Colonialism, Rural Social Structure and Resistance: The Relevance of Kathleen Gough's Work

Abstract

The Indian Context At the risk of being schematic and simplistic one may suggest that mainstream Sociology and Social Anthropology in India has been dominated, by and large, by two approaches: British structural - functionalism and the Indological approach. The structural - functional approach focussed on small - scale micro - studies of social institutions and cultural practices with no attempt to relate them to the historical context. Moreover, preoccupied with harmony and equilibrium, it ignored the issues of social tensions, resistance and struggles. Studies of kinship, caste, religion and village community -- the main focus of attention in the 1950s and the 1960s -- can be cited as instances of functionalism in Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology. On the other hand, the Indological approach, popularized through the Contributions to Indian Sociology, initiated in 1957 by Louis Dumont and David Pocock (and later on carried on by the Contributions ... [New Series]), focussed its attention on the concepts and categories of social organization in Indian thought embedded in Hindu religious scriptures. In this approach, the cultural specificity of India is misrepresented as the uniqueness of Indian society which is supposedly organized on principles opposite to those governing the organization of society and culture in the West. The most serious problem with this approach is that it takes the concepts and categories out of their context and presents them as trans - historical reality. There is no attempt to look at the tension and the correspondence between the concepts and categories, on the one hand, and the concrete historical reality, on the other. Rather, the concepts and categories are confused with the concrete reality itself. Furthermore, not only does this approach reduce the entire social - economic formation to a constructed notion of dominant Value, but, as Andre Beteille (1987:675) points out, it applies different scales to the dominant Value in the East as opposed to that in the West: societies are valorized in the very acts of comparison and contrast. Beteille calls it the disease of an intellectual climate. In my opinion, however, this is a case of dogmatic application of the orientalist ideology which tends to obscure our understanding not only of the East but also of the West. Kathleen Gough's work marks a bold departure from both Indology and functionalism. Her approach is structural and historical. She is sensitive to the cultural concepts and practices without, however, ignoring their historical context. Given the limitations of time and space, in addition, of course, to my intellectual limitations, it is not possible to review here Gough's work on India in its entirety. Rather, I will confine myself to her concern with peasant resistance and struggles in colonial and post - colonial India. In the spring of 1983, I had an opportunity to meet Kathleen Gough in Vancouver, when she told me that one of the incentives for her to write about peasant movements in India was the publication of Barrington Moore's famous work, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (1966, cf. Gough 1974). It was not so much the empirical content of Moore's work as the general approach to Indian history and society, especially his representation of Indian peasantry, caste system and traditional village structure as repository of passivity and non - resistance to external (colonial) and internal (post - colonial) domination and oppression that she found unacceptable. She also told me that she was herself preoccupied with her research and writing on Vietnam, but she would very much appreciate if more historically grounded anthropological studies were undertaken to counter the representation of a passive Indian peasantry. Going back to our first meeting at the Post - Plenary Session of the Xth World Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, 1979, in Lucknow (India), we had a brief discussion on how Barrington Moore is not alone in taking this particular approach to Indian society and culture, but rather it is part of a more general trend, including the Indological approach briefly referred to above. …