The Growth of Sociology in India

Colonialism was not a side event in the story of modernity — it was the engine of modern capitalism and industrialisation. Western sociologists wrote about capitalism, industry and social change, and their ideas are genuinely useful for understanding what happened in India. But the catch is that colonialism made India's experience of industrialisation fundamentally different from the West's. The textbook drives this home with Karl Marx's description of what the East India Company did to Indian cotton. India had been, for ages, the world's great workshop of cotton manufacture. Then English machine-made yarn and cloth flooded in, while Indian produce was either shut out of England or admitted only on the harshest terms. British goods entered India at a tiny, nominal duty, and the celebrated native cotton fabrics were ruined. So the same global process — industrial capitalism — that built the West dismantled an Indian industry. The tools of Western sociology are relevant, but they cannot be applied mechanically.

Sociology in India also had to confront Western writings about Indian society that were simply wrong. These came from colonial officials and from Western scholars alike, and a common thread was the assumption that Indian society was the opposite of Western society. The textbook takes one example: the Indian village, portrayed as unchanging. Influenced by Victorian evolutionary ideas, Western writers treated the Indian village as a remnant, a survival from what they called "the infancy of society." They looked at nineteenth-century India and believed they were seeing the past of Europe. This was a colonial lens, not a scientific one.

The global and uneven transformation of societies under capitalism is worth pausing on. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, an estimated 24 million Africans were enslaved; 11 million survived the journey to the Americas. They were torn from their homes and cultures, transported in appalling conditions, and forced to work in the service of capitalism. Enslavement is a graphic example of people being caught up in the development of modernity against their will. Slavery declined in the 1800s, but for India that same century brought indentured labour. The British shipped indentured workers to run cotton and sugar plantations in distant lands — Surinam in South America, the West Indies, the Fiji Islands. V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize-winning English writer, was a descendant of one of these thousands who were taken to lands they had never seen and who died without ever returning. The point is that modernity did not arrive everywhere as liberation; for millions it arrived as coercion.

Another colonial heritage is the sharp distinction Western academia draws between sociology and social anthropology. A standard Western textbook definition of sociology is "the study of human groups and societies, giving particular emphasis to the analysis of the industrialised world." Social anthropology, by that same standard, is the study of simple, non-Western, "other" cultures. The implication is that the sociologist studies "us" and the anthropologist studies "them." In India, this neat divide collapses. M.N. Srinivas explains why: in a country of India's size and diversity — regional, linguistic, religious, sectarian, ethnic (including caste), and between rural and urban areas — there are a myriad of "others." And in a culture like India's, "the other" can be encountered literally next door. You do not need to cross an ocean to find a society different from your own. …