ICSSR research surveys and explorations: Indian sociology, edited by Yogendra Singh, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014

Abstract

This three-volume set, comprising twenty-one chapters, is the outcome of the fifth round of survey of literature in the fields of sociology and social anthropology conducted under the auspices of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). The first ICSSR survey was published in 1974. Subsequently, they were published in 1985, 2000, and 2009. Obviously, there has been no consistent temporal logic guiding these surveys. Nor has there been any consistency in terms of substantive/thematic areas covered. Of course, a survey can only reflect the changing direction of research in a discipline, and is not bound to impose a pre-established thematic logic on the existing literature. Yet, readers expect an editorial introduction that would enable them to understand the underlying logic of thematic organization: why certain areas were included whereas certain others were dropped from the purview? A mere statement that the three volumes are titled as emerging concepts, structure, and change; development and change; and identity, communication, and culture does not help much in contextualizing the historical trajectory of the growth and development of sociology in India. What one finds rather is an inelegant set of platitudes that ‘‘sociology and social anthropology, in separate ways though, have been deeply affected by the forces of history and revolutionary social changes in societies’’ (p.1). In fact, a simplistic overdose of ‘‘social conditioning’’ of sociology embedded in a facile understanding of ‘‘sociology of knowledge’’ makes the editorial introduction a dull read. There is the usual attempt to place the emergence of sociology through the checkered career of the Indian national movement: sociology emerged to enable the discerning Indian intelligentsia to contest the colonial constructions of Indian society and culture. Moreover, the pioneers in the discipline challenged the universal validity of the western philosophical premises and theoretical formulations. Thanks to their concerted labor, sociology witnessed marked change from textual to empirical observational researches, thereby completing the transition from ‘‘pre-sociological’’ to ‘‘sociological’’. Interestingly, according to Yogendra Singh, there was no pre-anthropological moment, as census, Anthropological Survey of India and other agencies of the colonial state had already laid down an ethnographic-empirical tradition of research (p. 2). To be sure, there is an acknowledgement of the state as the prime agency in determining the trends in researches in the twin disciplines. The editor underlines the broad consensus existing in the first few decades following Independence between the state and the social scientists on paradigms of development, and its normative and ideological premises which guided research orientations. The consensus was M. Thakur (&) Public Policy and Management Group, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, India e-mail: mt@iimcal.ac.in