taken on different sides of the body (Karve 1937: 68-9). Her
thesis proved that there were ‘no such racial differences in asymme¬
tries’ (ibid.: 73). Fortunately, although Karve evidently imbibed some
eugenicist inclinations from Fischer,36 she escaped any stronger racist
influence. Perhaps one safety net was provided by her location as a
colonized Indian. Written years later, a footnote in a chapter on caste¬
like formations in other societies reads: ‘The author remembers
vividly how Germans and Englishmen refused to see any comparison
between the institutions of the primitive people and their own
institutions. Every time the author, then a student or a much younger
teacher suggested such a comparison it was brushed aside. After this
experience one learnt to keep one’s thought to oneself’ (Karve 1968a/
[1961]: 179).
However, as late as 1968 she retained a belief in the importance of
mapping social groups like subcastes on the basis of anthropometric
and what was then called ‘genetic’ data (blood group, colour vision,
hand-clasping, and hypertrichosis) (Karve and Malhotra 1968). To
summarise, through the combined effect of diffusionism, colonial
gazetteer style ethnology, and German ‘human genetics’, it was inevit¬
able for Karve to come to understand her task primarily as one of
mapping social and biological variations in society.

Building Academic Institutions in India

After returning from Germany, Karve worked for a while as Registrar

at the SNDT Women’s University in Bombay (1931-6), where she

36 As suggested by the title of her unpublished paper, ‘The need for eugenical
studies in India’. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get this paper. According
to K.C. Malhotra (17 April 2001), anthropology courses in India upto the 1970s
retained a fairly strong eugenicist slant.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 381

was apparently an indifferent administrator (Pundalik 1970:36). She

also did some postgraduate teaching in Bombay. In 1939 she joined
the newly revived Deccan College as Reader in Sociology and this
proved to be a congenial intellectual home for the rest of her life.37
According to her colleague, the archaeologist H.D. Sankalia: ‘Non¬
interference in the work of others, faith in the competence of the in¬
dividual as well as complete freedom to plan and execute one’s
scheme of research within the means at our disposal were mainly
responsible for the rapid development of the Deccan College’ (San¬
kalia 1978: 35).
For a while, she was the only sociologist at Deccan College, which
evidently meant a heavy burden since she had to teach all the papers
in the subject.38 Sankalia notes that his study of prehistory started
when she gave him G.G. MacCurdy’s Human origins so that he could
teach prehistory for her (Sankalia 1978: 41). In 1953 she was joined
by Y.B. Damle, another PhD student of Ghurye, and they were collea¬
gues till she died in 1970. They worked together on a monograph
(Karve and Damle 1963), but soon went their own ways, since their
conception of anthropology/sociology was quite different. Irawati’s
work was more Indological, drawing on ancient texts to explain the
present, and using anthropometric data to supplement her interpre¬
tations with ‘hard facts’, while Damle, by his own testimony, was
more concerned with contemporary social surveys, and issues of
power and authority. While Damle wanted to analyse their survey in
terms of contemporary theory, Karve insisted merely on presenting

37 The Deccan college began its life as the Poona College to teach Sanskrit
and English. The buildings, funded by Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy, were initiated
at their present site in 1864, and the college began functioning in 1868 under
the new name of Deccan College. In 1933, the Government of Bombay decided
to shut the college down, but it was revived as a research and postgraduate
teaching institute in 1938 after a court case by the Past Students Association. It
specialised in history/archaeology, sociology/anthropology, linguistics and Vedic
Sanskrit (Panja 2002; Taraporewala 1940).
38 Sankalia says this amounted to a load of Tour or eight papers’ (Sankalia
1978: 41). Upadhya (this volume, fns 48-50) lists four papers in the syllabus of
Bombay University which was later (1940s) revised to eight papers. According
to T.K. Oommen, Pune University followed the same pattern as Bombay
University.
382 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the ‘facts’ and letting people do their own interpretation.19 She

consciously eschewed contact with any new sociological theory. For
instance, there was some consternation when Damle began to teach
Talcott Parsons.40 Throughout, Karve remained head of the depart¬
ment—according to her student Pundalik (1970), she was reluctant
to cede power.41
Both in her research and in her teaching, thus, Karve remained an
old-fashioned anthropologist, combining the four-field approach:
archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and cultural
anthropology. While this may have kept her from being at the cutting
edge of sociology or social anthropology, it brought her closer to
some of her colleagues in other disciplines, such as S.M Katre and
C.R. Sankaran (see acknowledgements in Karve 1953b: xi). Sankalia
describes the origins of the second and third Langhnaj expeditions
which they undertook together (for reports of these excavations, see
Karve and Kurulkar 1945, Sankalia and Karve 1945, 1949):

On my table at the Jeejeebhoy Castle lay trays of assorted bones from

the Langhnaj excavation. The late Dr. Karve who took a keen interest in
my work would often step into my room to see these bones. Sometime
in 1943, while cursorily examining these assorted bones—which I
thought were all of animals—she picked up a fragment of a bone and
said that the fragment must be of a human skull. Trained as she was by
a famous human palaeontologist, she got excited. For here was a chance,
she said, of finding the Stone Age Man—may be microlithic or
mesolithic—but certainly the earliest man in India. (Sankalia 1978: 50)

The first skeleton was found on 28 February 1944, and, symbolic of

the frugality of the time, Irawati Karve offered Sankalia a glass of
lemon juice to celebrate (Sankalia 1978: 51).
In an attempt to model Pune University on the Oxbridge system,
the vice chancellor had decided that all lectures would be held in the

39 Interview, Y.B. Damle, 22 April 2001.

40 Interviews, U.B. Bhoite, 24 April 2001, Leela Dube, 10 August 2001.
41 In 1973 the department shifted from Deccan College to its present site in
Pune University, and four years later it split into separate anthropology and
sociology departments. 1 am grateful to Dr Bokhare for this information from
the Anthropology Department’s ‘Departmental Information’ file.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 383

university and not in individual colleges or postgraduate research

institutes like Deccan College. Every morning a taxi would be sent
to Deccan College and off the teachers would go to teach their MA
classes in the university. Never mind if in some subjects like Urdu
there was only one lecturer and one student and they both lived in
Deccan College—they would still have to make the long trek to the
university and sit in a classroom facing each other.42 But visitors
would come to Deccan College—to set papers, for PhD vivas, or to
give talks—D.N. Majumdar, N.K. Bose, I.P. Desai, M.N. Srinivas,
and later, Americans like Milton Singer, Robert Redfield, and McKim
Marriott. There were others, however—notably the innovative hist¬
orian, D.D. Kosambi—with whom Karve was not on speaking terms,
perhaps because their sources were similar but their approaches and
conclusions about society so different. In later years there was also a
falling out with Ghurye.43 Pune, which has always been the intellectual
capital of Maharashtra, had other sites for discussion as well—e.g.
the Pune Teachers Forum, a discussion group for people from dif¬
ferent academic disciplines, which ran from approximately 1953/54
to 1970. While Karve was not a part of this forum, she occasionally
gave talks at it (see also her radio talks published as Karve 1953c,
1962c).
In those days Pune University drew students from various parts
of India, particularly Kerala, where there were no sociology courses.
Karve s MA courses on ‘Social biology1 (‘The biological basis of
human society5) and ‘Indian sociology tended to be based on what¬
ever she happened to be working on at the moment or was interested
in, rather than a basic course which had to be covered, and would
combine anthropometric observations with examples drawn from
Hindu epics, all transmitted conversationally, while she walked
around the classroom or sat at her table.44

42 Interviews, Y.B. Damle, 22 April 2001, U.B. Bhoite, 24 April 2001.

43 Interviews, Y.B. Damle, 22 April 2001, K.C. Malhotra, 17 April 2001, and
lai Nimbkar, 26 April 2001.
44 Interview, T.K. Oommen, 19 October 2002. Oommen recalls her ‘Social
Biology’ course as being divided into three sections: the first was on genetics,
focused on the heredity vs environment controversy and explained the genetic
origins of various defects; the second was on race and racism based on the
1951 UNESCO publication; and the third was on population movements.
384 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Like science subjects today, where PhD students often work on

aspects of a larger project initiated by their supervisor, Irawati Karve s
physical anthropology PhD students were usually assigned subjects
that would reinforce her larger thesis about the independent origins
of jatis or castes. Thus, K.C. Malhotra compared the physical meas¬
urements and heritable traits of eight Brahman castes, while R.K.
Gulati studied nine potter castes (Karve 1968a/ [ 1961 ]: 132. Mal-
hotra’s study was published as Karve and Malhotra 1968).45 While
PhD supervisors did a lot for their students—got them research as-
sistantships, jobs, and often rewrote parts of their thesis (especially
because of problems with an alien language like English), PhD
students in turn were often expected to take on the roles of scribe
and research assistant.46 Some, like K.C. Malhotra, to whom Karve
dictated Hindu society and Yuganta (her eyes closed, her spectacles
off, and her feet on the table), felt honoured. In the process of check¬
ing out references for a senior scholar, there was often a great deal of
learning for the junior one. Others, however, like Srinivas, who was
then on a Bombay University Research Assistantship, and from whom
Ghurye tried to extract similar services, resented the time this took
away from their own work (Srinivas 1997: 6). The dependence of
the student on the supervisor for fellowships could also be misused
as a source of patronage and power over the student.47
K.C. Malhotra (hereon KC), one of Karves best students and later
colleague on the Dhangar project, provides a positive view of the
supervisor-student relationship.48 Recalling the sense of intellectual
enthusiasm Karve generated and her reputation at the time, he
described how he first went to Pune. He was registered at Delhi Uni¬
versity for a PhD when Karve wrote to his supervisor, P.C. Biswas,

45 See also Franz Boas’s relationship with his students: he commissioned

independent pieces on Native American linguistics as part of his larger project
(Stocking 1992: 73).
46 See also T.N. Madan (1994) on D.P. Mukerji.
4/ Durga Bhagwat claims that Karve and Ghurye conspired to make her
(Bhagwat) hold back some of her own work so that Karve’s paper could be
published first, using her fellowship as a card (Bhagwat n.d.). See also Bhatkal
on Ghurye, quoted in Upadhya (this volume).
48 Interview, K.C. Malhotra, 17 April 2001.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 385

asking for a research assistant to work on a biological survey of the

people of Tamil Nadu. KC and his family debated whether he should
go but others in the department told him that he would be foolish
to pass up the chance to work with someone as famous and multi¬
disciplinary as Karve. Just two days before he finished that project
and was to come back to Delhi, Karve called him in some excitement.
Skeletons had been discovered at an excavation forty miles out of
Pune at Chandoli, and Karve asked him whether he would like to
work on Sankalia’s excavation, since Delhi University students had
been taught to lift and reconstruct skeletons. This led from one thing
to another—Karve arranged a stipend of Rs 100 for him, and al¬
though the money was meagre and not very regular, KC decided to
stay on. As late as 1967, after her two heart attacks, Karve was still
thinking of new projects—or projects that she had always wanted to
do but never managed, like work on pastoralists and Mundari speak¬
ers. So she and KC, who was by then a lecturer in the department,
got money from the University Grants Commission, and KC took
on the main responsibility for research on Dhangars and Nandiwalas,
two nomadic groups. This research, which later turned into a study
in human ecology, was to occupy him for much of his life.
The university, at this time, was ostensibly a progressive arena
where the practice of untouchability was clearly rejected. In his auto¬
biography, Sankalia recalled an incident from the early 1940s when
he and Karve were doing fieldwork at Hirpura. Nobody from the
village would feed them since one of their workers was a ‘semi-
untouchable’ and Karve ended up cooking at the end of a long day’s
work (Sankalia 1978: 111). Yet this did not mean that caste had no
role in interpersonal relations, even if invoked in jest: U.B. Bhoite,
later vice-chancellor of the Bharati Vidyapeeth in Pune, recalled Karve
advising him not to go for a job interview saying: ‘You Marathas
always want government jobs. Stay with me and I’ll make a scholar
out of you.’49 The circle of intellectuals and university scholars was
still very small in caste and religious terms, and self-consciously so.50

49 Interview, U.B. Bhoite, 24 April 2001.

50 See the self-description in Karve 1962a: ‘Originating in a distinguished
Chitpavan Brahman family, she is the wife of Dinakar Dhondo Karve, long
386 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Ways of Apprehending the World: 'Fieldwork'

The best introduction to Karve s fieldwork methods comes from the

first chapter of Kinship organisation in India. Research started in
Maharashtra in 1938-9 and extended to other places over a number
of years, before the book was finally published in 1953.

I moved from region to region taking measurements, blood samples

and collecting information about kinship practices and terminology.
The contacts were established through friends, students and Gov¬
ernment officials. Supposing I had an acquaintance in Dharwar (in Kar-
natak), I would make that my first station and then get introduced to
the friends or relations of these acquaintances who, in their turn, would
take me to their homes and villages and so I travelled from place to
place never knowing where my next step was to be nor where my next
meal was to come from. . . . Rest pauses between work, meal times, travel
in buses full of people and in third class railway compartments filled
with men and women gave me the opportunities I sought for collecting
kinship material. A small begining would suffice to set the ball rolling
and each would come out with his or her stories. I had naturally to tell
also all about myself, my husband and children and the parents-in-law
and the others would tell about their kin. At such times it was not always
possible or advisable to take notes. Kinship terms and situations
involving personal narratives or family usages, scraps of song and
proverbs were, however, taken down. The working day meant over twelve
hours of work. When there was not material for measurement the time
was spent in canvassing contacts and there were never enough funds or
time to do this type of work for more than two months a year. After
coming back to Poona the data would be looked into and verified
linguistically by referring to some good dictionary and then a study of
some literature would be undertaken to find out how far the literature
reflected the kinship attitudes. These studies were very rewarding. They

Professor of Chemistry and Principal of Fergusson College, Poona, headquarters

of the Deccan Education Society; her father-in-law is the cenetenarian Maharshi
Dhondo Keshav Karve, pioneer in the education of Indian women and leader
in the emancipation of Brahman widows.’ It would be difficult to find a similar
author’s description by caste and lineage in any journal today.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 387

revealed the intimate connection between literature and social, especially

the kinship organisation and helped to interpret certain facts which
had seemed obscure to me. Such studies also gave a feeling of sureness
while dealing with people. (Karve 1953b: 18)

This account is corroborated by her children, who described their

mother as spending most vacations travelling while they awaited her
eagerly at home, to see the latest curiosity she brought with her and
hear her latest stories. From Gujarat she got the pise of a Saras bird,
from Orissa bamboo phanya, and ranphul kandh from the Himlayas.
Sometimes they accompanied her on her anthropometric measure¬
ment trips—Jai to Malabar, Bihar, and Orissa, and her son, Anand,
to Coorg, to measure Beta Kurubas and Jena Kurubas. Jai remembers
going to a village where people were losing blood all the time to
leeches and were covered with sores but were still scared of giving
blood from their fingers as blood samples. But here Karve s first aid
came in handy—she would dab the sores with spirit, which she
always carried with her, and Jai would then put tincture iodine. In
the more remote parts of the country they would contact the district
administration and ask for a jeep and officer to accompany them,
but stray references in her work also indicate that she walked long
distances and spent the night in tribal homes (see Karve 1957b:
88,89).
Another glimpse of her ability to undertake arduous fieldwork
comes through in Sankalia’s accounts of their joint expeditions—
how they walked for hours up and down the Mula-Mutha river in
Pune searching for stone age tools, or how on a certain expedition
they had to sleep in a tr uck because they could get no rooms (Sankalia
1978: 57, 111-12). A single woman doing fieldwork, even if part of
an expedition, must have seemed unusual at the time, and at one
place the headman turned them away, thinking they were part of a
cinema or circus company (ibid.: 88).
In the 1950s, this kind of extensive fieldwork had lost its attraction.
Year-long intensive studies of a village or a tribe in a restricted region
were in fashion and contemporary anthropological criticism of her
kinship work focused on the fact that the linguistic terminology she
collected was not ethnographically grounded in the life of particular
388 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

castes (Dumont 1957). However, ethnographic fieldwork of the

Malinowskian sort is no longer seen as the only ‘natural’ mode of
doing anthropology, involving a rediscovery of some older alternat¬
ives or different national traditions (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).
It is important also to remember that going to the field for a year
at a stretch was not perhaps an option for a married woman with
children at the time. There were no munificent foundations, and
research in those days was conducted on funds that would be laugh¬
able now. The study of the Nandiwalas, for instance, a group that
Karve discovered on her way back from Phaltan to Pune one day in
1969, was started on Rs 500, begged from H.D. Sankalia, then Director
of Deccan College. KC, with eleven students, was sent off to the field
to work and live on this amount for two months!51
As she grew older, and after two heart attacks, Karve stopped doing
fieldwork altogether. All her later survey work was carried out by
her coauthors,52 while Karve helped with designing the questionnaire
and analysis.
Ironically, while her ‘scholarly’ work was not ‘ethnographic’, her
literary writings in Marathi were exemplars of a delicate balance
between involved and detached ‘participant observation’ (see Karve
1949, 1972). Her daily immersion in the social life of Maharashtra
was transformed with a sociologist’s and writer’s eye into flashes of
rare insight and vivid portraits of ‘culture’ in some very nuanced
passages. One famous example is her essay on the Pandharpur pil¬
grimage, translated into English as ‘On the road’ (Karve 1962a). As
Deshpande and Rajadhyaksha note in their history of Marathi lite¬
rature, she was one of those responsible for reviving the genre of
‘personal essays’, along with her fellow anthropologist Durga Bhag-
wat, the scholar-poet G.V. Karandikar, and the architect-critic
Madhav Achwal. ‘The “personal” in the new essay was authentically
and richly so. The richness came from a fine intellect that probed
for the complex, impatient with the superficies the “old” essayist
was happy to play with’ (Deshpande and Rajadhyaksha 1988: 202).
It is perhaps the tragedy of colonised India that ‘scholarship’ and
‘sociology’ is what is done in English, often with outdated theoretical

51 Interview, K.C. Malhotra, 17 April 2001.

52 Interviews, Jai Nimbkar, 25 April 2001, and Y.B. Damle, 22 April 2001.

T
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 389

tools, while much that is relevant and contemporary in society and

which should be incorporated by sociology is written in other forms,
notably literature.53 Naregal (2001:124) argues that the use of English
for scholarly or analytical writing and of the vernacular for creative
literary work was a product of the colonial legacy of bilingualism,
whereby the vernaculars were subordinated to English.

II. APPRAISING KARVE'S WORK: CELEBRATING

THE DIVERSITY OF (HINDU) INDIA

A comprehensive bibliography of all Karve’s work prepared by K.C.

Malhotra in 1970-1, just after her death, lists 102 articles and books
in English, eight books in Marathi, several unpublished papers, and
several ongoing projects (Malhotra 1973). Her anthropological out¬
put in English can be grouped under four different heads, though
her most important contribution was really the way in which one
field fed into another.54 Not only is the range remarkable, but it is
quite unique among her contemporaries:

1. Physical anthropology and archaeology—anthropometric and blood

group investigations and the excavation of stone-age skeletons.
2. Cultural anthropology—kinship, caste, folk songs, epics, oral tradi¬
tions.
3. Socio-economic surveys—weekly markets, dam displaced, urbanisa¬
tion, pastoralists, spatial organisation.
4. Contemporary social comment—women, language, race.

53 Thus, for example, Anil Awachat, writing about ecological problems in

Marathi, or writers on the Dalit experience, often bring out contemporary social
issues more sharply than sociological debates about caste or ecology. Yet there
is little effort to incorporate them into syllabi or, even more importantly, to
revise our notion of what sociology or anthropology should be about in coun¬
tries like India. It is also significant perhaps in terms of the traditions that
Karve perpetuated, that while she left almost no significant cultural anthro¬
pologists as students, both her daughters, Jai Nimbkar and Gauri Deshpande,
became writers.
54 Malhotra (1971:26) provides a different ordering of her contributions to
sociology: palaeo-anthropology, Indological studies, physical anthropological
investigations, cultural anthropological investigations, building up an infra¬
structure of trained personnel.
390 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

These categories are also, roughly, chronologically arranged. Al¬

though she continued to do physical anthropological studies (with
her PhD students)—in her later career called genetic studies—it is
possible to discern a move towards engagement less with Indological
and more with contemporary concerns, as well as with work that
fed into policy, especially from the late 1950s. Some of this later work
was funded by the Planning Commission.
What follows is not so much an assessment of what her work
meant in the field of kinship or caste or social ecology in Indian an¬
thropology or anthropology in general—this has been done by others
for kinship, particularly (Dube 1974; Trautmann 1995; Uberoi 1993,
2000a). It is, rather, an attempt to understand how this diverse body
of work cohered within a single Weltanschauung and whether and
how this changed over time. Karve’s main concern was with the vari¬
ations within India, which she valued positively, and her frequent
diatribes against attempts to impose uniformity (for instance in per¬
sonal law), or against monotheistic religions, are all couched in terms
of a defence of diversity.

The present day cultural problems before India also largely revolve
around these three entities, viz. region, caste and family. . . . The
tendency is to minimize the differences and establish uniformities . . .
(by having a common language, a common civil code and abolishing
caste). . . . Welding of the Indian sub-continent into a nation is a great
cultural task, but very often the urge for uniformity destroys so much,
which from an ethical and cultural point of view, can be allowed to
remain. The need for uniformity is an administrative need, not a cultural
one. (Karve 1953b: 16)
The old segmental life failed to bring up a strong nation and so one
thinks of giving it up. But the old way of life had also certain valuable
cultural traits which we must preserve. (Karve 1953b: 302)

These valuable cultural traits are described as tolerance and an

awareness of diversity. Wh ile castes and joint families may have been
oppressive for specific individuals, they also provided security (Karve
1953b: 301-2). However, this diversity and tolerance are seen as largely
Hindu attributes, and ultimately it is the high Brahmanical culture
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 391

that provides direction and unity. In this, Karve was not very different
from Ghurye (see Upadhya 2001), or indeed most other Indian socio¬
logists to the present, who have followed a path of benign neglect
towards minorities—when not actively excluding them from defini¬
tions of ‘Indian culture’. Indeed, Indian sociology has by and large
been unable to free itself from the standard Hindu ‘consensus’—its
Hindu character often concealed through the rhetoric of nationalism
and social universality—about the great tolerance of Hinduism: ‘The
unity of India has always been a cultural unity based on an uninter¬
rupted literary and religious tradition of thousands of years. The
learned Brahmin, to whatever region he belonged, reads the Vedas,
Brahmanas, Smritis. .. . Whether it was drama, or poetry or grammar
or politics or logics or philosophy, whatever of excellence or medio¬
crity was created upto the threshold of this century owed its form or
matter to classical or Vedic literature . . .’ (Karve 1947c: 17-18).
Islam and Christianity, by contrast, are seen as unassimilated forces
in Indian society. Some of the hostility towards them is represented
in anti-colonial terms—against a European colonizing Christianity
(Karve 1947c: 10-14) and a fundamentalism that fails to see that
‘different societies express their sense of beauty and sanctity, and
the goodwill in their hearts, in different ways’ (Karve 1962a: 23).
These feelings were perhaps inevitable in a Brahman, and in a region,
Maharashtra, which constructed its history predominantly as one
of resistance against a Muslim empire; which had witnessed concerted
challenges by Christian missionaries; and which was the bastion of
a ‘Hindu reform’ movement that saw itself as countering inroads
made by other religions (O’Hanlon 1985). No doubt, also, Karve
had little personal experience of religious syncretism in practice, nor
of the intimate economic, cultural, administrative, and political ties
that bind people regardless of religion, such as are available to people
in areas with larger Muslim populations, for example, Bengal and
Uttar Pradesh.
However, there is no attempt even at a sociological understanding
of how differently Christianity and Islam might operate in the Ind ian
context. Equally importantly, because of the sociological tendency
to see religion as a social glue—as the fetishised equivalent of society
392 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

itself—sociologists have been unable to escape the warp of colonial

historiography even when attempting supposedly historical readings
of culture’.55 While Karve concedes that linguistic regions crosscut
religious unity, here again Muslims and Christians are seen as deviant
elements, and the blame for Partition laid solely at the door of the
Muslim League. Addressing the Asian Relations Conference in
March-April 1947, on the eve of Independence, Karve argues:

The Mohammedans have been in India for about a thousand years.

They created the first breach in the cultural unity of India. Though
they have become an indigenous element, their religious centre is outside
India and their co-religionists have spread all over the world. . . . This
consciousness of solidarity with outside Muslims, the peculiar regional
distribution which makes it possible for the extreme north and
northwest to form a majority province, and religious fanaticism which
sets at nought all human values arising out of a thousand years of asso¬
ciation, make it almost impossible to arrive at cultural compromise
with this element in the Indian population. They neither respect nor
understand the religious, ethical or aesthetic creations of other
people. . .. There was a time when in some linguistic areas, for example
Bengal, the Muslims kept to their dress, language and customs of pre¬
conversion days and it seemed as if the Bengal culture of future would
be a common creation of its Muslim and Hindu inhabitants. But the
process has been cut short by recent orientation in Muslim policy in
India which wants to stress its differences from the other communities
rather than the adjustments which have arisen out of a common life in
the same land. This racial conflict has got to be solved not by cultural
compromises or by paying too big a price for presenting a united front
to the world. (Karve 1947c: 19-20)

55 James W. Laine has commented on how Karve’s reading of Maharashtrian

history as a basis for a Maharashtrian identity is in fact ahistorical: ‘Irawati
Karve might claim that in making the pilgrimage to Pandharpur she found a
new definition of Maharashtra: “the land whose people go to Pandharpur for
pilgrimage”, but I see no evidence that such a statement would have made sense
to Shivaji, or even to his contemporaries who did make such a pilgrimage.’ The
claimed close link ‘between Shivaji and Vaishnava saints and the political
fortunes of the Varkaris, may well be the invention of a tradition whose roots
lie more in the 19th than in the 17th century’ (Laine 2000: 61).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 393

While her definition of'racial conflict’, under which she subsumes

caste, language, and religious conflict, remained vague,56 the need
to maintain India as a multi-cultural, multi-religious society becomes
paramount in her later writings. While she never accepted Islam or
Christianity as integral to the fabric of Indian society and persisted
in equating religion with culture, few secular people today would
quarrel with the views expressed in another paper, ‘The racial factor
in Indian social life’, written for a summer school in Indian history:

Many Hindus dream that if the government were wiser it could rid
India both of Muslims and Christians so that one has an entirely Hindu
India. It is foolish to think one can establish a uniformity and keep it as
such through ages. Without the Muslims and Christians there were bitter
wars between Buddhists and non-Buddhists, between Jains and Hindus
in the South and between Shaivas and Vaishnavas. The rational
humanitarian’s aim cannot be the establishment of one religion but to
bring about conditions by which people of different cultures can live
together in mutual understanding and respect. . . . Another argument
put forward is about how long one has lived anywhere. This does not
mean one’s own stay but one’s ancestry. This [is] altogether a dangerous
and also an extremely silly argument. ... It is a fascinating subject for
study to try to find out what we are—Indians as a whole, but it is entirely
wrong to imagine ancestries and base claims on territories as somehow
one’s own. All those who are in India today, who feel it is their homeland
are Indians. (Karve 1963c: 8-9)

Even more presciently, she notes the need for governments to investi¬
gate riots and be transparent about such events if they want to prevent
future violence (Karve 1963c: 7).
This need to acknowledge pluralism is also evident in her views
on social issues like language and schooling. She retained a strong
Marathi nationalism, which was probably enhanced by the Samyukta
Maharashtra Movement,57 and refused to concede Hindi superior

56 Probably exasperatingly so to more exact scholars like D.N. Majumdar,

who also gave a paper at the same Asian Relations Conference.
57 On the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, see Stern (1970). Karve’s close
colleague and neighbour, the well-known economist D.R. Gadgil, was, in Sterns
words, the Samyukta Maharashtra Congress Jan Parishads ‘major theoretician
394 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

status as a national language, or allow English to dominate access to

the civil services. All primary education, she insisted, must be in one
of the regional languages, and there should be no English-medium
schools at all. At the same time, she was too pragmatic to deny the
need for a link language, or the advantages conferred by English,
and she would have made English compulsory from secondary school
onwards (Karve 1960b, 1968b).
While preserving the cultural diversity of India from threats—
whether by Christian missionaries or Hindu chauvinists—and
understanding the relation between the present and the past (defined
in terms of the Hindu epics) remained central to Karves concerns,
she was equally aware of the problems and importance of nation¬
building in a multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual state.
It is this worldview—Indology tempered by rationalist humanism—
that Karve’s work later comes to encapsulate.

Mapping Broad Patterns

Kinship organisation in India (1953b), Karve s first major book, and

for which she was perhaps best known,58 was preceded by a number
of articles examining kinship terminology and usages in different
parts of India—Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu
(Karve 1940a, 1940b, 1942, 1950, 1953a), and comparing them to
terms and practices found in the Vedas (1938,1939a, 1939b, 1939d),
the Mahabharata (1943), and in folk traditions (1941b, 1947a). Kin¬
ship oganisation begins with a bald statement about Indian culture:
‘Three things are absolutely necessary for the understanding of any
cultural phenomenon in India. These are the configuration of the
linguistic regions, the institution of caste and the family organisation.
Each of these three factors is intimately bound up with the other

and publicist’ (ibid.: 33). While Karve was definitely in favour of Samyukta
Maharashtra, she was not an active member of the movement (interview, Y.B.
Damle, 22 April 2001).
58 T.N. Madan, for instance, writes that the books he carried to his fieldwork
among Pandits in Kashmir in 1957-8 included Evans-Pritchard and Fortes on
Nuer and Tallensi kinship, respectively, and Karve’s Kinship organisation (Madan
1994: 53).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 395

two and the three together give meaning and supply basis to all other
aspects of Indian culture’ (Karve 1953b: 1). Although this was seen
as reiterating the functionalist thesis of interrelation between all as¬
pects of a culture by ‘demonstrating the exact connection between
at least a few aspects of it’ (Karve 1953b: 1), in fact the book has a
very different approach. Kinship patterns are mapped on to linguistic
zones to come up with the following variations: 1. Indo-European
or Sanskritic organisation in the Northern zone; 2. Dravidian kinship
in the southern zone; 3. a central zone of mixed patterns (e.g. found
in Maharashtra); and 4. Mundari kinship systems in the east. Within
each linguistic region, there are variations between castes and
subcastes. The unity in all this diversity was provided by the Sruti
literature (Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads) and the epics, such
as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which she reads as sociolo¬
gical and psychological studies of the joint family in ancient North
India. North Indian Indo-European kinship is analysed through
etymological analysis of kinship terms in the Mahabharata, an exam¬
ination of kinship practices contained in Sanskrit and Pali texts, and
a similar collection of contemporary terms for kin in different
languages. There is a direct jump from the joint family systems of
ancient India to twentieth-century India, a jump which recent
historical work on the family has shown is completely unwarranted
(see for instance Chatterjee and Guha 1999, Singha 1998). The kin¬
ship practices of Muslim, Christian, and other communities do not
find a mention at all in this kinship organisation of India.
North Indian patri-clan exogamy is compared to Dravidian cross¬
cousin marriage for its effects on women—in the north they are
separated from their families at an early age and sent off to live with
unknown in-laws far away, whereas in the south, a girl is among her
own relatives even after marriage. The kinship organisation of the
central zone, ‘a region of transition from north to south’, shows
greater internal variation than the north with some castes allowing
cross-cousin marriage in one direction (to the mother’s brother’s
daughter) as in the south. There is also a greater practice of hyper-
gamy (Karve 1953b: 139). The bulk of the book is a listing of kinship
terms, with occasional flashes of insight, such as when she discusses
what contemporary legal and economic changes meant for the Nayar
396 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

matrilineal system (ibid.: 261-5), or when she discusses the con¬

cealment of divorce and conjugal relations with widows through
the use of linguistic devices which deny widow remarriages the status
of‘marriage’ (ibid.: 295).
Kinship organisation received favourable reviews in some quarters.
Hutton described it as a ‘notable advance in our understanding of
the structure of Indian society; it has not been superceded by any
other general comparative treatment of Hindu kinship in India as a
whole’ (Hutton 1954), while John Useem in American anthropologist
(1957:737-8) described it as a ‘valuable contribution on at least three
scores: first, as an addition to the newer literature on Indian culture;
second, for its exploration of the relationship between the modalities
and range of social arrangements within the context of a complex
culture; and third, for its delineation of the characteristic forms of
social behaviour that stem from various kinds of kinship structures.’
However, the reputation of the book never quite recovered from the
demolition job performed by Dumont and Pocock in the first issue
of Contributions to Indian sociology, which charges Karve with a lack
of conceptual precision, insufficient localisation of the kinship terms
(so that for instance northern kinship is equated with upper-caste
kinship), a haphazard clubbing of terms which makes it difficult to
say which term for father goes with which term for uncle and also
makes a structural analysis impossible, and an absence of attention
to what these kinship terms mean to people in practice. ‘It is an exam¬
ple of how valuable information can be sterilized for the use of future
research by an imprecise formulation’; and again, ‘(o)nce features
are torn out of their particular sociological context and lumped to¬
gether within one cultural or linguistic “zone” the culturologist may
feel at ease but the sociologist is at a loss’ (Dumont and Pocock 1957:
50). Ironically, too, for someone who was willing to subsume the
whole of India under Homo hierarchicus and compare it to Homo
equalis in the West, Dumont accuses Karve of supposing, by virtue
of her ‘self-assurance rooted in birthright and intellectual training’
and ‘her knowledge of one region’, that ‘ it would be sufficient for
her to make elsewhere brief enquiries or soundings to get a basis for
comparison.’
True, ‘conceptions of more easy-going times in anthropology,
when Rivers, for instance, collected within one day a terminology in
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 397

a Melanesian island society (Dumont and Pocock 1957: 44), had

changed. Yet to compare Karve’s synoptic research conducted over
several years, to the earlier hit-and-run approach, or trash the under¬
standing of similarities which a knowledge of ancient texts brings
(however problematic the Indological equation of the present with
the past, of Indian society with Hindu society) betrays in the re¬
viewers not just a deeply patronising attitude but a refusal to allow
problems to be defined in diverse ways.59 Fortunately, while recognis¬
ing these problems in Karve’s work (such as the confusion of lexical
and semantic issues [Trautmann 1995: 115]), there has been some¬
thing of a rescue operation in recent years. While Trautmann (1995:
114) claims that his work was an extension of her historicist approach,
Uberoi regards Karve as

a pioneer of an indigenous ‘feminist’ perspective on the Indian family.

Her central contrast of north and south Indian kinship revolved around
difference in marital arrangements as seen from the viewpoint of
women: marriage with kin versus marriage with strangers; marriage
close by versus marriage at a distance. . . . Similarly, she evaluated mod¬
ern changes in family life—for instance the modification of Dravidian
marriage practices in the direction of the northern model—from the
viewpoint of their possible effects on women’s life. (Uberoi 1993: 40)

There is much in Karve to support this reading of incipient femin¬

ism, apart from her own life and unorthodox defence of customs
like polygamy and polyandry (Kavadi 1970:26). There is, for instance,
her reading of what women like Kunti and Draupadi must have felt
in the Mahabharata (Karve 1969b), her essays on everyday gender
relations like Gaurai (in Karve 1949), and her essay on her father-in-
law which emphasises the costs of his sacrifices to his wife (Karve
1963d). Much was written from a women’s perspective, and in her
everyday dealings she seems to have had a special empathy for her
female students,60 or for the women she encountered on trains and
on pilgrimage (see Karve 1962a). Her essay on the projected status

59 For instance, the differentiation of ‘tribes’ and ‘castes’ by colonial

anthropologists definitely suffered from a lack of acquaintance with cultural
practices in non-tribal areas.
60 Interview, K.C. Malhotra, 17 April 2001.
398 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of Indian women in 1975, which looks at long-term trends in wo¬

men’s employment or education, was one of the first of its kind
(Karve 1966). Indeed, one might even conclude that before Women’s
Studies became formulated as a field in the 1970s, and the term patri¬
archy entered everyday discourse, studies of kinship and the family
were the major arenas where scholarship on women was possible
(see Dube 2000: 4041,4045). Yet Karve was certainly no radical, and
doesn’t seem to have wanted to identify as a feminist.61 The ‘joint
family’, for instance, was seen as an essential part of life, with all its
problems and joys (Karve 1953b:14),62 and questions about patri¬
archy and oppression do not figure.63
There are other aspects of Karve’s work on kinship and the family
which have been taken up more widely—sometimes without suffi¬
cient acknowledgement of her pioneering role in these—such as the
use of folk songs to illuminate kinship practices (Karve 1939c),64 or
her careful genealogical work to show how the joint family changed
over time, and the period in people’s lives when they were most likely
to live in a joint family (Karve 1960a, 1963a, 1963b, 1964, 1967a).65
Karve’s work on caste is collected in Hindu society—an interpret¬
ation (Karve 1968a/[1961]), though this book too was preceded by
several articles on what caste means culturally (Karve 1955, 1958b,
1958c, 1958d, 1959) and anthropometrically (1933a, 1933b, 1941a,
1948, 1954). Caste must be the most written-on subject in Indian
anthropology/sociology—with considerable debate on the origins

61 Nimbkar (1970). According to her student Pundalik she also disliked being
identified as a woman anthropologist (Pundalik 1970).
62 See Uberoi (1993: 33) on the nostalgia that marked Karve’s views on the
joint family, ignoring its seamier side.
63 Even if not in sociology, there were other Maharashtrian women writing
in her time or even before, e.g. Tarabai Shinde, Vibhavari Shirurkar, Mama
Warerkar or Gita Sane, who were more centrally concerned with women’s
oppression. (I am grateful to Leela Dube for these names.)
64 For instance, Raheja and Gold’s (1994) study of kinship and gender based
on oral traditions mentions Karve only in two footnotes, and both times as
cited by Goody.
65 For evidence on how this became a burgeoning field, see Uberoi’s
(2000a: 17) review of work on the ‘developmental cycle of the domestic group’.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 399

of the caste system (race, occupation, cultural-ecological explana¬

tions); the defining characteristics of castes (e.g. endogamy, restric¬
tions on commensality); the effective unit of caste (subcaste, caste
cluster, varna); the principles underlying caste ranking (purity-
pollution, interactional); mobility within and against the caste system
(the concepts of Sanskritisation, dominant-caste emulation, Western¬
isation, affirming Indie values, etc.); whether caste is specific to India
or whether it is a limited form of stratification; and whether resistance
to caste can only take place within its own categories or against the
caste system as a whole (for a discussion of some of these issues, see
Klass 1980; Bayly 1999).
Karve’s work addresses in the main only two themes within this
galaxy—the origin of caste and the unit of analysis, and differentiates
itself by challenging two arguments developed by Ghurye: first, that
caste in India is a Brahminical product of Indo-Aryan culture, spread
by diffusion to other parts of India; and second, that the smallest
endogamous unit or jati, was a product of fission in a larger group
caused by occupational diversification and migration (see Prama-
nick 1994: 30-2) Against these, Karve follows Hutton, Ketkar,
and other theorists of caste in arguing that while the varna system
may have been an Aryan import, it was superimposed on a jati system
which pre-dated the Aryans, and which allowed different endo¬
gamous groups to live separately. In course of time, the varna and
jati systems were interwoven into an elaborate ranking system (Karve
1968a/ [ 1961 ]: 45). More importantly—and this is a thesis which she
backs with anthropometric measurements and evidence from blood
samples, eye colour, etc.—Karve argued that it was the subcaste, such
as the Chitpavan Brahman, which should be treated as the ‘caste’,
while the overall category, Maharashtrian Brahman, should be treated
as a ‘caste cluster’, since not only did Chitpavans, Karhadas, Saraswats,
Deshastha Rgvedi, and Madhyandin Brahmans not intermarry, they
even had different marriage regulations and were ethnically different
from each other. Indeed, there were often ‘ethnic’ variations even
within a subcaste. The Madhyandin Brahmans, according to Karve,
came closer to the Marathas in their region in terms of anthropome¬
tric measurements than they did to other Brahman subcastes (Karve
1958b: 130-1, 1941a). Other caste clusters, such as the Kunbis and
400 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Marathas and potters, revealed similar findings (1941a: 25-30). For

Karve,‘a caste is a group which practices endogamy, has a particular
area (generally within one linguistic region) of spread or dispersion,
may have one or more traditional occupations, has a more or less
determinate or flexible position in a hierarchical scale and has tradi¬
tionally defined modes of behaviour towards other castes’ (ibid.: 8-
9). Ghurye (1969), in turn, found problems with this formulation,
among other things because of the fact that it was the context which
determined the unit a person identified with (in relation to non-
Brahmans, all subcastes would identify their caste as Brahman).
However, this is not the place to debate the respective merits of their
positions on caste (for a contemporary review, see Bose 1962). Indeed,
both Karve’s and Ghurye’s work suffers from an Indological approach
to caste which precluded them from analysing caste centrally as a
form of living discrimination (despite their token references to this).
Rather, it is to point to the ways in which Karve’s theory of caste
fitted her larger enterprise of understanding how Indian society came
to be the way it is.66
While the notion of a caste as an extended kin group has received
support from historical studies (for instance, Leonard 1978), for
Karve its historical importance lay in enabling an understanding of
migration in Indian society. Castes as endogamous kin groups were
seen as closer to tribal groups (seen as perhaps the original unit in
India) (Karve 1961b: 166):

For all sociological and anthropometric investigations one must start

with the sub-caste as the smallest social unit because the sub-castes are
historical entities, preserving in their exclusiveness the memory of some
socio-historical event. The generic terms like Brahmans and Marathas

66 Caste, according to Karve is even more fundamental than religion; or rather,

Islam and Christianity are so alien that they could never defeat the basic pattern
of Hindu society: ‘Mohammedanism with its ideas of forcible conversion was
so strange and repulsive to the general Hindu mind that the whole population
drew further back into its caste shell, and converts to Mohammedanism soon
adopted the caste system. The same fate met Christianity.... Mohammedanism
and Christianity, by dividing people into believers and unbelievers, have created
new divisions without in any way obliterating the older ones’ (Karve 1962b:
551,556).
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 401

are of almost no value for historical investigations. The Marathi speaking

Brahmins are anything but homogeneous. They represent various
cultural and racial groups, colonizing Maharashtra at widely different
times and places. The term Maratha is applied loosely to numerically
the strongest element in Maharashtra and even a superficial investigation
shows that it is a conglomerate of different elements. One must therefore
investigate separately the endogamous sub-groups of these bigger divi¬
sions in order to get a clear idea of the social and cultural hybridization
and the historical process of assimilation which has been going on for
centuries. (Karve 1941a: 1-2)

A similar, classically diffusionist, idea is reiterated under the heading

of‘Research needed’ in Current anthropology (1965), where she em¬
phasises the importance of taking blood groups of subcastes to de¬
termine population movements: ‘One of the tasks of cultural and
physical anthropologists is to work together to determine whether
more detailed cultural and physical configurations can be established
in terms of historical and proto-historical movements. In this attempt
blood groups with their definiteness and characteristics of heritability
might prove a good instrument of analysis. . . . India, with its many
endogamous groups and its variety of mating practices provides rare
opportunities for the study of human genetics’ (Karve, 1965: 332-
3). While much of this seems dated to cultural anthropologists, the
idea of tracing population movements through the mitochondrial
DNA and Y chromosome (inherited through maternal and paternal
lines, respectively) has had a major revival (see for example Roychou-
dhary et al. 2000; Kivisild et al. 1999; Watkins et al. 1999). While the
political and social implications of such studies may be debated,67
‘anthropological science’ in the post-Independence, post-World War

67 One controversial study by Michael Bamshad and researchers at Andhra

University, published in Genome research, claims that while upper-caste men
have European genes, upper-caste women are carriers of indigenous Asian genes
(Ramachandran 2001). Such studies have spawned both Hindu chauvinist
readings intent on proving that caste is rooted in biology and Dalit readings
intent on proving Aryan genocide and rape of an indigenous Indian population
(see also Romila Thapar’s foreword to Trautmann 1997). The problem with
most of these physical anthropology or genetic studies is that they assume the
timelessness of sociological practices like caste, hypergamy, patrilocality, etc.
402 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

II phase was a useful counter to popular opinion on racial differences.

