Indian Sociology Research Articles

Sociology of Disability in India: A Victim of Disciplinary Apathy

The recognition of disability as a human rights and developmental issue encouraged social scientists to study the phenomenon of disability more scientifically and objectively. Concerns raised by both disabled and non-disabled academicians and disability rights activists in the First World lead to a greater response from academia. The issue of disability thus, over the years, became a critical part of the agenda for public policy and social science studies. A section of western sociologists understood that, by and large, the onus of disability did not lie with affected individuals but rather on society which was responsible for their activity and for imposing restrictions. Unlike western academia, however, the issue of disability has not found space in India. Its absence from the subject matter of Indian sociology has created a gap in the discipline’s understanding, creating the risk to exercise sympathy and charity rather than a sociological sensibility which sees disability as a human rights issue to be dealt with at the level of rehabilitation and social work. The present article seeks to locate disability as an indispensible part of the curricular of the Indian sociology discipline; rejecting the ‘charity’ outlook favoured by sections of academia, policy makers, bureaucracy, activists and the general populace towards disabled people.

Introduction. Towards a Sociology of India’s Economic Elite: Beyond the Neo-Orientalist and Managerialist Perspectives

Is there such a thing as an “Indian way of doing business”? Many publications, whether academic or not, indeed assert the singularity of Indians’ approach to business, often mobilizing an orientalist gaze and reifying the peculiar conception of business that supposedly prevails in the subcontinent. This special issue of SAMAJ proposes to move away from a focus on “doing business” in order to rather dedicate more attention to the role of economic elites in the production and reproduction of in...

Changing Sociology of Medicine in India

Like economy, religion and politics the health and illness is a part and parcel of the any society. In sociology, the relationship among magic, religion and medicines have been discussed deeply. The Indian sociologists have done in-depth study of the social character of health and sickness. Truly speaking the field of medicine comprise a number of individuals interacting with each other influenced by the local health culture and the society. In this way the concept of health, illness and medicine will be largely influenced by the particular type of culture mainly. Hence health and illness should be studied in a holistic way from the lens of the socio-cultural factors. Each and every individual will develop the health seeking behavior or health care seeking behavior over the period of time. Sometime the health seeking behavior may be similar or different. In this background the Indian sociologists have tried to study the social dimension of health and illness and response of the society.

The World Bank, the Tata Conglomerate and Tea Workers in India

8 | International Union Rights | 24/1 FOCUS | WORLD BANK AND IMF The World Bank, the Tata Conglomerate and Tea Workers in India In September 2016, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) for the World Bank's private investment arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), issued a striking report on the Bank's investment in Indian tea plantations partowned by the massive Tata conglomerate and employing more than 30,000 workers. For a decade, the Bank had been involved with Tata in a project to spin the plantations off into a separate company. Smitten by Tata's reputation for social responsibility and plans for worker ownership, the Bank had ignored concerns about labour and living conditions. When problems arose, management denied them and the Bank provided cover. The CAO report lifted any remaining basis for that cover. As Wilfred Topno – one of those activists who initiated the CAO process – said of the report, it has validated concerns that workers have been raising for years. In carefully framed but unrelentingly critical language, the report vindicated complaints about poverty wages, dreadful living conditions, and harms from pesticide use. It savaged the Bank for relying on domestic regulation and third party certification. Even more significantly, the report exposed some of the thorniest and most vehemently denied violations of labour rights, union-management complicity and exploitation through a share-plan that was fundamental to the Bank's engagement in the first place. From Colonialism to CSR The tea sector in India began in the late nineteenth century as a public-private colonial project designed to break the dependence on China and provide for growing demand in Europe. Private companies were granted public land to create plantations, the most successful of which were established in Darjeeling and Assam. It is nearly a sin qua non of colonial mass labour projects that local populations, with established economic networks, are not easily drawn into wage labour. As a result, labour had to be recruited, transported, and, then, policed. In Assam, this involved massive displacement of primarily tribal populations, or Adivasis, from the areas that today form Jharkand and Odisha. Uprooted from their land, these populations became entirely dependent on the plantations for their survival, including healthcare, housing, and eventually education. Mobility was limited because of the isolation of the plantations and workers' dependence on 'benefits'. Cash wages were kept extraordinarily low, calculated on the basis of two working adults in each household and in-kind payments of food, housing and health care. It was nearly impossible for workers to build up savings and they had no right to acquire land or housing of their own on the plantation. There were criminal penalties for 'absconding' and collusion among planters insured that there was no variation on wages or conditions among the different plantations. While the criminal penalties are gone, much of the rest remains in place, including the fixed sectoral wage, the dependence on benefits and the extraordinary isolation. After independence, India adopted the Plantation Labour Act (PLA), a progressive law requiring plantations to provide adequate housing, sanitation, health care and education. But active enforcement of the PLA has been sorely lacking. According to Virginius Xaxa, a prominent Indian Sociologist and one of leading scholars in the field, there has been no serious effort to comply with the PLA by either companies or the state since the 1960s. These limitations might be less significant if there were active labour unions on the plantations. But government and planters have successfully colluded to allow the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS, Assam Tea Workers Union) to maintain a near monopoly since before independence. For workers, it has rarely served as anything other than an arm of management. For most of the last century, these terrible conditions, the corrupt monopoly union in Assam and the failure of the government to enforce the PLA were well documented. But in Assam in particular, companies had little incentive either to improve conditions or deny them. The terms of the debate began to shift in the late 1990s, when Russia stopped buying large bulk quantities of Indian tea after the fall of the Soviet Union, leading to a massive drop in producer prices. More than a hundred plantations...

