IGNOU SERIES

©Antara Chakrabarty
UGC NTA-NET
Sociology
 INDIAN
SOCIOLOGY
TIMELINE
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• WESTERN Sociology:
The Intellectual Revolution embodied in the movement for
Enlightenment, Scientific revolution and Commercial Revolution,
which spanned the period between the 14th and the 18th
centuries, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Industrial
Revolution put a deadly blow to the age-old feudal system
monarchy and the church
• INDIA
• Socio-Political causes: British civil servants, missionaries, and
Western scholars during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
• Sociology in India was the product of intellectual response of the
Indians to the Western interpretations of Indian society and
culture by the Westerners, mainly after the colonial rule of the
British began in India
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• the ascription of inviolable sanctity to
the ancient texts, it is alleged, inhibited
the growth of critical and independent
thought in later periods.
• The truth is that the ancient texts,
shastras and smritis, despite their
philosophical and metaphysical content,
were not concerned with the eternal
verities of truths only and did not ignore 2
the existential reality of the time. perspectives
• One of the first practical books:
• Treatises like Kautilya’s Arthasastra
(324-296 B.C.) urging upon the king to
take regular census of the subjects Coloniser Indians
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• Major travelers accounts:

• Most of the classical accounts of Indian society follow Megasthenes the
Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya (324-3000
BC). He had the advantage of direct observation of parts of India.
• He described the Indian society as being divided into seven classes, though he
did not refer to the varna theory.
• Three Chinese travelers
• Fa-Hien (AD 400-411), Yuan Chwang (AD 629-644), and I-Tsing (AD 671-
695) described the socio-cultural conditions of their time in India in
great detail. An analysis of their accounts in a chronological order may
give a valuable perspective on change in the Indian society.
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• Among the Arab travelers, Al-Biruni (973-ca 1030) seems to have been
familiar with Sanskrit sources and the Indian systems of thought. He
mentioned the four varna theory of caste in his description of the social
life and customs of the people.
• Ibn Btutta, Arab traveller from Morocco, offered valuable information
regarding the geography of the land, or socio-cultural conditions and daily
life of the people of India between AD 1333 and AD 1347.
• For South India useful information may be obtained from the chronicles of
Marco Polo who visited that part of the country around AD 1293
• In the seventeenth century many translations were made from the
Sanskrit literature into Persian by Indo-Moslem scholars.
• They paved the way for a better understanding of Indian culture and
society Abul Fazl, the author of Ain-i-Akbari which was a late sixteenth
century gazetteer containing description of Akbar’s court, revenue, and
administrative system, was “an empiricist par excellence”
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Colonizer’s
perspectives

Orientalist Administrative Missionary

• The orientalists were enchanted by the Indian spiritual tradition mythology, philosophy, etc. static, timeless and
space less.
• The missionaries, looked at it as a socio-cultural and ethnic system which needed total religious conversion.
Both the groups agreed that Hinduism as practiced within the realm of their observation was filled with
‘superstition’ and ‘abuses’.
• The administrators sought to develop categories that would help them in ordering their ideas and actions
relating to the life of the natives of India avoiding the enormous complexities characterising it. For example, B.
H. Baden-Powell’s 3 volumes of The Land Systems of British India (1892) contained a series of arguments about
the nature of Indian village and its resources in relation to the state and its demand over these resources.
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• Henry Maine’s view that there was only one type of Indian village, viz.,
• politically autonomous and economically selfsufficient village community.
• According to Baden-Powell, there were two distinct types of village in
India:
• (1) “ryotwari” or non-landlord or severalty and
• (2) landlord or joint-village.
• Rise of Educational Institutions [BOMBAY]
• Most notable was the Asiatic society of Bengal founded in 1797 by the world famous Sanskritist and
Indologist, Sir William Jones.
• W.H.R. River’s study of The Todas (1906) was based on intensive field work and was the first
monograph on a people of India in the modern anthropological tradition.
• Two of his students, G. S. Ghurye and K. P. Chottapadhyay came to play a significant role in the
development of sociology and anthropology in India. Rivers’ study was followed by A. R.
RadcliffeBrown’s on The Andaman Islanders
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• The first department of sociology and civics started in Bombay

