D.P. Mukerji on Tradition and Change

D.P. Mukerji came to sociology only after growing dissatisfied with history and economics as he had studied them, because neither discipline, in his view, took seriously what he considered the one truly distinctive feature of Indian civilisation: its social life. He argued that in India, history, economics and even philosophy had always been organised around social groups rather than around individuals, and that Indian society had, if anything, "too much" of the social dimension compared to the West, where politics and economics had developed as relatively separate, more autonomous spheres. From this conviction followed what he saw as the first duty of any Indian sociologist: to know India's social traditions from the inside, not merely to apply western sociological categories to Indian material. He insisted an Indian sociologist "must be an Indian first" -- sharing in the folkways, customs and languages, both classical (Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic) and local, of the people being studied.

Central to this outlook was his idea of tradition. The word itself, he pointed out, means "to transmit" -- its Sanskrit equivalents, parampara (succession) and aitihya (linked to itihas, history), both carry a sense of something handed down through retelling. But for D.P., a tradition's roots in the past never meant it was frozen: a living tradition is one that keeps its link with what came before while continuously adapting to the present. This is also how he read Indian society's basic orientation: unlike the individualist, "voluntaristic" West, Indian social life was organised around group, sect or caste action, an individual's desires largely following the pattern set by their social group -- though he noted this was beginning to loosen among the urban middle classes, itself a fact worth studying. …