Q.What does D.P. Mukerji mean by a 'living tradition'? Why did he insist that Indian sociologists be rooted in this tradition?

D.P. Mukerji's idea of a "living tradition" is central to his vision of what an Indian sociology should look like. He begins from the literal meaning of the word tradition -- "to transmit" -- noting its Sanskrit equivalents, parampara (succession) and aitihya (linked to itihas, history): both point to something handed down and kept alive through repeated retelling. But for D.P., being rooted in the past this way never meant a tradition had to stay fixed. A living tradition, in his sense, is one that keeps its connecting thread back to what came before while continuously absorbing and adapting to the present -- old elements persisting alongside genuinely new ones, rather than either being preserved unchanged or discarded outright.

This is why D.P. insisted that Indian sociologists needed to be rooted in this living tradition rather than simply applying imported western sociological categories to Indian material. His reasoning followed from a larger claim about what made India distinctive: that Indian history, economics and even philosophy had always been organised around social groups rather than individuals, so that society was, in his phrase, "over-developed" relative to the West even as India's other institutions -- its economy, its formal politics -- remained comparatively less developed. If society really was the defining fact about India, then understanding Indian social traditions from the inside became the first responsibility of anyone practising sociology in India. He went further: a sociologist, in his view, "must be an Indian first" -- sharing in the folkways, customs and languages, both classical and local, of the people under study, not observing them from outside as a purely detached western-trained expert would. …