Like B.S. Guha, Majumdar, and others, Karve’s take on her findings
was anti-racist and anti-caste: ‘That is what we are—Mongrels. The
castes also show race mixture to such an extent that at least in Maha¬
rashtra if people of different castes ranging from Brahmins to the
scheduled castes are put in military uniform no anthropologist can
pick people belonging to different castes. In these facts of similarity
of appearance and mongrality lie a hope of breaking the caste society
once economic equality of some sort and legal equality are reached’
(Karve 1963c: 4-5).

Socio-Economic Surveys: Reconciling

Diversity with Planned Change

A significant part of Karve’s output is in the form of socio-economic

surveys, or what today would be seen as applied anthropology or
policy studies. While the relationship between sociology and policy
has always been contested (see Uberoi 2000b: 17), the dominance of
the Delhi School style of sociology over the regions, and of ethnogra¬
phy over statistical surveys in the received ‘national history’, has often
tended to conceal the links that did exist.68 In part, sociologists must
themselves be held to blame for the fact that sociological survey re¬
search did not have much of an impact on both sociology/anthropo¬
logy as disciplines or policy. As Mukherjee (1979: 68) perceptively
remarked, while Karve was preoccupied with the ‘why’ of social re¬
lations in her Indological work on caste and kinship, this question
did not inform her large-scale surveys, which are largely descriptive
and packed with (sometimes meaningless) tables.
Karve’s first such survey was on the Bhils of West Khandesh, done
at the instance of the chairman of the Bombay Anthropological

681 am grateful to D. Sheth for this point, seminar at IEG on the history of
sociology/anthropology, 19-21 April 2000. See also Mukherjee’s (1979)
distinction between ‘conceptually oriented modernisers’ like Srinivas and Dube,
who took social change as a given, and ‘methodologically oriented modernisers’
who used statistical techniques to understand and plot social change (Karve,
A.R, Desai, I.P. Desai, and Y.B Damle, to name just a few). How successful they
were at this is, however, doubtful.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 403

Society, P.G. Shah (Karve 1958a). The work is slight, as are her writings
on tribals in general (1957a, 1969a), where she argues that tribals are
no different really from other parts of the Indian population, and
that it would ‘be wrong to create an entirely new entity by fostering
a consciousness of primitivity. This author has opposed the yearly
gatherings of primitive people on this same principle’ (Karve 1957a:
169). While they must be helped to ‘advance’ and assimiliate’, there
should be no attempt to impose outside sexual codes or dietary prac¬
tices on them, such as preventing them from eating ox meat. However,
they should be educated in the language of their region (initially in
their own mother tongue but in the regional script, and then make
the transition to the regional language), so that they can take part in
the regional ecumenae, and ‘a day will dawn when these once-prim-
itive scholars will cast new light on our cultural traditions, correct
the one-sided views we have cherished and tell us with convincing
proofs that the great Jagannath of Puri and the Vithoba of Pandhar-
pur are a gift of the primitives to the spiritual capital of India’ (ibid.:
169). However, Karve never asks why Marathi should be a regional
language, as against Gondi or Bhili, despite the large number of
Gondi or Bhili speakers—her Maharashtrian nationalism is too
strong, and, while she is willing to celebrate diversity or pluralism,
this pluralism must stay within the limits of the recognised states
and the regional cultures they officially embody.
Her other surveys are backed by extended questionnaires and re¬
sult in detailed tables. For instance, Group relations in village commu¬
nity (Karve and Damle 1963), a study of group (caste) relations in
four villages around Poona, has 75 pages of analysis (explication of
tables) and 400 pages of tables! They come to the earth-shattering
conclusion that caste continued to exercise a strong hold on social
relations. Fortunately, some of her later surveys partially remedy this
by providing several interesting insights into what planned change
could do, although even here the balance between analysis and tables
remains skewed in favour of the latter. Social dynamics of a growing
town and its surrounding area (Karve and Ranadive 1965), done on
behalf of the Research Programme Committee of the Planning Com¬
mission, is a study of Phaltan, a small sugar town in Satara district,
and its relation to the hinterland. The study came up with some
404 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

interesting results—such as the fact that towns had a greater diversity

of castes because many artisanal castes were migrating to towns, and
villages were no longer self-sufficient or had a full complement of
castes; that more educated people in the town were taking to agri¬
culture than uneducated because, with new cash crops like sugar
and cotton, farming had become more profitable than leasing land
out; and that the biggest change that urbanisation had brought about
was sartorial. But more important is the vision the authors provide
of a small town as an intermediary and channel of communication
between a village and a big city:

What we have seen in Phaltan and the surrounding villages suggested

a model for building up communities to which maximum cultural
amenities can be provided by the government. This is necessary as the
village is becoming a mere agricultural settlement. The classical village
community is dead. . . . Keeping the distinction between rural and urban
or emphasizing it further hinders the real progress of the rural areas. It
might be an experiment worth trying in a few selected places to connect
up the urban and the rural, the town and the villages, into an inter¬
connected unity in such a way that the town becomes the heart of lively
social intercourse made easy through well placed roads and well placed
villages. In such townships, then, one can spend money for providing
facilities. (Karve and Ranadive 1965: 117-19)

The role of weekly markets in the tribal, rural and urban setting
(Karve and Acharya 1970) looks at weekly markets in the very dif¬
ferent setting of Baglan Taluka of Nasik district. Whereas Phaltan
was part of a prosperous irrigated area which included several agro¬
industries and on its way to becoming further urbanised, Baglan
was more rural and tribal. But here, too, the market villages played
a similar role—‘of providing an active communication centre to the
surrounding villages’ (Karve and Acharya 1970: 111). Annual fairs
particularly, ‘sociologically and anthropologically interpreted . . . had
an integrative dynamic role. Integrative because, it brings together
people of the region and the people (some traders are from outside
the region) from the other regions. Dynamic, because indirectly the
traders introduce new wants among the tribals’ (ibid.: 82). The mono¬
graph provides details of which villages attend which market, how
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 405

far people travel, whether they come singly or in groups, what they
transact, etc. In different hands, this material could have yielded rich
insights and almost seems to cry out for a restudy, thirty years later
(see for instance Gell 1982).
While Karve may not have drawn out all the implications of her
own study, she was evidently groping towards an understanding of
how spatial organisation reflected and influenced social relations, a
subject which has only now become truly fashionable. This is evident
not just from the Weekly markets and Phaltan studies (which map
transactions between villages, towns, etc.), but more centrally from
her article titled ‘The Indian village’, which examines how villages in
different parts of India are organised spatially and how the objective
boundaries affect the subjective understanding or gestalt of a village
(Karve 1957b). A short article, ‘Location and the organisation of
space’ (Karve 1961a), is again, fascinatingly suggestive in its attempt
to provide a spatial basis or ‘location’ to social institutions like the
family.
A survey of the people displaced through the Koyna Dam (Karve
and Nimbkar 1969) is in its own way a model for studies of the dam-
displaced people, a subject which has received fresh attention in the
1980s and 1990s (see Dreze, Samson and Singh 1997), but often
without any awareness of what went before.69 The rehabilitation of
people from the Koyna valley was supposed to be a planned process,
as against some of the earlier displacements where they were left en¬
tirely to their own devices. Yet some of the problems faced by people
whose lands were submerged by the Koyna dam continue to be sadly
familiar to people today—hurried moves despite the possibility of
planning, because people were not warned of what would happen
during submergence time; paying people cash compensation for their
houses (which they are unused to) instead of participating in a house
construction process; not giving people alternative land in the
command area and instead sending them to distant places; expecting

69 This study was really initiated by Jai Nimbkar, who started talking to some
of the dam displaced people while holidaying at the Koyna dam guesthouse.
When Nimbkar talked about it to her mother, Irawati Karve suggested doing a
survey, got the funds for it and assigned two research assistants to help Nimbkar
with the fieldwork. Interview, Jai Nimbkar, 26 April 2001.
406 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

people to split into smaller groups to make finding land easier, etc.
Some of the conclusions are worth reproducing here:

Adjusting to a new life is especially difficult for ignorant and illiterate

people. The adjustment could have been made easier by making the
simplest amenities of life available to these people. The government
has not been able to do this. ... A large number of displaced people
still do not feel settled. There is an atmosphere of anxiety and fear, of
a certain amount of bitterness among the people we visited. The only
thing that gives them emotional security is the sticking together of the
old village or a large part of it. . . the government claims that it intended
to give the dam affected people an equivalent in value for what they
had lost, and that their aim was not the general betterment of these
people. We feel that this is not a fair attitude. Even supposing the people
receive an equivalent of what they have lost in terms of material be¬
longings, nobody can compensate them for the loss of their ancestral
homes, friends, marriage connections etc. For the loss of these they
must be given something more than the cash equivalent of what they
have lost by way of tangible belongings. Especially when they see the
rest of the state benefiting from the electricity provided by the dam,
they are bound to be dissatisfied with what they have got. . . the pro¬
blem needs to be approached with more foresight and imagination.
(Karve and Nimbkar 1969: 107-8)

Whatever her shortcomings in analysing her own data, the subjects

Karve took up for study were often far ahead of her time: and in
such work she generated insights that will perhaps outlive even her
work on caste and kinship/0

CONCLUSION

There is little doubt that Irawati Karve saw ‘science as her vocation’
(cf. Weber 1970), almost the equivalent of social service in the
university arena. In concluding, it might be useful to summarise what

70 I have not discussed here her work on pastoralists with K.C. Malhotra
because I could not locate the essays, but that again is a reflection of an ecological
concern that has only begun to make itself felt in sociology/anthropology in
the 1990s.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 407

this vocation meant in the Indian context in the critical middle de¬
cades of the last century.
To begin with, the idea that sociology and anthropology were
sciences was common to most anthropologists of the period (see
Bose, Ram, this volume). When Karve did fieldwork—involving an¬
thropometry, serology, archaeology, or the collection of kinship ter¬
minology—it is this broad science that she believed herself to be
engaged in. India, with its diversity of castes and customs, was seen
as one large scientific laboratory. By the same light, she did not see
her Marathi literary writings (with a few exceptions, e.g. Karve 1962a)
as anthropology.
Secondly, following Weber (1970: 129), it is worth re-examining
or reiterating the material conditions that made science as a vocation
possible for someone like Karve. One factor, of course, was her caste
and family background. The base of recruitment to university
teaching was even narrower then than it is now, and for all the minor
drawbacks of a father-in-law who was stricter with his own family
than with others, belonging to the Karve family was no doubt a parti¬
cular advantage in Maharashtra.
There were few Indian university departments in sociology and
anthropology when Irawati Karve started her work, with the result
that those who founded such departments or worked in them were
often self-consciously pioneers. Sticking to her own Indological and
four-field style when fashions in sociology had changed, and even
taking up new topics for survey work, was perhaps possible in part
because of the prestige attached to these early departments. In part,
too, it had to do with Irawati Karve’s standing in Maharashtra and
her attempt to provide an independent academic perspective on the
problems of contemporary citizenship, e.g. language or the status of
women.
In India, scholars are often sustained by the immediacy of social
problems and easy access to ethnographic riches, despite the lack of
library resources or a critical mass of sociologists to insulate oneself
and one’s students from the pull of the civil services or other profes¬
sions. On the other hand, this may compel scholars into a collectors’
mode, at the expense of keeping up with the latest theoretical
developments in their field. For instance, there is very little reference
408 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

in Karve’s work to ongoing work by others on similar themes, and,

although she spent a year in the USA, this does not seem to have
changed her theoretical approach much. Yet scholarship in ‘periphe¬
ries’ like India is invariably affected by the dependency syndrome—
the notion that only the West can certify true worth, and Karve too
seems to have suffered on this count.71
With all this, however, science was her vocation because she had
that‘inward calling’ (Weber 1970:134)—an enthusiasm and curiosity
with which she engaged the world, and a passion that still shines
bright for us these many decades after.

REFERENCES

Writings in English Authored and Coauthored, by Irawati Karve

Karve, Irawati. 1928. Chitpavan Brahmin—An ethnic study. Master’s thesis in

Sociology. University of Bombay.
-. 1932. The Parasurama myth. The journal of the University of Bombay
1, 1: 115-39.
-. 1933a. The ethnic affinities of the Chitpavans (Part I). The journal of
the University of Bombay 1, 4: 383-400.
-. 1933b. The ethnic affinities of the Chitpavans (Part II). The journal of
the University of Bombay 2, 1: 132-58.
-. 1937. Normal asymmetry of the human body. The journal of the Uni¬
versity of Bombay 6, 1: 66-74.
-. 1938. Kinship terminology and kinship usages in Rgveda and Athar-
veda (Part 1). Annals ofBhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 20: 69-96.
-. 1939a. Kinship terminology and kinship usages in Rgveda and
Atharveda (Part 2). Annals of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 20,2:
109-44.
-. 1939b. The kinship usages and the family organisation in Rgveda and
Atharveda. Annals of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 20, 3-4: 213-
34.
-. 1939c. Some folk-songs of Maharashtra. Bulletin of the Deccan College
Research Institute (henceforth B.D.C.R.I.) 1,1: 79-95.
-. 1939d. Note on Rgveda III, 31. New Indian antiquary 2, 2: 120-1.

'1 Pundalik (1970) recounts her craving for recognition as an anthropologist,

including the desire to go abroad for conferences and her inability to understand
how he could be satisfied without this.
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 409

-. 1940a. Kinship terminology and kinship usages of the Maratha country,

Part I. B.D.C.R.I. 1, 2-4: 327-89.
-. 1940b. Kinship terminology and kinship usages of the Maratha coun¬
try, Part II. B.D.C.R.I. 2, 3-4: 9-33.
-. 1941a. Anthropometric investigation of the Madhyandin Brahmins
of the Maratha country. B.D.C.R.I. 3, 1: 1-74.
-. 1941b. Eternal triangle in some Marathi folk songs. Proceedings of the
Indian Science Congress 28, 3: 215.
-. 1942. Kinship terminology and kinship usages in Gujarat and Kathia-
wad. B.D.C.R.I. 4, 2: 208-26.
-. 1943. Kinship terms and the family organisation in the critical edition
of the Mahabharata. B.D.C.R.I. 5: 61-148.
-. 1947a. A note on an incident in the Ramayana. B.D.C.R.I. 8,3-4:422-
4.
-. 1947b. Some problems of Indian anthropology: Presidential address of
the section of anthropology and archaeology. Indian Science Congress, New
Delhi: 1-12.
-. 1947c. Racial conflict. New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs.
-. 1948. Anthropometric measurements of the Marathas. Deccan College,
Monograph Series No. 2: 1-71
-. 1950. The kinship system and kinship terms in Karnataka. B.D.C.R.I.
10, 1:49-60.
-. 1953a. Dravidian kinship terminology and marriage customs. Proceed¬
ings of the Indian Science Congress 40, 3: 37.
-. 1953b. Kinship organisation in India. Poona: Deccan College Mono¬
graph Series No.ll.
-. 1953c. Books that have influenced me. Radio talk on 13 October 1953.
-. 1954. Anthropometric measurements in Karnatak and Orissa and a
comparison of these two regions with Maharashtra. Journal of the Anthro¬
pological Society of Bombay 8, 1: 45-75
-. 1955. Caste in modern times and some measures to combat its evils.
Report of the seminar on casteism and removal of untouchability, Indian
Conference of Social Work, Bombay: 1-4.
-. 1957a. Social education of the scheduled tribes. Vanyajati. 5, 4:
164-9.
-. 1957b. The Indian village. Deccan bulletin (Taraporewala volume) 18:
73-106 (a shorter version of this is also reproduced in A.R. Desai, ed. Rural
Sociology in India, Bombay: The Indian Society of Agricultural Economics,
1961).
410 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

-. 1958a. The Bhils of West Khandesh. Bombay: The Anthropological

Society of Bombay.
-. 1958b. What is caste? (I): Caste as extended kin. The economic weekly.
10, 4-6: 125-38.
-. 1958c. What is caste? (II): Caste and occupation. The economic weekly.
10, 12: 401-7.
-. 1958d. What is caste? (Ill): Caste as a status group. The economic weekly.
10, 26-8:881-8.
-. 1959. What is caste? (IV): Caste society and Vedantic thought. The
economic weekly. 11, 4-6: 149-63.
-. 1960a. Succession in a matrilineal royal house. B.D.C.R.I. 20: 364-8.
-. 1960b. The language problem in India (pamphlet).
-. 1961a. Location and organisation of space. The economic weekly Annual
12,4-6: 143-4.
-. 1961b. Some aspects of the organisation of the caste-society of the
Hindus. In V.M. Dandekar and N.V. Sovani, eds, Changing India, pp. 143—
66. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, pp. 143-66.
-. 1962a. On the road—A Maharashtrian pilgrimage. The journal of Asian
studies. 22, 1: 13-30.
-. 1962b. The Indian social organization: An anthropological study. In
Haridas Bhattacharyya, ed. The cultural heritage of India, pp. 536-56. Cal¬
cutta: Ramakrishna Mission.
-. 1962c. The individual and the family. Akashvani, 19 August 1962,
pp. 53-4.
-. 1963a. A family through six generations. In Bala Ratnam, ed., Anthro¬
pology on the march, pp. 241-62. Madras: The Book Centre.
-. 1963b. Individual case study and the statistical method in social investi¬
gations. The economic weekly 15,17: 701-6.
-. 1963c. The racial factor in Indian social life. History Summer School
on Indian social history (modern)—7th June 1963.
-. 1963d. Grandfather. In D.D. Karve, ed., The new brahmans: Five Maha¬
rashtrian families, pp. 80-104. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-. 1964. The family in India. In Baidya Nath Varma, ed., Contemporary
India, pp. 47-58. Bombay: Asia Publishing House.
-. 1965. Research needed. Current anthropology. 6, 3: 332-3.
-. 1966. The Indian women in 1975. Perspective, supplement to the Indian
journal of public administration. 1: 103-5.
-. 1967. Analysis of jointness and non-jointness of family. The anthro¬
pologist. 14, 1:41-5.

W
 IN THE CAUSE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 411

1968a/[ 1961 ]. Hindu society—An interpretation (2nd edition). Poona: Deshmukh

Prakashan.
-. 1968b. Language as a social factor. B.D.C.R.I. 27, 1-2: 20-6.
-. 1968c Maharashtra, Its land and people. Govt, of Maharashtra Gazet-
ters department, Bombay: 1-197.
-. 1968d. Education and social change. In Economic and political weekly,
Vol. 3 (1 and 2): 117-18.
-. 1969a. The tribals of Maharashtra. Urgent research in social anthro¬
pology, Transactions of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla. 10:
1-7.
-. 1969b. Yuganta—The end of an epoch. Poona: Deshmukh and Co.
Karve, I. and Y.B. Damle. 1963. Group relations in village community. Deccan
College Monograph Series No. 24.
Karve, I. and G.M. Kurulkar. 1945. A preliminary report on the human remains
atLanghnaj in February and December, 1944. Bombay: Times of India Press.
Karve, I. and K.C. Malhotra. 1968. A biological comparison of eight endogamous
groups of the same rank. Current anthropology 9, 2-3: 109-24.
Karve, I. and Jai Nimbkar. 1969. A survey of the people displaced through the
Koyna Dam. Deccan College Building Centenary and Silver Jubilee Series
No. 61
Karve, I. and Hemiata Acharya. 1970. The role of weekly markets in the tribal,
rural and urban setting. Poona: Deccan College Building Centenary and
Silver Jubilee Series No. 70.
Karve, I. and J.S. Ranadive. 1965. The social dynamics of a growing town and its
surrounding area. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Insti¬
tute.
Sankalia, H.D. and I. Karve. 1945. Preliminary report on the Third Gujarat
Prehistoric expedition. Bombay: The Times of India Press.
-. 1949. Early primitive microlithic culture and people of Gujarat. Ameri¬
can anthropologist 51,1: 28-34.
Writings in Marathi
-. n.d. Manavshastra va Samajshastra. In Sanshodhan-karya.
-. 1949. Paripurti. Pune: Deshmukh and Co.
-. 1972. Gangajal. Pune: Deshmukh and Co.

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 11

Towards a Praxiological
Understanding of Indian Society
The Sociology of A.R. Desai1

Sujata Patel

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;

the point, however is to change it.—Karl Marx, XI Theses on
Feuerbach, 1845

AKSHAY RAMANLAL DESAI (1915-94), WAS FIRST AND FOREMOST

a Marxist, and then a sociologist and teacher. It was his interpretation

of Marxism—as a perspective that understands and explains the
specific Indian context in relation to a general Marxist theory of
classes—that defined the contours of his sociology and pedagogic
practices. Desafs project of Marxist sociology was envisioned at a
very important juncture in the history of the subject and thus

1 This essay has benefited from discussions with friends, comrades, colleagues,
and students of A.R. Desai. I am particularly grateful to Neeraben Desai for
spending time to answer detailed questions despite her ill health. Interviews
were conducted with Jairus Banaji, Praful Bidwai, Bhagwan Singh Josh, Uday
Mehta, Indra Munshi, D. Narain, Vinayak Purohit, Manorama Savur, Ghan-
shyam Shah, and Sonal Shukla over the period between January 2002 and June
2002. Biographic references are also taken from Gorman (1986), Savur and
Munshi (1995), and Shah (1990)
418 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Fig. 11: Portrait of A.R. Desai (Photograph courtesy Neera Desai)

influenced its many contradictory receptions. He became a teacher

in the Department of Sociology in 1951, when the influence of the
‘Bombay School of Sociology’ under G.S.Ghurye was declining. By
the time he became Professor and Head of the Department of Socio¬
logy in the University of Bombay in 1969, the centre of academic
power had shifted from Bombay to Delhi and the subject had become
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 419

institutionalised in the context of post-Independence developments

in higher education. This shift coincided with the emergence of a
specifically social anthropological perspective in understanding and
explaining Indian society—an empiricist, structural-functional pers¬
pective premised on the distinction between value and fact.
It was at this historical juncture that Desai’s Marxist sociology
was conceived, and it took the contrary position of affirming the re¬
lationship of value to fact. It also envisaged a role for itself as an al¬
ternative to a growing and institutionalised conservative sociology.
It is no wonder, then, that Desai’s sociological vision stands out for
its differences with Indian social anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s
rather than its affinities with it. When the latter was concentrating
on analysing the micro (the village), Desai’s sociology studied the
macro and the meso (capitalism, nationalism, classes, agrarian struc¬
ture, the state, and peasant movements, among other things). And
while the dominant effort of social anthropologists was to create a
space for the ‘social’ unmarked by discourses relating to history, eco¬
nomics, and politics, Desai framed an interdisciplinary sociology in
which there was very little difference between sociology and social
science. Third, when mainstream sociology/social anthropology
perfected the methods of participant observation and fieldwork to
understand Indian social structure and capture the processes of
change, Desai’s Marxist sociology used the historical method to give
specific meaning to the Marxist notion of structure and the various
elements in its constitution in India, such as feudalism, capitalism,
the relationship between class and nation, peasants and working class,
the post-colonial state, and the rights of the deprived. And last, unlike
mainstream sociologists whose audiences consisted only of students
and researchers in university departments and research institutes,
Desai’s readers were, in addition, theliterate population of the coun¬
try.
Desai’s bibliography is extensive and his work and his ideas are
accessible in a variety of publications that range from books and
edited works to pamphlets, some of these also in the Indian regional
languages. In these publications he explores the relationship between
nationalism and the growth of classes in India; the nature of the
post-Independence Indian state and its role in fashioning capitalism;
420 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

changes in agrarian society during colonialism and the post-Inde¬

pendence period; the nature and growth of the workers’ movement;
new forms of urbanisation with special reference to slums; new de¬
velopments in Indian politics, including the political use of caste
and religion by communalism; and lastly, the growth of the Rights
movement in India—in effect an entire range of issues and questions
dealing with the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the coun¬
try.
I map out the main tenets of Desai’s Marxist sociology through a
discussion of three early texts written in the period between 1948
and 1961. These set out his assessments of the processes of change
in India. The first two texts, Social background of Indian national¬
ism (1948) and Recent trends in Indian nationalism (1960), analyse
nationalism, class formation, and the nature of the state in pre- and
post-colonial India, while the third examines the character of rural
transition. In the following sections, I draw out some of the salient
points of Desai’s theories on the troubled binary of nation/class and
its relationship with pre-capitalist formations and the post-Indepen¬
dence state. Later, I discuss his assessments of the nature of Indian
capitalism and the changes taking place in rural India, as reflected in
his book Rural transition in India (1961). In the course of this dis¬
cussion I also examine the extension of some of his earlier ideas on
state-civil society relationships as incorporated in two sets of edited
books published on social movements in India, Peasant struggles in
India (1979) and Agrarian struggles in India after Independence
(1986a); and his next set of books on the Human Rights movement,
titled Violation of democratic rights in India (1986b) and Repression
and resistance in India (1990). I also explore some of the contradictory
influences (especially those of his family and his father, as also those
of leftist student groups) that shaped his ideas and ideologies and
thus his sociology. Finally, I assess the implications of his ideas for
social science (and not only sociological) knowledge in India.
Though it has not been debated at length in the context of the
growth of sociology in India, commentators have highlighted the
nationalist roots of modern social theory. It has been argued that
nation and nationalism have loomed large and helped to ask ques¬
tions, identified issues and problems for discussion, and oriented
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 421

the perspectives of modern social theory in India. Even where it has

not helped to identify issues, problems, theories, and perspectives—
as in Indian social anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s—the nation
has framed the intellectual location of the same.2 Desai’s sociology
is distinct from Indian social anthropology in this regard. His so¬
ciology is embedded in the questions and issues that dominated
nationalism, and his concepts, categories, and theoretical approach
are organically connected with the Left perspectives that theorised
nationalism. Desai was emphatic that sociology must assess the char¬
acteristics and features of Indian capitalism. In this essay I ask: what
kinds of strengths did Desai’s sociology inherit from its organic rela¬
tionship with nationalist and Marxist perspectives? While elaborating
on his contributions to the making of specialisations such as political
sociology, sociology of the agrarian system, sociology of social move¬
ments, urban sociology, and sociology of communalism (among
other areas), I also discuss some of the limitations that his sociology
exhibited. I ask whether these limitations are due to Desai’s specific
interpretation of the Marxist concept of‘praxis’ in which the balance
between theory/knowledge and intervention is tilted towards the
latter rather then the former. Did his commitment to change the
world’ and not merely‘interpret it’ affect the content of his sociology?

I. THE MAKING OF A MARXIST

Interviews with Neeraben Desai (his wife), and with his friends and
colleagues suggest that two sets of ideologies and cultural practices
had a critical influence on Desai and helped to frame the perspective
that he adopted on the nation and the nature of nationalism in Social
background to Indian nationalism. The first set was related to his in¬
volvement in radical groups within the student movement in Baroda,
where he first registered as an undergraduate student, and later his
involvement as a student with other leftist and Marxist groups par¬
ticipating in the nationalist movement in Surat and Bombay, where
he pursued further studies. The second set was due to the influence
of his father, Ramanlal Desai, a civil servant, novelist, committed

2 See Patel (1998,2002, 2005) for an assessment of Srinivas and the growth
of sociology in India.
422 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

nationalist, and Fabian socialist with an admiration for Gandhi.3

The first set of influences was instrumental in training Desai to
theorise issues of nation and class, committing him to a revolutionary
intervention in society and to using historical materialist methods
to examine nationalism; the influence of the second set was signifi¬
cant in leading him to a reiteration of nationalism as the only ideology
that could confront colonialism. In Social background to Indian na¬
tionalism, Desai combines these two perspectives and argues that
nationalism is an all-class movement that plays a positive role in
confronting colonialism.
Having lost their mother early in life, Desai and his younger sister
spent their lives travelling and living in various homes set up by
their father as the latter was transferred to towns and district head¬
quarters in Baroda State. Over these travels Desai developed an inte¬
rest in the world around him. Discussions at home with family and
friends on nationalism and the role played by it in changing the nature
of rural society created a milieu in which he came to believe in the
necessity of social and political commitments and goals outside his
immediate family and career. Though Ramanlal Desai did not leave
the civil service to join the national movement, these issues find
reflection in his novels. For instance, the most popular of them, Gram
Lakshmi, documents in four volumes the changes taking place in
rural Gujarat after the arrival of the British, the exploitation suffered
by peasants via excessive rent, and the possibility of a Gandhian revo¬
lution. The critique of colonialism, the positive role of nationalism,
and the importance of citizens relating to the making of a new India
were ideas that ran through almost all the novels written by Ramanlal
Desai. In these he exhorted his readers to relate to the world around
them and to understand it in order to change it. These precepts had
an influence on Desai as he grew up in this Nagar Brahman household
in early-twentieth-century Baroda State.4
As soon as he joined college Desai was introduced to radical and
communist ideas. Baroda was then a base for intellectuals of radical

3 A biographical snapshot of Desai is available in the festschrift in his honour,

(see Shah 1990: 1-3).
4 Desai was trained to be a tabalchi in childhood and learnt this skill from
one of Barodas most famous schools of music which had Fayaz Khan as its
Principal.
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 423

persuasions and activists of the growing Communist Party. By the

early 1930s a kisan movement had already started in Gujarat. Desai
gravitated towards the student and later peasant movements after
he entered college in Baroda, where there was a family home. He
became a member of the Communist Party from 1934, for five years.5
However, it seems that he was not very comfortable with the doctri¬
naire positions taken by the communists His rustication from the
college in Baroda because of his political activities led him to Surat,
and later to Bombay for his studies. In Bombay he met C.G. Shah, a
communist who has been described as one of the most well read in¬
tellectuals of the city’. Shah was critical of the strategy advocated by
Stalin and the Comintern. He had just formed a study group of young
communist comrades (Shah 1990:2). Desai became part of this group
and was introduced for the first time to Trotskyite positions. During
these years he found work in a library of radical and communist
literature set up by Lokhandwala, a Gujarati trader. Together with
other radicals and communists he was employed to work in this lib¬
rary and comment on this literature. Here Desai wrote his first mono¬
graph: Gandhi X-rayed, and made an assessment of the complexities
of revolution in the Indian feudal states.6 At this time he was also on
the fringes of the Bolshevik-Leninist party, organised by a group of
Trotskyites from Sri Lanka, which included many Indians.7 It is in
this political and intellectual background that Desai penned Social
background of Indian nationalism.

II. NATION AND CLASS IN INDIA'S TRANSITION

TO CAPITALISM

Social background of Indian nationalism was submitted as a doct¬

oral thesis in 1946 and was first published in 1948 by the Bombay
University Press as part of the Sociology Series under the general

5 Interview with Neeraben Desai, 31 January 2002.

6 Neither of these monographs is mentioned in the bibliography, these being
mainly polemical and political texts written before Desai wrote his sociological
works.
7 On the Sri Lankan initiative to build a joint Indian-Sri Lankan Trostskyite
party, see Amarsinghe 2000: esp. 56—65. A.R. Desai’s name does not find mention
in this text, though Vinayak Purohit (interview) suggests that Desai was part
of the group.
424 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

editorship of G.S. Ghurye. Since then it has been reprinted almost

every alternate year and has gone through six editions. This text has
now become a textbook, referred to by undergraduate and postgra¬
duate students not only in sociology but also in history and political
science. There is irony in the fact that Desai was able to write a social
history of Indian nationalism much before this topic became popular
among Indian historians. The book attempted to simultaneously
argue and organically connect three discrete positions. It tried (i) to
explain the role played by colonialism in the transition from feud¬
alism to capitalism in India; (ii) to evaluate the specificity of the
nature of Indian pre-capitalist formations, specially the caste system;
and (iii) to examine the role played by nationalism in confronting
colonial capitalism. Social background of Indian nationalism was re¬
ceived extremely well.
The book is a historical work and its arguments are based mainly
on interpretations of primary historical sources. Desai understands
nationalism as a historical category that emerges at a certain stage of
evolution of the social structure when both objective and subjective
socio-historical conditions mature. He lays out the distinctive stages
of this development by first examining the nature of the pre-capitalist
structure in India, discussing ideas regarding ‘self sufficiency of
community’ as well as the nature of the agrarian system in pre-British
India that made the village its key unit. He then proceeds to analyse
the British conquest and evaluate the nature of the transformation
that it inaugurated in the agrarian society.8
Through this book Desai introduced new interpretations that were
being discussed within communist groups regarding the specificity
of the Indian case in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Against some received interpretations of Marx,9 wherein it was

8 Some critics have suggested that this text borrows heavily from R,R Dutt’s
India today. Many of Desai’s arguments also resonate with Barrington Moores
Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of
the modern world (1966), who also borrows from R.P. Dutt, though he does
not refer to Desai.
9 In an introduction to the writings of Marx and Engels on national and
colonial questions, Aijaz Ahmad argues that Marx lost ‘faith in the industrializ¬
ing mission of colonial capitalism in India’ and characterised British colonialism
as ‘a bleeding process’ (Ahmad 2001: 7).
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 425

suggested that Marx had argued that capitalism would and could
play a revolutionary role in changing the nature of productive forces
in traditional Indian society dominated by the caste system, Desai—
borrowing from nationalist ideology—suggested that colonialism
did not play a revolutionary role. Rather, it had a flip side to it, for
it destroyed the institutions that could have made possible the growth
of capitalism in India, namely the factories that had emerged to mass-
produce goods during the pre-capitalist period. However, colonialism
had a positive effect in that it made possible the growth of nationalism
through a contradictory process. It aided the growth of new classes
through the new education system, helped to create the conditions
for the emergence of social reform movements, and ultimately in¬
fluenced the growth of the nationalist movement. His book maps
out the contradictory nature of colonialism.
Desai’s arguments on Indian nationalism are also sensitive to the
specificities of its character and content. Indian nationalism heralded
India into the modern world. However it was also extremely complex
and remained peculiarly Indian because it incorporated features
specific to the making of Indian society. Framed in the context of
social and religious diversities and territorial vastness, Indian nation¬
alism incorporated powerful indigenous traditions and institutions,
making it distinct and different. Lastly, and most significantly, the
book argued that the nation was not class, though it was intimately
connected to it. Nationalism was a movement of various classes and
groups comprising a nation, attempting to remove all economic,
political, social, and cultural obstacles that impeded the realisation
of their aspirations; the nationalist movement was multi-class.
However, the movement was internally divided, because different
classes contested within it to mark it with their own interests. Ulti¬
mately, the class at the helm of the movement attempts to impose its
own class interests on the movement, filling it with the content of its
own class needs and aspirations and subordinating those of other
classes to its own.
The specificities of the Indian experience are explained in the
following manner:

• Indian feudalism is characterised by lack of private ownership

of land, where the village community is the de facto owner of
426 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the village land, the monarch receives a definite proportion of

produce as revenue and the revenue collector is the represent¬
ative of the monarch in the village.
• The development of occupational organisations and new forms
of consciousness that were growing slowly diminished the im¬
portance of caste organisations and weakened caste consci¬
ousness.
• British rule destroyed pre-capitalist forms of production rela¬
tions and introduced modern capitalist property relationships.
The caste system was the ‘steel frame of Hinduism’ and had
thrived in the pre-capitalist economy. The economic found¬
ations of caste were now shattered by the new economic forces
and forms introduced by colonial capitalism.
• The advanced British nation radically changed the economic
structure of Indian society for its own purpose, established a
centralised state, and introduced modern education, modern
means of communication, and other institutions. This resulted
in the growth of new social forces unique in themselves.
• Because their very nature came into conflict with British imper¬
ialism, these social forces provided the motive power for the
rise and development of Indian nationalism.
• The nationalist movement in India was led and dominated by
the capitalist class. It accomplished this through its classical
party, the Indian National Congress, which launched, shaped,
and provided ideological, political, and programmatic content
to the nationalist movement.