University in 1919 under the leadership of Sir Patrick Geddes.
• G. S. Ghurye was sent to the United Kingdom (UK) by Geddes.
He obtained a doctorate from Cambridge mainly for his work
on caste. On his return to the country, he succeeded in finding
a place in Bombay University where he became after a few
years Professor and Head of the Sociology Department
(1924).
• Ghurye’s knowledge of Sanskrit enabled him to use the
scriptures and epics in analysing and interpreting Indian
culture and society.
• He insisted on fieldwork though he himself was an armchair
sociologist
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• GHURYE’S FAMOUS STUDENTS:

• Ghurye was catholic in his interests as well as methods.

• A few of his students, K. M. Kapadia, Irawati Karve, and S. V. Karandikar

carried his approach and concepts to materials in the sacred texts and
other literature in Sanskrit.
• M. N. Srinivas, a structural-functionalist,
• A. R. Desai, a Marxist, obtained their Ph.D. in Sociology under Ghurye’s
supervision.
• Ghurye founded the Indian Sociological Society in 1952 and was the
first editor of its journal, Sociological Bulletin.
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• LUCKNOW UNIVERSITY:
• Radhakamal Mukerjee, Dhurijati Prasad Mukerji, and
anthropologist D. N. Majumdar
• Radhakamal Mukerjee:
• regional and ecological sociology.
• He stressed the need for multidisciplinary effort to
comprehend reality better.
• His Fields and Farmers of Oudh (1930) offer a good example
of the study of agrarian studies.
• He wrote also on the Indian labour class. He developed a
theory of human migration and settlement in which he
argued that human beings, like plants, thrive best in those
frontiers which are similar in environment to those in which
they have already succeeded. His regional analysis was
pervaded with his notion of ‘Sangha’ which depicted the
Hindu notion of commonality and cooperation rather than
conflict.
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• His stress on the importance of myth, language, ritual, art, and

symbolism made his works appear, according to Srinivas,
“philosophical, if not mystical”
• Yogendra Singh, a direct pupil of Mukerjee, maintains that one
of the most significant contributions that Mukerjee has made to
sociology lies in “his formulation of a general theoretical
paradigm of social science and sociology from the
perspective of Indian philosophical traditions”
• He thus sought to offer an alternative to the Western
theoretical approach in sociology.
 Antara
Chakrabarty
UGC NTA-NET
SOCIOLOGY
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•SOCIOLOGY: Science of Society?

•SCOPE of SOCIOLOGY

Formalistic
Synthetic
/Specialist
FORMALISTIC

G. Simmel
Max Weber
Vierkandt
Small
Von Wiese
Tonnies
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Formalistic
• Formalistic or Specialistic School
• The sociologists who belong to the formalistic of specialistics school
believe that sociology deals with various forms of human or social
relations.
• They regard sociology as a pure and independent branch of
knowledge distinct from all social sciences.
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•George Simmel
• George Simmel, a leading German sociologist considers social
science. He feels that it should describe, classify, analyse and
explain the several forms of social relationship.
• It should not be concerned with their contents which are dealt
with by other social sciences. He makes a distinction between
the forms of social relationships and their contents and subject
matter.
• In his view sociology should confine itself to the study of formal
behaviour and avoid the examination of actual behaviour.
• It means that the different forms of social relationship and not
the relationships between themselves, should be the subject of
sociology.
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• This view-point turns sociology into a science dealing with the same
topics as other social sciences, but the topics are judged from a
different angle namely, the angle of different forms of social
relationships.
• George Simmel has referred to the several forms of social relationships
such as competition, domination, subordination, division of
labour etc.
• They have an important role to play in different spheres of social life.
The spheres-being economic, political, religious and the like.
• It is an important function of sociology to separate these relationships
from one another and study them in abstraction.
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• Vierkandt :
• He maintains that sociology is an independent social
science or a special branch of knowledge. It should
concern itself with the ultimate forms of social or mental
relationships which bind people to one another in society.
• Sociology should not study concrete societies in detail like
history. It should study the irreducible categories of
science which are nothing but ultimate forms of social or
mental psychic relationships.
• These relationships consist in love and hate, attitude of
respect, submission, shame, co-operation, competition,
the approval of others etc, which bind individuals into
groups.
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• Max Weber:
• Max Weber an eminent German sociologist expresses his own
view-point on the scope of sociology. He says that the scope of
sociology consists in interpreting or “understanding” social
behaviour. For him social behaviour does not refer to entire field
of human relation.
• He means by social behaviour what we call social activity or
social action. It is related to the behaviour of others and is
determined by them.
• For instance, a bicycle accident is merely a natural phenomenon,
the way in which the bicyclists behave with each other after the
accident in the form of avoiding or using the language reflects
their true social behaviour. Sociology is thus concerned with
fundamental types of social behaviour.
• In other words, sociology should aim at analysing and classifying
the various types of social behaviour or social relationships.
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•Tonnies, Von Wiese and Small:

• There are sociologists like Ferdinand Tonnies, Von Wiese and Small who
have similar views on the scope of sociology.
• Tonnies agrees with other sociologists when he says that sociology is an
independent and pure social science but he has distinguished society from
community on the basis of forms of relationships.
• Von Wiese is of the opinion that sociology should confine itself to the
study of the various forms of social relationships. He has divided these
social relationships into different kinds.
• Small says that sociology should study all activities of society. It should
study the genetic forms of social relationship, behaviour, activities etc.
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Synthetic School
• The synthetic school of thought holds the view that
sociology is a synthesis of all social sciences.

• Sociology is the science of science. It embraces all

social sciences within its scope.
• In other words, it synthesizes them all.
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Emile LT
Durkheim Hobhouse

P. Sorokin
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• Emile Durkheim
• Emile Durkheim, an eminent French sociologist divides
sociology into three principal parts, namely social
morphology, social physiology and general sociology.
• Social morphology has direct reference ,to all those objects
which are basically or fundamentally geographical or
territorial in nature.
• These objects are of many kinds such as the problems of
population, its size, density and local distribution and the
like.
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• Social morphology not only analyses the size and quality of

population but also examines how population affects the quality of
social relationship and social groups.
• It also studies the main forms of social groups, institutions and- their
classifications. Social physiology is very complex and it covers all
subjects studied by particular social sciences like religion, economy,
language, morals, laws, etc.
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• Hobhouse

• Hobhouse an English sociologist, holds some what a similar

view on the scope of sociology.
• According to him, sociology should be a synthesis of numerous
social sciences. It should include other sciences in its scope.
• In his opinion all aspects of social life are inter-connected and
therefore, the study of one aspect of social life cannot be
adequate for an understanding of the entire social fact.
• Owing to this reason, sociology should study social life as a
whole in a very systematic way.
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• P. Sorokin
• P Sorokin has also expressed his view on the subject-matter
of sociology. According to him, sociology should aim at
studying the relationship that exists between the different
aspects of social phenomena and between the social and
non-social phenomenas. It should study the general features
of social phenomena as well.
• From the foregoing discussions on the scope of sociology it
can be conveniently concluded that the range of this science
is very wide. Sociology is regarded as a general science as well
as a special science. Like all other sciences, the subject-matter
of sociology is society.
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• Each of these sciences, as mentioned already, deals with only one

particular aspects of social life. But it is sociology which not only
studies social relationships but also studies society in its entirety.
• It aims at standing all aspects of society. At this stage of its
development it is neither essential nor possible to determine the
scope of sociology. As sociology is a developing science it is not easy
to delimit what exactly cannot be studied by sociological method.
 Antara
Chakrabarty
UGC NTA-NET
SOCIOLOGY
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Functionalism
• Comte effectively linked sociology with the prestige of biological
science.
• It was Herbert Spencer who used the organismic analogy to create an
explicit form of functional analysis.
• Drawing upon materials from his monumental The Principles of
Biology (1864–1867), Spencer's The Principles of Sociology (1874–
1896) is filled with analogies between organisms and society as well
as between ecological processes (variation, competition, and
selection) and societal evolution (which he saw as driven by war).
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• Spencer did not see society as an actual organism; rather, he

conceptualized "superorganic systems" (organization of organisms)
as revealing certain similarities in their "principles of arrangement" to
biological organisms.
• For Durkheim, then, sociological analysis would involve assessment
of the causes of phenomena and their consequences or functions for
meeting the needs of social structures for integration.
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STRUCTURE FUNCTIONALISM = FUNCTIONALISM

