II. Definition : According to D.P. Mukerji, this is a tradition which mainains links with the past by retaining something from it, and at the same time incorporates new things. A living tradition thus includes some old elements but also some new ones.
III. Causes responsible to insist by D.P. Mukerji that Indian sociologist be rooted in living tradition :
(i) D. P. Mukerji insisted that Indian sociologists should be rooted in living tradition to get a better and more concrete sense of what this means. If they would try to find out from different generation of people in their neighbourhoods or family about what is changed and what is unchanged about specific practices. For example, the Indian sociologists can know better the following subjects:
Games played by children of your age group (boys/girls)
Ways in which a popular festival is celebrated Typical dress/clothing worn by women and men.
....Plus other such subjects of your choice.
(ii) To fulfil to own their duty : Given the centrality of society in India. It became the first duty of an Indian sociologist to study and to know the social traditions of India. For D.P. this’ study of tradition was not oriented only towards the past, but also included sensitivity to change. Thus, traditions was a living tradition, maintaining its links with the past, but also adapting to the present and thus evolving over time.
(iii) To know and share the folk-culture and tradition etc ; D. P. Murkerji has written that it is not enough for the Indian sociologist. He must be an Indian first, that is he is to share in the folk-ways to mores, customs and traditions, for the purpose of understanding his social system and what lies beneath it and beyond it.” In keeping with this view, he believed that sociologists should learn and be familiar with both ‘high1 and ‘low’ languages and cultures - not only Sanskrit. Persian or Arabic, but also local dialects.
(iv) To understand true nature of Indian culture which in having cultural group patterns and hardly deviates from it : D.P. argued that Indian culture and society are not individualistic in the western sense. The average Indian indidual’s pattern of desires is more or less rigidly fixed by his socio-cultural group pattern and he hardly socia deviates from it. Thus, the Indian social system is basically oriented towards group, sect or caste-action, not ‘Voluntaristic’ individual action. Although ‘voluntarism’ was beginning to influence the urban middle classes, its appearance ought to be itself an interesting subject to study for the Indian sociologist.
2. Detail study of rural India will provide first hand knowledge of village society. If scholar and researchers go for experience of field work in village and rural area of India. Their experiences of field work would provide detail and upto some extent for complete information and knowledge about rural sociology.
3. Village studies use important if we want to challenge the incomplete and wrong factual and informative knowledge of factual and informative knowledge of western sociologist who had done their research work keeping in view the imperial interest, ideologies and policies of the British government as well as colonial outlook and wrong policies of the western parts.
4. Role played by M.N. Srinivas promoting village studies : (i) M.N. Srinivas produce a significance body of work on certain themes related with Indian society and certain issues related with rural life of India.
(ii) M.N. Srinivas had strong connections in British social anthropology as well as American anthropology. Like G.S. Shurye and the Lucknow scholars. Srinivas succeeded in training a new generation of sociologist who were to become leaders of the discipline in the following decades.
(iii) The Indian village and village society remained a life-long focus of interest for Srinivas. Although he had made short visit to villages to conduct surveys and interviews, it was not until he did field work for a year at a village near Mysore that he really acquired first hand knowledge of village society. The experience of field work proved to be decisive for his career and his intellectual path.
(iv) Help and encouragement of other sociologist : Srinivas helped encourage and coordinate a major collective effort at producing detailed ethnographic accounts of village society during the 1950s and 1960s. Along with other scholars like S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar, Srinivas was instrumental in making village studies the dominant field in Indian sociology during this time.
(i) M.N. Srinivas favoured to take the Indian village on a subject of sociological research because village society remained a life long focus of interest for Srinivas. He wrote on the Indian village in detail. His writings were of two broad types. There was first of all ethnographic accounts of fieldwork done in villages or discusstions of such accounts. A second kind of writing included historical and conceptual discussions about the Indian village as a unit of social analysis. In the latter kind of writting, Srinivas was involved in a debate about the usefulness of the village as a concept. Arguing against village studies.
(ii) Caste is more important : Some social anthropologists like Louis Dumont thought that social institutions like caste were more important than something like a village, which was after all only a collection of people living in a particular place. Villages may live or die, and people may move from one village to another, but their social institutions, like caste or religion, follow than and go with them whenever they go. For this reason Dumont believed that it would be misleading to give much importace to the village as a category.
(iii) A Relevant Social entity : As against this view, Srinivas believed that the village was a relevant social entity. Historical evidence showed that villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity was quite significant in rural social life.
(iv) Wrong picture presented by the colonial offices : Srinivas also critised the British administrator anthropologists who had put forward a picture of the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient, “Little republics”. Using historical and sociological evidence. Srinivas showed that the village had, in fact, experienced considerable change. Moreover, villages were never self-sufficient, and had been involved in various kinds of economic, social and political relationship at the regional level.
(v) Advantages : The village as a site of research offered many advantages to Indian sociology. It provided an opportunity to illustrate the importance of ethnographic research methods. It offered eye-witness accounts of the repid social change that was taking place in the Indian countryside as the newly independent nation began a programme of planned development.
3. His work was much appreciated by British anthropologists and administrators of the time, and later he was also invited to help with a similar ethnographic survey of Mysore state.
