Conclusion

Taken together, Ghurye, D.P. Mukerji, A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas illustrate just how differently Indian sociology could be, and was, shaped into a discipline suited to a newly independent, modernising country -- there was no single template for "Indianising" the field. Ghurye started out working within the questions that western anthropologists like Risley had already set, but brought to them a close, textually grounded knowledge of the classical tradition and a feel for educated Indian opinion that reframed those questions on Indian terms. D.P. Mukerji arrived from an almost opposite direction -- a thoroughly westernised, modern intellectual by training -- and yet it was precisely he who insisted on the importance of rooting Indian sociology in Indian tradition, all the while remaining critical of that tradition's limitations rather than treating it as something to be simply revered. A.R. Desai, like Mukerji shaped strongly by Marxism, turned this outlook toward the state itself, offering a sharply critical reading of the Indian and other post-colonial states at a time when such open criticism was unusual within the discipline. M.N. Srinivas, trained at the very centre of western social anthropology at Oxford, took that training and adapted it to Indian conditions, in the process setting much of the agenda that Indian sociology would follow into the late twentieth century. …