Except for Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown

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• Malinowski

• Radcliffe Brown
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• Durkheim

• Parsons

• Merton
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Structuralism

• Structuralism is the name given to a method of analysing social

relations and cultural products, which came into existence in the
1950s. Although it had its origin in linguistics, particularly from the
work of Ferdinand de Saussure, it acquired popularity in
anthropology, from where it impacted the other disciplines in social
sciences and humanities
• Founder of Structural Anthropology: Claude Levi Strauss
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Structure-Functionalism Structuralism
• Structural-functional • Structuralism, on the other hand, endeavours to
approach is interested in find the structures of thought and the structure of
finding order within social society.
relations. • Structuralism subscribes to deductive logic. It
• Structural-functional begins with certain premises. They are followed
approach follows inductive carefully to the point they lead to.
reasoning; from the • Aspects from geometry and algebra are kept in
particular, it moves to the mind while working with structuralism.
general • For structuralism, logical possibilities are worked
out first and then it is seen, how reality fits. For
true structuralists, there is no reality except the
relations between things
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• Lévi-Strauss was not interested in producing a text (i.e., a monograph) on a

particular culture, but a text that addressed the understanding of the
‘Universal Man’ rather than the ‘particular man’.
• This work offered a new approach to the study of kinship systems that has
come to be known as ‘alliance theory’ in opposition to what is called
‘descent theory’, which was put forth by British anthropologists (such as
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Meyer Fortes) and was the dominant theory in
kinship studies till then.
• The emphasis of descent theory was on the transmission of property,
office, ritual complex, and rights and obligations across the generations
(either in the father’s or mother’s line, or in both the lines), which
produced solidarity among the members of the group related by the ties
of consanguinity.
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• In The Totemism,
• The binary opposition of nature and culture that evolved in his
kinship study was further developed here. Rejecting the utilitarian
theory of totemism, Lévi-Strauss examined the merits of the second
theory of totemism that Radcliffe-Brown had proposed.
• In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss’s central point was that the
thoughts of the ‘primitive people’ were in no way inferior to those of
the ‘Westerners’.
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• For Lévi-Strauss, structuralism implies a search for deep,

invisible, and innate structures universal to humankind.
These unapparent and hidden structures manifest in
surface (and conscious) behaviour that varies from one
culture to the other.

• Conscious structures are a ‘misnomer’.

• Therefore, we have to discover the underlying ‘unconscious’
structures, and how they are transformed into ‘conscious’ structures.
 Antara
Chakrabarty
UGC NTA-NET
SOCIOLOGY
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Post Modernism
• Everything starts with STRUCTURALISM
• REMEMBER the points?
• Universal structure
• Binary opposite
• Dominant form of knowledge system.

• As is clear from the word “post structuralism”, these approaches are

those that came after ‘structuralism’.
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• These theories and approaches sought to seek

insights into society by critiquing and
deconstructing social and cultural processes.
• The post modernism break with structuralism was
the fact that structuralism reduced everything
into binary oppositions and the interrelations
between them.
• The structuralists held they could analyse any
phenomena with the help of their methodology.
We must emphasise that post structuralism is a
number of approaches and not one monolithic
theory.
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What was the problem with