Feminist challenges to sociology in India

This article suggests that paradigmatic changes took place in sociological traditions in India from the late 1970s to the 1990s in a manner similar to the catalytic changes occurring in the same period in different sociological traditions across the globe. In the case of sociology in India, it was feminist questionings of the systems of family, caste, religion and other tradition–modern dualities that introduced key re-conceptualisations. The article suggests that feminist studies posed theoretical and methodological challenges at four levels: first, these theories have argued that institutional and non-institutional forms of power flow through all forms of economic, social and cultural relationships; second, given that in India these inequities were organised during the colonial period, they assert that a historical and an interdisciplinary approach is imperative for the study of the ‘social’; third, these positions outlined a theory of intersection that explored the way economic and cultural inequalities and exclusions were organically connected; and lastly, they suggest a need to complicate the concepts of agency and experience, given that actors/agents can, and do, represent both dominant and subaltern positions in their life cycles. The article contends that the feminist interrogations unsettled the received sociological paradigm on sociology of India in significant ways, creating new possibilities for more eclectic and parallel paradigms to emerge.

Manish Thakur, The Quest for Indian Sociology: Radhakamal Mukerjee and Our Times

Manish Thakur, <i>The Quest for Indian Sociology: Radhakamal Mukerjee and Our Times</i>

Book Review: D.N. Dhanagare, The Writings of D.N. Dhanagare, The Missing Tradition: Debates and Discourses in Indian Sociology (with a Foreword by Partha Nath Mukherjee)

Book Review: D.N. Dhanagare, <i>The Writings of D.N. Dhanagare, The Missing Tradition: Debates and Discourses in Indian Sociology (with a Foreword by Partha Nath Mukherjee)</i>

The Politics of Indigenous Social Science: Invoking a Lucknow Sociologist

A deep sense of ambivalence towards the Western social scientific categories has been a characteristic feature of the growth and development of social sciences in postcolonial societies. Indian sociologists, in particular, have frequently turned their critical gaze on the ethnocentrism of the Western social sciences. In fact, there have been extreme responses on the issue—from the impossibility of an Indian sociology to the calls for an Indian ethno-sociology. At the core of such responses is the contestation over one's approach and orientation to Western modernity. Against this backdrop, the present paper selectively invokes Radhakamal Mukerjee's axial concerns and analytical thematics with a view to demonstrate the general contour of a long-raging debate on the indigeneity question in Indian sociology.

Review Articles: Trends in Indian Sociology of the Post-1991 Era

Review Articles: Trends in Indian Sociology of the Post-1991 Era

Roland Lardinois, Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India from France, 19th-20th Centuries

Roland Lardinois, Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India from France, 19th-20th Centuries

Sociological traditions

Students of sociology are likely to come across synoptic accounts of the ‘Lucknow School’ in courses relating to the growth and development of sociology in India. Most, if not all, may find names such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar, the ‘three Ms’ as T.N. Madan (2013: 3) calls them in his recently edited volume entitled Sociology at the University of Lucknow: The First Half Century (1921–1975),1 somehow familiar. This familiarity, though, does not presuppose any serious understanding on their part of the substantive works of the Lucknow sociologists. Preliminary ideas about Radhakamal Mukerjee’s work in the field of social ecology, or D.P. Mukerji’s stress on the study of tradition, or D.N. Majumdar’s ethnographic work among tribes, or A.K. Saran’s repartee to Louis Dumont, is all that one can generally expect. Given the general amnesia surrounding the works of the pioneers at Lucknow, Madan’s volume is a noteworthy contribution to the recent attempts at retrieving

Indian Society and Sociology: Challenges and Responses

Indian Society and Sociology: Challenges and Responses

Book Review: Ashidhara Das. 2012. Desi Dreams: Indian Immigrant Women Build Lives Across Two Worlds