4. L.K. Ananthakrishna Iryer was probably the first self-taught anthropologist to receive national and international recognition as scholar and an academician.
5. Ananthakrishan Iyer was invited to lecture at the University of Madaras, and was appointed as reader of the University of Calcutta, where he helped set up the first post-graduate anthropology department in India.
6. Anathakrishna remained at Universtiy of Calcutta from 1917 to 1932.
7. Though he had no formal qualifications in anthropology, he was elected president of the Ethnology section of the Indian Science Congress. He was awarded a honorary doctorate by a German university during his lecture tour of European universities. He was also conferred the titles of Rai Bahadur and Dewan Bahadur by Cochin state.
II. Practice of social anthropology by Sarat Chandra Roy : 1. The lawyer Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942) was another ‘accidental anthropologist’ and pioneer of the discipline in India.
(ii) Before taking his law degree in Calcutta's Ripon College, Roy had done graduate and post graduate degrees in English. Soon after he had begun practising law, he decided to go to Ranchi (now a capital town of Jharkhanda) in 1898 to take up a job as a English teacher at a Christian Missionery school. This decision was to change his life, for he remained in Ranchi for the next forty-four years and became the leading authority on the culture and society of the tribal people of the Chhotanagpur region (present day Jharkhand).
(iii) Sarat Chandra Roy became deeply interested in tribal society as a byproduct of his professional need to interpret tribal customs and laws to the court. He travelled extensively among tribal communities and did intensive fieldwork among them. All of this was done on an ‘amateur’ basis, but Roy's diligence and keen eye for detail resulted in valuable monographs and research articles.
(iv) Literary work : During his entire career, Roy published more than one hundred articles in leading Indian and British academic journals in addition to his famous monographs on the Oraon, the Mundas and the Kharias. Roy soon became very well-known amongst anthropologist in India and Britain and was recognised as an authority on Chhotanagpur. He founded the journal man in India in 1922, the earliest journal of its kind in India that is still published.
(v) Conclusion : (a) Both Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy were true pioneers. In the early 1900s, they began practising a discipline that did not yet exist in India, and which had no institutions to promote it. Both Iyer and Roy were born, lived and died in India that was ruled by the British.
(b) The four Indian sociologists you are going to be introduced in this chapter were born one generation later than colonial era, but their careers continued into the era of independence, and they helped to shape the first formal institutions that established Indian sociology.
(c) G.S. Ghurye and D.P. Mukerji were born in the 1890s while A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas were about fifteen years younger, having been born in the second decade of the 20th century. Although they were all deeply influenced by western traditions of sociology, they were also able to offer some initial answers to the question that the pioneers could only begin to ask: what shape should a specially Indian sociology take ?
2. Roy travelled extensively among tribal communities of Jharkhand and did intensively field work among them. All of this was done on an amateur basis, but Roy's diligence and keen eye for detail resulted in valuable monographs and research articles.
3. G.S. Ghurye was second best known sociologist for his writtings about tribal people of India. He became very popular specially for his debate with Varrier Elwin which first made him-known outside sociology and the academic world.
4. In the 1930s and 1940s there was much debates on the place of tribal societies within India and how the state should respond to them. Many British administrator-anthropologists were specially interested in the tribes of India and believed them to be primitive peoples with a distinctive culture far from mainstream Hinduism. They also believed that the innocent and simple tribal would suffer exploitation and cultural degradation through contact with ‘Hindu culture and society. For this reason, they felt that the state had a duty to protect the tribes and to help them sustain their way of life and culture. Which were facing constant pressure to assimilate with mainstream Hindu culture.
(v) The debate about the tribal people of India during fourth and fifth decades of the first half part of twentienth century. Put a great challenge before the nationalist Indian. They were equally passionate about their belief in the unity of India and the need for modernising Indian society and culture. They believed that attempts to presserve tribal cultures were misguided and resulted in maintainning tribals in backward and in need of reform, they felt that tribes, too, needed to develop.
(vi) G.S. Ghurye became the best known exponent of the nationalist view : Due to arguments and debates among the different groups of scholars, sociologist and colonial supporters of western ideology gave and opportunity to Ghurye to become the best known exponent of the nationalist view. He insisted on characterising the tribes of India as ‘backward Hindus' rather than distinct cultural groups. He cited detailed evidence from a wide variety of tribal culture to show that they had been involved in constant interactions with Hinduism over a long period. They were thus simply further behind in the same process of assimilation that all Indian communities had gone through. This particular agrument namely, that Indian tribal were hardly ever isolated primitive communities of the type that was written about in the classical anthropological texts-was not really disputed.
(vii) Main point of difference which came out from the debate related to tribal communities : The differences were in how the impact of mainstream culture was evaluated. The ‘protectionsist’ believed that assimilation would result in the severe exploitation and cultural extinction of the tribals. Ghurye and the nationalists. On the other hand, argued that these ill-effects were not specific to tribal cultures, but were common to all the backward and downtrodden sections of Indian society. These were the inevitable difficulties on the road to development.
(viii) Conclusion : Today we still seem to be involved in similar debates. Discuss the different sides to the question from a contemporary perspective. For example, many tribal movements assert their distinctive cultural and political identity - in fact, the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were formed in response to such movements.
Switch