Structuralism?
• That is different meanings can be assigned to a single text depending
upon the perspective taken.
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Major criticisms
• structuralism did not pay heed to historical processes and is a-historical
• applied the rules of linguistics to societal processes which is a
questionable procedure
• it is assumed that a work has meaning in itself and this persists even
before it is discovered and
• the text is only a conduit between the subject and the structure of
rational.
• The Enlightenment view that the individual is separate and whole and that the
mind is the area where values evolve
• on the other hand the poststructuralists felt that the individual was embedded in
social interaction. Such symbolic beings are referred to by the word “subject”. We
can then say that the subjects are intertwined with society and culture and occupy
some place within them, and sociologically based sites
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• In other words “objectivity” as in the case of earlier sociological theory is

found to be an illusion.
• according to Foucault there is no question of predicting history through
grand theories and meta narratives (Foucault, 1969).
• History is thus viewed by poststructuralists as happening by chance. Thus in
history the twists, turns, plots, subplots and important events and
happenings cannot be pinned down – that is it happens by chance.
• The structuralists felt that man was chained to structures which controlled
him. In contrast, however, Derrida feels that language can be reduced to
writing which does not control the subjects.
• According to him all institutions and structures are nothing but writing and
incapable of controlling the individual.
• The structuralists saw order and stability in language, hence in all structures;
the
• poststructuralists on the other hand saw language as essentially changing
and quite unstable.
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• In his early work on methodology, Foucault (1966) is doing an

“archaeology of knowledge”.
• His objects of study are bodies of knowledge, ideas, modes of
discourse, he contrasts his archaeology of knowledge to history and
the history of ideas, both of which he regards as being too rational
and as seeing to much continuity in the history of knowledge.
• the post modern covers:
• 1) a new epoch,
• 2) new cultural products,
• 3) new theories about society.
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Baudrillard and Post Modernism

• Baudrillard put forward the notion of “symbolic exchange” as an

alternative to economic exchange.
• Symbolic exchange itself involves a continuous process of a gift giving
and gift taking. It is clear that symbolic exchange was beyond and
opposed to the logic of late capitalism.
• Such symbolic exchange implied the creation of a society based on
the same, but Baudrillard chose to be a-political. He studied
contemporary society, and saw that it is not production but the
electronic media that characterises it e.g. TV, computers, satellites.
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• We have moved from societies under different modes of production

to a society that is more involved with the code of production.
Exploitation and profit motives have given way to a domination by the
signs/systems that produce them.
• Again signs referred to something else but in postmodern society
they become self referential and characterised by “simulations” and
‘simulacra’ which are representations of any aspect of consumption
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Famous Post colonialists in India

• Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh

Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee
• They have grappled with analytical problems and systematic
prejudices within the disciplinary forms of knowledge production
and sought to work through these problems and identify possible
solutions for more adequate ways forward.
• There is a rigour to their scholarship and a concern with maintaining
the standards of the academic enterprise even as they contest claims,
including claims of adequacy, within the larger field.
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Understanding Edward Said

Orientalists
History
Occidents
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 Antara
Chakrabarty
UGC NTA-NET
SOCIOLOGY
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The term feminism describes political,

cultural, and economic movements that
aim to establish equal rights and legal
protections for women
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Waves
First Second Fourth
19th and early 20th 1960s and 1970s Third Internet-
century (equal legal and based
social rights) intersectionality
(Right to vote) movement
s
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First wave

• First-wave feminism promoted equal contract and

property rights for women, opposing ownership of
married women by their husbands.
• By the late 19th century, feminist activism was primarily
focused on the right to vote.
• American first-wave feminism ended with passage of the
19th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919,
granting women voting rights.
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Second Wave
• Second-wave feminism of the 1960s-1980s focused on issues of
equality and discrimination.
• The second-wave slogan, “The Personal is Political,” identified
women’s cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked and
encouraged women to understand how their personal lives reflected
sexist power structures.
• Betty Friedan was a key player in second-wave feminism. In 1963, her
book The Feminine Mystique criticized the idea that women could find
fulfillment only through childrearing and homemaking.
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Third Wave
• early 1990s,
• responding to perceived failures of the second
wave and to the backlash against second-wave
initiatives.
• second-wave over-emphasized experiences of
upper middle-class white women.
• The third-wave sees women’s lives as
intersectional, demonstrating how race,
ethnicity, class, religion, gender, and nationality
are all significant factors when discussing
feminism.
• It examines issues related to women’s lives on an
international basis.
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Fourth-wave