III. STATE AND CAPITALISM IN

POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA

In 1960 Desai published a sequel to Social background of Indian

nationalism, titled Recent trends in Indian nationalism. While Social
background of Indian nationalism remains structured within the
questions raised by Marxist perspectives on nationalism, the sequel,
and his next book of essays, Rural India in transition, address the
debates among communists regarding the transition to socialism,
and also provide for a general sociological perspective. In these books
we see Desai combining the agenda of Marxist theory with that of a
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 427

general theory of sociology, for by then Desai had joined the Depart¬
ment of Sociology at the University of Bombay and was interacting
with colleagues in the professional world of sociology He was eager
to provide a Marxist sociology for India in a context wherein there
were competing schools offering varied interpretations of Indian
society
According to Desai, a critical sociology of India has to undertake
the study of the capitalist system as its main focus. Capitalist deve¬
lopments in India cannot be understood without using the historical
method. Such a sociology has to examine the history of nationalism,
the growth of classes that nationalism encouraged, and the relation¬
ship between these classes and the modern Indian state. The state’s
role in promoting capitalism, especially in the rural areas, needs to
be assessed, as well as the contradictions that emerge from these pro¬
cesses, such as the growth of new forms of inequalities through the
formation of new classes in rural areas or the lack of access to housing
in urban areas, increasing inequalities—with the rich getting richer—
and finally the escalation in the use of the states powers as it employs
them to extend capitalist growth.
The theoretical basis of these arguments lies in the evolution of
Desai’s ideas regarding the specificity of India’s path of capitalist
development. Against the positions taken by Communist parties of
the time, he became convinced that India had commenced capitalist
development under British rule. In this he was following the precepts
fashioned by Trotskyite groups who rejected the theory of‘two-stage
revolution’ advanced by the Communist Party and supported later
by its two offshoots, the Communist Party of India and the Commu¬
nist Party of India (Marxist). These parties argued that India must
pass through a ‘national democratic’, ‘people’s democratic’ or ‘new
democratic revolution’ before it can inaugurate a socialist revolution.
Instead, Desai suggests India had already started on a capitalist path
of development through colonialism. Today, the capitalist system is
being institutionalised through the agency of the modern Indian
state, which has had to take a dominant role in the context of the
weakness of the bourgeoisie in India.
These arguments are now elaborated in Desai’s books and pre¬
sented for the consideration of sociologists. Drawing from C. Wright
Mills’ critique of structural functionalism, Desai argues that the
428 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

project of sociology is to delineate ‘historical social structures’.10 Argu¬

ing that post-Independence social science has ‘taken to expedient
apologetics in place of scientific inquiry’, Desai suggests that sociolog¬
ists accept the relevance of the Marxist approach (Desai 1973 [1960]:
xii). He sees Marxist sociology as providing an alternative historical-
materialist perspective against the conservatism running through
contemporary Indian sociology. Both his books are significant be¬
cause they help him build this alternative perspective and lead him
to clarify the elements that constitute his Marxist sociology. The argu¬
ments in Recent trends in Indian nationalism and the essays in Rural
India in transition reflect the new intellectual context that Desai is
addressing.
Recent trends in Indian nationalism was written initially as a post¬
script to Social background of Indian nationalism. This small mono¬
graph has not been discussed by contemporary commentators but
remains significant for its critical and incisive theorisation of the
nature of the post-colonial state in India. It extends the arguments
elaborated in the earlier book to examine the nature of contemporary
capitalism, defines and elaborates the new class structure that emerg¬
ed as a consequence of nationalism, and assesses the relationship
between these classes and the state in India.
Desai’s arguments may be summarised as follows:
*

• India saw the uneven development of new classes as a result of

the economic transformation initiated by colonialism, specifi¬
cally the penetration of Indian society by commercial forces
that established modern industries in India for their own

10 The new orientation of Desai’s work emerged with his increasing

interaction with other professional sociologists from India and abroad. From
the early 1950s Desai had also started doing empirical research sponsored by
various government and international agencies on themes such as: Literacy
and Productivity among Industrial Workers, Non-Wage Benefits in Manufactur¬
ing, Slums and Slum Dwellers in Bombay, Potters in Dharavi, and lastly the
magnum opus, the 25-volume source book of the Labour Movement in India.
From the early 1960s, his contacts with international sociologists also widened
with his increasing participation in international workshops, seminars, and
conferences.
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 429

interests. As a result, capitalism in India was characterised by

the following: (a) a weak technical base; (b) monopolistic orga¬
nisation; and (c) speculative rather than productive processes.
Uneven development of capitalism was a function of two feat¬
ures: (a) the differential integration of the new economy in time;
and (b) the differential integration of pre-capitalist communi¬
ties with the new economy. In the new environment, the Banias,
who were traders in the pre-British period, were the first to
take to modern capitalist commerce and banking and grew to
become the commercial and financial bourgeoisie, while the
Brahmins were the first participants in the modern education
system, in the process becoming the intelligentsia and growing
into a middle class.
The Indian bourgeoisie is largely composed of certain castes
and communities belonging to land-owning classes of certain
geographical regions of India. Desai disputes the application
to India of the classic Marxist contradiction between town and
country and suggests instead that the interests of the bourgeoi¬
sie in India are not distinguishable from those of the semi-feudal
landowning class. This characteristic affects the style, content,
and nature of the political programme of the Indian bourgeoi¬
sie. This class cannot complete the tasks of bourgeois demo¬
cratic revolution—such as a complete liquidation of feudalism,
organisation of a prosperous national economy, solution of the
nationality problem, democratisation of social institutions, and
creation of a modern rationalist culture. Given these characteris¬
tics, it cannot evolve genuine bourgeois political programmes.
It thus uses negotiations between the ruling classes as a political
style to deflect criticism.
In this it is helped by the nature of the administrative structure
inherited through the state. The state after independence reflect¬
ed almost all aspects of the colonial state. Two processes helped
this development: (a) the nature of transfer of power, which
took place through negotiation rather than revolution; and (b)
the mass support for the Congress Party. The Congress utilised
it to strengthen its negotiating capacity with the colonial autho¬
rities. Thus, in the end, the constitution of India was a bourgeois
430 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

constitution that guaranteed rights to the bourgeoisie rather

than to the proletariat.

The weakness of the bourgeoisie, its institutionalised relationship

with the feudal landowning class, and the received colonial state appa¬
ratus, according to Desai, put into place the play of certain specific
contradictory features of Indian capitalism. The first characteristic
relates to the dominance of the state over the ruling classes and the
use of its welfare orientation not in the interest of the exploited but
in the interest of Indian capitalism. He evaluates the ideologies and
practices of development and planning, including the role played by
the public sector in these processes, as well as legal instruments of a
similar kind put into place by the post-Independence state, to exa¬
mine how these help the development of capitalism in India. Accord¬
ing to Desai, planning plays a critical role in preserving the capitalist
system in the epoch of monopoly capitalism, in two ways. First, it
transfers the main burden for financing the various Plans on to the
common people. This leads to the decline of purchasing power of
taxpayers and a drain of the very sources of financial capital. Second,
it aids the growth of concentration and centralisation of capital. This
centralisation is reinforced by the control of industry, trade, and
finance by a few families belonging to certain castes and certain na¬
tionalities. Thus the programme of mixed economy pays lip service
to its ‘socialist’ aspects, but instead develops capitalism. Additionally,
it also makes possible a close liaison and fusion between big business,
the government, and institutions that shape the ideological and cultu¬
ral life of the Indian people. It is no wonder that the national economy
is characterised by lopsided and asymmetrical development and is
in the grip of structural disequilibria.
Because the modern state is a strong state that intervenes, partici¬
pates, and initiates policies and programmes that are necessary to
sustain an economically weak bourgeoisie, it assumes enormous
powers for itself. These powers are now used against the democratic
assertions of the people, thereby contradicting the civil rights that it
has assured the people of India. Over the decades the Indian state
has attempted to curb civil rights and liberties rather than enhance
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 431

them. Desai suggests that in order to protect and preserve the capit¬
alist foundations of society, the state has to sacrifice democracy.
Third, through an analysis of changing agrarian and industrial
structures, Desai signals the need to analyse the implications of pro¬
grammes and policies introduced in rural India together with an
assessment of new inequalities emerging in the urban arena. He
argues that the critical issue in rural India is unemployment. This
theme is discussed once again in the essays incorporated in Rural
India in transition.n The book assesses the changes taking place in
the countryside as a result of land reform through the introduction
of legislation for tenancy reform and the land ceiling, and through
new programmes and policy interventions such as the Community
Development Programme and Panchayati Raj. It also evaluates the
limitations of the new movements in rural India, such as the bhoodan
movement which emerged to help the state to implement land ceiling
legislation.
Desai argues that while land reforms have helped, their impact
has been limited to a few. It has led to the growth of a class of rich
peasants instead of benefiting the underprivileged sections for which
it was framed. By eliminating parasitical landlordism, the Indian
state has created new classes which are directly dependent on the
state, but, due to its capitalist outlook, has abstained from transferring
land to the actual tillers of the soil. Desai believes that the focus of
the agrarian policy was to create a class of agricultural capitalists,
rich farmers, and viable middle peasant proprietors directly linked
to the state. Desai argues that these policy measures of the govern¬
ment strengthen—economically, socially, and politically—only the
rich sections of agrarian society. On the other hand, in the urban
arena an urban upper class has emerged which is predominantly
hybrid, isolated from the masses, and combines the authoritarian
upper-class and upper-caste values of both capitalist and feudal India,
respectively Ironically, the principle of equality of citizens laid down

11 Desai had already written a long monograph on the nature of the agrarian
question in India, published by the Indian Society of Agriculture Economics
in 1949. It was later published as Rural sociology in India (1961).
432 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

in the constitution is contrarily giving rise to a new ruling class im¬

bued with a feudal culture.
Thus, if colonialism and nationalism were key concepts to under¬
stand the processes of change in the pre-Independence period, the
role played by the state in changing rural society is the critical issue
that now occupies Desais attention. He argues (a) that rural change
generated by the state has resulted in sharpening the contradictions
among various classes, which in turn is leading to the growth of
tensions, antagonisms, and conflicts; and (b) that these changes are
strengthening the rich sections of rural society.
Desai was also one of the first sociologists to note the new relation¬
ship between caste and politics in contemporary India. Examining
the correlation between caste, wealth, economic rank, class position,
political power, and accessibility to education and culture in India,
he argues that caste affiliations have led to the growth of caste move¬
ments, such as the anti-Brahmin and Adi-Dravid movements in
Maharashtra and South India.
The task of nation-building cannot be accomplished by the histori¬
cally weak Indian bourgeoisie in a backward country during the
period of a general crisis in the world capitalist system. It cannot re¬
solve or liquidate mass poverty, mass unemployment, mass illiteracy,
and mass ignorance. These developments have led to the growth of
a weak capitalist society which cannot resolve the economic, political,
social, educational, and cultural problems arising from its current
crisis. This crisis will only further aggravate economic disequilibria,
which in turn will aggravate political instability and social, moral,
and cultural degeneration. Desai concludes that the tasks left unfin¬
ished by nationalism could only be attained through a socialist revo¬
lution. He is convinced that Indian social and economic conditions
have ripened to the point that a non-capitalist alternative is not only
desirable but also necessary. This conclusion motivated him to spend
the rest of his professional and political life documenting the ways
in which the modern Indian capitalist state furthers inequalities,
deprivation, and marginalisation among the Indian people. He docu¬
mented how movements of resistance emerged to question these
processes, and how the state in turn utilised the massive resources of
violence at its command to repress these movements.
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 433

IV. STATE AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: RESISTANCE

AND REPRESSION

In the two decades between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, intellec¬
tual and institutional forces helped to displace those perspectives in
sociology that were competing with the dominant structural-func¬
tional school which affirmed a strong preference for distancing value
from fact.12 Its institutionalisation as the dominant school occurred
in the context of institutional changes in the area of higher
education.13 First, the expansion of higher education led to the
growth and spread of the teaching of sociology as new universities
were formed.14 Second, as mentioned earlier, there was a shift of the
power centre of academia to Delhi. These trends were reinforced
with the setting up of the Indian Council of Social Science Research
in New Delhi. And it was in this period that the Indian Sociological
Society merged with the All India Sociological Congress and shifted
its offices to Delhi.15
If this was the condition of sociology, there were contrary develop¬
ments in other social sciences. The establishment of Jawaharlal Nehru
University in the late 1960s saw the growth of the Marxist perspect¬
ive in social history, together with an increasing interest in Marxist

12 For instance, in his Presidential Address to the All India Sociological

Congress in 1980 Desai states: ‘The dominant approaches which shaped
sociological studies have been basically non-Marxist. The practitioners and
advocates of dominant approaches have always adopted an attitude wherein
the potential of Marxist approach to understand the Indian reality has been
bypassed, underrated or summarily dismissed prima facie by castigating it as
dogmatic, value based and therefore lacking objectivity and value neutrality
(Sociological bulletin 30,1: 8-9).
13 The review of the theme Sociology of Politics for the first ICSSR Survey
of Sociology and Social Anthropology does not refer to any of Desai s texts on
the modern state nor to his analysis of the public sector and planning in India.
Ironically, Desai was a member of the committee conducting the survey.
14 Between 1960-1 and 1980-1 there was a 167 per cent increase in the
number of Indian universities.
15 Desai does not seem to have played a significant role in the merger
agreement, and was apparently noncommittal on this issue. On the politics of
this merger, see Patel (1998).
434 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

theories of the state. Desais earlier work, especially Social background

of Indian nationalism, found a new audience in the disciplines of
history and political science.16
Meanwhile, Desai was travelling on new paths and becoming very
concerned about the looming crisis in society: in fact his perceptions
of society and assessment of the development of new processes be¬
came sharper and more penetrating as time passed. Agitations, pro¬
tests, and struggle were emerging in the countryside. The working
class, the traditional revolutionary force, was in the throes of changes
both in the context of its structure and its changing political consci¬
ousness, and the trade union movement was not able to play its tradi¬
tional role. In the mean time, new contradictions were emerging in
urban areas with the growth of new forms of social organisation—
for instance, the slum. Simultaneously, politics was changing and
political parties were using caste and religious issues to mobilise the
populace. For Desai, the key to an assessment of all these processes
lay in the analysis of the modern Indian state. He argues that it is
important to ask the question: why was the state playing an undemo¬
cratic role? Why was the state in India using extra-constitutional
powers to repress the growth of democratic movements in the coun¬
try? Answers to these questions, he argues, can only come through a
historical-comparative analysis of state-civil society dynamics in
India. Desai, it seems, was no longer involved in a debate with conser¬
vative sociology, which had already made its assessment of him.
Rather, his vision now encapsulated a set of questions that over¬
whelmed all the social sciences in India.
During these two decades Desai initiated four complementary
projects which analysed contemporary trends by documenting new
information. First, he expanded his earlier work on rural transition

16 Desai’s Social background of Indian nationalism became the text for new
histories to be constructed. In the Preface to his essays on nationalism, Bipan
Chandra states, ‘The social character of the [national) movement, its origins,
stages of development, the nature of social support and popular participation,
the tactics and strategies evolved or used, and stages of development were not
properly studied. There have been of course exceptions; for example the works
of A.R. Desai, R. Palme Dutt, and several economists during the 1920s and
1930s’ (Bipan Chandra 1979: vi).
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 435

and attempted to capture the growth of new contradictions in rural

India by documenting the struggles and agitations in contemporary
agrarian India. From this there emerged two edited collections theoris¬
ing the distinctions between colonial and contemporary social move¬
ments in rural India. Titled Peasant struggles in India (1979) and
Agrarian struggles in India after Independence (1986a), these two
books immediately became, and continue to be, a major source of
reference on social movements and agrarian sociology. In the first
of these, Desai questioned the received evidence that peasants were
not and are not militant. Fie was also making visible a set of histories
forgotten by mainstream social science, thereby constructing the
foundations of the sociology of agrarian structure in India.17
Agrarian struggles in India after Independence divides the agrarian
struggles of post-Independence India into two phases: pre- and post-
Green Revolution periods. Desai argues that the first period is charac¬
terised by a low level of agrarian struggles, lack of political direction,
and the predominance of the landed peasantry rather than landless
labourers. On the other hand the post-Green Revolution period is
marked by differences among classes and groups that revolt, a variety
of protests, and differences in political ideology among agrarian
struggles. It is interesting to note that Desai does not here distinguish
between tribal and peasant struggles.
Second, during these decades Desai initiated one of his most
ambitious projects, that of documenting the history of the working-
class movement in India. In order to realise this, he organised a re¬
search collective of seven scholars who worked for more than ten
years to collect and organise various documents, ranging from news¬
paper records to private diaries and interviews. Initially, Desai had
proposed the documentation of labour history in three volumes.
Ultimately, however, the project evolved into a twenty-five volume
source book (Desai 1989-2006).
This work is significant not only because it made visible a series
of struggles and agitations of the working class not known or docu¬
mented before, but also because of the definition of the worker and

17 Commentators have acknowledged the definitive work of A.R. Desai which

helped to facilitate the formation of the Subaltern School. See Ludden (2001).
436 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the working class that he used. His study was not restricted to the
industrial working class, but encompassed all oppressed sections in
society who were selling their labour power in the market. The change
in definition is significant because Desai was the first to notice the
‘informal sector’, discovered only later by economists and anthropo¬
logists.18
Third, Desai wrote a series of articles on the relationship between
state and society in India that assessed the programmes, policies,
and institutions of state and simultaneously captured the social and
political processes that they promote. These essays, published as State
and society in India: Essays in dissent (1975) and India’s path to deve¬
lopment: A Marxist approach (1984), not only lay out the terms of a
Marxist sociology of development but also question the theories of
modernisation being used by social scientists.19 These essays extend
this argument and for the first time use theories of underdevelopment
to explain India’s particular situation. However, whilst using these
theories Desai does not abandon his position on the critical role
played by the state in modern India in creating underdevelopment
out of development: all Third World states, he argues, tend to protect
the interests of the propertied classes of their nation-states. These
books contain an evaluation of the implications of imperialism, the
planning process, the mixed economy, the public sector, and the caste -
ist and communalist politics which emerged.
The importance and significance of the state and the use it made
of its repressive powers caused Desai to initiate the last of his major
projects, a task which occupied him through most of the 1980s. This

18 A.R. Desai organised a collective of researchers to do this work. These

included Praful Bidwai, Sunil Dighe, Kamala Ganesh, M.N.V. Nair, S.D. Punekar,
Manorama Savur, and Robert Varikayil. Desai was the General Editor of the
series. The first three volumes were published in 1989-90 by Popular Prakashan,
Bombay, on behalf of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). These
covered 1850-1920. The remaining volumes, prepared by Manorama Savur,
were delayed and finally published in 2003 and 2006 by Pragati Publishers,
New Delhi, for the ICHR.
19 A prelude of this argument appears as an introduction to the two-volume
edited book (Desai 1971) on modernization theories published by Bombay
University’s Department of Sociology on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee
celebrations of the department in 1969.
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 437

project also made him widen his political networks; he had resigned
in 1981 from the Revolutionary Socialist Party, of which he was a
member from 1953. As a result of.this work he had met many‘activ¬
ists’, ranging from comrades in various sections of the Left, including
Marxists-Leninists and independent Marxists, to others, including
those in voluntary groups, and liberals who were committed to fight
for civil liberties. The result of this endeavour was a two-volume
book, Violation of democratic rights in India (1986b) and Repression
and resistance in India (1990), which focused on the state and docu¬
mented the way it restricted and curtailed the struggles of the oppres¬
sed for these rights. In these volumes Desai addresses the question:
why does the state show little interest in ensuring that the oppressed
get the civil rights guaranteed to the people of India in the constitu¬
tion? He also examines the nature of parliamentary democracy and
the contradictions that this institution raises for the ruling classes
and the state in India. What is remarkable is the fact that, for the first
time, Desai incorporates in his analysis struggles not only of classes
but also other groups who cannot be defined as a class in Marxist
language. For instance, he uses the categories ‘rural poor’, adivasis
(to denote tribes), and dalits (to denote the ex-untouchables). Sec¬
ondly he defines these struggles as ‘rights struggles’ rather than class
struggles, and divides these rights into bourgeois property rights,
civil liberties, and proletariat rights.
Why did Desai eschew the use of Marxist categories for assessing
the entire range of struggles? Why does he feel the necessity to define
them in terms of‘human rights’? Why does the first volume devote
so much attention to the United Nations’ definition of human rights?
What indeed is Desai’s theory of knowledge/fact and value? What
relationship did Desai envisage between Marxist theory and scientific
method? What is the defining characteristic of his sociology?

V. A.R. DESAI: AN EVALUATION

In a review of Desai’s edited book, Agrarian struggles in India after

Independence, K. Balgopal (1986) applauds the emphasis placed on
the Indian state to understand the nature of struggles in contemp¬
orary rural India. However, two aspects of Desai’s introduction puzzle
him. The first is Desai’s classification of the landed classes in Indian
 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST
438

agriculture into rich peasants, middle farmers, and landlords. The

second is his division of agrarian struggles in terms of pre-Green
Revolution and post-Green Revolution. In many parts of India, the
Green Revolution programme was not introduced. And yet, Desai
thinks that it is a benchmark for an analysis of the contradictions it
generates. On what basis can one assert this? The same problem oc¬
curs again in relation to Desai’s understanding of the differentiation
among ruling classes. Where is the empirical substantiation for this
classification? Balgopal wonders whether the problems lie in Desai’s
orientation. Is Desai being political and ideological rather than
sociological? Is he interested more in changing the world rather than
interpreting it?
Problems of empirical substantiation also occur in Desafs work
from his first book, Social background of Indian nationalism. Here he
argues that pre-colonial India did not have private property and that
village India was self-sufficient, autocratic, and unprogressive—
among other things. Though there is now enough historical material
to question these assessments, Desai did not retract these errors in
subsequent editions of his book. If his project was completely poli¬
tical, as is argued, then the logic of its ideology suggests that he should
not have translated Mclver and Page’s textbook, Sociology, into
Gujarati for students of sociology, nor should he have termed his
sociology of the agrarian system ‘Rural Sociology’. As he has himself
suggested, the term Rural Sociology emerged in the context of deve¬
lopments in agriculture in the United States, especially the growth
of a new class of farmers. One wonders why he uses this terminology
when terms like peasant society and agrarian society were available
within Marxism. Moreover, his introduction to the book gives a
classification of aspects of rural life, and not an historical-materialist
rendering of the nature of rural structure. If he became aware of
these concepts later, why did he not change the titles of his books, or
insert addenda? An entire generation of students has read and orga¬
nised their ideas of agrarian systems on the basis of a very specific
definition of rural sociology. One wonders why Desai allowed this
conservative categorisation to continue in his own work? Surely it
does not advance scholarship or extend his political project?
It is not that Marxist theory was insensitive to issues of method,
and was not seized of the need for using new categories to embrace
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 439

new social experiences. When Desai was writing his sociology, the
Frankfurt School’s debates on various aspects of Marxism were being
elaborated. Desai’s own predilection was for a historical perspective.
And he was certainly aware of the debates in Marxist historiography
regarding transition and transformation and issues of class and state
(widely discussed among the New Left, as most of its members were
influenced by Trotskyite ideas).20 In the 1970s and 1980s Desai was
concerned more with the present than the past, and he interacted
closely with Marxists developing the Dependency and Development
of Underdevelopment theories rather than historians. As shown earl¬
ier, his attempt was to provide a specific interpretation of the Indian
case against the background of underdevelopment theories: the latter
were mainly economists keenly involved in examining new forms of
the capitalist system in the emerging world economy, rather than
evaluating the Marxist method and methodology.
That Desai’s agenda was organised in political terms is not in
doubt. But here politics should imply a perspective rather than a
specific strategy of political mobilisation and intervention through
collective action. Though a member of a political party, he did not
allow the party line to dictate his intellectual questions and theories.
He can be called a scholar-activist, with his scholarship defined by a
political perspective, a commitment to assess facts in the context of
values. It was this perspective that led him to ask sociological ques¬
tions and evaluate contemporary processes in the context of the
nation-state rather than the microscopic local that dominated the
perspective of social anthropology. It is this perspective that made
him a sensitive observer of the ills besetting India as he attempted to
build an analysis to eliminate them. His assessments were macro¬
level attempts to understand the play of social and political forces in
the context of the nation-state, and thus possessed contemporan¬
eity. He was clear that the key to these ills lay in property relations

20 This was related to the assessment of the peculiarities of the English case
and led to a debate between E.P. Thompson and the New Left. The key to this
debate was the contending methodologies developed by the empirical school
of Marxist historiography in England and the New School, against the new
approach that combined Western Marxist methodologies and theories.
Additionally, Desai knew Thompson; the latter visited him when he came to
India.
440 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

established in India through colonialism and nationalism. In this

sense, nationalism was a theoretical frame through which he evalua¬
ted both the causes and consequences of contemporary processes. It
also became a mediatory link to build a Marxist sociology for India.
Desai s corpus of work is an attempt to educate sociologists and
the general public about the contradictions that affect Indian society.
When he is arguing for nationalism or making visible the complexi¬
ties of peasant movements in India (much before the Subalterns made
the study of peasants fashionable), or analysing communalism and
claiming human rights for all, he. shows an understanding of Indian
society unparalleled among social scientists of the day. In many ways
his theories, and the broad strokes in which he argued them, paved
the way for new arguments to be presented and new positions to be
taken. Most significantly, his work as an archivist helped to make
visible the complexities of the colonial and post-colonial experiences
that shaped sociological processes in India.
This political orientation defined Desai s work within the depart¬
ment in Bombay University as teaching and learning became activities
that would inspire students and like-minded colleagues to identify
processes in the world around them. Bombay then was the theatre
of new struggles: it saw the growth of the Shiv Sena as well as the
Dalit movement. Additionally, there were demonstrations, meetings,
and strikes launched by organised workers, which included anti price-
rise demonstrations and the railway strike. The pre- and post-Emer-
gency periods saw the growth of the women’s movement. Desai con¬
sidered these events an example of the maturity in contradictions.
He initiated research projects to study these events (such as the
projects on slums, the history of working class struggles, state, society
and development) and simultaneously encouraged students, collea¬
gues, and comrades to do research on these issues.21 He also tried to
integrate these concerns within the intellectual community of the
city."" These concerns flowed into the curriculum of the department.

1 Desai guided the theses of 28-odd students. Topics ranged from Marxist
theory, uroan issues, industrial structure, labour and trade movements, peasant
movements, and agrarian structure, as well as the sociology of art.
Desai started study circles in which scientists from the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research and students and academics of the Indian Institute of
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 441

New papers such as Sociology of Development, Sociology of Marx,

Sociology of Economic Planning, and Sociology of Art were intro¬
duced during his headship (Savur 2002).
However, Desai’s audience was larger than that defined by the
profession of sociology or that of the social sciences. And he wrote
directly for this larger audience, not only in English but increasingly
in Gujarati. The C.G. Shah Trust that he set up put into circulation
small pamphlets containing his essays for the general public. He also
wrote for The call, the party journal of the Revolutionary Socialist
Party, and started and edited a Gujarati journal called Padkar. His
commitment to the need for a ‘correct’ interpretation of processes
taking place in India and for collective action made him align first
with the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which he joined in 1953 and
remained a member of till 1981. Later he continued to work with
the Inquilabi Sangathan of India (a section of the Fourth Interna¬
tional in India) till his death.
A.R. Desai believed that the first task of a revolutionary was to
make a correct assessment of society: to this end, he devoted every
moment of his life. His all-pervading enthusiasm was for a critical
engagement with the world fashioned by capitalism, in an effort to
demystify it. And so was his involvement in various struggles—those
of workers and peasants, tribes and castes, women and slum dwellers,
all of which provided ways of confronting the dominant order of
the ruling class and different visions for developing a new society
free from exploitation. This passion to learn, to relate, and to identify
with movements of the oppressed enveloped him, and overflowed
through him to others who came in contact with him.
Desai s ebullience and commitment were reinforced by personal
traits of warmth, affection, and overwhelming generosity. As a result,
he left an imprint on all those whom he encountered, whether Marx¬
ists or not, whether colleagues or students, whether activists or those
who were ideologically neutral. Possibly, this was also because his
interpersonal relationships were marked by a deep sense of human¬
ism and a complete belief in democratic practices. In a predominantly

Technology participated together with students and colleagues from Bombay

University (Savur 2002: 59).
442 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

hierarchical academic and political culture, he stood out for being

absolutely non-hierarchical. He, his comrades, and his students parti¬
cipated as equals in study circles that he led, analysing processes of
class formation and state oppression in India. He continued with
this work after his retirement in 1975. He moved back to Gujarat
and interacted with its intellectual community. He travelled around
the state, building groups that engaged with the changes taking place,
making Baroda his base. His end, at the age of 79, came there.

REFERENCES

A.R. Desai: A Short Bibliography

1948. Social background of Indian nationalism. New York: Oxford University

Press.
1973 [I960]. Recent trends in nationalism. Bombay: Popular Pmkashan.
1979 [1961]. Rural India in transition. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
1969 [1953], ed. Rural sociology in India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
1971, ed. Essays on modernization of underdeveloped societies, vols 18c 2. Bombay:
Thacker and Co. Ltd.
1975. State and society in India. Essays in dissent. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
1979, ed. Peasant struggles in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
1980. Urban family and family planning in India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
1984. India’s path of development: A Marxist approach. Bombay: Popular Praka¬
shan.
1986, ed. Agrarian struggles in India after independence. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
1986, ed. Violation of democratic rights in India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
1990, ed. Repression and resistance in India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
A.R. Desai and S.D. Pillai, eds. 1970. Slums and urbanisation. Bombay: Popular
Prakashan.
. 1972. A profile of an Indian slum. Bombay: University of Bombay.

Secondary Sources

Ahmad, A., ed., 2001. On the national and colonial questions. Selected writings of
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. New Delhi: Leftword.
Amarasinghe, Y.R. 2000. Revolutionary idealism and parliamentary politics. A
study oflrotskyism in Sri Lanka. Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association.
Balgopal, K. 1986. Agrarian struggles. Review (article) of Agrarian struggles in
 TOWARDS A PRAXIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING 443

India after independence, ed. A.R. Desai. Economic and political weekly 21,
32: 1401-5. Reprinted in G. Hargopal, ed., Probings in the political economy
of agrarian classes and conflicts, pp. 3-20. Hyderabad: Perspectives, 1988.
Chandra, Bipan. 1979. Nationalism and colonialism in modern India. Delhi:
Orient Longman.
Gorman, R., ed. 1986. Desai, Akshya Kumar Ramanlal. In Bibliographical
dictionary of Marxism, pp. 92-4. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Ludden, D., ed. 2001. Reading Subaltern studies. Critical history, contesting
meaning and the globalisation of South Asia. Delhi: Permanent Black.
Patel, S. 1998. The nostalgia for the village. M.N.Srinivas and the making of
Indian social anthropology. South Asia 21,1:49-61.
-. 2002. The profession and its association: Five decades of the Indian
Sociological Society. International sociology 17, 2: 269-84.
Savur, M. and I. Munshi, eds. 1995. Contradictions in Indian society. Essays in
honour of Professor A. R. Desai. Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications.
Savur, M. 2002. A history of the Bombay School of Sociology (draft).
Shah, Ghanshyam. 1990. Capitalist development: Critical essays (Felicitation
Volume in Honour of Professor A.R. Desai). Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
 12

Ties that Bind

Tribe, Village, Nation, and S.C. Dube1

Saurabh Dube

WHEN SHYAMA CHARAN DUBE DIED IN FEBRUARY 1996 AT THE

age of 73, he left behind a body of writing and a sphere of influence,

spanning almost half a century, which traversed various disciplines,
languages, and arenas. Initiated into the academy through the tribal
anthropology of the 1940s, Dube was a major player in the village
studies boom of the 1950s, straddled scholarship and administration
over the 1960s, primarily occupied higher positions in academic
bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s, and dedicated himself to
political-cultural writing in Hindi after the mid-1980s. At each step,
Dubes interests and presence could not be simply compartmentalis¬
ed into discrete arenas, easily divided into distinct roles. His life and

1 For obvious reasons, I have found this a very difficult essay to write. For
reasons still unclear, an enormous resistance to writing and revision overcame
me at different points. I would like to thank Ishita Banerjee for sustenance and
comments through the process, Feela Dube for answering queries and detailed
inputs, and the editors of this volume for their patience. I also acknowledge
interviews/conversations with Feela Dube, T. N. Madan, Andre Beteille,
Yogendra Singh, and McKim Marriot. Discussions with Purushottam Agarwal,
Michael Herzfeld, David Forenzen, and Anupama Rao put matters in
perspective. The comments of two anonymous readers on the essay were more
than helpful.

'A
 TIES THAT BIND

Fig. 12: Portrait of S.C. Dube (Photograph courtesy Leela Dube)

445
446 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

work were shaped by the interplay between the cosmopolitan and

the vernacular, while imbuing such intersections with a distinct twist,
a particular salience. Writing as a son and an academic, a critic and
an admirer, heeding a warning Arthur O. Lovejoy issued several de¬
cades ago, I feel it would be a mistake to treat S.C Dube’s work and
life as all of a piece’.2 Rather, Dube’s contribution and legacy emerge
from a dynamic but chequered career, a productive yet divided voca¬
tion, an accomplished life but with under-realised possibilities.
My purpose in this essay is not so much to construct a narrative
about Dube’s legacy to the disciplines of anthropology and sociology
as to discuss aspects of his work and life—attributes of an intellectual
biography. Here I feel it is important to consider the texture of Dube’s
vocation and the terms of his writing by thinking through their inner
tensions—from fluctuations and hesitations, to juxtapositions of
opposed sensibilities and contrary ideas, to subterranean continuities
tied up with productive contradictions, to expressions of ambiguities
and containments of ambivalences. On the one hand my endeav¬
our is informed by the history of anthropology (e.g. Stocking 1992,
1995; Tambiah 2002; Vincent 1990; see also, Peirano 1998), while
being concerned with the difference introduced when understanding
a particular scholar, the subject of an old colony and a new nation.
On the other hand my effort keeps in view works exploring the con¬
junction of ethnography and biography (e.g. Battaglia 1995; Herzfeld
1997; Orlove 1995; Reed-Danahay 1997); while keeping a historian’s
disposition, interweaving historical readings with anthropological
sensibilities. I will focus on the first four decades of Dube’s life, which
saw the publication of three important books by him. Then, based
upon this discussion, towards the end of the essay I will raise a few
questions concerning Dube’s later career and writing.

I. EARLY YEARS

Born in the unremarkable town of Seoni (Central Provinces) on

25 July 1922 into a family of comfortable if middling circumstances,
Shyama Charan was the only child of Dharma and Mool Chand

Of course, Lovejoy (cited in Kern 1983:10) was speaking of the reading of

texts, an emphasis that bears extension to the narratives of lives. On such
conjunctions see, for example, S. Dube (forthcoming).
 TIES THAT BIND 447

Dube. Although there were close links with his ancestral home in
Narsinghpur, close to Jabalpur, Mool Chand Dube after obtaining a
Bachelors degree in agriculture, worked in a transferable position,
as a middle-ranking official in the Agriculture Department of the
Central Provinces Government. However, this employment did not
last long. Soon after the birth of his son, while in Seoni and following
a racist remark by a British superior, Mool Chand resigned from his
position. If this bold measure was born of personal pride, it carried
the support of his wife.
By all accounts Dharma Dube was an unusual woman. Striking
and beautiful—in the memory of those who had seen her; no photo¬
graph survives—she was also a person of integrity and intelligence.
Her pride and politics played upon familial registers. An ardent
nationalist, after the death of Bal Gangadhar Tilak a grief-stricken
Dharma refused to eat for four days. While living in Narsinghpur, as
part of the joint family, she quietly but firmly asserted her dignity
before a self-willed and tyrannical mother-in-law, always covering
her head modestly with the end of her sari, but ever refusing to en¬
tirely hide her face behind it. Influenced by writings on the new Hindu
woman in Hindi literary magazines of the day, she extended susten¬
ance and solidarity to the other, younger daughters-in-law in the
family and neighbourhood. Indeed, S.C. Dube liked to describe his
mother as the ‘first feminist in the family’. So it is barely surprising
that Dharma more than stood by her husband when he resigned
from a job that afforded security at the cost of dignity to take up a
less prestigious position, without the benefits of a pension, in the
semi-government Court of Wards Service in the Chhattisgarh Divi¬
sion of the Central Provinces.
Before Independence the Chhattisgarh region comprised the
khalsa—areas under direct rule of the imperial government; several
feudatory states; and numerous zamindaris—landed estates under
petty chieftains that had a semi-independent status, these zamindars
(petty chieftains) placed under the charge of the Deputy Commis¬
sioner of the zamindari system. When a zamindar (or a feudatory
chief) died with a minor to succeed him—or when a state or an
estate were ‘mismanaged’ or became insolvent—they came under
the charge of the Court of Wards. In the mid-1920s Mool Chand
Dube took up the position of an administrator in the Court of Wards
448 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Service, and, over the next two and a half decades, he worked prim¬
arily as Manager in zamindaris such as Deori, Pitora, Bilaigarh, and
Phingeshwar, all in the western reaches of Chhattisgarh.
These zamindaris mainly occupied heavily forested regions, com¬
prising a population that a colonial administrator described with
characteristic candour as ‘sparse and backward consisting principally
of the simple aboriginal tribes’ (Nelson 1909: 310). It was here that
the child Shyama Charan took primary education, also making his
first, distant acquaintance with the adivasi peoples of these estates.
It was here too that his mother told him stories derived from the
Mahabharata and Ramayana, tales of nationalist leaders, and legends
of Hindu heroes, including Sikh Gurus; and Shyama himself brought
out a magazine, ‘Sevak’, written by hand on un-ruled paper, his
mother and father its sole readers. And it was amidst hill and forest
that the little Shyama, barely eight years old, lost his vibrant young
mother: Dharma, dying of tuberculosis, adored always by her hus¬
band and child, was unable in her last days to have either come close
to her. Shyama Charan retained a vivid recall of these times, places,
tales, feelings; and these memories became a palpable force—a struc¬
ture of sentiment, a texture of experience—traversing his vocation
and haunting his life.
After Dharma’s death the father and son rebuilt their lives founded
on loss—sorrow shared more than suffering spoken. Now, Shyama
Charan studied in schools away from Chhattisgarh, first in Narsingh-
pur, living with his grandmother, and then at Model School in Jabal¬
pur, lodging in the Boarding House there. During school vacations
he would return to his father’s home, books becoming his compan¬
ions through solitary summer days and long winter nights. Away at
school, but even more in a large house occupied by two inhabitants,
with few acquaintances and no friends around, he read voraciously.
I began with popular detective novels—Robert Blake and Sexton
Blake but soon graduated to serious fiction and poetry in Hindi,
and later to classics in English’ (Dube 1993: 24).3 Both in Hindi and

1 his short text primarily consists of Dube’s autobiographical recollections

ot his times in anthropology/sociology and academic administration. I have
quoted from it liberally in the earlier parts of this essay for two reasons. First,
 TIES THAT BIND 449

English, the works he read included translations from other Indian

and European languages. Reading was not all: ‘While still in High
School I began to write, and dashed off my efforts to magazines’
(ibid.). These first efforts included pieces on popular cinema, their
publication a matter of immense pride for the adolescent Shyama
Charan. During these years his loneliness also led to an interest in
the folklore of Chhattisgarh, a region that was to become the base of
his writing and research for most of the 1940s.
Shyama Charan took the school-leaving examination in Hindi,
apart from the obligatory papers in English language and literature.
This was his nascent nationalist nod towards the live possibility of
Indian languages and against the assumption that English alone was
the medium of success. He performed well enough in this test but
did not secure the results expected of him. Three months before the
examination he had enrolled as a volunteer at the Tripuri Session of
the Indian National Congress. At the meetings, the machinations of
the old guard and the marginalization of the younger force within
the Congress captured Shyama Charan’s youthful passion and poli¬
tics.* * * 4 The event itself was enormously demanding of his time and
drained his energy, leaving him less than fully prepared for the final
rite of passage out of High School. Dube’s father’s disappointment
at his son’s examination results was expressed in a single statement:
‘I had not expected this of you.’