304 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 2 (2014): 279–305 Ashidhara Das. 2012. Desi Dreams: Indian Immigrant Women Build Lives Across Two Worlds. New Delhi: Primus Books. xviii + 162 pp. Tables, bibliography, index. `795 (hardback). DOI: 10.1177/0069966714525296 The title indicates that the book will be about immigrant women from India and their dreams, and the reader does find some material in that regard. The book is gracefully written and is generally informative but scholars will be disappointed since the book is a hotchpotch of theory, statistical data and interview material. Information about the key informants is limited and the material presented from them is still more limited. The book poses some interesting questions and makes provocative generalisations as the author presents her own views as well as those of her subjects. Das opens by presenting her hypotheses about the various identities and selves of professional Indian women. She argues for a three-stage model of identity formation: a first stage—two years of shock of acculturation upon arrival; a second stage of growing familiarity with the American way of life; and a third stage, for those residing at least a decade in the US, a phase of achievement of the American dream but also a reassertion of Indian ethnic identity. These, apparently, are her actual findings and they are repeated several times throughout the book and in the conclusion. The reasoning given for the third outcome, although never systematically evidenced by statements from her interviewees, seems to be twofold. Her informants believe that although they have become Americans, they are still pigeonholed by others as Indian; in other words, a full assimilation is not possible. Further, they resist categorisation as a racial minority group in the US and prefer to identify as diasporic or transnational Indians. It is often hard to distinguish the author’s views from those of her informants because, as she says in the preface, she and they are so similar. This appears to be a revised PhD dissertation and Das moves on in her first chapter to discuss the relevant theoretical literature on migration and diaspora, and summarise census data on Asian Indian immigrants in the US. She ends the first chapter with brief remarks about her fieldwork and methodology. She conducted 60 detailed interviews. She writes that 40 were with professional Indian immigrant working women in the San Francisco Bay Area, 10 with non-working Indian immigrant women in the same area and 10 with professional working women resident in India (defined as ‘the sending community’). The next sentence states, however,

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

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

Company and contract labour in a central Indian steel plant

This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the way in which the working world of contract labourers in a public-sector Indian steel plant is differentiated from that of its regular workforce. The two kinds of workers regard themselves as distinct kinds of people and are now best seen as distinct social classes. While the sociology of India has broadly accepted the manual/non-manual labour distinction as the crucial marker of the boundary between the working and the middle classes, what is suggested here is that that between naukri (secure employment) and kam (insecure wage labour) – which cuts right across that distinction and is broadly congruent with that between formal- and informal-sector employment – is a more important marker of difference. At work, the two kinds of workforce are sharply distinguished by the material rewards of their jobs and by their security and conditions of employment; outside it by differences in life-style and attitudes – a gap that has grown with the liberalization of the Indian economy. The composition of the work groups to which the two kinds of labour characteristically belong are sharply differentiated by gender, by regional ethnicity and by urban or rural residence. Interactions within the work group are again very different, while interactions between regular and contract workers are largely confined to the work itself. Outside it they are kept to a minimum, testifying to a shared sense that socially the two kinds of workforce are profoundly different.

Book Review: Sujata Patel, ed., Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations, and Practices

Book Review: Sujata Patel, ed., Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations, and Practices

POLITY, RELIGION AND SECULARISM IN INDIA: A STUDY OF INTERRELATIONSHIPS

POLITY, RELIGION AND SECULARISM IN INDIA: A STUDY OF INTERRELATIONSHIPS

The ‘Bombay School’ and Urban Sociology in India

The ‘Bombay School’ and Urban Sociology in India

Book review: Sujata Patel (ed.), Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations, and Practices

Book review: Sujata Patel (ed.), <i>Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations, and Practices</i>

Beyond Structural-Functional Perspective: A Critical Heart Searching For Dalit, Tribal and Gender in Indian Sociology

Functionalism is the most outstanding Intellectual acumen of European world, but among the absolute elitist approaches ever explored by early pathfinders of sociology in comprehending the social reality worldwide. No doubt, it has been excelled as an exceptional academic perspective among all social science perspectives worldwide; however, its face value is getting redundant in the country like India, where the dominant social structures push the subalterns down and pulls them out of their established social patterns. It runs away from the realities and gets enticed with Indian dominant ideology and western methodology. The tragedy is that it does not endorse the salient reflections of cultural diversities and pluralism nurtured by the subaltern castes, tribes and gender in the Indian society. Our study reveals that going beyond the prospect of the structural-functional perspective on Indian society will definitely be an uphill task. And instead of, going right through the accounts of the early travelers’ visits, orientalist’ studies, missionary views, British officials’ ethnographic studies, indological perspective, Marxist perspective, etc on Indian society has been a critical heart searching for the subaltern people and their ethnic autonomy in Indian sociology. Addition to that, the Indological hegemony, and its related functional ideology still persist like “cultural watchdog” against any possibility of the subaltern perspective in contemporary India. Unfortunately, the authentic essence and liberating presence of the subaltern groups in Indian sociology is largely missing. Contrary to it, although, the subaltern consciousness as a liberating intellectual project has been gaining momentum but grappling with stiff oppositions. Since the dominant discourse on mainstream sociology has grudge against such development, it requires more scrutiny and debate for the sociology in India. Thus, an analytical reviews but critical history of Indian sociology has been sufficed to our purpose under the study. We have developed a resourceful analytical framework with Figure format in a comparative knowledge base for the study of Indian society in detail.