• Fourth-wave feminism is a phase of feminism that began around 2012

and is characterized by a focus on the empowerment of women and
the use of internet tools, and is centered on intersectionality.
• The first, second, and third waves of feminism fought for and earned
women greater liberation, individualism, and social mobility; the
fourth wave continues the push against problematic gendered norms
that cause the oppression and marginalization of women in society,
the intersectionality
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Liberals

• This kind of feminism works within the

structure of mainstream society to
integrate women into it and make it
more responsive to individual
women’s rights,
• but does not directly challenge the
system itself or the ideology behind
women’s oppression.
• The suffragist movement is an
example.
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Radicals
• Radical feminism views patriarchy and sexism as
the most elemental factor in women’s
oppression – cutting across all others from race
and age to culture, caste and class.
• It questions the very system and ideology
behind women’s subjugation.
• The term often refers to the women’s
movements emerging from the civil rights,
peace and other liberation movements at a time
when people increasingly were questioning
different forms of oppression and power.
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Marxists and Socialists

• Marxist and Socialist Feminism: Feminists,

grounded in Marxist and socialist analysis,
attribute women’s oppression principally to
the capitalist economic system where global
corporate power prevails.
• Many other feminists believe that this form
of power seen in the class system is a
crucial factor in women’s subordination but
see patriarchy as the major force behind
women’s subjugation.
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Eco-Feminism

• This form of feminism views patriarchy and its focus on control and
domination not only as a source of women’s oppression but as being
harmful to humanity as well as destructive of all living creatures and
the earth itself.
• Combining a more comprehensive analysis of power often with a
greater spiritual vision, eco-feminists see women’s rights and
empowerment linked to political, economic, social and cultural
factors that benefit all living creatures and Mother Nature herself.
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Post Moderns
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Standpoint feminism
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 Antara
Chakrabarty
UGC NTA-NET
SOCIOLOGY
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Telegram Channel
Youtube channel:
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ANTARALIVE
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Quantitative
data
Positivism
Rationalism
Science
Qualitative data
Interpretivis
m
Empiricism
Are our
understandings
and experiences
only limited to
our senses??
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Hermeneutics
• takes a variety of forms but in essence is a means of interpretation,
principally of historical events, phenomena or texts.
• Hermeneutics has been described as the science of interpretation.
• Hermeneutics, although with a history stretching back to the Ancient
Greeks, developed in the Middle Ages as a mechanism for Biblical
understanding.
• It subsequently became transformed into a philosophical and
later sociological form of enquiry and, with the work of
Heidegger
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• Schleiermacher and the origin of modern hermeneutics

• Hermeneutics was originally devised as a method of textual

interpretation by a German philologist and theologian called
Friedrich Schleiermacher.
• Deep understanding
• Reading beyond the text
• understanding
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• Dilthey's historicist hermeneutics

• Dilthey was concerned to establish an objective method for

interpretive history. His approach to hermeneutics is the traditional
historicist approach.
• Dilthey was concerned with cultural creations and the meaningfulness
of human activity. Echoing Schleiermacher, Dilthey reconfirmed the
need for re-experiencing meaning within the original context in order
to develop understanding (Verstehen).
• For Dilthey, Verstehen was essentially historical.
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• Heidegger's "hermeneutic circle" a frequently referenced

model that claims one's understanding of individual parts of a text is
based on their understanding of the whole text, while the
understanding of the whole text is dependent on the understanding
of each individual part.
• Hermeneutics in sociology was also heavily influenced by German
philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer
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Subjectivity

Objectivity
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Interpretivists
• Sociological theory is often broadly divided
into positivism and interpretivism.
• Interpretivists argue that the study of human society must
go beyond empirical and supposedly objective
evidence to include subjective views, opinions,
emotions, values: the things that can't be directly
observed and counted.
• They are phenomena that require interpretation. Indeed
most interpretivists would go further and suggest that
research cannot really establish social facts, that society is
all about subjective values and interpretations and cannot
be understood just through facts and figures.
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