II. ENTERING ANTHROPOLOGY

For the Intermediate degree, Shyama Charan came to Raipur, joining

Chhattisgarh College, which was affiliated to Nagpur University. Here
he built upon his prior, extra-mural interests. While in his first year

such a move foregrounds the memory of Dube as subject, particularly when

the passages are read alongside other materials and memories, setting up an
interplay between distinct terms of remembrance. Second, the volume in which
Dube’s piece appears is often difficult to find, a result of poor distribution.
4 As is well known, it was in the Tripuri session that Subhas Bose was effect¬
ively sidelined after having been (re)elected as President of the Indian National
Congress. Gandhi played an important role here (Sarkar 1983: 372-5).
450 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of college, he wrote in Hindi and English on the folksongs and folk¬

tales of Chhattisgarh, the articles being published in journals such
as Hans, Modern review, and Vishal Bharat.5 Somewhat later Shyama
Charan also published a collection of Chhattisgarhi folksongs in the
form of a small book, also in Hindi. As his range of interests expand¬
ed, he seemed—in his own remembrance—to be imperceptibly pre¬
paring the ground for a vocation in anthropology:

From folklore I moved to people, and wrote about their customs and
traditions. The anthropologist within me was taking shape, although
at that time I did not know what anthropology was all about. Around
this time I came in contact with two tribal groups, the Kamar and
Bhunjia. They came to my father with petitions or in connection with
court cases that he was hearing. They would never spend the night in
a town or in a mixed-caste settlement, retreating always to the jungle
nearby. I liked their shy smiles and their openness. I persuaded them to
sing, to tell stories, and to talk about their life and problems. I was irre¬
trievably being drawn into anthropology. (Dube 1993: 24)

Yet these were contradictory times, their downs and ups partly excised
by Dube s recollection of his entry into anthropology.
During his second year as a student of Chhattisgarh College, stric¬
ken by typhoid, he nearly died. Indeed, his state was so critical that
the principal closed the college for a day in his remembrance. Luckily
he survived, although his preparation for the Intermediate Examin¬
ation consisted of a friend, Dashrath Chaube, reading from textbooks
and supplementary texts to him. Shyama Charan nonetheless posted
remarkable results. All this turned him into a local legend in a provin¬
cial town. It is hardly surprising that those around him felt that his
future lay in entering the Indian Civil Service (ICS). I do not know
how Shyama Charan looked upon this possibility at the time, but he

Needless to say, these were reputed and significant periodicals of the day.
Hans and Vishal Bharat were flagship endeavours in Hindi writing inspired by
Munshi Premchand and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, respectively. Later, Dube would
recall his enormous audacity in sending the articles to these journals, and his
sense of utter disbelief and extraordinary excitement at their being accepted
for publication.
 TIES THAT BIND 451

wanted to offer his father a spectacular university career. After com¬

pleting the Intermediate degree, inspired by Ziauddin Khan, his
teacher of Civics (and a friend) in Raipur, in 1941 Shyama Charan
enrolled for the BA (Honours) in Political Science at Nagpur Univer¬
sity. He was now studying and living in the capital of the Central
Provinces. His performance in the first year was exemplary, betoken¬
ing a bright future.
During the Quit India movement various educational institutions
closed down, Nagpur University among them. Shyama Charan re¬
turned to stay with his father, also visiting Raipur. While there, in
those heady, stormy days, Shyama Charan and an acquaintance—
possibly from Chhattisgarh College—engaged in a youthful prank,
considering it as nationalist politics, as their own contribution to
ridding India of British rule. They sought to burn a post box. The
police caught them. The post box counted as crown property. A cri¬
minal case ensued. The details are not clear. Most people who knew
Shyama Charan then accorded little significance to these events, but
Dube himself emerged terribly shaken, refusing until the end of his
life to talk about the matter, as was his way with unhappy memories.
He had disappointed his father a second time, undoing, too, his own
certainties regarding life and the future.
Back in Nagpur, Dube read widely for his elected subject, particu¬
larly works of political thought, even as he searched for a vocation.
No longer envisioning the ICS as a possibility, but thinking about
journalism as an option, he sent for the handbook of the Journalism
Faculty at Columbia University. The other alternative he considered
was anthropology; he tried to find out more about the subject. ‘The
library of Nagpur University did not have a rich collection of books
on anthropology. . . . Grigson’s Maria Gonds of Bastar; Elwin’s
Baiga . . . Christoph von Fiirer Haimendorf’s Chenchus; and Sarat
Chandra Roy’s Kharia. Later a copy of Lowie’s Primitive Society was
acquired. Frazer’s formidable Golden Bough was also there. I read
bits and pieces of it without much comprehension’ (Dube 1993: 24-
5). More concrete help came from an unexpected source: ‘About this
time I had a chance meeting with K.B. Lall, then an I.C.S. proba¬
tioner. ... He had studied anthropology for the I.C.S. examination
in England. He spoke of the climate of British anthropology and the
452 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

debates around the approaches of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.

As a model of analysis he suggested Malinowski’s Crime and Custom,
which he also generously lent me. I borrowed several other books
from him. My ideas were still hazy but my mind was being made
up . . .’ (ibid).
Indeed, Dube soon decided upon a career in anthropology, begin¬
ning with a study of a tribe of hunter-gatherers and shifting-culti¬
vators, the Kamar, for the PhD, which he would pursue in Nagpur
University. Many of his well-wishers considered this a foolhardy
move, particularly as he had secured a first division and first position
in the BA Political Science (Honours) examination. Not only was he
the first student to gain a first class in this examination at Nagpur
University—it being a difficult programme of study that was equal
to an MA in the subject, along the Madras (or Oxbridge) pattern, but
also the university did not offer anthropology or sociology as subjects.
Nonetheless, for the PhD project, Dube got generous support in the
form of two research awards—the King Edward Memorial Research
Scholarship and, a little later, the Morris Memorial Fellowship—of
Nagpur University. Fie was to be supervised by the Political Science
Department’s A. Sen, who had popularized anthropology and socio¬
logy in Nagpur. And he was also advised to consult the man who had
put Central India on the map of anthropology, Verrier Elwin.

III. FIRST FIELDWORK

Dube had established primary contacts with the Kamars in 1939, re¬
cording their folksongs and taking notes on their ‘life and living’.
Gradually, his collection of Kamar songs had grown and his interest
in their ‘culture’ had increased, permitting him to publish represent¬
ative examples of the former and a brief account of the latter. This
work was enabled by continued visits to Kamar settlements that al¬
lowed him to acquire a working knowledge of the Kamari dialect,
also conversing with the group in Chhattisgarhi, which many of its
members spoke by the latter part of the inter-War period. Based up¬
on this familiarity, Dube (1951: x) began his fieldwork for the PhD
project on the Kamar in the second half of 1944, limiting his ‘field to
the southern part of the Raipur district in Chhattisgarh, specially to
the still wild and backward Zamindari of Bindranawagarh’.
 TIES THAT BIND 453

Aided by his father’s contacts in the region, Dube began fieldwork

accompanied by his friend, Dashrath Chaube, and a cartman-cum-
cook, Polu Kewat.

My research procedure was simple. I had to record all that I saw and
heard. The outline of the coverage was provided by the standard mono¬
graphs and by the sacred Notes and Queries brought out by the Royal
Anthropological Institute. I was in no tearing hurry to start interview¬
ing my informants. I began instead by observing the physical aspects of
the settlement and its daily routine. When young people went out to
collect fruits, roots, and tubers, I accompanied them. I also joined their
hunting and fishing expeditions. They mostly hunted small game—
rabbits and barking deer, or an occasional wild hog or spotted deer.
Night fishing was particularly thrilling. I also observed the sixth day
ceremony for [a] newborn, two weddings, and a burial. This was occa¬
sion for me to witness several stages of the slash and burn method of
cultivation. When people had opened up sufficiently I began asking
questions. Most of my data was gathered through informal discussions.
My Zeiss-Ikon Superlkonta camera was also active, although because
of wartime shortages film was hard to get and expensive. (Dube 1993:
26)

Yet, these idyllic days soon yielded to live difficulties. Now, the wider
terms of the unequal encounter between the anthropologist and the
subject became palpable:

I stayed in the wild and sparsely populated Bindranawagarh Zamindari,

the home of the Kamars, from January to June 1945. Unfortunately, my
tours of investigation in the Kamar country were preceded by a drive
for recruitment to the labour units of the army. This created difficul¬
ties for me. A rumour went around that I had come to enlist the Kamars
for war. Our initial efforts to establish contacts with the people were
mostly fruitless, and on several occasions we found that on our ap¬
proach the entire population of the village deserted it. The first few
weeks were thus spent in disappointment. (Dube 1951: 8)

Almost fifty years after, Dube (1993: 26) added that his mistake lay
in ‘recording genealogies and taking a village census before I had
established a proper rapport. I was recording their names, they
thought, to conscript them into the army.’ This was not all. There
454 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

were other differential perceptions as Dube (1951: x) penetrated

deeper into the field and visited Kamar settlements in the hills’, for,
‘Although I could speak their dialect I was still an outsider and there¬
fore suspect. A taciturn elder did not take kindly to my camera. From
him spread the notion that each time a person was photographed he
lost a little bit of his “life-substance.” All I could do was show hund¬
reds of enlargements of photographs that I had taken earlier in my
research without bringing any calamity upon their subjects’ (Dube
1993:26).
What allayed the Kamars’ suspicions? In the 1940s Dube had writ¬
ten of establishing‘some valuable contacts’, of securing the ‘friendship
of Dukalu, Sukalu, and Bhainsa, the celebrated Kamar Baiga’, which
cleared earlier misgivings, leading to their ‘excellent co-operation’.
In the early 1990s the ethnographer-ethnologist presented a more
dramatic account concerning how he convinced the Kamars:

One afternoon I found myself surrounded by the inhabitants of the

settlement. Their mood was ugly. No book had prepared me for a situ¬
ation like this. I had a flash. I said, ‘I am young. When I go back the
British may recruit me forcibly. That is why I am hiding here.’ A few
smiles encouraged me to go on: ‘Keep me here. If there is a dumb-
witted girl I will marry her. Never mind if she is ugly and has been
deserted by her husband. But keep me here.5 There was a burst of laugh¬
ter. The dark clouds of suspicion had cleared. The next day I was taking
photographs and recording genealogies again, without a murmur of
protest. (Dube 1993: 26-7)

The tensions between these accounts notwithstanding, the vignet¬

tes stand shaped around a specific story line, intimating unexpected
hurdles to research, each overcome, all in the interest of anthropology.
At the same time, folded into the accounts, including in Dube’s
remembrance of the adventure and romance of fieldwork—lingering
invocations of‘cool and comfortable shelters’, of lurking wild animals
kept at bay through fires lit at night and the beating of drums—
there lie other tales. They point poignantly to Dube’s ambivalent
presence as an anthropologist, at once ‘alien’ and ‘native’ among a
tribal people, primitive’ yet ‘his own’, in the midst of war and cons¬
cription an ambivalence and a present that shaped the Kamar study.
 TIES THAT BIND 455

In the months that followed, travelling on foot or in a bullock

cart, Dube (1951: x) made ‘an extensive tour of the wild hill-villages’,
also visiting Kamar settlements in the Khariar Zamindari in Orissa.
Here he ‘witnessed a number of important rites and ceremonies and
recorded a very full sociological census of a number of important
villages visited’, further tracing nearly 200 genealogies. While these
visits provided the mainstay of materials that underlay Dube’s dissert¬
ation and book on the Kamar, the fieldwork itself was interspersed
with an important interlude which was to have important consequen¬
ces for his research and, indeed, his life.
Late in the first quarter of 1945 Dube came to Nagpur, possibly
to collect his fellowship money from the university. Here he received
an unusual proposal. Leela Ambardekar, then studying for an MA in
Political Science, had heard of Shyama Charan, two years her senior,
as a brilliant student. She had only recently told her parents that,
rather than their seeking a suitable match for her, she would try to
find herself a husband. Now, she had a glimpse of Shyama Charan:
‘When I saw him he was wearing khadi clothes. I sought further in¬
formation about Dube from my younger sister’s husband who was
acquainted with him. Dube belonged to a Hindi speaking Brahmin
sub-caste, but did not feel compelled to marry within his biradri
(endogamous group). He too was, opposed to dowry, rituals, and
ostentation. He looked forward to an academic career’ (L. Dube 2000:
4039). Leela’s brother-in-law carried the proposal for marriage. Al¬
though the perspective groom was somewhat chary of marrying at
the time, he agreed, stipulating that the wedding would only take
place once he had a job, their decision approved of by Leela’s parents
and Dube’s father. Dube soon resumed his research in the field.
Around this time Dube was offered a lecturership, teaching Politi¬
cal Science, in Hislop College at Nagpur, which he took up in July
1945. A little over a month later Leela and he were married in a simple
civil ceremony. When Dube returned to the field in April 1946 he
was accompanied by his wife. Collecting ‘important data on tribal
law and its breaches’ while checking ‘the materials collected in
previous tours’ (Dube 1951: x), his fieldwork was aided immensely
by her presence. Not only did he find greater acceptance among the
Kamars as a married man, Leela also helped secure invaluable
456 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

information—and a wider perspective—through her access to Kamar

women. Although she had no formal anthropological training, she
was already familiar with Dube’s research, helping him with analysis
of the data and the writing of the dissertation, which he had begun
soon after their marriage. Back in Nagpur, Dube completed and sub¬
mitted his dissertation on the Kamar, helped ‘unobtrusively’ by his
formal supervisor, Shri Sen, and aided by the warmth and support
of Verrier Elwin, his unofficial advisor. As an examiner of the thesis,
Christoph von Fiirer-Haimendorf appreciated the work, finding it
comprehensive and capable. The dissertation was to provide Dube’s
first monograph, The Kamar, but this had to await moves to other
institutions.

IV. INVIGORATING TIMES

Teaching Political Science in a small institution was confining Dube.

There was little by way of sustained anthropological debate and
discussion in Nagpur. Meeting senior figures in the discipline, such
as D.N. Majumdar and Irawati Karve—both of whom delivered en¬
dowment lectures in Nagpur University—and attending the occasio¬
nal anthropological event was exciting, but these encounters perhaps
also enhanced Dube’s larger sense of intellectual isolation. Majumdar
drew him into the board of editors of the newly launched Eastern
anthropologist and also published a collection of Chhattisgarhi folk¬
songs by Dube (1948) under the auspices of the Ethnographic and
Folk Culture Society of UP, but even this did not alleviate the intellec¬
tual loneliness. In the second half of 1947 Dube hesitatingly applied
for, and in the following year delightedly accepted, the position of
Lecturer in Political Science at Lucknow University.
Around the time of Independence, Lucknow University was a re¬
markable institution. Here Dube learnt about ecology and regional
planning from Radhakamal Mukerjee, picking up Valuable ideas
about the importance of tradition’ from D.P. Mukerii. Above all, he
interacted professionally with D.N. Majumdar, whose ‘zest for
anthropology was infectious. He lived anthropology, talked anthro¬
pology, and, I suspect, even dreamt anthropology. We talked about
the gaps in the ethnographic map of India and of the monographs
 TIES THAT BIND 457

that remained to be written; and about how anthropology could be

useful in the administration of tribal areas’ (Dube 1993: 30). These
discussions were based upon concrete collaboration. On the one
hand, in addition to his duties in the Political Science Department,
Dube was assigned classes in anthropology—teaching economic
organisation, social organisation, and religion—for a few hours a
week, sharing Majumdar’s burden. On the other, Dube was an active
volunteer in the activities of the Ethnographic and Folk Culture So¬
ciety, recently founded by Majumdar, also assisting his senior collea¬
gue in the running of the Society’s journal, Eastern anthropologist.
In Lucknow, Dube met keen academic challenges alongside wider
intellectual stimulation. Beyond anthropology, there were convers¬
ations with other scholars, an engagement with other disciplines.
Beyond academics, there was lively political interchange, meetings
in the Coffee House with important public figures, representing a
range of political persuasions, from Communists to Lohiaites to
Congressmen, including the occasional presence of a charismatic
parliamentarian, Feroze Gandhi. Dube read widely, delving into the
rich collection at the Tagore Library of the University. He also began
systematically building a personal library that cut across disciplines
and included various literatures, buying from two superb bookshops,
Universal and Ram Advani.
In this invigorating atmosphere, Dube finalised the Kamar study
for publication. Already, before his move to Lucknow, the work was
quite complete. By way of a commendation of the manuscript, pos¬
sibly in order to help Dube secure a subsidy towards its publication,
Verrier Elwin had sent him a handwritten note in June 1947:

I have had the pleasure of reading Mr S.C. Dubes MSS on the Kamars.
It is a substantial contribution to Indian anthropology. It is thorough,
fresh, well-written and gives a clear and vivid picture of the life of the
tribe. Mr Dube evidently has a future in anthropology, and I hope it
will be possible for his work to be published in the style it deserves. . ..
I again commend Mr Dube’s work as of high excellence and as among
the best by an Indian writer of recent times.

In Lucknow, Dube partially revised and mainly polished the manus¬

cript.
458 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

The Kamar was published under the auspices of the Ethnographic

and Folk Culture Society, Majumdar extending a great deal of practi¬
cal support to the project. The work bore the impress of discussions
with Majumdar on the application of anthropology to the admin¬
istration of tribal communities. Deeper anthropological influences
upon the study came from Dubes long-term engagement with the
work of Elwin and his ongoing exchanges with Furer-Haimendorf.
At the same time, he registered a particular voice in the book, provid¬
ing a distinct twist to Elwin s primitivist blueprints of anthropological
practice, bypassing Furer-Haimendorf's diffusionist concerns—these
being characteristic of the Vienna School. Dube’s first monograph
marks a specific moment in the passage of Indian anthropology,

V. TRIBE AND NATION

At the time, Dube saw the work as a contribution to the anthropology

of the Central Provinces. The book has a simple structure. Its intro¬
duction lays out the basics of the Kamar country, earlier accounts of
the tribe, and their attributes. The next three chapters describe, suc¬
cessively, the nature of Kamar settlements and forms of livelihood;
their patterns of social organization; and the phases in their lives.
The ensuing two chapters discuss customary law through its provi¬
sions and transgressions, sanctions and containments; and myths
and legends, ritual and religion, magic and witchcraft. The last two
chapters explore questions of‘cultural contacts’ and issues of‘tribal
adjustment’ under a nationalist dispensation. Recall that Dube had
described his approach to anthropology in The Kamar as being gov¬
erned by the standard monograph and the Notes and Queries format.
This actually led to a comprehensive presentation of ethnographic
materials, based upon careful fieldwork, enlivened by an anthropolo¬
gical sensitivity which was related to Dube’s wider familiarity with
region and subject. In addition, through brevity of style and economy
of expression, Dube averted the inelegance of the grab-all, salvage-
^a88age ethnography that confused volume with knowledge (see
Madan 1996: 300).
But the significance of the work might also be traced in other
ways. The Kamar lies in a cusp: the end of colonial rule and the arrival
 TIES THAT BIND 459

of Indian independence. The study was shaped by presumptions of

the prior‘primitive’, the ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot 1991) within colonial
ethnography, and yet it referred to Kamar life-ways as embedded
within wider social processes. It cast its subjects as caught within the
larger terms of nationalist transformation, but nonetheless constantly
returned to an essential Kamar tradition. Such tension does not
merely register a shift of accent in the study between portions written
earlier and sections drafted later. Nor is the tension simply disabling.
Rather, the tension is formative for the book, running through its
chapters. This is to say that The Kamar captures and contains the
ambiguities and ambivalences of S.C. Dubes thought and writing—
themselves indicative of anxieties at the heart of his discipline—at a
critical juncture, uneasily braiding anthropological demand and
nationalist desire, raising questions for ethnographic practice in the
shadow of empire and nation.6
The formative tensions and productive ambiguities of The Kamar
appear bound to the style, structure, and sentiment of the work.
Dube considered that primitive cultures were not static but dynamic,
especially since culture itself was an adaptive mechanism. Here the
notion of the primitive entailed twin registers. On the one hand it
signified backwardness upon an evolutionist axis, a self-explanatory
schema assumed a priori, the dominant vision of anthropology and
nation at the time. On the other hand it registered cultural difference,
coeval with the ethnographer, in the space of the nation, which invited
empathetic understanding. Thus, in the study, the imperative to des¬
cribe the Kamar way of life before it changed crisscrosses with the

61 am not suggesting that Dube’ first ethnographic monograph prematurely

reconciled these contrary tendencies. Rather, my point is that the text is the
site where such contradictory pressures are visible, the terrain where these
tensions were set in motion, also revealing and unravelling the conjunctions
and disjunctions between anthropological frames and nationalist formulations.
Just as prejudice is not merely a mistake but can also be productive of a truth,
so too are contradictions more than just lapses. My effort to stay with the
tensions that were constitutive of work such as The Kamar is to point towards
archival traces in the history of anthropology and the past of nationalism that
require further examination. For a rich exploration of middle-class dispositions
to the figure of the ‘primitive’ in colonial India, see Banerjee, 2006.
460 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

impulse to record the changing way of life of the Kamar, the dual
dispositions pulling apart but also coming together.
The Kamar cast the economy of its subjects as being in transition,
showing at crucial points that their social structure and oral traditions
stood shaped by interactions with other tribes. At the same time,
precisely through its terms of description, the work clung to the no¬
tion that the Kamars had not lost the ‘distinctiveness of their tribal
culture which shows very few signs of disintegration and degener¬
ation (Dube 1951: 177). Dube wrote of the Kamars as singing of
‘the Englishmans raj, where kantopwalas (hat-wearers) used to rule’,
and mentioned their ‘seriously talkfing] about Gandhi Mahatma,
the king of all kings . . . endowed with greater magical powers to fight
the white sahibs' (ibid.: 166). Poignantly, he recorded that the Kamars
‘talk despisingly about the Englishman who put an end to their age
old practice of dahi [shifting cultivation]. With suspicion they talk
of the suraj [swaraj], the reign of the Congress, in which “liquor may
be completely forbidden to them” and “they may not be allowed to
eat any meat” nor will “they be permitted to have two wives or more”.
They are afraid that in this new epoch they may even lose the sem¬
blance of freedom which they possessed under the British rule’ (ibid.:
166). Yet Dube described the Kamars as ‘almost untouched5 by the
‘great political awakening which has given a new national conscious¬
ness to India during the last sixty years5, and as barely affected by the
‘social and economic upheaval which had stirred the bulk of Indian
society to its depth5 (Dube 1951: 166). The narrative holds together,
but it also strains at the seams.
The tension is palpable, the strands intertwine, each constitutive
of The Kamar. For it is this strain and such braiding that suggest the
need to approach the work in a manner that does not simply assimi¬
late it to Elwins propositions regarding tribal segregation or Ghuryes
calls for tribal assimilation (on this debate, see Guha 1999: 155-60,
274-5), especially when Dube deals with the problem of tribal ‘adjust¬
ment5 in front of national reconstruction. Here analytical predilec¬
tions, ethnographic sensibilities, and nationalist imperatives appear
bound and separate, paternalist but also democratic, presenting the
Kamars as at once object of anthropology and subject of nation.
Long decades after, recalling how the book had stopped short of
 TIES THAT BIND 461

describing the quotidian forms of exploitation of the Kamars, the

abuse and corruption of local officials, and of the Kamars’ question¬
ing of everyday domination through their ‘improvised skits’, Dube
(1993:27) wrote that‘we really were the prisoners of a pattern.’Actu¬
ally, the very tensions and the precise ambivalences of The Kamar
hold up a mirror to the pattern, suggesting the need for readings
that reconsider the chequered history of Indian anthropology.
The profession was pleased with the book for its own reasons. In
his Foreword to the study, Christoph von Fiirer-Haimendorf (1951:
i) praised Dube’s ‘lucid and sympathetic description of the Kamars,
a tribe hitherto practically unknown to anthropology.’ An unsigned
review, which appeared in The Hindu, carried a slightly different
flavour:

Mr Dube’s book on the Kamar is a pleasant surprise, for it is published

in a series sponsored by the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society of
Lucknow, which includes some of the most inferior work done in
the field of Indian anthropology—and that is saying a good deal. But
Mr Dube’s monograph is admirable. It is the result of long and careful
research; it shows a sufficient acquaintance with technical method and
theory; it is simply and unpretentiously written. It obviously belongs
to the Elwin school of writing, and Mr Dube in several passages echoes
the ideas and methods of such a book as ‘The Baiga’.7

Writing in The illustrated weekly of India, Elwin himself reiterated

the terms of such critique and praise, finding The Kamar ‘quite bril¬
liantly illustrated’: ‘Dr Dube gives us really lovely photographs well
reproduced. The text, too, is good. Dr Dube knows his people and
wants the best for them . His chapter on “Problems of Tribal Adjust¬
ment” should be read by all Ministers of Tribal Welfare.’ But then
the twist: ‘Unfortunately, the book appears in a series sponsored by
the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society of Lucknow, whose pre¬
vious publications are masterpieces of shoddy scholarship. Dr Dube
should keep better company.’ On the one hand Elwin was seriously

7 In a few cases, including this one, I have been unable to trace the full refe¬
rence to reviews of Dube’s works. Nonetheless, I have cited these, providing
the bibliographic information that I have for them in the text.
462 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

concerned about poor publication qualities, a worry expressed in

the commendation note that he had sent Dube in June 1947: ‘Much
good work in this line [of anthropology] in India is spoilt by bad
printing and wretched reproduction of pictures. It is essential that
Mr Dube’s work be handled by a responsible publisher.’ On the other
hand Elwin used The Kamar to criticise Majumdar, who was a rival,
further aligning Dube’s work with his own writing.
Away from this struggle for turf in Indian anthropology, J.H.
Hutton (1952:77) at Cambridge wrote a generous review of the work
in Man, emphasising that:

Dr Dube has aimed at giving a full and integrated picture of the Kamar
culture and has done it well; and beyond that he has dealt with the
problems arising from the contact of these primitive hunters and
cultivators . , . with the external world of officials, traders and money¬
lenders, at whose hands they suffer the victimization and exploitation
so familiar to all of India’s primitive tribes. His treatment of these prob¬
lems and his views as to the measures which need to be taken are mod¬
erate and sane, and might well be acted upon by those now in author¬
ity. .. . Dr Dube is to be congratulated on his careful and objective work.

At the same time, outside India, the best known of Dube’s work in
tribal anthropology is a concise essay on ‘token pre-puberty marriage’
(1953), also published in Man and widely cited within the discipline.
Dube himself was in the midst of a journey from tribe to village.

VI. VILLAGE WORK

Much before The Kamar was published, and after a stay of less than
two years in Lucknow, Dube was invited to Hyderabad for an inter¬
view. Here Ftirer-Haimendorf served as Advisor on Tribal Welfare
to the Nizam’s Government while holding the position of Professor
of Anthropology in the Sociology Department at Osmania Univer¬
sity. He was soon to leave India and had suggested that Dube replace
him, at an appropriately junior rank, in the university. Following a
meeting over a drink with the vice-chancellor, Nawab Ali Yavar Jung,
at the Secundarabad Club, Dube was formally interviewed the next
 TIES THAT BIND 463

day under informal circumstances and offered the position. After a

moving farewell from Lucknow University, home to an eventful, pro¬
ductive period and one piercingly painful memory—during this time
the Dubes had lost their first child, a girl, who died some days after
birth—they found a home in yet another urban centre of Indian
Islam, Hyderabad.
A.midst somewhat eccentric, rather colourful, yet appropriately
supportive colleagues, Dube reorganised the syllabi in his new loca¬
tion, teaching a general introduction to anthropology, a survey of
the history of ethnological theory, and a course on ethnography.
While none of these was entirely innovative, the latter two courses
introduced aspects of recent developments in the discipline and com¬
parative perspectives on tribal cultures. But it was research that truly
occupied Dube in Hyderabad. On Fiirer-Haimendorf’s suggestion
that he work on a tribe in the region, Dube had explored possible
projects in adivasi pockets in the Andhra country, witnessing in the
process ruthless killings by the police of communists and their sym¬
pathisers. Yet the research he eventually undertook was wholly dif¬
ferent: the study of a village, Shamirpet, located in the Telangana
region, twenty-five miles from the twin cities of Hyderabad and
Secunderabad.
The project was an outcome of the shared imaginings of a season¬
ed, visionary administrator and a young, ambitious scholar:

the result of a conjunction of two somewhat dissimilar ideas. Ali Yavar

Jung . . . had in mind an experimental rural social service extension
project in which the different faculties of the university could pool their
insights and resources to work for the uplift of the village. I was think¬
ing of an in-depth study of a non-tribal village, different from the hun¬
dreds of surveys done by governmental agencies. The inputs of the seve¬
ral specialist units could enrich my study, which itself could serve as a
benchmark for later extension work. Ali Yavar Jung recognized the fit
between the two objectives and gave me the go-ahead to draw up a
comprehensive plan. (Dube 1993: 32)

The choice of Shamirpet combined practical and sociological consi¬

derations. Not too far for project members to reach and return on
464 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the same day, the village was more than merely a suburban extension;
and in terms of its size (area as well as population) and caste composi¬
tion, Shamirpet was representative of villages of the region.
The project team consisted of eighteen members drawn from six
faculties—Arts, Agriculture, Veterinary Science and Animal Hus¬
bandry, Medicine, Engineering, and Education—of Osrnania Uni¬
versity. Each unit carried out a research survey and conducted social
work in the area of its interest and competence. The units had consi¬
derable autonomy with respect to social work, limited chiefly by the
funds and resources available to them. At the same time, Dube and
four other members of the Sociology Department designed the dif¬
ferent surveys, also helping in the conduct of research by all units at
every stage.8 The inter-faculty team carried out twenty weeks of work
over two summer vacations, while the anthropology/sociology unit
was active in Shamirpet for an entire year. Dube himself divided his
time between Shamirpet, where he directed both the welfare and re¬
search activities of the project, and Hyderabad, home to teaching,
administration, and family life with Leela and their new-born son
Mukul.
On the one hand, given its novel objective of village welfare and
rural research as part of nation building in a former princely state—
a ‘feudal’ terrain—the project attracted from the beginning consider¬
able attention in the press, including a documentary film on the
venture. This tended to draw curious visitors and onlookers, their
presence often annoying and aggravating, a difficulty resolved parti¬
ally and gradually. On the other hand, the villagers themselves were
at first sullen and suspicious, regarding the project as a missionary
endeavour and then as anti-communist government propaganda,
their apprehensions allayed in steps:

8 These members from the Sociology Department were research assistants

on the project, mainly students who had recently finished their MA from
Osrnania University. Apart from Dube, the Sociology Department at Osrnania
included a guest lecturer, Nawab Mansab Jang Bahadur, and a professional socio¬
logist, Jafar Hasan, neither of them involved in the Shamirpet project (Dube
1993: 31). In the context of a social work project, this also meant that Dube
was the only one who produced an academic account (ethnographic or
otherwise) based on the work of the project.
 TIES THAT BIND 465

our resources, especially our tents, crockery and cooks and buses im¬
pressed them. The co-operation of highly placed officials rehabilitated
us in the eyes of the village folk, and many of them who went to the city
and made enquiries about us from educated relations returned to the
village satisfied about our credentials. But more than all this, the excell¬
ent work of the Medical Unit established rapport with the community,
and the sympathetic welfare activities of the Agriculture, Veterinary
and Education units further helped us to establish more intimate con¬
tacts with the people. They were benefiting by our presence. . . . This
changed the attitude of the people considerably. To begin with the in¬
vestigators making anthropological enquiry were regarded as a nui¬
sance; now they [we] were tolerated as inquisitive but friendly outsid¬
ers. In a few days there was a change for the better. We had never talked
politics or religion, there was no propaganda or attempt at reform
and no superiority of city-ways and sneering at the rustic ways of the
village people in our attitude. Indifference turned into warmth and
friendship, and at this point we intensified our anthropological inves¬
tigations. (Dube 1955: 14-15)

The passage speaks for itself and of the texture of the times, optimisti¬
cally straddling the instrumentality of fieldwork and empathy for
its subjects, easily intertwining the means of rural welfare and the
ends of village anthropology.
Beginning with a general sociological census, the anthropological
enquiries of the project focused upon themes of social, economic,
ritual, kinship, and family str ucture of the village. Here, an important
role was played by intensive investigations by means of a selected
sample of 120 families (out of a total of 380)—representing different
castes and religions, at distinct levels of income, education, and urban
contact—together with eighty episodic and topical life-histories and
eleven full biographies, recorded through free-association interviews.
Besides, the social sciences team used The established method of
participant observation and the usual techniques of anthropological
enquiry’, also studying carefully available village records (Dube 1955).
Surveys on diet and nutrition, village agriculture, and animal care
provided useful, supplementary information. As a team endeavour,
engaging the joint energies of several members, the research conduc¬
ted by the Osmania project on Shamirpet village was wide-ranging
466 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

in its sweep and depth. At the end, Dube (1993: 32) hadcthree-thou-
sand sheets of notes neatly typed and systematically classified.’
Even as the project was under way, Dube received an invitation
from Furer-Haimendorf in London to spend a year as Visiting Lec¬
turer at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Resolving to
write up the study of Shamirpet over his year abroad, during the late
summer in Hyderabad, from June to August 1952, Dube immersed
himself in the notes and data, sketching an outline, preparing tables,
and producing a tentative draff of two chapters. Sailing a month
later, he reached London. Amidst seminars and lectures, lodging in
the home of the archaeologist couple Raymond and Bridget Allchin,
with a social life largely limited to academic acquaintances, working
up to fourteen hours a day, Dube read widely even as he searched for
means of giving shape to the materials at hand:

My main difficulty was that I had no model for my study. The com¬
plexity of working on the caste system made everything so different
and difficult. Redfield’s studies and many other books on villages around
the world were helpful, but they could not solve several of my prob¬
lems. The Wisers’s Behind mud walls was limited in scope, and the vil¬
lage surveys of the time were tilted toward economic rather than socio¬
logical data. I was aware that some studies were in the pipeline. M.N.
Srinivas was doing a Mysore village. With his cooperation the Economic
weekly. . . was publishing a series of studies done by anthropologist
and sociologists, including one by me, though it was not on Shamirpet.
There was news that Me Kim Marriott at Chicago University had planned
a symposium volume on village India, but its contents were not known
to me. As I was working on a tight schedule, I had to find my own way.
(Dube 1993: 33)

Dube’s aim was an integrated account of an Indian village commun¬

ity, providing a feel of its fabric, conveying a sense of its texture. Two
seminars helped him shape such a study: his own at the School of
Oriental and African Studies; and that of Raymond Firth at the Lon¬
don School of Economics, where Dube presented some of his mater¬
ials and arguments. In each case, the imperatives of clear exposition
and the responses to his presentations proved crucial to the framing
and the writing of his work.
 TIES THAT BIND 467

Once the manuscript was complete, Dube sought the ‘professional

opinion’ of a senior colleague: ‘Raymond Firth agreed to read the
typescript, and with some trepidation I handed it over to him. Ten
days later he asked me to lunch at the LSE. On his desk rested my
typescript, with the brief notation “First Rate—R.L” My vegetarian
meal in the senior dining room could not have tasted better’ (Dube
1993: 33). Firth also felt that the work deserved a quality publisher:
he sent the manuscript over to Routledge and Kegan Paul. Not much
later, Dube received a letter of acceptance: the book was to form
part of RKP’s prestigious series, The International Library of Socio¬
logy and Social Reconstruction.
Constitutive of Indian village (1955) is simplicity of style and ease
of exposition. Setting out to provide ‘a clear and intimate picture of
some aspects of life in one Indian village’ (ibid.: 15), Dube singularly
succeeded in the endeavour. From Shamirpet’s physical, historical,
and demographic attributes, to its social, economic, caste, political,
and ritual structure(s), to its ethos and ambience, the book presented
a compelling, vivid portrait of the village. This led Morris Opler
(1955: vii) to describe the work as ‘a total study, not in the sense that
it gives us all possible details concerning the village Shamirpet, but
in the sense that it presents between its two covers all important as¬
pects of the culture of this community.’ Here the descriptive devices
and narrative techniques of the book were bound to its terms of
theory. A latent functionalism unobtrusively woven into the texture
of the account, the presentation of dominant norms and main vari¬
ations—with personality often projected as ‘explaining’ the latter—
shoring up the description, a tight terminology entwined with the
narration, in the book analytical categories and empirical materials
were imbricated in each other. As Edmund Leach wrote, in an un¬
signed review, in The times (London): ‘Dr Dube describes his book
as a “descriptive” study and at the level of description it is unsur¬
passed. The moral atmosphere and facts of day-to-day life are well
conveyed. It is perhaps a sign of this richness of matter that problems
of theory change.’9 Dube’s concern with social change, interest in

9 Leach was suggesting that the book delivered marvellously at the level of
description, but that there was also more to the work. With theoretical consider¬
ations woven between the lines, quietly organising the study, the very richness
468 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the ‘binding forces in Indian culture (Opler 1955: ix), engagement

with issues of ‘civilisation on the subcontinent (Yogendra Singh,
interview, 2002), and insights into ‘psychological’ dimensions
(McKim Marriott, interview, 2002) rounded off the picture.
Yet Dube’s fluid, graceful prose, seamlessly binding the analytic
and the empirical, also contains contrary strains lying at the heart of
the narrative. Let me turn here to the tension between the presence
of history and the present of anthropology—or the push and pull
between projections of a village shaped by the past, and propositions
regarding a community out of time—which are at the core of Indian
village. In his account Dube (1953:3-7) not only questioned the no¬
tion of an entirely ‘representative’ village, casting matters instead in
terms of the important distinctions and structural similarities
between villages in India, but also argued that ‘we cannot regard the
Indian village community as static, timeless and changeless. Time
and the interplay of historical and sociological factors and forces
have influenced the structure, organization and ethos of these com¬
munities in many significant ways.’Yet, in the narrative, transform¬
ations through time primarily made their appearance at the opening
and the close of the account, the first steps its framing devices, the
last strides its masterful finale—-a comprehensive chapter describing
the changes in the village in the past and present.
This is to say that the work of history is not absent from Indian
village. On the one hand such labour inhabits the edges of the ac¬
count, intimating its ends, marking a breach between change and
transformation that come from outside the village, and continuity
and stability that inhere within the community, a divide between
external history and internal structure. On the other hand the narrat¬
ive equally presents historical processes and contemporary develop¬
ments as encompassing the village, thereby further inserting and
instituting Shamirpet in a lasting ethnographic present, descriptively
a place in history, analytically an entity out of time. These twin attri¬
butes are a result of the structure of the work, and of its style of writ¬
ing, which work in tandem. For example, the organisation of Indian

of the materials presented in the book meant that it raised new questions for
anthropological theory.
 TIES THAT BIND 469

village and The Kamar bear a family resemblance, each discussing

the changes affecting its subjects at the end. Yet, while Dube’s explo¬
ratory prose in his first monograph could not rein in the transforma¬
tions of tradition’ among the Kamars—despite wider predilections
concerning an unmoving social structure, registering its reworking
over time in the middle of the account—in his second study an ac¬
complished, elegant writing style managed to neatly fit such tensions
into the flow of the work.10
Such questions of substance and style have wide implications.
Andre Beteille (1996: 811) has hinted that a critical reading of Indian
village today would consist of revisiting the work in light of what we
have come to know of villages on the subcontinent since its publi¬
cation. In addition, it seems to me, such a task equally entails con-

10 When focusing on an Indian anthropologist studying Indian society soon

after Indian independence, to pose matters in this manner is to indicate the
importance of revisiting and extending issues of the‘denial of coevalness’ (Fab¬
ian 1983) between the anthropologist author and the native subject, questions
of the presence of‘never, never lands’ (Cohn 1980) and the ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot
1991; see also, Trouillot 2002: 848-55) in ethnography, problems of the
persistence of‘enchanted spaces and modern places’ (S. Dube 2002,2004) and
‘exotics at home’ (di Leonardi 1998) in social worlds. This is to say that the
contrary tracks of the timeless object of an enquiry/civilisation which is also
the coeval subject of a nation/knowledge require further investigation. The
point equally holds for other anthropological works on South Asia, such as
those that appeared around the time of Dube’s book, including collections of
village studies (Srinivas 1955; Marriott 1955) and Srinivas’s (1952) seminal
study of the Hindu Coorgs (which had, however, also earlier seen a different
incarnation under the supervision of G.S. Ghurye in the 1940s). To ask such
questions is to be vigilant about how metropolitan theory came to be translated
in practice in its application in the academic context of a new nation, such
procedures equally holding a mirror to the contradictory strains that could
shore up metropolitan anthropology. All this is also to consider further the
legacy afforded to the post-Independence sociology of India by the prior
presence, the extended tradition, of colonial and nationalist writings on the
village in the subcontinent (see Inden 1990:131-51), especially if it is admitted
that colonial modalities of ‘knowledge/power’ themselves shifted from the
‘historical’ to the ‘ethnographic’ (Dirks 2001) between the first half of the
nineteenth century and the last ninety years of imperial rule.
470 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

sideration of how later village studies, too many to recount here,

were influenced by the terms of writing—both implicit assumptions
and explicit descriptions-—of Dubes work, bracketing ethnography
from history, forging a tendentious relationship between anthropolo¬
gical structure and historical process.
Indian village received wide acclaim and attained an extraordinary
success. As ‘the first book on a single village’ (Mandelbaum 1956:
579) in post-Second World War South Asia, it was a key statement of
the wider shift from tribe to village in Indian anthropology, a work
presented further as part of the movement away from studies of
‘isolated’ groups toward writings on ‘modern’ communities in the
discipline at large (Dube 1955:8-13). Andre Beteille (interview, 2002)
recalls that as a college student in the late 1950s, Indian village ap¬
peared to him as embodying meaningful, relevant anthropology,
distant from the dead weight of tribal studies, providing for his own
arguments in discussions with friends such as the economist Sukho-
moy Chakravarty. The book’s contents and close connections with a
collective project of social welfare carried intrinsic interest in an India
aiming at directed change in rural areas through Five Year Plans.
The work’s moorings in a multidisciplinary team endeavour captured
the attention of social science scholars in post-Second World War
US, where collective research projects signalled the mood and interest,
sensibility and ambition of departments of the state and the academy
(see Cohn 1996: 11—15; Geertz 1995: 99-109). The intimacy of the
account and its straightforward nature led to mentions of Dube’s
‘Indian background and Western scientific training’ as providing him
with a ‘double insight’ (The new statesman); of his exploiting ‘to the
full his advantages as a man of the country to gain that kind of infor¬
mation and insight usually denied to the Western sociologist in India’
(The times literary supplement).
The work blended with the times, making Indian village something
of a flagship endeavour of social sciences in a young, independent
India—generously cited, drawn upon as a model monograph, and
heavily used in teaching in various parts of the world. It had several
hardcover and paperback editions in the UK, USA, and India, and
came to be widely excerpted and translated in Indian and foreign
languages. Reviewing the book in Rural sociology, James Silverberg
 TIES THAT BIND 471

(1955: 332) had commented that it provided an ‘excellent’ basis for

‘measuring’ directed change and the impact of technological factors,
further wondering about the fate of India’s community development
programme in Shamirpet. Indeed, this was the direction and drift of
Dube’s next book, even as he relocated his research in North India.

VII. TWO VILLAGES AND THE NATION

Soon after his return from London, Dube very nearly left the aca¬
demy Selected for the high-pOwered Indian Frontier Administrative
Service, which was later merged with the Indian Administrative
Service, Dube was a younger member of an elite corps handpicked
to work in the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). After a brief
meeting with Nehru in the presence of Elwin, Dube underwent a
month’s training in Delhi as he awaited his first posting. Then, at the
last moment, he declined the appointment. Much later Dube (1993:
35) recalled that, while this was not a case of his developing ‘cold
feet’, he had realised that the move would mean a farewell to academic
anthropology. The statement, it seems to me, tells us only partly why
Dube took the final decision at such a late stage. At the time, there
were other opportunities waiting in the wings, taking Dube toward
questions of community development.
During his stay at SOAS, Dube had participated in Claude Levi-
Strauss’s seminars in London on questions of myth, making inter¬
ventions there that drew upon adivasi legends, myths, and stories,
especially from Central India. Based on these contacts, towards the
end of his year in London he received an invitation to a UNESCO
roundtable in Paris on the human implications of technological
development, organised by Levi-Strauss. While he had discussed as¬
pects of social change in his first two books, the roundtable provided
Dube with ‘an abiding interest in planned change and its human
dimensions’ (Dube 1993: 35). A little after Dube’s brief flirtation
with joining administration, two developments permitted him to
translate this interest into a concrete study.
Among the different multidisciplinary projects on newly inde¬
pendent nations launched within the US academy after the Second
World War, the Cornell India Project, directed by Morris Opler,
472 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

focused on villages in North India. Opler was enthusiastic about

Dube s work—recall that he had written the Foreword to Indian vil¬
lage—and now invited his Indian colleague to join the project, the
offer consisting of a year of fieldwork in UP, and then a year as a
visiting professor of anthropology and Far Eastern studies at Cornell
University. Equally, at this time, India’s community development pro¬
gramme had been launched amidst great expectations, and with even
greater fanfare. The Secretary of the Planning Commission, Tarlok
Singh, wanted Dube to play a role in evaluating the programme.
Dube himself was keen to get a grassroots perspective on the respon¬
ses to these initiatives. Dube accepted Opler’s offer to join the Cornell
India Project, choosing to focus on the community development
programme at work in UP villages, and was left free to devise his
own terms for the study.
During 1954-5 the Dubes were part of the Rankhandi Field-
Station of the Cornell project. Conducting research along with other
scholars—among them John Gumperz, Michael and Pauline Mahar,
and Leigh Minturn—Dube had four associates as part of his own
study: Leela Dube, Raghuraj Gupta, R. Prakash Rao, and Tuljaram
Singh. The aim was to analyse and evaluate a wholly rural community
development project—especially the responses it engendered—
covering slightly over 150 villages. The team carried out an in-depth
study of two villages, ‘Rajput’ village with a population of slightly
over 5000 people, and ‘Tyagi’ village with around 750 inhabitants.
The research procedure primarily consisted of fieldwork among offi¬
cials and villagers, using extensive interviews and wide-ranging sur¬
veys, and the study of materials generated by the community
development programme. The work was carried out under the lead¬
ership of Dube, but the team members also took up specific aspects
of the study more individually—for example, Leela Dube took care
of research among women in the villages.
At the end of the year in the field, during the late summer of
1955, the Dubes left for upstate New York, the data from the Ran¬
khandi research shipped to Ithaca. Flere they found a stimulating
academic atmosphere and keen intellectual interlocutors, but Dube
also had to shoulder a heavy teaching load, consisting of a graduate
seminar on culture and change in India, and large parts of both a
 TIES THAT BIND 473

seminar on anthropological theory and a survey course on Asia with

a very large number of students. Living close to campus, Dube worked
prodigiously to write up the study, assisted in his analysis of the data
by Leela, while Prakash Rao and Tuljaram Singh continued to provide
help from the field. The time away from this hectic schedule primarily
consisted of travel for talks and seminars, including a memorable
visit to Chicago at the invitation of Robert Redfield. In the end Dube
completed the manuscript three days before leaving Ithaca, sub¬
mitting it to Cornell University Press on the eve of his departure,
and handing it over to Routledge and Kegan Paul in London en route
to India.
Quite possibly, the work was completed too quickly, finished too
fast. In India's changing villages: Human factors in community develop¬
ment (1958) the writing is clear, the style adequate: but there is
something somewhat un-weighty about it. If the neatness of Indian
village was the strength of the study—as well as containing its ten¬
sions—in its sequel the structure was too linear, the materials too
modular. It is not only that the first four chapters of India’s changing
villages largely detailed a community development project and its
work through mainly descriptive and statistical commentary, it is
also that such terms of organization, these requirements of writing,
cast a tangible shadow upon its later, more imaginative and analytic
chapters which discuss questions of communication and issues of
culture in community development.
The departures, distinctions, and difficulties of India’s changing
villages entail each other. Here, the key departure derived from the
focus of the study on actions of the state, the building of the nation.
Several decades before ethnographic considerations of the state
became important in the discipline (e.g. Axel 2001; Fuller and Benei
2000; Gupta 1998; Hansen 1999), Dube’s work gestured towards
anthropological apprehensions of the interplay between nation and
village, articulated by protagonists seen as subjects moulding the
present, rather than as peoples of‘never never’ lands. If the concerns
of the book intersected with those of wider area-studies projects
launched in the US academe in the 1950s, the distinction of the work
emerged in the ways such interests and apprehensions were sieved
through the filters of a nationalist provenance, being imbued thereby
474 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

with a specific salience.11 Yet, precisely these measures of the work

appear orchestrated and overdetermined by its construal of a specific
sociology uncertainly in and out of the tracks of the state, the grooves
of governance, its envisioning of anthropology in the looking-glass
of the nation. Now, my quick remarks do not form a total appraisal,
intimating instead possible, critical-constructive readings of the
contrary archival traces of state and nation in Indian anthropology/
sociology. Here can be readings that might even pick up quotidian
configurations of state and everyday formations of nation, which
are embedded as details, especially in the latter part of India's changing
villages—an authoritative account that was yet unable to entirely
stamp out such stubborn, recalcitrant residues.
The work did not entirely live up to the expectations aroused by
its predecessor. A part of the problem, as McKim Marriott (1958:
192) pointed out, concerned the title of the study, which implied a
link with Shamirpet of Indian village and an account of changes in
Indian villages, though the book had nothing to do with the Deccan
village and primarily discussed villagers’ ‘responses’ to change.
(Calling the work India’s changing villages was a decision of Routledge
and Kegan Paul; Dube’s preferred title, Human factors in community
development was used by the publisher as the subtitle.) The larger
difficulty concerned the nature of the work, which meant that al¬
though the scholarly response to the book was broadly enthusiastic,
it did not necessarily consist of critical acclaim and academic acco¬
lade. Nonetheless, as T.N. Madan (interview, 2002) put it: ‘In the

11 Interestingly, Dube’s study was the only one in the Cornell-India project
that focused on efforts at nation-building through community development
and village welfare. The other scholars at the Rankhandi station, all from the
US, pursued more conventional ethnographic, social-scientific, and linguistic
enquiries (e.g. Gumperz 1958; Minturn and Hitchcock, 1966; yet see also
Gumperz 1957). Apart from Dube, the other Indians on the project based in
western UP were academic associates, research assistants, and interpreters. There
were few dissensions here of the kind that led to D.N. Majumdar’s criticism of
the conduct of the Cornell-India project in another part of UP. Nor did Dube’s
association with the project affect his relations with Majumdar (L. Dube,
interview 2003).
 TIES THAT BIND 475

1950s, Dube and Srinivas were showing the way for Indian anthropo¬
logy.’ The real success of India s changing villages came from its use
in administrative programmes in third world nations, questions of
modernisation and development themselves central to Dube’s
thought and writing in the following decades.
At the same time, even before the book was published, the Dubes
had moved from Hyderabad. Here is how Dube (1993: 37) recalled
the events:

On my return from Cornell I was keen to remain in Hyderabad. C.D.

Deshmukh, Chairman of the University Grants Commission, suggested
the creation of a research professorship for me with the Commission’s
support; but this idea did not materialize as there was a clause in the
university’s statutes which prescribed thirty-five years as the minimum
age for a professor. In retrospect I feel that I should not have become
sore about the snag, but I was young then and very sensitive. I decided
to leave Hyderabad. Within a month I had a senior position in the An¬
thropological Survey of India and a few months later I was appointed
to the chair of Anthropology at the University of Saugar. I was still
under thirty-five and had made my point.

As at many other points in Dube’s life, success was shadowed by sor¬

row. Not much after the move to Sagar, Dube’s father—who had
taken early retirement to live at his son’s—took a journey alone to
Amarkantak, dying on the way.

VIII. AFTERWARDS

It is time to end the detailed description, but not to terminate the

tale. How are we to apprehend Dube’s later vocation and work? In
broad strokes, there are two kinds of orientations to the life and
work of a figure such as Dube—two dispositions that find everyday
expression and public pronouncement within the academic world.
The first concerns projections of Dube’s important earlier studies
giving way to synthetic, thinner, general pronouncements—especially
as he moved back and forth between administration and academics—
until, in the end, he became an essayist in Hindi, marginal to anthro¬
pology and sociology. The second entails proposals of a singular
476 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

success story—of Dube following his early achievements by making

solid contributions to academic administration, participating actively
in public life, always widening his intellectual canvas, addressing
questions of national import, increasingly drawing in a larger
readership, with this process culminating in his later writings in
Hindi.12 Neither orientation is wrong, each points in important di¬
rections: yet both reflect the image of ideal academic life and suggest
the possibility of an immaculate intellectual biography. Failure and
success are all too easy to find here. Rather than arguing with such
propositions, my point is that the uneven textures of a life and the
contrary pasts of a discipline suggest other dispositions to ethnogra¬
phy and biography, history and anthropology.
Consider Dube’s presence in Sagar. On the one hand it can be
proposed that the precise limitations of a provincial university curbed
Dube’s academic talents and scholarly energies. It can be argued, on
the other, that intellectual dynamics are not the prerogative of metro¬
politan centres, and that Dube’s contribution exactly lay in developing
teaching and research in Sagar, a place of scholarship in its own right.
My worry concerns the singularity and starkness of such supposi¬
tions.
When the Dubes moved to Sagar in 1957, the university there was
an exciting place: counting some distinguished scholars on the
faculty, there were efforts afoot to draw in younger talent from
different parts of the country, and a new campus was under cons¬
truction.13 Dube was on par with the senior scholars yet one with
the younger faculty, both marks of distinction.14 Here Dube built

12 As already indicated, such dispositions circulate as part of quotidian con¬

figurations of academic worlds, and over the years I have encountered them so
often that to signal particular writings as indexing the one or the other
orientation may well be to miss the point.
13 This paragraph is based on the following accounts: Krishna 1997; Atal
1997: 93-7; Mishra 1997: 53-5; Premshankar 1997: 39-41; and Chauhan 1997:
47. All these people knew the Dubes, in different capacities, in Sagar. See also,
Dube 1993: 37.
4 Younger members of faculty in Sagar at the time included Daya Krishna
and Pratap Chandra (Philosophy), S.R. Swaminathan and Malikarjunan (Eng¬
lish), Muzzafar Ali and Vinod Mishra (Geography), R.N. Mishra (Ancient
 TIES THAT BIND 477

the anthropology department very nearly from scratch, starting novel

courses, recruiting new faculty, initiating team projects of research,
insisting on plurality and autonomy in academic endeavour. With
his trademark pipe and classic cigar, Harris Tweed jackets and well-
cut suits, an impressive presence and a striking manner—‘something
subtle that had to do with “style”—what he said and how he said it’
(Madan 1996: 299)—Dube was a figure of admiration and envy, a
role model to his male students. In a relaxed social environment and
with few hierarchical distinctions among the younger set, Dube’s
broad range of intellectual interests meant that he was at the centre
of lively discussions on literature and philosophy, politics and psycho¬
logy, his colleagues and friends from other departments also invited
to address his students. Clearly, Dube loved all this, none of it in fact
adversely affecting his academic productivity as he initiated a major
team project of research on leadership in villages of Madhya Pradesh
and wrote a non-textbook introduction to anthropology in Hindi,
Manav aur sanskriti (1960), both ventures intimately tied to his pre¬
sence in Sagar.
Yet these times came with their twist. Rather less than three years
after the move to Sagar, in 1960, after D.N. Majumdar died, Dube
received a proposal to take up his position as professor and chair of
the anthropology department from the vice chancellor of Lucknow
University. The details need not detain us, but matters proceeded
very far before administrative mismanagement together with opposi¬
tion from a section of the department meant that Dube could not
take up the appointment. Dube spoke little of the affair afterwards,
but it was a blow at the time. Not surprisingly, a few months later, at
the end of the year, a little before I was born, he accepted the position
of Director of Research at the National Institute of Community
Development (NICD) in Mussoorie, remaining at the institution
for four years. Upon Dube’s return to Sagar, after times of prominence

History), Premshankar (Hindi), and Brijraj Chauhan (Anthropology/Socio¬

logy). Senior scholars included Nanddulare Vajpeyi (Hindi), George West
(Geology), M.P. Shrivastava (Physics), and Baburam Saksena and Dhirendra
Verma (Linguistics). This is an indicative inventory: there were other, young
and established scholars on the Sagar faculty.
478 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

on the national and international stage, the university may have

seemed constraining, the town too small. Now Dube organised confe¬
rences and held seminars, inviting senior and promising scholars,
yet he did this on a campus that had lost some of his main inter¬
locutors and friends—such as the philosopher Daya Krishna. Dube
secured a grant of‘special assistance’ from the UGC for the depart¬
ment he reconstituted as one of anthropology and sociology,
initiating new broad-based courses on communication, modernisa¬
tion, development, and sociological theory, linked not just to one or
two schools, but introducing and discussing the work of, for instance,
Merton, Parsons, C. Wright Mills, Gunnar Myrdal, and Barrington
Moore, Jr. But Dube also increasingly travelled away from Sagar for
conferences, meetings, and selection committees.15 He was not dying
to leave Sagar—for example, he took insufficient interest in a possible
professorship in the US (Stanford or Hawaii, we do not know clearly),
suggested by Wilbur Schramm—yet when offered the position of
Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, in the early 1970s, he
was happy to move on.16

15 This is not suggest that Dube travelled away extensively from Sagar only
after his return from Mussoorie. When he assumed the chair of anthropology
in Sagar in 1957, full professors were rare in the Indian academy (see Atal 1997:
95). A decade or so later, when he was still in his mid-forties, Dube was one of
the senior figures in sociology/anthropology. Between these years, there were
numerous appointments made in departments of sociology all over India, Dube
being called as an expert on several selection committees. Together with confe¬
rences, this involved a great deal of travel from the later 1950s through to end
of the 1960s. It also meant that Dube had an important role, which cut different
ways, in the founding of sociology departments in India (Sharma 1997: 33).
My question is: should Dube have refused some of these invitations, especially
as he was seeking to establish a major centre of research and teaching in Sagar
from the mid-1960s?
16 For most of S.C. Dube’s working life, his career intersected with that of
Leela Dube. Not only had he first advised and encouraged her to work on Gond
women for the PhD (L. Dube 2000: 4040), but Dube’s father was also very sup¬
portive of his daughter-in-law’s fieldwork. Later, she recalled (ibid.: 4041), ‘While
working on and completing my dissertation, for a few years, I had an interrupted
 TIES THAT BIND 479

The years in Mussoorie further left a strong imprint on the nature

of Dube’s writings. India s changing villages had led to Dube’s appoint¬
ment at NICD, first as Director of Research and then as Principal.
Here, acute conjunctions between administration and academics
shaped his concerns, moulding his work. Official visits to assess rural
development programmes and village leadership initiatives in
Afghanistan and Pakistan provided him with hands-on experience
of nation-building in a wider South Asian context, and he participat¬
ed in numerous international conferences and workshops, where
his contributions primarily consisted of ‘think-pieces’, which drew
upon his ongoing involvement in research and bureaucracy,
particularly training programmes for rural development conducted
by NICD. At the same time, Dube’s insistence on research inputs

career. In a way I had become an adjunct of S.C. Dube, temporarily teaching in

his place, helping him in field work and its analysis, being his research asso¬
ciate ..In Sagar, Leela Dube first took up an honorary teaching position at
the Department of Anthropology, S.C. Dubes ethics preventing him from asking
the academic authorities for a position for his wife. It was at the initiative of
the vice chancellor that Leela Dube was offered a permanent position there.
The two worked together in the conduct of anthropology and sociology at
Sagar University, Leela taking charge of the department in the absence of Dube,
particularly when he left for Mussorie and then for Shimla. Not only during
these years, but also from the mid-1970s through to the late 1980s, Leela Dube
and Shyama Charan usually lived apart, taking up appointments in different
places, which in their case meant both personal understanding and professional
support to each other. Such mutual support also extended to scholarship: despite
their very different scholarly styles, Dube often edited his wife’s writings, just
as Leela was generally the first reader of his work, both intensely loyal to each
other’s academic endeavour; my father took care of me when my mother
travelled to Lakshadweep for fieldwork in the late 1960s, and Leela stood by
Dube through his successes and disappointments. Yet I doubt that they
professionally promoted each other. All this is not to envision the Dubes’ mar¬
ried life as immaculate. Rather, it is to register intersections that bear consider¬
ation in understanding two distinct lives and scholarly styles that constantly
crisscrossed, bearing upon and shoring up each other, issues that require further
elaboration in a manner biographical and analytical, ethical and critical.
480 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

meant that the NICD forged close connections with academic depart¬
ments, involving scholars from universities, and running a PhD
programme. It followed that Dube also produced work grounded in
detailed field investigations by team projects. Especially important
was a long essay on communication and planned change (Dube
1967), carrying forward issues initiated in India s changing villages,
which proved influential in discussions on the ‘modernization’ of
developing nations, addressing and extending the influential views,
at the time, of Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm.
Taken together, we might ask two questions of this body of Dube’s
work. Despite shared concerns and a mutual sensibility, do these
writings perhaps lack a consistent engagement with a set of theoreti¬
cal questions or empirical materials, possibly because Dube wrote
to address readily, immediately, the themes at hand? But can we also
approach this work as constituting an acute record of social sciences
in pursuit of nation-building, issues of analyses bound to matters of
state, the envisioning of sociology in the mirror of the nation, a salient
chapter in the contrary pasts of Indian anthropology?
The concerns of the period actually led to a more systematic study,
which Dube wrote after completing his tenure at NICD, based on
the results of research projects on questions of leadership, faction¬
alism, and communication in villages of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa,
team endeavours that Dube had initiated before and after the move
to Mussoorie. Much of what we know about this work is through
T.N. Madan (1996: 302), who had read the manuscript soon after its
completion:

On his return to Sagar, Dube resumed analysis of data gathered ear¬

lier. . . . Unlike the work in Hyderabad, this research was more con¬
cerned with ‘problems’ and ‘processes’ than holistic description. It
focused on themes such as ‘power’, ‘factionalism’, and ‘leadership’. For
reasons never clear to me, the book that was written on the basis of this
research .. . was not published. Only one article, which was an abridged
chapter from it, came out in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1968).
Some of the results of this research, however, appeared as articles in a
few edited volumes.

Upon my further enquiries about this study, Madan (interview 2002)

added that it was a rich work, with ‘a lot of data, a lot of analytical
 TIES THAT BIND 481

categories, not just descriptive categories’ that might well have been
Dube’s ‘best book’.
Why did Dube lose interest in publishing an almost finished
manuscript? Leela Dube (interview 2002) does not remember the
reasons behind Dube’s decision. Madan himself asked Dube several
times regarding his plans for the manuscript, but received evasive
answers. Was there insufficient intellectual stimulation in Sagar to
prod Dube into providing that final push? Did a severe illness and a
major operation—one that Dube almost did not survive—come in
the way? Had Dube’s interests and commitments widened so much
that he simply forgot about the manuscript and moved on to other
challenges? Was there no sense of loss, feeling of pain, from work
unfinished, so tantalisingly close to completion? Is this the reason
that Dube never talked about this study, bearing it like his other dis¬
appointments as a quiet secret? In the past, Dube had left behind re¬
search agendas—for instance, work on the Bhjunjia adivasis carried
out in the late 1940s; detailed, rich materials from the Shamirpet
study—but he had always turned manuscripts into books with
dogged persistence. In the late 1960s, he partly assumed the mantle
of scholar-at-large, inaugurating the anthropology series of the Uni¬
versity Grants Commission National Lectures and the Dr Rajendra
Prasad Lectures, the former in English, the latter in Hindi, broad¬
cast on All India Radio to public acclaim, the two series together
comprising a slim book on development, Explanation and manage¬
ment of change (1971).
For Dube, the role of academic administrator shadowed his promi¬
nence as a public intellectual. In 1972 he became Director of the
Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) in Shimla, appointed to
the position by his friend from Lucknow days, the historian Nurul
Hasan, now Minister of Education in the Congress government at
the Centre. In the magnificent environs of the former Viceregal
Lodge, and as the head of an institution commanding generous
resources (the support of the Education Ministry in Delhi in hand),
Dube was pleased with the position, seemingly tailored for him. Here
he could express his ability in administration and enjoyment of
power. Here he could articulate his wide-ranging intellectual inte¬
rests and gift for public speaking. Here he could seek out younger
talent, something that always gave him true pleasure (Madan 1996:
482 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

299), from different disciplines—Mrinal Miri, Ramchandra Gandhi,

Sudhir Chandra, and Sudipta Kaviraj among them—invited as Fel¬
lows, Visiting Fellows, and participants in several imaginative, im¬
portant conferences he organised over the years at the institute. Here
he could invite a range of senior scholars. Here he could encourage
newer scholarship by upcoming academics and established scholars,
including Satish Saberwal, S. C. Malik, Prabhati Mukherjee, K. N.
Sharma, Baidyanath Saraswati, and A.K Saran, engage his passion
for publication qualities, and increase too the range and number of
books published by the Institute. Under Dubes direction (1972-7),
the IIAS regained its prior prominence—acquired in the mid 1960s
under Niharranjan Ray—-and posted new achievements in the Indian
academy (Mishra 1997, 55-6; Sacchidananda 1997: 78-9; Sharma,
1997: 33-4).
Not all was smooth sailing, of course. Dubes desire for affective
acknowledgement and readiness to trust people, too easily, too much,
meant that he was pursued by‘favourites’ (Saraswati 1997: 61). This
did not always augur well in front of a community of Fellows with
its distinct commitments and cleavages, ambitions and dissensions
(see Jain 1997:65-6). Besides, as India inched towards the Emergency
and after its declaration, Dube’s friendship with Nurul Hasan meant
that he was often seen as a state intellectual. Given the texture of the
times, the sharp divisions in academic and public life, the charge
sometimes stuck, although Dube resisted pushing the Institute’s
activities in the service of a political regime, while retaining his own
academic integrity, sense of justice, and fierce personal pride (Sara¬
swati 1997: 62). This found expression when, soon after the declar¬
ation of the Emergency, Dube announced to the Fellows of the
Institute that within its premises they had the right to discuss any
question, and that he would defend their academic freedom (Mishra
1997: 56). The sense of justice was manifest in Dube’s readiness to
shelter in the official camp office of the institute in New Delhi an
old acquaintance, gone underground, a prominent accused in the
Baroda Bomb Conspiracy Case, at the height of political victimisation
in Indira s India. In times that spawned a culture of sycophancy and
demanded absolute loyalty, Dube asked the Minister of Education:
Nurul bhaiy aapko chamche chahiye ya dost? [Nurul bhai, do you
 TIES THAT BIND 483

want sycophants or friends?].’ Dube’s stay at Shimla came to a

somewhat abrupt end in the middle of 1977.
Subsequently, he held other senior appointments in academic
bureaucracy: but the period at the IIAS was possibly the most pro¬
ductive and successful of his administrative forays. As the vice
chancellor (1978-81) of Jammu University, his efforts at developing
a new campus, cleaning up the administration, and bringing in new
faculty are remembered with fondness and admiration.17 Yet, it is
also important to ask if the university and the town did not in the
end prove much too resistant, caught in a curious warp, of place
and time, which turned upon each other (see Jain 1997: 66). As the
Director of the Madhya Pradesh Uccha Shiksha Anudan Ayog (1984-
8), Dube undertook a dynamic drive and wide-ranging measures to
revamp the higher education system in his home state, redrawing
syllabi, changing examination patterns, seeking to infuse a new life
into teaching (Mishra 1997: 56-58). But it is equally important to
consider whether his best laid plans and well meaning measures were
eventually rolled back by a formidable inertia and sedimented
interests at the heart of higher education in Madhya Pradesh (see
Jain 1997: 66-7), save perhaps in tiny pockets.
How did these long years in academic administration—broken
by a short, three-year spell as National Fellow, Indian Council for
Social Science Research, and as Consultant at the United Nations’
Asian and Pacific Development Centre, Kuala Lumpur—augur for
Dube’s scholarship? Over the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to the
volumes he edited (Dube 1977a, 1977b, 1979; Dube and Basilov
1983), much of what Dube published in English took the shape of
synthetic writings, including several papers presented at international
conferences and workshops, many organized by the UNESCO and
related UN institutions connected with development.18 There were
books, of course. At the beginning of this period there was a short

17 This was evident more than twenty years after Dube left Jammu, when I
visited the city in February 2003 to deliver the second S.C. Dube Memorial
Lecture of Jammu University.
18 During this time, Dube also frequently lectured and published in Hindi
(for example, Dube 1983a), further writing a textbook in English on sociology
for the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT).
484 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

work (Dube 1973), consisting of the inaugural D.N. Majumdar Lec¬

tures delivered in Lucknow in 1972; another work on modernisation
(Dube 1974); at its middle two slim volumes (Dube 1983b, 1983c);
at its end three books, one commissioned by United Nations Univer¬
sity (Dube 1988), the other two comprising collections of papers
written over the previous thirty years (Dube 1990a, 1992). This cor¬
pus addressed three broad, overlapping sets of concerns in the socio¬
logy of India: communication, education, and change; tradition,
development, and modernisation; and the terms for relevant, ade¬
quate, and ‘indigenized’ social sciences.
Despite a shared sensibility, the corpus equally embodies impor¬
tant differences of emphases, carrying rather particular distinctions.
This is to say, these writings need to be read together but recognised
for their wider, constitutive contrariness—from their conception
through to their reception. On the one hand, labouring under
administrative burdens, pressures of time, and endless deadlines,
most of this work was written quickly, usually realised in order to
meet specific requirements of conference formats, which called upon
Dube to make general statements on broad problems. On the other,
Dube himself increasingly insisted upon a ‘committed’ social science,
directed towards public policy and national concerns, written in an
entirely accessible style, exceeding narrow scholarly concerns. Taken
together, necessity and belief fed each other.
There are continuities between Dube s earlier work and his later
writings, from the 1940s through to the 1980s. These concern the
emphasis upon the application of the social sciences towards nation¬
building—finding first expression in the Kamar work and providing
the grounds for Modernization and development (1988)—and the
characteristic ability of Dube s scholarship to synthesise ideas and
materials, using theoretical considerations primarily as a means of
analytic description. Yet there were also critical differences. Earlier,
Dube s statements regarding a practice of anthropology adequate
tor the time(s) and the nation—and his synthesis of empirics and
analytics had emerged from broad-based research, individual and
collective. Later, the requirements of social sciences relevant to
development, modernisation, and the nation expanded from being
a key concern to becoming the frame and locus of his writing,
 TIES THAT BIND 485

secondary works now shoring up his reflections. Here the 1960s were
at once a bridge and a watershed.
In the context of the greater professionalism of Indian sociology
by the end of the 1960s—and following the wider institutionalisation
of the social sciences, especially through the efforts of the ICSSR, in
the following decade—Dube’s body of work of the 1970s and 1980s
appears as bearing contrary connections with disciplinary emphases.
Here, in his own way, Dube addressed the terms for a relevant socio¬
logy, including issues of academic colonialism and decolonisation
of disciplines, which were being variously debated in the social scien¬
ces in India (e.g. Seminar, 1968; Seminar, 1980; see also, Uberoi 2000),
and his formulations regarding modernisation and development,
tradition and change were read with respect in various arenas, pro¬
vincial and metropolitan (Yogendra Singh, interview 2002). But these
writings could also appear at some remove from the more theoretical
preoccupations of the discipline, particularly in its important hubs
such as the Delhi School of Economics. Unsurprisingly, Dube’s
friends and critics such as T.N. Madan and Andre Beteille were dis¬
appointed in this corpus, finding that it looked askance at what they
considered the important analytic issues within the discipline, insuf¬
ficiently thinking through these concerns, and progressively turning
away from professional colleagues.19 Once again, it is precisely be¬
cause of such varying attributes that Dube’s work of the time bears
critical reading, its limits and possibilities articulating the past and
present of the social sciences in India, indexing abiding ironies and
formative tensions.
As noted earlier, these writings insinuate more than unchanging
verities and dead certainties, registering shifts in accent, movements
in thought, particularly as Dube developed his ideas regarding pur-

19 Also, as Madan (interview 2002) put it, compared to M.N. Srinivas, from
the later 1960s Dube lost contact with important centres of anthropological
research in the UK and the US. Of course, this had to do with the nature of
Dube’s work, including his generally intelligent but often impatient responses
to analytical and theoretical concerns within the discipline. Yet, it was also a
matter of Dube’s increasing ambivalence towards approval from abroad in
developing the social sciences in India, and his insufficient professionalism as
regards sending his writings to colleagues, which he did but rarely.
486 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

posive scholarship and elaborated his apprehensions concerning

meaningful development. The call for a relevant anthropology, es¬
chewing grand theory and abstruse formulations, endorsing com¬
mitted, objective research that offered analysis, interpretation, and
social criticism, influencing change yet not legislating upon it, ad¬
vising but not dictating policy (Dube 1972) found distinct formu¬
lations a decade later in Dube’s appeals for ‘indigenisation’ and
‘decolonisation’ of the social sciences (see, for example, Dube 1990a).
The former drew upon the wider criticism of the disciplines in the
1960s and the latter elaborated the critical third world spirit directed
against Western epistemic domination at the close of the Bandung
era, each anticipating some of the questions concerning Eurocentr¬
ism that are important in the academy today. Similarly, Dube’s
incipient questioning of authoritative paradigms of development
and modernisation in the early 1970s was elaborated over the follow¬
ing years, especially as he spoke and wrote more and more on the
importance of tradition, until it found a much clearer manifestation
in his writings of the 1980s, which revised and recast his prior pre¬
dilections (e.g., Dube 1988). At the same time, it is important to ask
if this corpus also appears caught between a desire for innovative
understanding and the force of inherited apprehension: for example,
pointing to the salience of everyday’ categories, yet realising these in
all too given, attenuated forms. In what ways did Dube’s probing in
newer directions simultaneously push against yet remain limited by
the categorical compulsions and analytic grids of the nation?
Woven into the warp of the times, such strains in Dube's work
were bound to its style and sensibility, poised between academic
sociology and public scholarship. They raise crucial questions. Did
Dube’s preference for objective scholarship, which could advise
policy, lead to his opting for clear solutions rather than staying with,
thinking through, critical tensions? Did this mean that although
Dube struggled against what Bourdieu (2000) has called ‘scholastic
reason —the detached view of the world of the ascetic scholar—he
nonetheless questioned its premises inadequately, reproducing its
oppositions, so that he was separated from his critics regarding the
terms ol academic endeavour by just an old, rickety epistemological
fence? While addressing varied, distinct audiences, Dube wanted to
 TIES THAT BIND 487

present the model of a relevant scholarship to his professional collea¬

gues, but in going about this task, did he not become increasingly
distant from at least some among them? Dube never wanted to marry
off sociology to the state, vet is it not the companionship between
social sciences and nation-building, shoring up his writings of the
1970s and 1980s, which registers these works as a key presence in the
archival tracks of Indian anthropology?
After completing his term of appointment in Bhopal in 1988, Dube
came to live in Delhi. In an aggressive city resonant with institution¬
alised power, he found prestige away from office. Of course, he was
now part of important juries and committees, himself receiving
prestigious awards and commendations.20 There were meetings and
travel, conferences and talks, plenary lectures and keynote pre¬
sentations. However, above all, Dube wrote. He wrote furiously and
mainly in Hindi—with passion and desire, urgency and anxiety.21
The terms of this writing require close, careful, critical reading, which
I cannot offer here. My point is that, in the last decade of his life,
Dubes medium of expression drew in a wide readership.22 He com¬
mented incisively on cultural politics and critically analysed political
cultures, combining a literary sensitivity, a sociological sensibility,

20 These included the coveted Moorti Devi Award of Bhartiya Jnanpith in

1993 (awarded for Dube 1991), the Indira Gandhi Gold Medal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal in 1993 (he had already won the S.C. Roy Gold Medal of the
Society in 1976), and honorary doctorates from Kashi Vidya Peeth and Kanpur
University.
21 During the 1990s, Dubes books in Hindi included those comprising earlier
essays (Dube 1991, 1994a), and others written after his move to Delhi (1994b,
1996a, 1996b), some published posthumously, including revised reprints of
earlier translations (Dube 1996c). A wider appreciation of Dube’s contributions
to writing in Hindi can be found in most essays in L. Dube and S. Pachori
(1997).
22 This was also true of Dube’s writings of the period in English. Thus, Indian
society (1990b), written in the late 1980s for the younger and lay reader,
showcased Dube’s capacity to synthesise varied and complex materials in an
accessible style, the book appearing in translation in several Indian languages
over the 1990s. In English and in translation, the work is widely used as a text¬
book at school and college levels.
488 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

an ethnographic imagination, and a citizens concerns. He wrote on

new subjects and returned to older concerns of education and deve¬
lopment, tradition and culture, conceptually translating and imagi¬
natively recasting the terms of the social sciences into Hindi, coining,
according to his interlocutors, a new idiom of apprehension and ex¬
pression in the language (see Kumar 1997: 152-3; Mrinal Pandey
1997: 155-6); Manager Pandey 1997; Rajkishore 1997; Singh 1997;
see also Tandon 1997:71-2). Now a somewhat different, more verna¬
cular nation came to the fore. Dube became concerned about its
progress by salvaging its civility, quite as he extended support, publicly
but also privately, to citizens’ struggles such as the Narmada Bachao
Andolan.
These years and this labour came with their twists—another chap¬
ter in Dubes life and vocation. In Samay aur sanskriti (1996a), a
work published posthumously, he wrote of how the contemporary
Indian intellectual was alienated from indigenous thinking and the
common man, writing and publishing mainly in a foreign idiom,
adding that those who wrote in Indian languages were either ignored
or considered second- or third-grade intellectuals. Commenting on
this passage, the critic Namvar Singh (1997: 109) wrote:

Antim dino mein Dubeji adhikanshtah Hindi mein likhte they. Is gunah
ki saza hhi mili. Dusre darze ke buddhi jivi mane jane lage. In shabdon
mein kahin na kahin unkipeeda bhi hai. cBhartiya Gram multah angrezi
mein likhi gayi thi. Yah Dube ji ki dusri pustak thi. Desh ke sath sath
videsh mein bhi sarahi gayi. Aaj bhi Dube ji usi pustak ke liye yaad kiye
jaate hain. Is prashansa mein bhi ek dansh hai. Use Dubeji khub samajhte
the.

[In his last days Dube ji wrote mostly in Hindi. He also received pun¬
ishment for this crime. He came to be considered a second-grade intel¬
lectual. Somewhere among these words there is also his personal pain.
Indian village was basically written in English. This was Dube ji’s sec¬
ond book. It was praised both nationally and abroad. Even today Dube
ji is remembered lor this book. This praise also carries a sting. Dube ji
understood this very well.]

The contrast between the enormous prestige accorded to Dube’s later

w ritings in Hindi and the formidable odds against anyone writing
 TIES THAT BIND 489

in the vernacular being heard in the English-dominated academy

are important issues. At the same time, rather than reading Singh’s
statement as a final appraisal, it is better approached as symptomatic
of the divisions and tensions between the worlds of reflection and
writing in English and Hindi.23
Dube straddled these divisions and embodied such tensions, his
life and work shaped by contradictions and conjunctions between
Hindi and English, administration and academics, nation-building
and classical’ anthropology, the vernacular and the metropolitan.
Similarly, the notable shifts indexed by Dube’s scholarship, from tribe
to village, from proposals of modernisation to critiques of develop¬
ment—each mediated by nationalist concerns and policy prescrip¬
tions—do not simply insinuate a clear-cut trajectory. Rather, they
appear imbued with a wider contrariness, emblematic of the pervas¬
ive and present yet chequered and changing relationship between
the pursuits of sociology and the provisos of the nation. Neither the
tensions nor the shifts bear easy resolution. They demand patient
and prudent thinking through. And so we return to Namwar Singh
(1997, 111), who closed his essay with a near clairvoyant, intensely
personal profile of Dube, noting that he was ‘Adequately successful
in every way, yet pained by a hurt of failure. Entirely secure, but still
haunted by insecurity.’ When placed alongside the shifts and tensions
at the core of Dube’s life and work, these appraisals—entwining the
public and the personal-—are pregnant with questions for an ade¬
quate, ethical biography of an Indian anthropologist, for a critical,
careful history of Indian anthropology.

REFERENCES

[A full list of S.C. Dube’s writings from 1947 to 1992, compiled by Indira and
Surendra Gupta, is contained in Atal 1993: 579-84.]
Atal, Yogesh, ed. 1993. Understanding Indian society: Festschrift in honour of
Professor S.C. Dube. New Delhi: Har-Anand.

23 As already indicated, Dube continued to write in Hindi throughout his

life. Thus, between his earliest essays from college days and his final books of
the 1990s in Hindi, apart from the works (Dube 1960,1983a) mentioned earlier,
Dube also wrote for periodicals and magazines such as Yojana, Kalpana, and
Dharmayug.
490 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

_. 1997. Tvameva guruscha pita tvameva (You are the teacher and the
father). In L. Dube and Sudesh Pachori, eds, Seemanton ke anveshak:
Shyamacharan Dube (Enquirer of frontiers: Shyamacharan Dube),pp. 92-
104. Delhi: Vani.
Axel, Brian Keith. 2001. The nations tortured body: Violence, representation, and
the formation of a Sikh ‘diaspora. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Banerjee, Prathama. 2006. The politics of time: ‘Primitives’ and history-writing
in a colonial society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Battaglia, Deoborah, ed. 1995. Rhetorics of self-making. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Beteille, Andre. 1996. Shyama Charan Dube (1922-96). Economic and political
weekly 31, 13: 811.
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 13

Fashioning a Postcolonial
Discipline
M.N. Srinivas and Indian Sociology*

Satish Deshpande

THE SECOND VOLUME OF THE WELL-KNOWN HISTORY OF

Anthropology series launched under the editorship of George W.
Stocking Jr. has an interesting photograph on p. 180 (Stocking Jr.,
1984:180). ‘Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford.
Prof. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s class 1945-6’, says the caption. At first
glance, there is nothing unusual about this formally posed group
photo of ten persons, five of whom are seated on straightbacked
chairs, behind which stand the other five. It is hardly surprising that

* Acknowledgements: My first debt is to Professor M.N. Srinivas himself—I

would not have had the confidence to attempt this essay had it not been for the
long interview that he was kind enough to grant me in December 1998. It is
one of my deepest professional regrets that this interview, which I was treating
as the first in a series, was fated to also be the last. Professor Srinivas had expres¬
sed considerable interest and even some quiet enthusiasm for the collective
project of disciplinary history that this volume was part of. However, while
acknowledging my debt to him, I must also emphasise that he did not and
could not have seen this essay since it was commissioned for this volume after
(and because of) his sudden death. The views and interpretations here are my
responsibility alone, particularly since this is an exploratory venture. But this
essay could not have been written without the patient support of my co-editors,
Nandini Sundar and Patricia Uberoi, both of whom made many useful sugges¬
tions for improving it.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 497

Fig. 13: Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford,

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's class of 1945-6: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown seated
middle, Meyer Fortes (Reader, 1947-50) on his right. M.N. Srinivas
standing extreme right. (Photograph courtesy Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University.)

all the men are dressed in formal Western suits, or that the lone wo¬
man is identified as the ‘secretary and librarian’. Seated next to her in
the middle of the group is Radcliffe-Brown, with Meyer-Fortes on
his other side. It is the remaining seven, all men and all students,
who look vaguely odd. The initial sense of visual incongruity is trig¬
gered by the fact that only two of the seven students look like white
Westerners, an impression confirmed by the names listed for the
other five: K.T. Fiadjioannou, K.A. Busia, L.F. Flenriques, A.A. Issa,
and M.N. Srinivas.
This was no doubt an aberrant cohort (except for its gender com¬
position) because of the Second World War, which explains the min¬
ority of the white British men students, who might otherwise have
been expected to dominate the student body at Oxford. Nevertheless,
this photograph strikingly illustrates the truth that, by the end of
498 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

the war, there existed a significant (albeit small) number of anthropo¬

logists who were both Western-trained and ethnically non-Western.
In other words, by the time decolonisation began, the colonised (or
otherwise subjugated) countries of Asia, Africa, and South America
were no longer only supplying the raw material for anthropology—
they were also producing anthropologists. While there is nothing
novel about this well-known fact, its implications for a critical history
of anthropology—whether in Western or non-Western contexts—
are yet to be fully explored.1 Leaving aside the larger questions for
another occasion, this essay focuses on the person standing on the
extreme right of the Oxford photograph—the late M.N. Srinivas
(1916-99)—and his role in the making of a postcolonial social an¬
thropology in India.
Although its presence dates back to the pre-Independence era, it
was only in the 1950s that a self-consciously Indian social anthro¬
pology, that is to say, one located in Indian institutions and relying
on the work of Indian scholars, began to take shape. With the benefit
of hindsight, it is easy to see that the end of colonial rule did not
(and perhaps could not) necessarily mean a fresh beginning—many
of the institutions and, indeed, much of the logic of colonialism
were taken over by the new nation, whether unknowingly or by de¬
sign, or because there was no immediate alternative. Despite the
inevitable euphoria of Independence and the millennarian rhetoric
that it provoked, therefore, there was as much continuity as change
in the social system and the academy was no exception to this general
truth.
Like many other institutions, universities and academic disciplines
could rely on institutional inertia to keep going without having to

1 This is despite the intense scrutiny to which the history of anthropology

has been subjected in recent decades, including specially its implication in colo¬
nialist modes of domination. (There is a large literature whose route can be
roughly signposted by Asad 1998/1973; Clifford & Marcus 1986; Stocking 1992;
Fox 1991; and Trouillot 2003). The specific issues of non-Western anthropology
and anthropologists have also been discussed (for example, in Burghart 1990;
Fahim 1982; Fardon 1990; Peirano 1998; Gerholm & Hannerz 1982), so my
claim that this literature has not pushed the question far enough must remain
an unsubstantiated assertion for the moment.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 499

justify themselves afresh in any fundamental sense. But some dis¬

ciplines—history and economics are good examples—actually
benefited by Independence, being gifted new agendas and enhanced
prestige in the nationalist regime. On the other hand, because of
their bad reputation as handmaidens of colonialism, disciplines like
anthropology and social anthropology were put on the defensive by
Independence. They could not afford the luxury of institutional
inertia either, because they were under pressure to demonstrate their
relevance for a post-colonial India. Unlike other disciplines, they
had to reposition and reinvent themselves in an environment that,
despite its general enthusiasm and optimism, was unsympathetic to
them. The 1950s and 1960s were, therefore, a critical period for Indian
sociology and social anthropology.
Paradoxically, the first difficulty in exploring the role played by
M.N. Srinivas in moulding institutional practices and preferences
during this crucial phase is posed by Srinivas’s own fame and pre¬
eminence. Often described as The doyen of Indian sociology’, MNS
was widely recognised as a major figure in the discipline—so much
so, in fact, that his influence acquires a natural, self-evident character
that deflects detailed analysis and seems to render it redundant.2
This sense of redundancy is underlined by the fact that there is already
a significant body of work chronicling Srinivas’s career, including
several well-known autobiographical essays.3 It is therefore more
important than usual to specify the objectives of this essay and its
relationship to the existing literature.
As part of the larger collective effort that this volume represents,
my essay attempts to ask questions which cannot be answered ade¬
quately today, given the rudimentary state of disciplinary history as
a field of specialised research in India. Only a preliminary sketch of
probable answers is being offered here, with speculative place-holders

2 To avoid repetition and enhance readability, this essay will often refer to
Srinivas by his initials, MNS.
3 These include: ‘My Baroda days’, ‘Sociology in Delhi’, ‘Itineraries of an
Indian social anthropologist’, and ‘Practising social anthropology in India’,
originally published in various volumes and journals but all available in Collected
essays (2002: hereafter CE). Unless the context requires mention of the original
place of publication, I will use CE for ease of reference.
500 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

marking the gaps to be filled by further research. Three main sets of

questions are considered under the broad theme of MNS’s role in
fashioning the disciplinary stances of Indian sociology: (a) the Take
over’ of sociology by social anthropology; (b) the advent of village
studies and their implications for Indian sociology, including such
issues as its acquisition of a new audience or its attitude towards the
state and social policy; and (c) the installation of intensive fieldwork
as the preferred method of Indian sociology/social anthropology.

I. OCCUPYING 'SOCIOLOGY'

Among MNSs first professional initiatives when embarking upon

his career in India—one that is still distinctively associated with
him—was his insistence on The unity of sociology and social anthro¬
pology’. What this meant in practice was the colonisation of sociology
by social anthropology. Of course MNS himself never put it so blunt¬
ly, preferring to say that the union was to the advantage of sociology;
but it is also clear that he thought sociology had little to offer and
could only gain by being converted into social anthropology. MNS
was quite open in acknowledging that this was largely a strategic
move prompted by the need to avoid association with anthropology,
which had a very bad reputation in the colonies. However, it would
be misleading to suggest that it was entirely an act of pragmatism,
for there were also intellectual reasons-—mostly to do with the new
look that British social anthropology had acquired under Radcliffe-
Brown and Evans-Pritchard—that encouraged and enabled this
distancing from anthropology.
Perhaps the best source for Srinivas’s views on this matter is a
brief note on ‘Social anthropology and sociology’ that he wrote for
the inaugural issue of the Sociological bulletin, published in 1952
(reprinted in CE). Written at the very beginning of his academic
career in India, soon after he had resigned his lecturership at Oxford
to become professor and head of a newly created department of
sociology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, this pro¬
grammatic piece is almost a manifesto. Srinivas begins with a candid
confession about the embarrassment that social anthropologists must
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 501

endure because of their discipline’s kinship with anthropology and

its unsavoury public image outside the West:

It is unfortunate that the term anthropology should immediately sug¬

gest to one, bearded and myopic ancients who study apes, skulls, primi¬
tives, head hunters, witchcraft, and human sacrifice. In non-European
countries the term is particularly odious, as the indigenous inhabit¬
ants—the term ‘native’ is deeply resented—do not like being regarded
as ‘primitives’ (another unfortunate word). The more educated people
in these countries have all kinds of suspicions against anthropologists—
that they are the agents of imperialism, spies masquerading as scien¬
tists, people who dig up unsavoury customs like polyandry which are
best not remembered even if they existed, and so on. Names are an im¬
portant matter, and social anthropologists have reason to feel that their
subject has not been lucky in the choice of its name. (CE: 457)

He then goes on to distinguish (and distance) social anthropology

from the other branches of anthropology such as physical anthropo¬
logy, ethnology, and prehistoric archaeology. As ‘the comparative
study of human societies’, social anthropology would ideally include

all societies, primitive, civilized, and historic. Actually, however, it has

until recently confined itself to primitive societies. But in the last twenty
years, and especially in the last ten years, it has made great progress in
England, and social anthropologists are beginning to study non-primi¬
tive societies. . . .
Anthropology in our country is mostly restricted to physical an¬
thropology and ethnology—especially the former—and social anthro¬
pology is conspicuous by its absence. This is specially marked in the
field studies undertaken in our country. (CE: 458)

Srinivas then provides a very brief genealogy for (British) social an¬
thropology from Durkheim through Malinowski to Radcliffe-Brown
before proceeding to distinguish it from cultural anthro-pology in
the Tylorean and especially the Boasian tradition dominant in
America.4 ‘Emphasis on “culture” reveals historical or ethnological

4 Eor broad overviews as well as detailed discussions of the issues involved

502 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

interests whereas emphasis on “society” reveals sociological interests’,

according to Srinivas, and though he is careful not to claim superior¬
ity for the latter, this is more out of politeness. For cultural anthropo¬
logy is described as pre-Malinowskian: in its willingness to settle for
‘anything less than 12 to 18 months with a strange people’, and for
being willing to rely on informants rather than insisting on the ‘direct
observation of social relations’. This is crucial because where the mere
existence of a norm may be enough to reconstruct a ‘culture’, for
those ‘interested in making significant general statements about social
relations between persons, the verbal respect to the norm and the
violation of the norm in actual behaviour are both important’ (CE:
459-60).
Srinivas identifies three main virtues in social anthropology: its
emphasis on a holistic approach encompassing the totality of a
society; its basis in intensive fieldwork involving total immersion
and language learning; and its comparative perspective, which guards
against ethnocentrism. Of these the second—intensive, long-
duration fieldwork—is considered the most important, and the main
source of social anthropology’s prestige in Britain. MNS acknow¬
ledges, but subsequently rebuts, the popular charge against social
anthropologists, namely that ‘they are completely preoccupied with
primitive societies, and that they have no time for anyone who wears
a loin cloth’.3 This accusation is no longer true, he says, with social
anthropologists having recently undertaken the study of peoples with
a civilised past. Moreover, they have embarked on studies of‘peasant
communities’ in many parts of the world; they are engaged in village
studies in India; and they are even beginning to take on urban studies
in both Britain and America. But though it is true that social anthro-
pology has concentrated mainly on primitive societies until recently,
there is a lot to be gained by such studies because they present a hist¬
oric opportunity to make a comparative analysis of societies that

in this intellectual history, see the History of Anthropology series, including

specially Stocking 1983 and 1984.
Here Srinivas is implying that, in the popular perception, only naked or
leaf-clad natives are primitive enough for anthropologists, who lose interest
even in natives civilised enough to wear a loincloth.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 503

are vastly different from modern ones; and because they serve to
innoculate the social anthropologist against ethnocentrism.
In the next couple of pages, Srinivas turns to the specifics of the
training that social anthropologists ought to receive, and it is here
that his intention of replacing sociology with social anthropology is
stated most clearly. He begins with an attack on American socio¬
logy, which, despite its 'belief in quantitative methods and “scientific
objectivity’”, is nevertheless ‘bogged by utter subjectivity’ and ethno¬
centrism.. Mentioning the preoccupation of American sociology with
the ‘social problems’ of a rapidly industrialising multi-racial and
multi-ethnic immigrant society, Srinivas dismisses this kind of ori¬
entation as being prompted by the availability of funds: ‘It is difficult
to resist the desire to do good especially when it helps to keep the
proverbial wolf at a respectable distance from the doors of sociolog¬
ists. But this has not been advantageous to the growth of “pure” or
“fundamental”—I regret I cannot find more suitable terms—socio¬
logy, which is devoted to the study of social institutions on a com¬
parative basis, which has as its main aim the making of intellectually
significant statements about the nature of human social relationships’
(CE: 464). Then follows a contemptuous rejection of two major
tendencies in American sociology, its penchant for surveys and
questionnaires (‘I am as yet unaware how exactly sociology has
profited through them’); and its partiality for large, multi-country
studies of cultural patterns (‘A social anthropologist. . . would be
aghast at the ease with which facile generalisations are made about
vast countries’). The stage is thus set for the declaration that the
textbooks and methods used to teach sociology in India constitute
‘a national intellectual disaster of the highest magnitude’. The solu¬
tion offered is hardly surprising:

How then should we teach the subject in our universities? It would be

a good idea if we could insist that students wishing to study ‘sociology’
make a prior study of‘social anthropology’ for at least two years. This
is very desirable for a number of reasons. It provides a cure to ‘ethno¬
centrism’. Besides, it produces a certain charity and tolerance towards
ways of life other than one’s own. The study of societies as integrated
wholes provides the correct perspective for studying small fragments
504 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of modern industrial societies. It is also more difficult to study one’s

own society than it is to study an alien society. Finally, it is essential
that students of sociology must develop an empirical outlook—a know¬
ledge of social anthropology will teach them that.
We could, of course, do away with the distinction between sociol¬
ogy and social anthropology and include them both under ‘compara¬
tive sociology’. This would help to separate social anthropology from
physical anthropology and ethnology. The union of social anthropo¬
logy and sociology is desirable and will be to the advantage of socio¬
logy. ...
The sociology we should evolve must then include all aspects of our
society—it should include within itself the study of primitive groups,
peasant communities, the various sects and cults, and aspects of our
urban life. It should convince historians and Indologists that we have
something to offer to them, something that will make their work even
more fruitful and interesting. (CE: 465-6; quote marks in original)

Except for very minor modifications, MNS never deviated from this,
his first considered description of the relationship between social
anthropology and sociology, throughout his entire career over the
next half century. It is interesting to note in passing that, at this early
stage of his career, Srinivas singles out history and Indology rather
than economics or political science as interlocutors. But what is most
remarkable in this account is, of course, the passive and empty role
for ‘sociology’. There is not a single instance where the content or
methodologies of sociology are described positively—either the dis¬
cipline remains a blank, or its contents are uniformly tainted and
worthless, fit only for immediate erasure. Conversely, social anthro¬
pology is the golden discipline that can do no wrong—its only prob¬
lem is that educated natives cannot forget its links to the colonialist
obsession with primitivism. However, this perception is itself unfair
because it is not social anthropology but its siblings—physical
anthropology and ethnology—that carry such stigma. Social anthro-
pology has now turned over a new leaf and is abrogating its past by
extending its interests beyond the primitive to all kinds of societies,
including civilised and urban industrial ones.
A half century after it was written, this programmatic statement
will surely strike the contemporary reader as being rather partial to
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 505

social anthropology, apart from being somewhat sanguine about its

past. However, before proceeding with such evaluative analyses we
need to explore the possible grounds for Srinivas’s views being what
they were, reasons why he may have felt his opinions and judgements
to be justified or self-evident.
The first set of such reasons is perhaps related to the genuine fer¬
ment that British social anthropology was undergoing at that time
and the missionary zeal with which its new self-image was being
propagated (Kuper 1996; Stocking 1984). Srinivas was not just an
observer but a privileged participant in this process, having been a
student of both Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard. This was also
the time when British social anthropology was at the peak of its power
and influence; it would never regain this pre-eminence, but at the
time it was the dominant voice of Western anthropology. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that the young Srinivas found this heady
environment inspiring, or that he enthusiastically and uncritically
adopted the worldview of British social anthropology. Moreover, the
new directions that social anthropology was taking at this time could
not have failed to affect MNS deeply. As is amply evident from his
writings, he was well aware of the nationalist antipathy towards
anthropology in his own country, and the shift from an exclusive
emphasis on primitive societies to a more universal description of
the object of study must have been especially welcome for ‘native
anthropologists’ of his generation. Given all this, the absence of a
more vigilant stance towards the claims of the discipline is perhaps
understandable.
The second and more important argument in explanation of
Srinivas’s patronising attitude towards sociology (in contrast to social
anthropology) is that it was a reaction to the past reputation and
present state of sociology at the time, namely the early 1950s. As is
now well known, the latter half (and especially the last quarter) of
the nineteenth century saw the rapid diffusion of European social
theory and its attendant debates among the educated Indian elite,
notably in Bengal (Forbes 1975; Chatterjee 1996). Positivism was
particularly popular, and the early sociological thinkers were much
discussed, especially Comte and Spencer. Thus, although a Bengal
Social Science Association had been established in 1867 which also
conducted‘empirical investigations on social matters, using schedules
506 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

and questionnaires’ (Chatterjee 1996: 16), by the early decades of

the twentieth century ‘sociology’ was mainly associated with social
philosophy and social theory of a general and abstract kind. Indian
intellectuals tended to see its importance in terms of the resources it
offered for investing discussions of indigenous traditions of schol¬
arship and modes of thought with the power and prestige of science.
Works like Brajendranath Seal’s The positive sciences of the ancient
Hindus (1915) or, even more appropriately, Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s
The positive background of Hindu sociology (originally 1937, reprinted
1985), are products of this context. They attempted to assert the
‘positive’—i.e., the this-worldly and material-practical—potential
of the indigenous sciences and arts, thereby challenging dominant
Orientalist/Indological scholarship and its positioning of indigenous
knowledges as exclusively spiritual-ideal, and as belonging to an
ancient and irretrievable past without relevance for the present. Such
a vision of ‘sociology’ seems to have been quite influential at the
time, particularly through the many-sided efforts of Benoy Sarkar
(see Roma Chatterji, this volume); Srinivas himself recalled that
sociology was sometimes refered to as ‘Sarkarism’ in the 1930s.6
However, we do not yet know enough about the career of this
notion of sociology in the formal institutions of the colonial-era
academy, particularly the universities. It is likely that ‘sociology’ did
not remain the exclusive or most advantageous label for the nation¬
alist intellectual-ideological project of ‘Sarkarism’ outlined above,
or that the project itself dwindled into eventual silence. In any case,
there seems to be a discontinuity of sorts between the activities of
Indian public intellectuals and the history of sociology as an academic
discipline. In Calcutta University itself, sociology was established as
a separate department long after an anthropology department focu¬
sing on ethnology and physical anthropology. In India’s first
postgraduate research department of‘sociology and civics’ (later to
include economics as well) set up at Bombay University under Patrick
Geddes, urban sociology was the area of emphasis during the initial

Excerpts from this interview are published in Deshpande 2000, although

this pai ticular reference is part of the unpublished full transcript. From the
tone and tenor of Srinivas’s remarks in this interview, it is clear that he felt this
to be an unflattering term.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 507

years. In Lucknow, widely regarded as an outpost of Calcutta in its

early years, the combined department of sociology and economics
hosted many different (and eclectic) tendencies. The only other colo¬
nial-era department of significance—at Osmania University in
Hyderabad, under the leadership of Christoph von Ftirer Haimen-
dorf—was focused on tribal ethnology.
In short, at the time of Independence sociology had a rather
diffused and unimpressive presence in the Indian academy. It is not
very surprising, therefore, that to the young Srinivas in the early 1950s
it looked like a modest discipline with much to be modest about.
Moreover, Srinivas was extremely uncomfortable with the associa¬
tions that sociology did call to mind—social philosophy (‘a vague
and woolly sub ject which consists of theories of philosophers who
occasionally like to deck out their theories with facts which suit their
theories7 [CE: 463]), and social work (‘a more prosperous academic
neighbour1 with the prospect of dangerous liaisons ‘on the basis of
expediency [which] will not only prevent the emergence of the proper
kind of sociology but.,. . will make popular a cheap variety of
“applied sociology” which everyone with any respect for academic
integrity and standards will keep away from1 [CE: 463-4]). His
remarks on these twin dangers are followed immediately by his scath¬
ing attack on American sociology and its preoccupation with ‘social
problems1 (mentioned above). These remarks echo the disdain for
American social science widely shared by contemporary European,
and especially British, scholars.
It is thus impossible to be in any doubt about the specific mix of
perspectives, prejudices, and judgments that shaped MNS’s world¬
view and informed his desire to see sociology become social anthro¬
pology. Other individuals living in the same times may well have
internalised a more or less different set of biases and preferences.
The preceding account has tried to describe and (as far as possible)
explain, the particular set of biases that MNS did in fact work with:
it is not an evaluative assessment of these biases, much less an implicit
invocation of a mythical ‘God’s eye-view1 free of all bias. Such a
disclaimer is not intended to preempt the question of an evaluation
either: it is only to acknowledge that the present state of knowledge
in disciplinary history does not allow us to venture into such terrain.
508 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

II. FROM THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TRIBES TO THE

SOCIOLOGY OF VILLAGE INDIA

From a contemporary vantage point, it is almost a cliche that the

village studies phase of the 1950s and 1960s reoriented Indian social
anthropology and gave it a new post-Independence identity that
helped it to distinguish and distance itself from its previous asso¬
ciation with the study of‘primitive’ tribes. It is also well known that
MNS was prominent among those who advocated (and were engaged
in bringing about) this change of direction. However, for these very
reasons, it is necessary to guard against the effects of presentist com¬
mon sense when revisiting such apparently over-familiar terrain.
Common sense treats the advent of village studies as a logical and
almost inevitable development arising out of the special status of
the village in Indian culture and history. Three main factors tend to
be cited—the civilisational idea of the village found in the Hindu
scriptures and in subcontinental cultural traditions; the efforts of
British colonial administrators in the nineteenth century to fashion
a juridico-ethnological notion of the village useful for governance;
and Gandhian nationalism and its enshrinement of the village as
the authentic moral core—the soul—of the nation.7 There is nothing
illusory about these factors, but it is only by a sleight of hand that
they can be positioned as ‘antecedent causes’ underwriting the seif-
evidentness of village studies. From the perspective of disciplinary
history, what is remarkable is that despite the undoubted existence
of these antecedents, village studies were unknown in Indian social
anthropology before the 1950s.

7 ‘The idea of the village in Indian civilisation, its reinforcement by Mahatma

Gandhi, the pragmatic interests of government officers and the influence of
anthropological methods elsewhere in the world have created this fundamental
presupposition that the clue to an understanding of Indian society lies in the
village (Dumont and Pocock 1957:26). S.C. Dube begins his well-known book,
Indian village, with the assertion that ‘[fjrom time immemorial the village has
been a basic and important unit in the organization of Indian social polity',
and goes on to cite its occurrence in the Rig-Veda and post-Vedic literature,
notably the Mahabharata and the Manusmrti (Dube 1955: 1-2).
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 509

This is explicitly acknowledged not only by Srinivas himself,8 but

by two other Indian scholars prominently associated with the advent
of village studies, S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar. Recalling his
sojourn as a visiting lecturer at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, London, in 1952 while he was writing Indian village, Dube
complains about the lack of role models.9 And in his editorial
introduction to the 1955 special double issue of Eastern anthropologist
on village studies, Majumdar bemoans the fact that economists seem
to have monopolised research on rural India, going so far as to declare
that ‘there is a complete lack of first-hand studies of our rural life
and the cultural setting that provides the stage for rural action’
(Majumdar 1955: iii).
It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that Srinivas’s interest
in village studies of the type that he helped institutionalise in the
1950s and 1960s was almost entirely a product of his Oxford training.
As he says himself, the idea for the Rampura study (MNS’s first and
only substantial village study) was born in 1945-6 through the re¬
peated suggestions of his first supervisor at Oxford, A.R. Radcliffe-
Brown, about the importance of a field study of a multi-caste Indian
village (1976: 1). Radcliffe-Brown in turn may have owed his interest
in village studies to his intimate acquaintance, while a member of
the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago in the

8 MNS does acknowledge partial- or proto-precedents in the work of Gilbert

Slater, Harold Mann, and especially the Wisers. He also notes that between the
two World Wars, some Indian scholars (like D.R. Gadgil and R.K. Mukherjee)
had also begun to study aspects of rural life while others (like C.N. Vakil and
G.S. Ghurye) encouraged their students to conduct field studies of villages.
However, he still maintains that proper social anthropological fieldwork in
villages only began after World War II (CE: 515-16).
9 ‘My main difficulty was that I had no model for my study. The complexity
of working on the caste system made everything so different and difficult.
Redfield’s studies and many other books on villages around the world were
helpful, but they could not solve several of my problems. The Wisers’ Behind
mud walls was limited in scope, and the village surveys of the time were tilted
toward economic rather than sociological data. I was aware that some studies
were in the pipeline . . .’ (see Saurabh Dube, this volume).
510 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

1930s, with the much acclaimed studies of Mexican villages done by

Robert Redfield and his associates.10 In any case, whatever the route
by which this idea reached Oxford and MNS, the important point is
that his prior training in India—including his eight years of ap¬
prenticeship’ under Ghurye11—does not seem to have nudged him
in this direction.
It is also pertinent in this context that Religion and society among
the Coorgs of South India—the work on which MNS’s professional
reputation mainly rested for the first half of his career—did not
accord any special importance to the village. The main focus was on
the okka or clan, the subject of chapter 5. All the larger social units
relevant to the practice of religion—the ur or village; the nad or a
collection of villages; and the larger regional unit called sime or
desha—were all discussed in a single succeeding chapter,(ch. 6: ‘The
cults of the larger social units’; 1952: 177). Thus, although the ur is
a significant social unit, it is one among others, none of which are
accorded the analytically privileged status of the okka.12
If the idea of the village was not really a part of the sociological
imagination at the time of Independence, what factors pushed it
onto the foreground of Indian sociology during the 1950s? This is
clearly an important question as it concerns a crucial moment in
disciplinary history; but a full and detailed answer would take us

10 Radclifle-Brown was in Chicago from 1931 to 1937, when he left to take

up the newly created chair in social anthropology at Oxford (see Stocking 1984
for details). Redfield’s first major study of Tepoztlan village was published in
1930, and several others followed during the 1930s (Redfield 1930; Redfield
and Villa Rojas 1934).
11 This apprenticeship stretched from 1936 to 1944, and included a book-
length MA thesis (published in 1942 as Marriage and family in Mysore); a 900-
page two-volume doctoral dissertation (containing the basic Coorg material,
reworked for his second dissertation at Oxford); and at least two stints as a
research assistant collecting folklore and other material from Andhra Pradesh
and Tamil Nadu.
It is true, ot course, that the main objective of this book was to describe
the linkages between social structure and religious practice; but it is nevertheless
significant that the village, though it was included, did not appear as a self-
evidently pre-eminent unit of analysis.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 511

well beyond the boundaries of this essay. The paradigm shift

represented by village studies was precipitated by a range of social
and disciplinary changes that cannot be associated with any indi¬
vidual, even one as influential as Srinivas. The following account
thus offers only a brief summary of the wider reasons for the sudden
salience of the village in Indian sociology—just enough, that is, to
situate MNS in the context of this larger shift.
Many of the background factors that are retrospectively claimed
as antecedent causes that prepared fertile ground for the emergence
of village studies were (by and large) already in place by the 1930s.
The special status of the Indian village in the Hindu and larger sub¬
continental religious-cultural tradition is, of course, a‘timeless factor,
and for the purposes of the present discussion may be said to have
been present for centuries. The writings of British colonial officials
like Maine, Munro, and Baden Powell were also available well before
the 1920s.13 The Indian National Congress adopted the ‘constructive
programme’ designed by M.K. Gandhi in the 1920s, and Gandhian
village renewal projects began functioning in the 1930s (Gandhi 1952;
Kaushik 1964; Kumarappa 1958). What is not as well known is that
even the statist developmental perspective on the village was already
around by the end of the 1920s. Although more research is needed
to identify similar projects and initiatives elsewhere in colonial India
at the time, the Gurgaon ‘village uplift’ experiment of F.L. Brayne
could be considered a prototype of the later developmentalism
(Brayne 1927). Similarly, Charlotte and William Wiser’s study—
widely acknowledged as a precursor of village studies—was based
on the authors’ experience of living (as Christian missionaries) in
the village of Karimpur from 1925 to 1930 (Wiser & Wiser 1963).
So, if most of the enabling conditions were already in existence by
the 1930s, why did academic village studies take off only in the 1950s?
The broad answer to this question is by now well mapped out—
the cold war, decolonisation, and the birth of an independent Indian
nation-state initiated a set of chain reactions that brought about the

13 Maine’s Village communities in East and West, originally lectures delivered

at Oxford, had already entered its third printing in 1876 (Maine 1993; reprinted
from the 1913 edition). See also Baden Powell 1957 (originally 1896).
512 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

advent of village studies in Indian sociology. Decolonisation saw the

emergence of numerous new nation-states in Asia and Africa, and
the Cold War precipitated a competitive struggle between the two
superpowers for winning over these new nations to their bloc and
worldview. The USAs hegemonic position in the post-Second World
War scenario prompted it to invest major resources in an academic
component to the effort to win the Cold War. This created an un¬
precedented demand in the American academy for expertise on the
societies, cul tures, and polities of the new nations of the Third World,
expertise that would help devise policy initiatives to wean these
nations away from the attractions of socialism and the Soviet bloc.
It was this contextual impetus that gave birth to new multi-disci¬
plinary fields of research focused on Third World societies, fields
like development studies, modernisation studies, area studies, and
peasant studies (Gendzier 1985). At the same time, newly independ¬
ent states in this part of the world carried the burden of the material
and cultural aspirations of nationalism, which usually translated into
ambitious programmes of state-led ‘development’, the idea that
defined this epoch. Given that most of these new nations were
overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, it was only to be expected
that the combination of domestic aspirations and geopolitical
manoeuvrings would give a historically unprecedented boost to
research on rural economy and society in the Third World.
While this story has been well documented in the Indian context
(see, for example, Deshpande 2002; Jodhka 1998; Rosen 1982), there
are two problems with this big-picture account. The first is that this
global narrative does not quite fit the Indian case, despite large areas
of overlap. For instance: modernisation studies did not dominate
the Indian academic scene as it did in many other Third World con¬
texts (Deshpande 2002); despite the Gandhian push towards the vil¬
lage, there were powerful tendencies in the Indian polity that were
not, for various reasons, enamoured of rural society (Jodhka 2002);
and given the Orientalist scholars’ longstanding interest in India, it
is arguable that the Cold War context outlined above was not a
decisive factor in the emergence of research on village or rural India—
such studies would have developed in any case in response to both
domestic and foreign interests. The specifics of such discrepan¬
cies need not detain us here, but they are also related to the second
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 513

problem, which is that the big picture account does not really provide
us with detailed descriptions of the specific institutional-intellectual
routes by which village studies entered the mainstream agendas of
academic research on India.14
In terms of the details of disciplinary and intellectual history, then,
there seem to be three main routes by which village studies entered
the Indian academy. The first is via British social anthropology after
its refashioning in the 1930s; the second is via US-based academic
initiatives which were located in a range of fields including social
anthropology, peasant studies, area studies, and political science; the
third is via more explicitly policy-oriented and eclectic academic
initiatives geared towards rural development and extension. Srinivas
was, of course, the best known and most influential traveller along
the first route. The second route has produced several major ini¬
tiatives that have contributed significantly to Western scholarship
on India, including the Berkeley Village Studies Program, the Chicago
initiative, the Cornell-India Project, and (later) the Centre for Village
Studies at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex.15 The third
route saw many prominent efforts, including those at Osmania

14 While this criticism is not applicable to George Rosens work,it is certainly

true of the other ‘macro’ accounts cited above, i.e. Deshpande 2002 and Jodhka
1998. There is—inevitably—a significant gap between the goals and intentions
(howsoever established) of Leviathan-like entities such as the US state and the
workings of smaller entities like university departments, disciplinary factions,
and individual scholars. This is not to deny the plausibility of the relationship
between the two, but to underline the need for more concrete and specific
evidence for establishing causation, particularly in the context of disciplinary
history.
15 McKim Marriott was initially affiliated to the Berkeley programme when
working on Kishangarhi. The Chicago initiative was part of Robert Redfield’s
civilisational studies project, and brought Milton Singer to India; Marriott was
also associated with it. The Cornell Project was led by Morris Opler and is
famous for having trained a significant number of American scholars, including
Bernard Cohn and Pauline Kolenda. Several Indian scholars including S.C.
Dube, were also associated with this project. (A detailed history of this project
is currently being prepared by Nicole Sackley; Sackley n.d.) The Sussex pro¬
gramme came later; it was led by Michael Lipton and involved mostly econo¬
mists. I have avoided details as this essay is oriented to sociology and social
anthropology; see Dasgupta 1978.
514 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

University and the Etawah Pilot Project in Uttar Pradesh, but over
time receded from the mainstream of social science research into
institutions like the National Institute for Rural Development (ori¬
ginally Community Development), agricultural universities and
agro-economic research centres.16
MNS can be situated fairly straightforwardly in this broad context:
he was, of course, identified with the British social anthropology
route; he had a largely positive relationship with the scholars and
studies produced through the second route; but he was always op¬
posed to the third route and distanced himself from it throughout
his career.
Given the current state of knowledge on this subject, it seems fair
to say that in Indian sociology and social anthropology the emergence
of the village as a privileged unit of analysis was due more to
disciplinary trends in Britain and the USA than any indigenous in¬
clinations. However, once village studies began, they quickly gathered
a local support base both within and outside the academy. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that the studies themselves were not preceded
by any extended attempts at examining or defending the theoretical
suitability of the village as a unit of social anthropological analysis.
But such self-conscious reflection was not entirely absent even if
it was not visible in the work of the protagonists of village studies
themselves. Louis Dumont and David Pocock wrote a long review
essay in the inaugural (1957) issue of Contributions to Indian sociology
on the two major collections of village studies edited by Srinivas
and McKim Marriott that were both published in 1955 (Dumont
and Pocock 1957). In this review essay, which has acquired retrospect¬
ive fame as an early critique of village studies, they argue that the
route linking British social anthropology to Indian village studies
passes through Africa. Most of MNS’s teachers and colleagues at
Oxford in the 1940s had been initiated into the discipline via ethno¬
graphic research on African societies, for which Radcliffe-Brown had

The Osmania University project is best known for S.C. Dube’s famous
book, Indian village; the Etawah project was led by Albert Mayer, an American
ar wk° was invited by Nehru to help design the community development
programme of the Indian government. McKim Marriott was also associated
with it in a consultative capacity.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 515

been the major intellectual influence. Dumont and Pocock expressed

concern about the consequences of this African influence,17 a concern
echoed—albeit in a different register and context18—by Bernard
Cohn in his perceptive essay on the influence of African models on
Indian histories (Cohn 1987: 200-2). All three authors are agreed
that the salience of the village in Indian social anthropology is directly
derived from the theoretical and methodological presuppositions
of the work done by British-trained Africanists in the 1930s and
1940s.
The Malinowski-Radcliffe-Brown school of social anthropology
dominant in Africa was built on the twin foundations of the former’s
(soon to be canonical) ideas about fieldwork, and the latter’s
Durkheimian conception of social structure (later termed struc¬
tural-functionalism). Both scholars firmly believed that the
anthropologist’s object of study needed to be a bounded whole
clearly demarcated—even isolated—from its broader social context.
This ‘island’ model was thus a requirement of both the underlying
theory as well as the method. Methodologically, Malinowskian norms
of‘participant observation’ fieldwork required a unit small enough
to be directly observable by a single individual. Theoretically, struc¬
tural-functionalism defined a social system as a synergistic whole
constituted by the network of observable social relations (rather than
fluid-bordered intangibles like culture, values, etc.) binding its parts
to each other and each part to the whole. It was these requirements
that the idea of the Indian village successfully met. As Bernard Cohn
put it: ‘Unit, boundary, social structure, and group are the central

1 ‘Social Anthropology has grown up in Africa and this to such an extent

that its African orientation has become almost implicit, an unconscious feature
of its existence. Despite the much longer period of Anglo-Indian contact, the
sociology of India has only properly begun in the last ten years. It might be
assumed a priori that such a new branch of sociology would run the risk of
being overshadowed by the conclusions of more advanced branches and fail to
define its distinctive approaches. .. .’ (Dumont and Pocock 1957: 24)
18 Cohn was of course associated with the Cornell Project in the early 1950s.
In this later essay, he is trying to ‘understand the limitations of the gift to us of
British social anthropologists’ in the broader context of the relationship between
history and anthropology in the study of India—a theme to which he devoted
his entire career and made unique and lasting contributions.
516 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

concepts which appear time and time again in the anthropological

literature of the forties and the fifties. A unit means something that
was observable on the ground. Hamlets, villages, lineages, tribes were
believed to be bounded—they were countable, mappable, had names,
and above all had social structures—patterned relations between
groups’ (1987: 202).
However, while Cohn was not focusing exclusively on the village—
his was a more general argument about the often unnoticed conse¬
quences of the ‘travelling’ of theories and concepts—Dumont and
Pocock launched a frontal attack on the theoretical foundations of
the village as the prefered unit of analysis. They argued that the Africa-
inspired search for bounded wholes isolated such units not only from
their larger socio-cultural milieux but also from their historical
trajectories.19 Indeed, they went on to assert that Africanist influences
had misled Indianists into mistaking an ‘architectural and demo¬
graphic’ fact for a social fact:

A field-worker takes a village as a convenient centre for his investiga¬

tions and all too easily comes to confer upon that village a kind of so¬
ciological reality which in fact it does not possess. The architectural
and demographic fact which the village is lures us away from a struc¬
tural perspective, where things exist only in the relations which are the
proper objects of study, to an atomistic or elemental point of view where
things exist in themselves. The substantial reality of the village deceives
us into . . . assuming a priori that when people refer to an object by
name they mean by that designation what we ourselves mean when we

19 One of the axioms which gave such vigour to English social anthropology
in the thirties was the insistence that the field-worker approach his area untied
by questions of a historical or cultural nature and that he be concerned with
the social wholes in themselves, to describe and analyse their contemporary
functioning. At such a period, Africa was an ideal field for study. But the Indian
sociologist dare not isolate the area of his enquiry from neighbouring areas or
from history. ... To try and understand a local Indian society as an anthro¬
pologist in the past approached a primitive society elsewhere in the world, or
as Indian tribes have been approached, is to fail at the outset. The Indian socio¬
logist must keep his attention upon a constant interaction between a general
and the local working out of that idea (Dumont and Pocock 1957: 24—5).
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 517

speak of it. In fact we should be on our guard and examine the social
referent of the term. When we do this we frequently find that the refer¬
ent is not the whole village but merely the local caste group of the
speaker. (Dumont and Pocock 1957: 26)

Although an anticipatory defence against this argument does ap¬

pear in the editor’s introduction to his 1955 volume of village studies
(see below), MNS’s extended formal response to this critique seems
to have taken almost two decades to appear in print in the form of
his well-known essay, ‘The Indian village: Myth and reality’.20 Typi¬
cally, for Srinivas, the response is mainly in the form of copious em¬
pirical evidence for the sociological reality of the village culled from
his own and others’ fieldwork. However he does raise the theoretical
issue of whether the presence of inequality within a community must
disqualify it as such (as Dumont seems to imply); and the historical
issue of the village and its linkages with larger entities. By the time
that this response appeared, the exaggerations in the Dumont-
Pocock position had already become apparent, and MNS managed
to wrest back much of the ground claimed by their critique. Never¬
theless, it gives the impression of a post facto defence rooted in meth¬
odology rather than theory.
At the time (1947-8) when he planned and carried out his own
fieldwork, MNS does not seem to have been particularly concerned
about the theoretical status of the village as a unit of analysis. His
decision to study the village of Rampura, as described in the opening

20 Dumont and Pocock’s review essay appeared in 1957, in the inaugural

issue of their journal, Contributions to Indian sociology. Srinivas’s essay was
first published in 1975, in a festschrift for his teacher, Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard.
The bibliography and acknowledgements to this essay suggest that it was written
fairly close to the date of publication, although this needs to be fully verified.
MNS has pointed out elsewhere that Dumont later revised his criticism and
accepted MNS’s position as ‘a well-balanced synthesis’ (see MNS 1996b: xii,
the Introduction to Village, caste, gender and method). However, since the dis¬
cussion in the editor’s introduction to India's villages (see Section III, especially
pages 5-11, of Srinivas 1955) refers to precisely those doubts that were voiced
by Dumont and Pocock in 1957, it is possible that MNS was already aware of
their ideas (either through personal communication or some other source)
and was in fact responding to them.
518 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

pages of The remembered village, does not dwell on the choice of the
unit of analysis itself (1976: 1-2). It is interesting that this choice is
discussed mainly in terms of its fieldwork-related aspects (about
which more below), although the general motivation of‘adding to
existing knowledge about the working of a uniquely hierarchical
society which was on the threshold of far-reaching changes’ is men¬
tioned at the outset (ibid.). But in his editorial introduction to India’s
villages, written seven years later, by which time he had acquired an
international reputation as a leading exponent of village studies, MNS
does deal with the question of the village as unit of study. However,
the distribution of emphasis in this introduction provides interesting
evidence of the order of priorities that MNS was faced with at the
time.
After the initial remarks locating (geographically and otherwise)
the village studies in the volume, the second section is devoted to an
explanation and defence of the fact that as many as nine of the twelve
contributors are non-Indian scholars from the USA and Britain. MNS
argues that social anthropological fieldwork is predicated on cultural
strangeness and therefore privileges non-natives; that it is much more
difficult for Indians to study their own culture; and that the time-
urgent task of studying a rapidly changing society requires all possible
help, especially given the expensive and time-consuming nature of
social anthropological training, and the neglect of social anthropo¬
logy (in favour of physical anthropology and ethnology) and conse¬
quent paucity of trained personnel in India (1955: 2-5). Section III
begins with a careful overview of the status of the village as a unit of
analysis:

A body of people living in a restricted area, at some distance from other

similar groups, with extremely poor roads between them, the majority
ol the people being engaged in agricultural activity, all closely depen¬
dent upon each other economically and otherwise, and having a vast
body of common experience, must have some sense of unity. The point
is so simple and obvious that it seems hardly worth making it but for
the existence of the institution of caste. Caste is even today an institu¬
tion of great strength, and as marriage and dining are forbidden with
members of other castes, the members of a caste living in a village have
many important ties with their fellow caste-men living in neighbouring
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 519

villages. These ties are so powerful that a few anthropologists have been
led into asserting that the unity of the village is a myth and that the
only thing which counts is caste. Secondly, in spite of the fact that com¬
munications between villages are still poor and were even poorer in the
past, they were far from being self-contained. It is argued that the many
strong ties which existed between villages came in the way of the devel¬
opment of a sense of village unity. If in the nucleated villages, a sense of
unity is weakened if not destroyed by caste and by the interdependence
of villages, it ought to be even weaker in dispersed villages. The unity
of the village is not then an axiom to be taken for granted, but some¬
thing that has to be shown to exist. (1955: 5-6)

As this passage demonstrates, Srinivas was well aware that the

village was not an unproblematic entity. But his characteristic res¬
ponse to such questions was to search for experiential (which is to
say ethnographic) evidence for the unity of the village, and this is
what he does in the pages following the passage quoted above. He
does not enter into any extended theoretical discussion a la Dumont,
and is content to rely on his own (and others’) field experiences. On
the whole, MNS was happy to go along with the broad justifications
for village studies that were being offered at the time.
The earliest justification that MNS himself offers is that of
invoking the urgency of producing an ethnographic record of a tradi¬
tional 'way of life’ that is fast changing and may soon disappear for¬
ever. This is the familiar refrain of anthropology in salvage mode,
and has now been extensively critiqued in the literature. However, at
the time it proved to be a persuasive argument to many. A second
common justification, offered especially by the ‘peasant studies’
school of village studies, was that village dwellers represented the
majority (and usually the vast majority) of people living in Third
World or non-Western societies at the time; to understand such so¬
cieties, therefore, it was imperative that villages be studied. While
MNS was of course aware of this argument, he invokes it mostly im¬
plicitly rather than explicitly. A third justification for village studies,
one that was most in keeping with the dominant ideas of the mid¬
twentieth century, emphasised their utility for purposes of develop¬
ment, planning, and rural uplift. Srinivas could not but have been
aware of the attractiveness of this argument, because he mentions it
520 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

quite often, especially in his early works. However, he always remained

not just sceptical but even hostile, and never failed to distance himself
from its utilitarian ‘policy orientation’21 He maintained this basic
orientation throughout his career, as can be seen in his writings across
the decades.
One may note as an aside that this is an important aspect of his
professional worldview that needs more detailed study. Part of this
attitude is of course a version of the classical scholar’s disdain for
‘interested’ knowledge, and it is likely that he was encouraged in this
view by his teachers and colleagues at Oxford. But there is also a
principled stand here against the temptations—of power, funding,
and academic advancement—that such an orientation seemed to
promise. MNS would have seen these temptations up close, given
his location at the Delhi School of Economics, where his economist
colleagues were deeply involved in the government’s development
planning effort and enjoyed enviable access to the highest echelons
of the state. By the same token, one cannot rule out the possible pre¬
sence here of some degree of resentment aroused by sibling envy.
Finally, there is an aspect to MNS’ attitude that may seem anachronis¬
tic today but was not uncommon in his time, namely his belief that
‘policy’ involved decisions about good and bad that a ‘value neutral’

21 A striking instance of such distancing is to be found in the introduction

to the 1955 village studies collection cited above: ‘The two five-year plans aim,
among other things, to increase agricultural production and to change the
social life of our peasantry. An intimate knowledge of the social life of our
peasantry in different parts of the country, obtained by men trained to obtain
such knowledge, would have been thought helpful to the execution of the plans,
in avoiding avoidable human misery, and in increasing efficiency. I may add
here that I am not one of those social scientists who believe that the social
scientist holds the key to the success of the plans. The far reaching claims made
on behalf of the social scientist are unjustified and will, in the long run, do
nothing but harm to the social sciences. [. . .] From the point of view of the
growth of social anthropology, concentration on merely the useful or practical
is not altogether healthy. The theoretical growth of the subject will be neglected
as the best talent will be drawn into applied work. The only safeguard against
this is the establishment of university teaching and research departments in
social anthropology’ (MNS 1955: 11-12).
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 521

social scientist could not and should not take.22 This could also be
related, in a general sense, to IVINS’ lack of enthusiasm for direct in¬
volvement in practical politics of any sort.23 On the other hand a
case could also be made for MNS’s keen interest in contemporary
social changes, including especially electoral politics in post-colonial
India. This is clearly a subject deserving more detailed and extensive
research.24
As far as village studies are concerned, however, what is most strik¬
ing about MNS is that, in the final analysis, his own justification is
methodological. The village is important not so much for its own
sake but because it provides a suitable site for fieldwork. By his own
reckoning, MNS was powerfully interpellated by the social anthropo¬
logical enterprise as it was being transformed and energised in Britain
in the late 1940s. Central to the epistemological claims of this enter¬
prise was the practice of Malinowskian fieldwork, which was the
factor most reponsible for the enhanced legitimacy and prestige of
anthropology in the Western academy. And, as discussed in the
previous section, MNS enthusiastically welcomed the shift (in
principle if not yet in practice) from the older anthropological ob¬
session with 'primitives’ to the more catholic orientation of British

22 ‘The anthropologist [.. . ] can place his understanding of a village or tribe

at the disposal of the planner. He can understand and sympathise with the
difficulties of his peasant or tribesman. He may in some cases even be able to
anticipate the kind of reception a particular administrative measure may have.
But he cannot lay down policy because it is the result of certain decisions about
right and wrong. Politicians and reformers lay down policy, and the anthropo¬
logist can at best make clear the implications of a particular policy5 (MNS
1955: 12). Although this quote is from the early part of his career, MNS held
basically the same views throughout his career. (See for example the interview
in Deshpande 2000.)
23 Interesting contrasts are provided by other scholars featured in this
volume, specially Nirmal Kumar Bose and A.R. Desai.
24 For example, he arranged for faculty and research scholars of the Delhi
department to pay a special visit to their respective fieldwork sites to observe
and report on the general elections of 1967 and 1971. These studies have now
been published in Srinivas and Shah 2007.1 am grateful to Patricia Uberoi for
bringing this to my notice.
522 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

social anthropology. But though the city and city folk were declared
to be legitimate subjects, it was still rather difficult in the 1940s to
move away from the anthropological concern with the ‘traditional’.
Hence the importance of the village. It offered a site that was tradi¬
tional yet not inhabited by primitives, a research site that was relatively
free from the taint of racial-colonial stereotypes and could be
defended in a post-colonial context. Moreover, it was also a site where,
despite being a native (thereby lacking the reinforcement of colonial-
racial dominance), the upper-caste, Western-educated, city-based
anthropologist could nevertheless count on the social distance and
status differentials upon which the highly intrusive, intense, and long-
drawn-out practice of fieldwork inevitably depended.
I do not mean to suggest that MNS or his contemporaries neces¬
sarily thought in this fashion, at least not explicitly. What I am arguing
is that this reason for choosing the village (in preference to towns or
other locations) would have insinuated itself into the calculations
of social anthropologists in the form of‘practical considerations as
they went about planning their research or looking for suitable field
sites. It is not as though fieldwork-related social interaction in rural
contexts was easy or tension-free; there were also the physical-logisti¬
cal and social hardships that city-bred researchers had to face when
living in amenity-scarce and privacy-scarce villages—tribulations
which formed the stuff of professional lore.25 Although it is difficult
to generalise, since much would have depended on the particulars
of each instance, it is certainly arguable that as an institutionalised
and routinised practice (rather than an exceptional virtuoso perform¬
ance), participant observation—like much of empirical social
science—required the tacit support of status differentials. This was
(and presumably is) true in spite of the apparently contradictory
fact that fieldwork places the researcher in a position of relative
vulnerability vis-a-vis his/her subjects. (To borrow Louis Dumont’s
terminology from another context, such vulnerability may be said

~5 See, tor example, A. Beteille, ‘The tribulations of fieldwork’ in Beteille &

Madan 1975; tor similar accounts from an urban setting, see Khadija Gupta,
Travails ot a woman fieldworker’ in MNS, A.M. Shah, & E.A. Ramaswamy
2002 [1979].
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 523

to be ‘encompassed1 by the researcher’s position of power within a

broader set of social relations.) While the situation today may be
more complicated, it is surely plausible that in the 1950s and 1960s
villagers were more likely to be accommodating than city folk. In
this sense, therefore, fieldwork in villages may have seemed more
likely to succeed, which is perhaps one reason (apart from other
disciplinary preferences and traditions) why most apprentice social
anthropologists tended to do fieldwork in villages.26

III. METHODOLOGICAL MONOTHEISM:

THE CENTRALITY OF PARTICIPANT
OBSERVATION

Despite his role in establishing village studies, and as he himself re¬

peatedly noted, Srinivass lifelong commitment was not to any parti¬
cular research site but to a method, namely participant observation
in the Malinowskian mould, as propagated by Radcliffe-Brown and
Evans-Pritchard at Oxford. This was one subject on which he never
changed his views; perhaps it is also the single-most enduring feature
of his legacy. More than any other scholar, MNS was responsible,
through all his professional activities and especially in his role as a
teacher and mentor for students and younger colleagues, for the
establishment of participant observation as the most prestigious
methodological choice for the practice of social anthropology in
India.
In his autobiographical writings, Srinivas has unambiguously

26 This is well trodden ground, but it would still be worthwhile to revisit it

from a contemporary perspective. Apart from the extensive discussions in the
international literature, two Indian collections from the 1970s on fieldwork
experiences provide much material on the issue of relative status and its
consequences: Beteille and Madan (1975) and MNS, A.M. Shah, and E.A.
Ramaswamy (2002 [1979]). For different strategies for handling cstatus-by-
association’, see in particular, the essays by Mayer, Beteille, and Mencher in the
former volume, and by MNS and Pandey in the latter volume. An interesting
miscellany of the problems of urban fieldwork can be found in Saberwal’s essay
in the first volume, and those by Gupta, Dua, Bellwinkel, Patwardhan, Rama¬
swamy, and Baviskar in the second volume.
524 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

acknowledged the formative—indeed transformative—impact of

Oxford on his professional self. It was here that he came to look up¬
on social anthropology as something of a vocation rather than just
a career. He went to Oxford in May 1945 as a ‘mature student’ armed
with a two-volume doctoral dissertation of nearly 900 pages (CE:
651) written under the supervision of G.S. Ghurye and already ac¬
cepted by Bombay University.27 His decision to go to Oxford was
motivated more by ‘push’ factors—a falling out with Ghurye that
had seen him passed over for a lecturership at Bombay and which
led to the termination of his research assistantship with no concrete
career alternatives in sight—than by the ‘pull’ of Oxbridge (CE: 669-
70; CE: 651-2). Acquiring a foreign degree was seen as the next logical
step in the attempt to enhance his job prospects. It is hardly sur¬
prising, therefore, that during his early days as a student at Oxford—
a period marked by financial and career uncertainties—he wanted
to earn his degree as quickly as possible, being particularly keen to
avoid further fieldwork.28
Things had changed substantially by July 1947, when MNS’s dis¬
sertation, based on the Coorg material without recourse to fresh
fieldwork, was passed by his second supervisor, Evans-Pritchard, and

27 Andre Beteille has written: ‘When Srinivas arrived in Oxford in 1945 to

work for a D.Phil. in social anthropology, he was a mature student. He had
done fieldwork in various parts of south India; he had earned a Ph.D. degree
from Bombay University; and he had published a book. Nevertheless, Oxford
had a transformative effect on him. It was at the time the Mecca of British
social anthropology, and the five or six years that he spent there were enchanted
years’ (Beteille 2003: xvii).
28 Here is MNS in his own words: ‘R-B’s [suggestion] that I analyse the
material on religion in my Coorg thesis from the functionalist point of view
was to teach me, in a way that I would never forget, the fruitfulness of his ap¬
proach. .. . The idea was attractive, even challenging, but I was scared that he
might want me to visit Coorg again. The last thing that I could think of then
was the luxury of another field trip. Besides, I had protracted my student life
too long and I wanted to get a job and start contributing to the family income
instead of being a drain on their hard-won resources. R-B assured me that the
material in my thesis was enough for a D.Phil. thesis, and armed with that
assurance, I went ahead’ (CE: 654-5).
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 525

awarded the DPhil degree by Oxford University. During these three

years MNS had been ‘converted’ (his word) to the structural-
functionalist cause espoused by Racliffe-Brown.29 He had also earned
acceptance in the inner circle of Oxford social anthropology, deve¬
loped a special rapport with Evans-Pritchard, a comfortable profes¬
sional relationship with other teachers like Meyer-Fortes, and
friendships with fellow students like Max Gluckman and Godfrey
Lienhardt. Above all, his dissertation was well regarded and had been
recommended for publication under the prestigious Clarendon
imprint of the Oxford University Press, and he was being considered
for a lectu rership at Oxford. Despite all these achievements, however,
Srinivas was acutely aware that he had not yet experienced the most
important rite of passage of his tribe, namely Malinowski-style
intensive fieldwork, and was therefore not really a ‘proper’ social
anthropologist.
George Stocking Jr.’s now classic account of the emergence of‘field-
work’30 as the distinguishing characteristic of British (and later
global) social anthropology tracks the evolution of this methodology
from the ‘intensive study of limited areas’ proposed by A.C. Haddon
through the ‘concrete method’ advocated by W.H.R. Rivers to its ele¬
vation as a ‘mythic charter’ for scientific anthropology by Bronislaw
Malinowski (Stocking Jr. 1992; see also the ‘Introduction’ in Beteille
8c Madan 1975). Having acquired prestige through the tireless prose¬
lytising of Malinowski, intensive, long-duration, solo ‘immersion’
fieldwork had become universally accepted as the mandatory method
for social anthropology by the 1930s and 1940s. It marked a decisive
break with the earlier practice of‘armchair anthropology’ that relied
on data collected by others, especially amateurs like missionaries,

29 ‘In the course of time I became an enthusiastic convert to functionalism,

a la Radcliffe-Brown. I had the feeling that I had at last found a theoretical
framework which was satisfactory but like all new converts I was a fanatic. I
suppressed my natural scepticism, one of my few real assets, to accept such
dogmas as the irrelevance of history for sociological explanation, the unimpor¬
tance of culture, and the existence of universal laws’ (CE: 655).
30 Stocking notes that this term itself was ‘apparently derived from the
discourse of field naturalists, which [A.C.] Haddon seems to have introduced
into that of British social anthropology’ (Stocking Jr., 1992: 27).
526 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

traders, and colonial administrators, who happened to be the ‘men

on the spot’ in distant lands. The insistence on trained anthropolog¬
ists undertaking intensive fieldwork allowed the discipline to
implement higher standards of rigour and thus claim scientific status
equivalent to the natural sciences. In fact, even those who disagreed
with everything else that Malinowski had to say agreed on the
indispensability of fieldwork as the primary justification for the
scholarly claims of the discipline. Srinivas’s initiation had made him
very conscious of the centrality of fieldwork for the discipline and
its role in raising the intellectual and social prestige of social anthro¬
pology above that of rivals like sociology:

It is the insistence on the experience of intensive fieldwork that has

chiefly contributed to making social anthropology a respected and re¬
spectable academic discipline. It is not without reason that in British
universities, where academic standards are of a uniformly high level,
social anthropology is an established and expanding subject, whereas,
barring London, no English university has a chair in sociology. The
distinguished occupants of the Martin White Professorship of Sociol¬
ogy in London, formerly Westermarck and Hobhouse, and at present,
Professor Ginsberg, have all been not only deeply read in social anthro¬
pology but themselves conducted investigations which are social-
anthropological in character. The difficulty in the establishment of social
anthropology [sic—sociology?] as a subject of scholarship in the an¬
cient universities of Great Britain is a moral for our country. (CE:
461-2)31

Understandably, Srinivas’s own significant prior experience of

fieldwork under Ghurye in India simply could not measure up to
the heavily ideologised phenomenon that he was exposed to at
Oxford. Despite his fanatical commitment to fieldwork (docu¬
mented, among others, by MNS himself), Ghurye was largely an
armchair scholar’, who managed to get a lot of fieldwork done by

In the last sentence of this quote, ‘social anthropology’ seems to be an

error, lor it is clear from the context that MNS meant sociology rather than the
established and expanding subject’ of social anthropology. This quote is from
the essay that MNS wrote in 1951 immediately upon his return to India from
Oxford to take up a professorship at Baroda’s newly created MS University.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 527

students in the linguistic regions to which they belonged, through

short trips to villages and towns, relying mainly on collecting inform¬
ation from knowledgeable informants.32 MNS was dissatisfied with
his past experience of fieldwork and eagerly awaited the opportunity
of a ‘proper5 experience; his first supervisor at Oxford had already
encouraged him in this direction.

Radcliffe-Brown’s suggestion that I should make an intensive study of

a multi-caste village appealed to me for several reasons, including of
course the purely scientific one of adding to existing knowledge. For
one thing, I felt that my previous field experience, diverse as it was, had
not been sufficiently intensive. I had only made brief forays into rural
areas from towns, and I had gathered information from a few individu¬
als instead of participating intimately, over a period of time, in the day-
to-day activities of the people I was observing. I had been converted
during my year of studentship to Radcliffe-Brown’s brand of function¬
alism (subsequently designated ‘structural functionalism’ in the United
States), and I was excited about its implications for field-work: I wanted
to examine, first-hand, events and institutions in all their complex in¬
terrelations. (1976: 2)

The opportunity was presented to Srinivas in the form of a lectu¬

rership that he was offered in November 1947 by Oxford University
at Evans-Pritchards initiative, which stipulated that the first year
could be spent on fieldwork in an Indian village. That is how Srinivas
came to spend the better part of 1948 studying ‘Rampura5, a village
very close to his ancestral village near Mysore. Apart from being the
most famous instance of fieldwork in Indian social anthropology,
the Rampura experience was profoundly important to MNS at a

32 Srinivas felt that the village studies conducted by Ghurye’s students‘were

more similar to the studies carried out by the agricultural economists than to
the intensive studies undertaken by anthropologists since the 1950s’ (1976:9).
But it also has to be mentioned that the range of subjects covered by Ghurye
and his students and associates at Bombay was much wider, and the village did
not occupy as central a place in this range as it did in the Srinivasian conception
of social anthropology on display in Baroda and especially in Delhi (see also
CE: 668).
528 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

personal level, one which he referred to with great feeling.33 Glimpses

of his personal and emotional involvement in fieldwork are visible
in The remembered village (1976), particularly in the descriptions of
his arrival in and departure from Rampura.
The point of recounting the story of MNS’s encounter with field¬
work at such length is to demonstrate that it formed the cornerstone
of his professional creed. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that from
the very beginning of his teaching career in India till its very end and
beyond, Srinivas remained steadfastly committed to making
fieldwork a mandatory part of the training of every student of social
anthropology in the two departments he headed at Baroda and Delhi.
Even beyond the boundaries of his own departments, MNS promoted
the cause of fieldwork in every academic forum, whether through
his committee work or through his writings.34 As a gifted fieldworker
himself, he succeeded in training (or guiding) a generation of
successful fieldworkers including A.M. Shah, Andre Beteille, B.S.
Baviskar, E.A. Ramaswamy, and Anand Chakravarti (to name only a
few). Above all, he succeeded in transmitting to succeeding gene¬
rations of students much of his messianic zeal for fieldwork and his
deep faith in its pedagogic and, indeed, redemptive worth.
If these can be said to constitute the unambiguously positive aspect
of MNSs commitment to the fieldwork method, there are the more
mixed and negative aspects still to be considered. Moreover, all these
aspects, whether positive, ambivalent, or negative, remain in need
of detailed historical research that will accumulate the necessary evid¬
ence on these questions and contribute towards knowledge
cumulation, so that the same ground need not be trod repeatedly
and new questions of interpretation and evaluation can be allowed
to emerge.

331 still remember the emphatic way in which MNS spoke about this experi¬
ence in the interview that he gave me: ‘. . . that changed entirely my outlook on
anthropology, that ten months of 1948 living in Rampura’ (Deshpande 2000:
108).
34 For example, he arranged for paid leave for young teachers in his Delhi
department so as to enable them to do fieldwork; he also got research funds
created for financing the fieldwork of students. (‘I attended innumerable com¬
mittees to try and secure scholarships for my students to go to the field’ [CE:
708]). '
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 529

For example, as Andre Beteille wrote almost thirty years ago, the
actual teaching of intensive fieldwork methods has remained a rather
vague process because ‘few standardized procedures have been
developed which can be communicated in a way that is at once abs¬
tract and meaningful. Manuals for research students which are so
good on survey techniques and procedures in fact give very little
actual guidance in the matter of intensive fieldwork. Apart from a
few practical suggestions about collecting genealogies, observing cere¬
monies, recording disputes and so on, what the student is told in ef¬
fect is that while in the field he should do his best to keep his eyes
and ears open’ (1975: 100). Thus, while the heavy emphasis on
intensive fieldwork in Srinivasian social anthropology has become a
much repeated commonplace, and we now have several collections
of personalised accounts of fieldwork,3' we still need a detailed
history of what actually was done in the classroom (and in the field)
byway of training in this method. This will have to be pieced together
from the personal accounts already available, and from systematic
interviews with different generations of the teachers and students
involved in the transmission process. Particularly important here
will be the tracking of syllabi and reading lists over time, since such
data usually fall victim to weak institutional memory. A possible
case in point is the ‘Modern fieldwork monographs’ course that MNS
designed and included in the MA programme at the Delhi School of
Economics.36

35 These include Beteille & Madan 1975, MNS, Shah, & Ramaswamy 2002
[1979], and Thapan 1998.
36 The Delhi department has a better institutional memory than most other
institutions of a similar sort. But even here, though a full set of annual reports
is available from the inception of the department in 1959 to the present day
(albeit the period 1959-71 is covered in a single ‘twelve year report’), the reports
do not include course lists. (Full course outlines may, of course, be too much
to include in an annual report. There exists a separate collection of course
outlines and syllabi, but it has gaps which can only be filled through painstaking
personalised efforts.) The 1966 report of the UGC Review Committee on ‘Socio¬
logy in Indian universities’ provides some valuable information on the kinds
of courses that were being taught at various levels in universities across the
country. Interestingly, the‘Modern fieldwork monographs’course is mentioned
here as being taught at the Mysore and Panjab universities in addition to Delhi.
530 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Coming now to the more mixed or negative aspects of MNS’s

single-minded devotion to intensive fieldwork, two main points may
be made. First, MNS is much too uncritical about his chosen
method—while his arguments in favour of fieldwork frequently
mention the limitations of rival methodologies (which he invariably
presented as popular, fashionable, dominant, or otherwise privileged
in comparison to the ‘underdog5 method of fieldwork), he hardly
ever mentions the possibility of problems with the fieldwork method
itself. Whenever they are mentioned—as with the question of the
‘expensive5 nature of social anthropological research, meaning its
insatiable appetite for enormous person-hours of work by highly
trained researchers—it is as though they are virtues first and vices
only a distant second.37
Another frequently mentioned issue is that of the long time-lag
between social anthropological fieldwork and its publication: ‘ 15—
20 years5 is the period mentioned in one essay (CE: 461), while the
results of the only intensive fieldwork that Srinivas ever did, that in
Rampura in 1948, were finally fully published in book form (as The
remembered village) in 1976, a full twenty-seven years later! Of course,
this is an exceptional case; it is well known that various misfortunes
including a fire at Stanford delayed publication beyond what would
have been normal. But, as is clear from Srinivass writings, if fifteen
to twenty years is normal then twenty-seven years is only slightly

But it is only through the independent testimony of others (such as Andre

Beteille: ‘The fieldwork monograph became the hallmark of social anthropology
as an intellectual discipline. Srinivas set great store by it, and when he designed
the first MA syllabus in sociology at the Delhi School of Economics in 1959, he
had a separate paper entitled “Modern fieldwork monographs’” [2003: xixj)
that we know that this course was taught from that very year, 1959, and that
MNS designed it. (See also Kabir, Mathai, Vakil etal. 1968, which includes G.S.
Ghurye and D.N. Majumdar among its authors, and has separate sections on
sociology, social anthropology, and anthropology. Patricia Uberoi informs me
that a similar course on monographs was also taught for several years at the
lawaharlal Nehru University.
See, tor example, the preface to India’s villages (1955), or the ‘manifesto’
essay of 1951 (CE: 461).
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 531

above normal. It is a curious aspect of MNS’s orientation to metho¬

dology that the consequences of such long lags are rarely discussed.
This is all the more puzzling in the Indian context, where ‘social
change’ was the major item on the research agenda for social scientists,
an item which MNS himself believed to be important and was engag¬
ed in addressing. Should it not be a matter of concern that it takes
two decades to make available a ‘thick description’ of social change?
There is an interesting standoff here between the notion of an asyn¬
chronous snapshot view of a contextualised community and the
dynamic of change—the snapshot is considered valuable in and of
itself, and it does not bear the burden of an urgency to address the
present.38
The major problem which MNS does consider in the manner of
a shortcoming is the lack of generalisability—the social anthropolo¬
gist relying on participant observation alone can only study one or
two communities in an entire career. Understandably, this is usually
discussed in the context of the criticisms of social anthropology often
made by economists. Here, Srinivas’s usual response is to invoke the
complementarity of methods and say that micro and macro studies
each have a valuable role to perform.39 However, it was generally left
to others to deal with macro methods; there is little evidence to show
that this complementarity was taken seriously by the institutions
that MNS shaped, or that they did much to bring about a ‘mutually
creative relationship’.
This, then, is the second negative: a methodological exclusivism
in practice, despite the profession of catholicity in principle. It can

38 In this regard, perhaps the specifically Indian forms of the ‘allochronism’

of anthropology that Johannes Fabian (1983) talks of could form a fruitful
research topic.
39 For example: ‘Indeed, participant observation and the quantitative
techniques associated with macro-studies can be used in a mutually
complementary way. Thus macro-studies describe the behaviour of large cate¬
gories and aggregates in specific matters while micro-studies provide insights
into relationships and motivations in small units. Properly used, micro-studies
can provide hypotheses to be tested by macro-methods while the latter yield
perspectives as well as problems to be tackled by new micro-studies. In short,
the two can be brought together in a mutually creative relationship’ (CE: 662).
532 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

be nobody’s case that a single individual should embody in his or

her person all the methodologies of a discipline. Moreover, it is also
true that no individual can be held solely responsible for the metho¬
dological vices or virtues of an entire discipline. But future research
will have to address the question of MNS’s methodological exclus-
ivism and its potential impact on the discipline at large. This is clearly
a very complicated issue, for it is not a matter of assessing MNS
alone. During the early part of MNS’s innings in the profession, there
were a number of well-known practitioners who used other methods,
such as surveys or interviews of various kinds in addition to intensive
fieldwork.40 Why did these other scholars and centres decline relative
to Delhi or MNS? Did they really decline? What kind of evidence-—
and conceptual/historical perspective—will allow us to answer such
questions in a constructive and useful manner? MNS frequently
mentioned the fact that, at the beginning of his career, intensive
fieldwork of the Malinowskian kind was almost completely absent
in India, while all kinds of other methods, including especially survey
methods, were extremely popular. By the time his career ended, how¬
ever, the shoe seems to have been on the other foot. Both these im¬
pressions—the early paucity of fieldwork as well as its later domi¬
nance—need to be subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

IV. CONCLUSION

This essay has confined itself almost entirely to the domestic con¬
cerns, so to speak, of Indian sociology and social anthropology. The
question of their relationship to the global milieu—the non-Western
as much as the usually dominant Western—has not been dealt with.
Consequently, I have set aside the subject of MNS’s relationship to
the global discipline and the place that it could or could not offer
him and others like him, in the times that they lived in. I have sug¬
gested that in the crucial post-Independence decades, MNS helped
social anthropology gain a new name (‘sociology’), create fresh ob¬
jects of analysis relevant to the new India (village studies), and lay
claim to a rigorous method (intensive fieldwork). All these moves

Fxamples include Irawati Karve, D.N. Majumdar, I.P. Desai, S.C. Dube,
A.R. Desai, and, of course, MNS’s own teacher G.S. Ghurye.
 FASHIONING A POSTCOLONIAL DISCIPLINE 533

brought benefits, but none of them came free. However, any reliable
evaluation of the net gain or loss can only be made after more inten¬
sive and extensive research. For disciplinary history, as much as for
other kinds of history, God is in the details.

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 Index

Abbi, B.L., 12n, 45n American Anthropologist, 33n, 76,

Abercrombie, Sir Patrick, 181-2, 351-2, 396
182n animism, 150, 153; see also religion
aborigines/aboriginal, 147, 150n, Anthropological Survey of India, 48,
158-60, 215-16, 224, 322, 74, 295, 475
337; see also adivasi(s); tribe/tribal anthropologist(s), 224, 349, 354;
academic colonialism, 31-2; see also native, 79-80; women, 31, 49-50,
colonialism 68, 360-2, 364n, 522n
Ackerman, Robert, 332 anthropologist-administrator(s), 136,
acculturation, 119, 309-10, 325; 166
see also adaptation, assimilation anthropology, 194, 223, 225, 226n,
activism, 131, 181-3; political/social, 501-2; and archaeology/pre¬
439, 441 history, 143, 223, 293, 302-4,
Action Research, 39—40, 40n, 49; 306, 384-5, 501; and architecture,
see a,lso applied anthropology 302-7; and colonialism, 11-22,
adaptation, 301, 314; see also 49, 64-105; and development,
acculturation, assimilation 311-14; and literature, 26—7, 44,
adivasi(s), 437, 481 287, 327, 330-59, and sociology,
Agaria (tribe), 339, 342, 345, 351, 223-5, 260; applied anthropology,
350n, 356 39-40, 40n; as science, 31-6,
Agarwala, B.R., 240, 243n 71-2, 140-1, 155-6, 161-2,
agrarian society, 232n, 419-21, 424, 290-329, 344-5, 406-7, 460; see
440n, 431, 435, 438 465; see also also science; cultural, see cultural
sociology, rural; village studies anthropology; four-field model,
Ahmad, Aijaz, 424n 33-4, 146, 407; in Britain, 78,
Aiyappan, A., 48, 240n 140-1, 217, 348, 451; in
Alatas, Syed Farid, 3n, 8, lln, 17-18, Germany, 378-80; physical, 33,
36, 50 146, 363n, 377, 380, 389-90,
Alatas, Syed Hussain, 11, 50 401-2, 501; social, see social
All India Oriental Conference, 144 anthropology
All India Sociological Conference, anthropometry, 75-6, 142, 362, 381,
241, 257, 433 389, 407; see also physical
Allchin, Raymond and Bridget, anthropology
466 archaeology, 33, 37, 143, 146, 178,
538 INDEX

219, 224n, 293, 306, 382, 385, Bhandarkar, R.G., 199, 212n
407, 501 Bhattacharya, K.C., 17—18, 18n
Archer, W.G., 136, l43n, 157, 166, Bhattacharyya, Swapan Kumar, 107,
339, 346, 346n 126, 130, 258
architecture, 36, 75, 148, 184, 210, Bhil (tribe), 403
219, 302-3 Bhuinya (tribe), 143
Arnold, David, 24 Bhunjia (tribe), 450, 481
Asad, Talal, 13, 13n, 70, 136, 498n Bidwai, Praful, 4l7n, 436n
Asiatic Society of Bengal, 141, 487n Bihar and Orissa Research Society,
Asiatic Society of Bombay, 239 134
assimilation/assimilationism, 39, 43, Binet, Alfred, 115
157, 166-7, 210, 215, 246, 274, biography, viii, 22-31, 446; see also
279, 458, 460 psychobiography
Asur (tribe), 134, 150n Birhor (tribe), 143, 303
autobiography, 5n, 207, 341 Boas, Franz, 15, 34n, 296-7, 305,
Avasthi, Abha, 264, 286 501
Bombay Anthropological Society,
Bachofen, j.]., 114, 146 225n, 239, 402-3
Badaga (tribe), 96 Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Baden Powell, B.H., 511, 51 In Society (BBRAS), 239
Baiga (tribe), 336-9, 342, 344-5, Bombay Sociologist (society), 243n
346n, 347, 349, 350n, 356, 461 Bombay University, 5, 37, 202n,
Bailey, F.G., 348, 350n 213n, 218, 220-1, 223n, 233,
Bala Ratnam, L.K., 64, 67-8, 79-80, 325, 440, 524n; Sociology
82-3, 85-6, 88-9, 99 Department, 49, 136n, 172-3,
Balgopal, K., 437-8 196, 201-3, 207, 220-7, 376-7,
Bandyopadhyay, Bolanath, 129n, 130 418-19, 423n, 436n, 437, 506,
Baroda University/MS University of 524, 526
Baroda, 5, 48, 233, 422, 500, Bondo (tribe), 337, 339, 343^, 346,
526n, 527n, 528 350n, 356
Basic concepts in sociology Bopegamage, A., 233, 238, 241
(D.P. Mukerji), 268-9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20n, 27, 64, 65, 68,
Bastar, 337, 342 82, 97, 365n, 486
Baviskar, B.S., 360n, 528 Bose, Nirmal Kumar, 8-9, lln, 15,
Benedict, Ruth, 364n 26-9, 33-4, 36-42, 37n, 4In, 44,
Beteiiie, Andre, 1, 3n, 6n, 7, 16n, 22, 49, 132, 136, 157, 290-329, 362,
25n, 26n, 34n, 36, 47n, 48, 106n, 370n, 372, 383, 52In; and
235n, 299, 321,373, 444n, M.K. Gandhi, 9, 26-8, 38, 49,
469-70, 485, 522n, 523n, 524n, 190-6
525, 528-9, 529n, 530 Bose, Pradip Kumar, 27-8, 34, 39, 42,
Bhabha, Homi, 99 44, 407
Bhagwat, Durga, 374, 388 Bose, Satyen, 258-9
bhakti movement, 155, 334 Bottomore, Tom, 237n
 INDEX 539

Brahman/Brahmin/Brahmanism/ Chandra, Pratap, 476n

brahminism, 214-15, 243-4, 246, Chandra, Sudhir, 482
310,315, 325, 365-6, 429, 455; Chandra, Sushil, 262
Chitpavan, 366-8, 385n, 408, Chapekar, L.N., 228, 238, 248
399-400; Tamil, 91-9; see also Chatterjee, Partha, 314-15, 505-6
caste Chatterji, Roma, 22, 28-9, 33, 47, 49
Brayne, F.L., 511 Chatterji, Saratchandra, 259
British rule, 274, 276, 451; see also Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 259,
colonialism 280n
British Association for the Chattopadhyay, K.P., 15, 26n, 33n,
Advancement of Science, 71, 77, 37n, 48, 136, 157, 207, 225n,
140 258, 364n, 370n, 372; see also
British Sociological Society, 18, 177 Calcutta University
Brown, Norman W., 237 Chauhan, Brijraj, 477n
bureaucracy/bureaucratization, 285, Chhattisgarh, 447-50, 452
479 Chicago University, 129, 466, 473,
509, 510n, 513
Calcutta, 142, 256, 258-9, 294-5, Chotanagpur, 132, 134, 142-3
319-21 Christian(s)/Christianity, 156, 258,
Calcutta Review, 143 332, 334, 340-1, 391-4, 400n,
Calcutta University, 37, 40n, 66, 81, 464; missionaries, 166, 511
113, 128-9, 136n, 172, 202n, city/cities, 178, 186, 217, 22In, 232,
207, 225n, 239, 258, 260, 292-5, 241, 318-21, 420; see also
506 sociology, urban; urbanisation
Caldwell, Bishop, 147 civics, and sociology, 172, 177, 202
Cambridge University, 134, 199-200, civil disobedience, 335; see also
206-7, 213, 217-18, 223, 332, M.K. Gandhi
349, 452, 462 civil society, 420, 434, 437
capitalism, sociology of, 419, 424, civilisation, 219, 222, 224, 224n, 468
426, 427-8, 430, 441 class(es), 116, 230n, 275, 419-20,
Carr, E.H., 264 425, 427-8, 437; class struggle,
caste(s), 71, 76-7, 81, 87, 94-6, 211, 279, 440
219, 222n, 232, 240, 243-5, 247, Clifford, James, 23-4, 27, 34n, 137,
275-6, 311, 318, 325, 424, 426, 154-5, 168, 297, 349, 353n, 498n
429, 432, 434, 467; system, 81, Cohn, Bernard, 13, 20, 70, l4ln,
213, 215-16, 243, 306-11, 320, 209, 325, 374-5, 470, 513n, 515,
325, 365, 398-402, 432, 518 516
Census of India, 6, 20, 62, 67, 69, Collingwood, R.G., 272
70-1, 74, 141, 455 colonial rule 32, 70, 78-9, 86, 94,
Chakravarti, Uma, 93, 95, 21 On, 211, 99-100, 108, 119, 216, 237, 245,
215n, 366, 375 247, 274, 321, 422, 425, 427-8,
Chakravarti, Anand, 528 432, 440, 458, 498-9, 508; see also
Chandra, Bipan, 434n nationalism
540 INDEX

colonialism, academic, 17, 20, 237, custom(s), 228, 322, 458; see also
485; and anthropology, 9, 11-22, culture
69-74, 80, 82, 459, 498n
Columbia University, 451 dalit(s), 437, 440; see also caste
communalism, 316-17, 421, 436, Damle, Y.B., 232-3, 360n, 381-2,
440 383n, 388n, 402n, 403
communism/Communist Party, 423, Darwin, Charles, 147
426-7, 457, 463 Das, Veena, 3n, 6n, 197n
Community Development Dasgupta, Biplab, 513n
Programme, 40, 236, 431, 471, Dasgupta, Sangeeta, 20—1
474n Dawn Society, 108, 110, 113, 127-8
community studies, 229, 229n, 240, Deccan College, Poona, 363n, 369n,
467; see also village studies 381, 382n, 383
comparative sociology, 47, 222, 298, decolonisation, 485, 511—12; see also
502-3 colonialism
Comte, Auguste, 32n, 40, 175-6, Deen Dayal, Lala, 82
204, 211, 21 In, 220, 241, 259, Delhi School of Economics, 5, 6, 7n,
505; see also positivism 235n, 242, 402, 485,-520, 528
Congress Party, see Indian National Dependency theory, 439
Congress Derrida, J., 97
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 36, Desai, A.R., 9, 28-9, 37-8, 41, 44,
37n, 396, 480, 514, 517n 49, 229, 230n, 232-3, 237n, 238,
Coomaraswamy, A.K., 35, 108-9 242, 242n, 244n, 370n, 407n,
Coorg(s), 23In, 469n, 510, 524 417-43, 521n, 532n; see also
Cornell (University) India Project, sociology, Marxist
471-3, 474n, 513, 5l4n Desai, I.P., 31, 48, 22In, 223n, 230-
criminology, 128, 223n 3, 240n, 241, 383, 423n, 532n
Crooke, William, 80, 206 Desai, Neera, 29, 242
cultural anthropology, 6, l40n, 145, Desai, Ramanlal, 221, 421-2
223n, 299, 301, 389, 501-2 Deshmukh, C.D., 475
cultural capital, 89-99 Deshpande, Satish, 2n, 3n, 6, lOn,
cultural nationalism, 213; see also 18, 21, 24, 30n, 41, 106n, 197n,
nationalism 360n
cultural pluralism, 319-20 development, 4n, 39, 235, 240, 312,
cultural studies, 4n 439, 475
culture(s), 219, 271-4, 280, 282, Devereux, George, 352-3
298-300, 452, 473; and Dhanagare, D.N., 5n, 6n, 7n, 53, 229
anthropology, 298-302; change, dialectical materialism, 261, 285; see
156, 221-2, 272—6, 458; diversity also Marxism
of, 228-9, 246-7, 318; traits, diffusion/diffusionism, 144, 205,
300-1 205n, 206, 209n, 213, 217, 220,
Current Anthropology (journal), 33n 245, 258, 298, 300-2, 305, 375,
curriculum, see syllabi 400
 INDEX 541

Dirks, Nicholas, 86-7, 94, 2l4n, 228, 297, 227, 245, 261, 268,
469n 321, 324-5, 419, 467
dravidian, kinship, 395-7; peoples, Engels, E, 267, 277, 281, 424n
75, 148 English language (medium), 4, 27, 31,
D’Souza, Victor, 241 43—4, 48, 50, 389, 448; see also
Dube, Leela, 3In, 360n, 373n, 390, vernacular
398, 444n, 455-6, 472-3, 478n, Enlightenment, 8, 325
79, 481 Enthoven, R.E., 374
Dube, S.C., 5n, 8-9, lln, 26, 29, environment, 4n, 178, 189-90, 356;
30n, 34-5, 38, 40-5, 340, 355-6, see also ecology
364n, 402n, 444-89, 508n, 509, Ethnographic and Folk Culture
513n, 532n Society of Uttar Pradesh, 456—7,
Dube, Saurabh, 29, 43—4, 469n, 461
509n ethnographic method, 31, 42, 468
Dumont, Louis, 36, 46n, 278, 299, ethnographic novel, 336
308, 349-50, 362, 388, 396-7, Ethnographic Survey of India, 71
508n, 514-16, 517n, 519, 522; ethnography, 146, 228-9, 297, 307,
see also Indology 446, 458; salvage, 137, 458; see also
Durkheim, Emile, 40, 115, 501 anthropology; fieldwork
Dutt, R.P, 424n, 434n Ethnological Society of London, 140
Dutta, Michael Madhusudan, Ethnological Survey of India, 72
280n ethnology, 146, 165, 167, 501; see also
anthropology; ethnography
Eastern Anthropologist (journal), 33n, eugenic(s), 2l6n, 378-9, 380n; see
286n, 456 also race
ecology, 179-83, 187-9, 363n, 389n, Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 347, 394n,
456 505, 517n, 523-4, 527
economics (discipline), 37, 41, 48, evolution/evolutionism, 71, 78,
118, 176, 230, 235n, 260, 319, 144-6, 151, 179, 183, 205, 296,
499, 504; see also development 375, 459
Economic and Political Weekly, 2n
Economic Weekly, 466 Fabian, Johannes, 1 In, 14, 54, 72,
Eickstedt, E.E von, 75, 80-1 422, 469n, 531
Elliot Smith, G., 205, 205n, 206, family, and kinship, 81, 114, 139,
375 212, 215n, 216, 217n, 219, 22In,
Ellis, Havelock, 115 229, 232, 240, 243-5, 394, 455,
Elphinstone College, 198-9, 199n, 465
200, 213, 366 feminism/feminist, 4n, 244, 397-8,
Eiwin, Verrier, ix, 8, 9n, lln, 19, 21, 447
26-9, 38-43, 49, 134, 136, 139, Fergusson College, Pune, 73, 367
166, 169, 216, 330-59, 362, Fergusson, James, 306, 306n
363n, 372, 452, 456-8, 461, 471 Ferreira, J.V., 173, 203n, 240-1
empiricism/empiricist, 114, 217, 223, feudalism, 419, 424—6, 429
542 INDEX

fieldwork, 33n, 41-2, 78, 85, 129, Geddes, Patrick, ix, 8-9, lln, 18-19,
151- 2, 174, 205n, 217, 227, 232, 21-2, 26, 28, 29n, 30n, 34, 42-3,
243, 261; in anthropology, 297, 49, 172-93, 202-4, 221, 224n,
298, 322-3, 341, 343-7, 351-2, 506
386-9, 407, 419, 452-6, 465, Geertz, Clifford, 349, 353, 470
502, 515, 518, 521, 524; see also Gell, S.M.S., 35In
methodology, participant gemeinschafi, 114, 117
observation geography, 37n, 174, 176, 179, 189,
Firth, Raymond, 466-7 294, 298
Fisher, Eugen, 353 gesellschaft, 114, 117
Flora, Giuseppe, 109, 112, 120n, ghotul, 337, 345, 350n
122n,128,130 Ghurye, G.S., 9, lln, 19, 26—7, 29,
folklore, 140, 144, l47n, I6ln, 450 33, 36, 38-9, 41, 4ln, 43, 47-8,
Fonseca, Mabel, 243n 136, 157, 167, 174, 194-255,
Forde, Daryll, 347 258, 325, 361—408, 418, 424,
Fortes, Meyer, 348-9, 394n, 497, 525 460, 469n, 509n, 510, 524, 526,
Foucault, Michel, 71, 89 527, 527n, 530, 532n; and Irawati
Fox, Richard G., 498n Karve, 383-4, 391, 399; and M.N.
Frankfurt School, 439 Srinivas, 204n, 206, 226n, 230—6,
Frazer, J.G., 80, 139, 146, 149, 240-2, 384, 527n; see also
331- 2, 342, 346, 352, 356, 451 assimilationism; Bombay
Freud, Sigmund, 115 University; Indology
Fujii, T., 334 Gluckman, Max, 23, 525
functionalism/functionalist, 144, Gokhale, G.K., 212n; see also social
152- 3, 219, 301, 345, 352, 467, reform
524n, 527; see also structure- Goldenweiser, Alexander, 305
functionalism Gond (tribe), 333, 335-6, 342, 353,
Fiirer-Haimendorf, C. von, 337, 356, 403, 478n
350n, 356, 451, 456, 458, 462, Gore, M.S., 24ln, 242
507 Gottleib, Manuel, 286
Gough, E. Kathleen, 92, 98
Gadamer, FE-G., 111-12 Green, F.W., 334
Gadgil, D.R., 509n Grigson, W.V., 350, 350n
Gait, E.A., 141 Guha, B.S., 30n, 33n, 48, 402
Gandhi, M.K., 12n, 19, 24n, 124n, Guha, Ramachandra, 15, 19, 24, 29,
283, 422, 449nm 460, 511; and 30n, 41,43-4, 49, 55, 185, 194n,
N.K. Bose, 19, 26-7, 290-6, 303, 2l6n, 360n, 372, 460
308, 314—15; and Verrier Elwin, Gumperz; John, 472
332- 3, 335-6; Gandhism, 26, 28, Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 111, 115, 118,
291, 293, 298, 311-13, 322, 333, 118n, 119, 122, 127-9
335, 422, 508, 512
Gandhi, Ramchandra, 482 habitus,68, 69, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97,
Ganesh, Kamala, 436n 99, 365n
 INDEX 543

Haddon, Alfred, 72, 80, 87, 141, Indian Council of Social Science
204, 205, 205n, 206-7, 525 Research/ICS SR, 3n, 5n, 6n, 433,
Haimendorf, see Fiirer-Haimendorf 483
Harrison, Jane, 346 Indian Frontier Development
Hasan, Nurul, 481-2 Programme, 471
Hastings, James, l63n Indian Institute of Advanced Study
Haushofer, Albrecht, 111, 118, 124, (IIAS), Shimla, 478, 481
126 Indian Journal of Sociology, The, 19n,
Hegel, G.W.F., 128, 266, 270 37
hermeneutics, 111 Indian National Congress, 165, 332,
Hewitt, J.N.B., 156 335, 426, 429-30, 449, 5U; see
Hindi (language), 393—4, 448, also Congress Party
475—6, 487-9; see also vernacular Indian Science Congress, 138n, 144,
Hindu-Muslim relations, 316—17; see 305
also communalism Indian Sociological Conference, 267-
Hinduism, 39, 120, 164, 215, 243, 8
246, 258, 274, 308-9, 324-5, Indian Sociological Society (ISS), 3n,
334, 371-2, 196, 220, 235n, 238-43
Hislop College, Nagpur, 455 Indian village (S.C. Dube), 467— 70,
historical materialism, 428, 438; see 472-4, 488, 491
also Marxism indigenisation, of social sciences, 11,
history (discipline), 37, 220, 230, 484, 488
245, 468, 499, 504; historical Indology, 36—7, 219, 227, 239n, 243,
anthropology, 305—6, 35In; 299, 324, 362, 373-6, 389n, 400,
history of anthropology/sociology, 503
1-11, 446, 498 industries, 428, industrial worker,
Hivale, Shamrao, 333, 335, 337 428n
Ho (tribe), 134, 158 industry/industrialisation, 178, 186,
Hobhouse, L.T., 204, 204n, 223n, 285, 428; sociology of, 225, 229n,
526 230
Hocart, A.M., 80 interdisciplinary approach, 189-92,
hunter-gatherers, 452; see also 244, 264, 419; see also synthesis
aborigine(s); tribe(s) International Congress of
Hutton, J.H., 136, 157, 350, 396, Anthropological and Ethnological
399, 462 Sciences, lOn, 80
Huxley, Thomas, 175—6 International Sociological Association,
Hyderabad, 462; see Osmania 5n, lOn, 219, 239n
University Irigaray, L., 97
Islam, 274, 391-4, 400n; see also
Ibbetson, Denzil, 81 Muslim(s)
India's changing villages: Human factors Iyer, L.K. Ananthakrishna, 5, 10, lln,
in community development 19-20, 27-9, 32, 41-2, 46, 48,
(S.C. Dube), 473-5, 479-80, 491 64-105
544 INDEX

James, Wendy, 15 Kinship organization in India (I.

Jammu University, 483 Karve), 363n, 378, 386-7, 394,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, 433-4, 396, 409
530n knowledge, scientific, 33—4; see also
Jeffrey, Robin, 90 science
Jodhka, Surinder Singh, 513n Kolenda, Pauline, 513n
Josh, Bhagwan Singh, 4l7n Koppers, William, 80
Joshi, P.C., 287 Korwar (tribe), 15On
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kosambi, D.D., 73
143 Kroeber, A., 298, 301, 305
Journal of the Benaras Hindu Kuhn, Thomas, lOn
University, 158 Kuki (tribe), 322
Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Kuper, Adam, 505
Society,143, 157 Kurumba (tribe), 96
Juang (tribe), 42, 292-3, 310-11,
324, 354 Lacapra, Dominick, 22
language (medium), English, 43—4;
Kamar (tribe), 42, 450, 452—6; see vernacular, 43—4; linguistic
also S.C. Dube competence, 342—3
Kandh (tribe), 299, 345 law, 209, 22In, 228, 322, 455,
Kane, P.V., 239n 458
Kanpur University, 487n Lawson, Barbara, 350n,
Kant, I., 114, 120, 128 Leach, Edmund, 350n, 467
Kapadia, K.M., 37, 196n, 217n, Le Bon, Gustave, 115
227n, 229, 232-3, 235, 237n, Lepenies, Wolf, 35, 37, 57
238, 240, 240n, 241, 24In, 242n, Le Play, Lrederic, 176-7, 181, 204
243 Lerner, Daniel, 480
Karandikar, S.V., 229, 338 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 12n, 46n,
Karve, Dinakar Dhondo (D.D.), 471
368-9, 370-1, 378 Lewis, Diane, 7n
Karve, Irawati, 9, 1 In, 26-7, 34, Lewis, Oscar, 351
36, 41, 4In, 44, 49-50, 136, liberalism, 211, 283
212, 212n, 229, 232-3, Lienhardt, Geoffrey, 525
238n,350n, 360-416, 456, life-histories, viii, 22-31, 446, 465; see
532n also biography
Karve, Maharshi (D.K.), 361, 368-9, Linnean Society of India, 110
369n, 374 Lipton, Michael, 513n
Kaviraj, Sudipta, 112, 482 London School of Economics, 204,
Keith, Sir Arthur, 134 234, 234n, 350, 353, 466
Kharia (tribe), 134, 143, 150n, 158, London School of Oriental and
166 African Studies, 466, 471, 509
kinship, 365, 386-7, 389-90, 394-8, Lowie, Robert H., 146, 305
407 Lubbock, John, 146
 INDEX 545

Lucknow, 185-6, 256; University, 29, Marriot, McKim, 36, 57, 383, 444n,
47, 225n, 239-41, 259-60, 456 466, 469n, 474, 513n, 514
Marx, 40, 268, 270, 272-3, 276-7,
Macaulay, Thomas, 31 28In, 424-5, 427
Mclver, Robert M., 237, 438 Marxism, 266-7, 278-9, 281-3,
Madan, T.N., 6n, 27, 29, 34, 35n, 417-18, 421, 433-4, 439-40
39, 44, 49, 261, 286n, 287, 332, Marxist sociology, 38, 230, 232n,
372, 394n, 444n, 474-5, 480, 266, 277, 417, 421-3, 433n, 440
485, 525 material culture, 37, 300, 302-7; see
magic, 153; and witchcraft, 458 also architecture
Mahabharata, 372, 377, 395, 397, Mead, Margaret, 15, 23
448 Mehta, Deepak, 106n
Mahar, Michael and Pauline, 472; see Merton, R., 237, 478
also Kolenda, Pauline Metcalf, Barbara, 25
Maine, Henry Sumner, 46n, 224n, methodology: in anthropology/
511 sociology, 40-3, 152-3;
Mairet, Philip, 175 comparative method, 502-3; field
Majumdar, D.N., 8, 19, 29, 33n, 48, research, 217, 222, 223n, 240,
136, 157, 241, 257, 260-2, 266, 325, 341; participant observation,
286n, 383, 393n, 402, 456, 462, 40, 152, 341-7, 386-9, 419, 465,
474n, 477, 484, 509, 530n, 532n 502, 515, 522, 523-32;
Malhotra, K.C., 360n, 362, 371, qualitative, 31; quantitative, 31,
380n, 383n, 384, 388n, 389, 397, 41-2; scientific, 33—4, 321, 324;
406 survey method(s), 31, 389, 465-6,
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 23, 34n, 151, 503; textual analysis, 217-8; see
217, 219, 301, 341, 345, 350, also Marxism; village studies
352, 388, 501, 515, 521, 523, middle class, 28, 32, 218, 272-5, 316,
525, 532 371, 429-30, 432
Man, Journal of the Royal migration, 240, 319-20, 400
Anthropological Institute, 33n, Mills, C. Wright, 136, 157, 211,
143, 330n, 334n, 336, 350, 350n, 212n, 247, 427, 478
462 Mintern, Leigh, 472
Man in India, 33n, 48—9, 132n, 139, missionaries, European/Christian,
143, 153n, 295 156, 464; see also Chrisdan(s)
Manchester University, 350 Mitra, Ashok, 264
Mandelbaum, David, 237, 332, 470 Mitra, Rajendralal, 322
Mann, Harold, 509n modernity, 31-6, 70, 89-90, 129,
Marcus, G., lln, 27, 35, 41, 168, 211-12, 245-6, 267, 278, 280-1;
353, 498n see also science; tradition
Marett, R.R., 34n, 98-9, I63n, modernisation, 245, 270—1, 273—7,
207n, 347 279-82, 284, 475; theories of,
Maria (tribe), 337, 339, 350n 245, 284-5
marriage, 81, 118, 240, 322 Modern Review, 143
546 INDEX

Moore, Barrington, 424n, 478 Narain, Dhirendra, 233, 235, 238,

Morgan, Lewis Henry, 46n, 143, 146, 240, 243n, 4l7n
150 Naregal, Veena, 199n, 21 In, 360n,
Mukerjee, Radhakamal, 29, 39, 48, 366-7, 389
113, 174, 213n, 258, 259-61, Natesan, L.A., 65, 88, 91-4, 104
265, 267, 286-7, 363n, 456 nation, 38-40, 108-9, 22In, 230,
Mukerji, D.P., lln, 22, 26-7, 29, 245, 508; nation-building, 230,
34-5, 35n, 37-9, 44, 48-9, 314-18, 432, 458-9, 464, 473-4,
239-41, 256-87, 364n, 456 479—80, 484—6; nation-state, 122;
Mukherjee, Asutosh., 292, 258 national integration/unity, 215-16,
Mukherjee, Ramkrishna, 5n, 8, 31, 316, 340
36, I44n, 240, 241, 24In, 287, nationalism, 38—40, 86, 117, 125,
362, 364n, 378, 402, 509 127-8, 155, 161, 167, 197, 199n,
Mukherjee, Satishchandra, 108, 110, 202, 208-9, 212, 215-16, 232n,
128 245, 246n, 419-20, 425-6, 434n,
Mukherjee, Syamaprasad, 293 440; and sociology, 243-7; cultural
Mukherji, Partha Nath, 3, 3n, 9, 1 In nationalism, 21 On, 213, 243-7;
Mukherji, Radhakumud, 127, 130, Hindu nationalism, 144, 212n,
213n, 239n 215, 365; sociology of, 229-30,
multi-cultural(ism), 318, 393-4; see 243-7, 419-20, 424-5,
also pluralism 427-30
Mumford, Lewis, 174—5, 181, 191-2 nationalist movement, 28, 108, 165,
Munda (tribe), 96, 134-5, 143, 150n, 195-6, 210, 243-7, 279, 290-2,
158, 166, 311 314—18, 425—6, 451; see also
Munro, Sir Thomas, 511 M.K. Gandhi; social reform
Munshi, Indra, 4n, 5n, 18, 49, 58, National Institute of Community
203n, 4l7n Development, (NICD), 477,
Muria (tribe), 337-9, 345, 350n, 479-80
356 National Institute for Rural
Muslim(s), 121-2, 274, 391-5; see Development, 514
also Islam National Institute of Sciences,
Myrdal, Gunnar, 478 144
myth(s), 458; see also folklore; religion natural sciences, 33-4, 297; see also
anthropology; science; sociology
Naga (tribe), 299, 353 Needham, Rodney, 77, 104, 356
Naidu, Ratna, 45n Nehru, Jawaharlal, 264, 333, 340,
Nagpur University, 449, 451 471, 5l4n
Nair, Janaki, 90 Nelson, A.E., 448
Nanda, B.R., 351n Nepali, G.S., 228, 233n
Nandy, Ashis, 24n Nesfield, John C., 81
Nanjundayya, H.V., 66n, 76, 81-2, New Review, The, 157
103 Nicholas, R., 45n
Naoroji, Dadabhai, 198 Nimkoff, M., 237
 INDEX 547

Non-cooperation Movement, 28, 440n, 502; peasant studies, 513,

290-2; see also M.K. Gandhi; 519
nationalist movement Pels, Peter, 5n, 58, I40n, 161 n, 169
North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), Perry, W.J., 205-6, 375-6
471 personal narratives, 150, 323-4; see
autobiography
Oakeshott, Michael, 281 personality, 267-9, 271, 282, 467
Oommen, T.K., 4n, 5n, 58, 360n, photographs/photography, 20, 81-2,
381n, 383n 85, 343n, 344, 348, 454, 497-8
Opler, Morris, 467, 471-2, 513n Phule, Jyotiba, 366-7
Oraon (tribe), 132, 134, 141-3, physical anthropology, 33, 75-6, 146,
145-6, 148-9, 151, 299 377, 380, 384, 389, 401-2, 501
Orientalism/orientalist, 219-20, 213, Pillai, S. Devadas, 194n, 196n, 224n,
215, 224n, 245, 326, 374, 376, 227n—28n, 230n, 233n, 235n,
378, 512 236n, 237n, 239n, 242n, 243n,
Osmania University, Hyderabad, 247n
462-5, 507, 514 Pinney, Christopher, 20, 81-2
otherness/other societies, 45—7; see plan/planning, 282, 430, 440;
also anthropology, colonialism, Planning Commission, 236, 472
methodology pluralism, 30, 276, 309, 315,
Oxford University, 5, 134, 199, 207, 318-19, 365, 393—4
23In, 334, 349-50, 452, 496-7, Pocock, David, 36, 299, 396-7, 508n,
500, 51 On, 520, 524, 524n, 514-16
526-7 policy research, 486—7
Oxford University Press, 218n, 330n, political science, 37, 129, 230, 421,
332n, 337, 348, 525 451,455-7, 504, 513
Pollock, Sheldon, 94—5
Padel, Felix, 35In pollution, 97-8; see also caste system
Panchayati Raj, 431 Popper, K., 28In
Panchnadikar, K.C., 241 Popular Book Depot, 218n
Panini, M.N., 5n, 31n, 58, 232, 287n population, 128, 2l6n, 219, 464
Pareto, V., 115, 126 positivism/positivist, 109, 120, 211,
Parsons, Talcott, 268, 286, 382, 245, 262, 324-5, 505-6; see also
478 Comte
participant observation, 41—2, 341—7, Pradhan, G.R., 227
419, 523—32; limitations of, Prakash, Gyan, 84—5, 99, 21 In, 212,
530—2; see also fieldwork, 246n
methodology Pramanick, S.K., 196n, 215, 225n,
Partition of India, 273—6 232, 239, 258, 399
Patel, Sujata, 41, 194n, 232n, 239n, Pratt, Mary Louise, 323
240n, 24In, 242, 360n, 42In, prehistory, 33; see also archaeology
433n Presidency College, Calcutta, 290,
peasant/peasantry, 419, 435, 438, 303
548 INDEX

primitive, 160, 165—6, 454, 458-9, Ray, Niharranjan, 482

501-2; see also aborigine, tribe Ray, Subrata, 132n, 133, 142, 169
professionalisation (of anthropology/ Redfield, Robert, 23, 59, 383, 473,
sociology), 1-63, 220-38, 245, 510, 513n
364-5, 485 reform, 87, 89; see also social reform
progress, 119, 269—71; see also Rege, Sharmiia, 3, 4n, 59, 197, 373
evolution/evolutionism regional languages, 419; see also
protectionism/protectionist, 39, vernacular
157-8, 166-7, 215-16, 340; see religion, 81, 94, 96, 139, 149, 153,
also assimilation 210-11, 219, 22In, 229, 232,
psychiatry, 352 243, 245, 267, 279, 339, 349-50,
psychobiography, 24, 30 350n, 351,356, 457;
Purana(s), 161-2, 377 revivalism, 210-11, 275; see also
religion, social reform
questionnaire(s), 503; see also survey Revolutionary Socialist Party, 437,
method 441
Quit India Movement, 294, 451; see Richards, F.J., 87-8
also Nationalist Movement Risley, H.H., 20, 74-5, 79, 81, 142,
147, 152, 213, 375, 377
race/racial difference, 81, 126, 213n, ritual(s), 458; see also religion
22In, 383n, 401-2; see also Rivers, W.H.R., 36, 46, 72, 80,
eugenics; physical anthropology 204-5, 205n, 206-7, 212, 217,
Radcliffe-Brown, A,R. 34n, 217, 219, 219,225n,376, 396-7, 525
23In, 232, 301, 346n, 452, Roseberry, William, 14, 59
496-7, 501, 505, 509-10, Routledge and Kegan Paul
514-15, 517n, 523, 524n, 525, (publishers), 467, 473
525n, 527 Roy, Rammohan, 120, 258, 280
Ram Advani (bookseller, Lucknow), Roy, Sarat Chandra, ix, 9, lln, 20—1,
263, 457 26, 32, 41-2, 46, 48, 132-71,
Ram, Kalpana, 10, 19-20, 27-8, 32, 295, 336, 451
42, 64-105 Royal Anthropological Institute of
Ramaswamy, E.A., 16n, 45n, 522n, Great Britain and Ireland, 140—1,
523n, 528, 529n 144, 453, 458
Ramayana, 147, 448 Royal Asiatic Society, 306n
Ranade, M.G., 198, 199, 199n, 200, rural society, 420, 422, 432, 465,
211, 212, 212n, 215, 219n 479; rural sociology, 438, 470
Rao, M. Chalapati, 265
Rao, M.S.A., 225n, 232-3, 240n, Saberwal, Satish, 3, 12n, 17, 45n, 47,
241, 253 47n, 106n, 332n, 482
rationality, 30, 109; see also Sagar, see University of Sagar
modernity, science Said, Edward, 13
Ratzenhofer, Gustav, 111, 115, 118, Saksena, R.N., 241, 242n
118n, 119, 121n, 122, 127-8 Sankalia, H.D., 381-2, 385, 387-8
 INDEX 549

Sanskrit: language, 198-9, 199n, 200, Shah, A.M., 4, 10, I6n, 45n, 60,
209, 211, 213-14, 219-20, 227, 521n, 522n, 523n, 528, 529n
229, 232, 238, 375, 395; learning, Shah, C.G., 423
161, 367n; see also Indology Shah, Ghanshyam, 4l7n, 443
sanskritisation, 96, 212, 245, 310, Sharma, K.N., 482
390 Shah, K.T., 202, 234
Santal/Santhal (tribe), 134, 158, 322 shifting cultivator(s), 452, 460; see also
Saora (tribe), 337, 339, 345, 348-51, aborigine(s); primitive
354, 356 Shils, Edward, 25, 237n, 28In
Saran, A.K., 35-6, 240, 262, 265-6, ShukranitHSukraniti, 36, 110, 112
283-4, 287, 482 Setalvad, Chimanlal, 172
Saraswati, Baidyanath, 482 Silverberg, James, 470-1
Sarkar, Benoy Kumar, 9, 22, 29—30, Simmel, Georg, 115
32, 36-8, 37n, 44, 46-7, 49, Singer, Milton, 383, 444n, 513n
106-31, 258, 506 Singh, Baljit, 286
satyagraha movement, 293; see also Singh, K.B., 228
Nationalist Movement, Non¬ Singh, Kumar Suresh, 135
cooperation Singh, Namvar, 45, 488
Savara (tribe), 324 Singh, V.B., 266, 286
Savur, Manorama, 194n, 201, 202n, Singh, Yogendra, 17, 212n, 245,
203n, 222n, 223n, 229n, 4l7n, 444n, 485
436n, 440, 44In Sinha, Surajit, 244n, 290, 296
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe, Slater, Gilbert, 509n
312, 333n; Commissioner for, slum(s), 189, 428n, 434, 440; see also
295, 311 urbanisation
School of Oriental and .African Small, Albion, 115, 129
Studies, 466, 509; see University of SNDT Women’s University (Bombay),
London 242, 369n, 380-1
Schramm, Wilbur, 478, 480 social anthropology, 6, 6n, 129, 196,
science(s), 30, 31, 33, 84, 86-7, 95, 217, 223n, 225n, 301, 342,
100, 109, 114, 141, l46n, 261, 348-9, 351, 362, 419, 439,
306, 321, 344, 348, 353; and 499-504, 513-16, 525-6, 532-3;
modernity 31-6, 246n; colonial, in Britain, 5l6n, 524
32-3 Social background of Indian nationalism
scientific method, 155—6, 268-9, (A.R. Desai), 423-4, 426, 428,
271; see also anthropology, 434, 438
sociology social biology, 222-3, 223n
scientism, 297, 324 social change, 219, 240, 244—5, 267,
Seal, Brajendranath, 33n, 36, 113, 402-6, 460, 468-9, 531
506 social institutions, 216-17, 226n,
Seminar, viii, ix, 2n 229, 244, 285, 301
sex/sexology, 338; sexual behaviour, social organization, 458; see also
219, 241 family, kinship
550 INDEX

social philosophy, 113, 114, 507 G.S. Ghurye, 204n, 206, 226n,
social psychology, 114, 222 230-6, 240, 240n, 241-2, 384,
social reform, 87-91, 113—14, 128—9, 527n
160, 199n, 200, 203, 209-11, Srivastava, Vinay, 7n, 33, 35In
21 In, 212n, 217, 293, 340, state, 115, 122n, 125, 139, 221n,
366-7, 374, 425 312, 419-20, 427-9, 434, 436,
social sciences, 268-9, 465, 484; see 473; see also nation
also economics; geography; history; Stocking, George W., lOn, lln, 14,
political science 78, 217, 364, 446, 496, 498n,
social work, 336-7, 339, 355; see also 502n, 505, 51 On, 525,
social reform Stopes, Marie, 259
Social Sciences Association, 67 structure functionalism, 226, 23In,
socialism/socialist movement, 426-7, 242, 244, 427,419, 433, 515,
430, 432, 457 525, 527
sociology, 113, 116, 127, 172, 223n, Subaltern school, 435n, 440
446, 500, see also social Sundar, Nandini, 49-50, 106n, 136n,
anthropology; action sociology, 157, 194n, 212n, 351n, 496n,
179, see also activism; and 351n
economics, 37, 234—5, 237; and survey method(s)/research, 41, 129,
town planning, 181-3, 189; 177, 181-2, 217n, 402, 463, 465,
applied sociology, 115, 128; 472, 503, 529, 532
cultural, 212, 221-2, 272-3; Swadeshi movement, 38, 108, 110,
empirical, 40-1, 222-3; industrial, 127, 258; see also nationalism
225, 229n-230; Marxist, 266-7, swaraj, 11, 108, 119, 128, 165, 292,
272-3, 417-19, see also Marxism; 460; see also indigenisation
nationalist, 243—7; of religion, syllabi (teaching), 197, 220—2, 233,
229; regional, 176; rural, 438, 463
462-71, theory, 223-4; 245, synthesis, 191, 260, 267, 271,
267-8; urban, 177-9, 202, 225, 274, 276, 281—3, 484; see also
230n,232, 421 pluralism
Sociological bulletin, 196, 239, 243,
500 Tagore, Rabindranath, 35n, 44,
Sorokin, Pitrim, 264, 286 108-9, 117, 258-9, 280, 280n,
Spencer, Herbert, 175-6, 211, 212n, 287
259, 505 Tata Institute of Social Sciences
specialisation/specialism, 34-5, (TISS), 242
191-2, 485 Taussig, Michael, 82
Spinoza, B., Ill, 226n, 228 teaching, 50, 219, 220; see also
Srinivas, M.N., 5, 6n, 9, 1 In, 21, 26, syllabi
29, 30n, 39-41, 64, 92, 96, technology, 246, 246n, 302
128-9, 226, 287n, 352, 354-5, Thakur, U.T., 238
364n, 372, 402n, 421n, 466, Thompson, E.P., 439n
469n, 475, 485n, 496—536; and Thomson, J.A., 177, 190
 INDEX 551

Thurston, Edgar, 75 University of Calcutta, see Calcutta

Tilak, Balgangadhar, 198, 212n, 374, University
447 University of London, 204; see also
Toda (tribe), 204, 322 London School of Economics
Tomas, D., 77-8 University of Lucknow, 259; see
Tonnies, Ferdinand, 111, 114-15, Lucknow University
117 University of Sagar, 475-8, 478n
Toothi, N.A., 174, 207-8, 221, Upadhya, Carol, 33, 21 On, 213n, 325,
234-5 360n, 370, 391
town planning, 19, 174, 177, 181-7, Uraon (tribe), see Oraon
202, 241; see also urbanisation urban studies, 219, 389, 502
tradition(s), 116, 211—12, 245-6, urbanisation, 177-9, 229, 403-4,
267, 276-7, 280, 28In, 456, 460; 420, 431, 465
traditionalism, 246, 281-2, 284 Urry, James, 10, 62, 146, l47n, 171,
Trautmann, Thomas, 209, 209n, 224n, 375, 377n, 415
21 On, 363n, 375, 390, 397 utilitarianism, 211
tribe(s), 5, 21, 71, 76-7, 95-6,
132-71, 216, 219, 222n, 224, Vakil, C.N., 201, 234, 235n, 236,
229, 307—11, 403; concept of, 509n
148, 333n, 397, 435, 450; Vasavi, A.R., 194n
development of, 311-12; policy Vedanta, 271
towards, 215, 458, 460; study of, Venkatanarayappa, K.N., 238
307-11, 470; welfare of, 313, 461; vernacular (regional) language(s), 4,
see also Scheduled Castes and 27, 31, 43-4, 321-4, 446
Tribes Vibetsky, P., 35In
Trotsky, Leon, 272; Trotskyite, 423, Vidyarthi, L.P., 3n, 5n, 8, 30n, 33n,
423n, 427, 439 362, 364n, 372
Trouillot, M.-R., 459, 469n, 498n village, 22In, 240, 424, 438, 444,
Turner, Victor W., 348, 350, 351n 465; village studies, 365, 404—5,
Tylor, E.B., 77-80, 145, l45n, 146, 462-71, 500, 502, 508-23, 527n
150, 346, 501 Vincent, Joan, 12, 15n, 23, 23n, 220,
373, 446
Uberoi, J.P.S., 3n, 17, 35, 45n, 47n Visvanathan, Shiv, 36, 49
Uberoi, Patricia, 45n, 46, 106n, Vivekananda, Swami, 124, 125n,
197n, 360n, 390, 397, 398n, 258
399n,496n, 521n, 530n von Wiese, Leopold, 111, 115-16,
UNESCO, lOn, 45n, 471, 483 127-8
University Grants Commission, 225,
475, 481 Watts, Alan, 347n, 348
unity in diversity, 246, 425; see also Webb, Sidney, 204
culture, pluralism Weber, Max, 40, 268, 364-5,
University of Bombay, see Bombay 406-7
University Weiner, A., 23
552 INDEX

Westermarck, Edvard, 223n, 326 women, 87-9, 92, 98, 356; see also
westernization, 277; see also anthropologists, women
modernisation working class, 419, 428, 435-6, 440
Wiser, Charlotte and William, 466,
509n, 511 Zakariyya, Maulana Muhammad, 25
Wissler, Clark, 305 Zimmerman, Carl, 286
 BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

3 9999 06162 239 3

** 'on9^nTu>>«<=uw*«
.JSS-—■* •
 EDITED BY PATRICIA UBEROI, NANDINI SUNDAR AND SATISH DESHPANDE

m Anthropology and sociology have long histories in India. Yet, with the
exception of fieldwork experience, there is neither much available on the
institutional and material contexts of these disciplines, nor on the prac¬
tices of pioneering anthropologists and sociologists. Filling this impor¬
tant gap, this book spans a century of life and work, from the late
nineteenth'to the late twentieth century. It focuses on scholars with vary¬
ing research trajectories and shows how local influences and personalities
P§Pr : played a major role in shaping the field. It examines their common con¬

m cern with nation-building, social reform and the value of science.

its B lis currently Honorary Director of the Institute of Chi¬

nese Studies, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. She
is co-editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology and author of Freedom
and Destiny'. Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India (2006),

is Professor of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics,

Delhi University, and co-editor, Contributions to Indian Sociology. She is
currently working on a book on adivasi politics and identity in contem¬
porary India, and editing a volume on laws, policies and practices in the
state of Jharkhand.

was trained in the disciplines of economics and so¬

ciology, and taught at the Department of Anthropology, University of
Chicago (March-June 2001).