Understanding Society Chapter 5 Indian Sociologists

1. What is meant by tradition ? D. P. Mukerji points out that tradition comes from the root traderes, which means to transmit. The Sanskrit equivalent of tradition is either parampara that is succession or aitihya which has the same root as itihasa, or history.

2. Traditions are supposed to have a source. It may be scriptures, or statements of sages (apta vakya), or mythical heroes with or without names. Whatever may be the source, the historicaly of traditions is recognized by most people. They are quoted, recalled, esteemed. Indeed, their age-long succession ensures social cohesion and social solidarity.

Exmple : After coming Turks to India the Hindu culture and Islamic culture started the process of acculturation.

1. Inter caste marriage was prohibited. Hence people marry within their own caste grouping. They practise endogamy.

2. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye mentions also the role of hypergamy in promoting limited mobility within the caste system.

3. In Gujarat and Rajasthan there are instance where rulers or Rajas have married tribal women. It has, thus, contributed to the unity of the Indian society through the institution of caste.

4. Caste is linked with kinship through caste-endogamy and also gotra – exogamy. Gotra has been treated as a thoroughly exgomous unit by the Brahmians and later by the non-Brahmins. The basic notion here is that all the members of a gotra are related to one another, through blood, i.e. they have a rishi or a sage as their common ancestor. Therefore, the marriage between two persons will lead to incestuous relationship. It will lead the lineages of the gotra to near-extinction. It is totally unscientific.

5. The fact that gotra survives even today-with very few exceptions - shown the role and tyrannical power of certain ideas and beliefs in human behaviour and social process.

1. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye made original contribution to the study of Indian religious beliefs and practices. He wrote six books : (i) Indian Sadhus (1953), (ii) Gods and Men (1962), (iii) Religious consciousness (1965), (iv) Indian Acculturation (v) Vedic India (1979) and (vi) The Legacy of Ramayana (1979), to certify the role of religion in the society.

2. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye delineates five foundations of culture : They are (i) Religious consciousness, (ii) Conscience, (iii) Justice, (iv) Free pursuit of knowledge, and (v) Toleration. Religious consciousness as a value manifested itself at the dawn of history.

1. D.P. Mukerji was against the positivism of western social sciences. For it reduced individual into biological or psychological units. The industrial culture of the west had turned individuals into self-seeking agentss. The society in the West had become ethnocentric.

2. By emphasizing individualisation, i.e. recognition of the roles and rights of the individual, positivism had uprooted man from his social moorings.

3. D.P. Mukerji observes, “our conception of man is pursusha and not the individual or vyakti.” The word vyakti rarely occurs in our religious texts or in the sayings of the saints.

4. Purusha or person develops through his co-operation with the others around him through his sharing of values and interest of life with the the members of his group.

II. Definition : According to D.P. Mukerji, this is a tradition which mainains links with the past by retaining something from it, and at the same time incorporates new things. A living tradition thus includes some old elements but also some new ones.

III. Causes responsible to insist by D.P. Mukerji that Indian sociologist be rooted in living tradition :

(i) D. P. Mukerji insisted that Indian sociologists should be rooted in living tradition to get a better and more concrete sense of what this means. If they would try to find out from different generation of people in their neighbourhoods or family about what is changed and what is unchanged about specific practices. For example, the Indian sociologists can know better the following subjects:

Games played by children of your age group (boys/girls)

Ways in which a popular festival is celebrated Typical dress/clothing worn by women and men.

....Plus other such subjects of your choice.

(ii) To fulfil to own their duty : Given the centrality of society in India. It became the first duty of an Indian sociologist to study and to know the social traditions of India. For D.P. this’ study of tradition was not oriented only towards the past, but also included sensitivity to change. Thus, traditions was a living tradition, maintaining its links with the past, but also adapting to the present and thus evolving over time.

(iii) To know and share the folk-culture and tradition etc ; D. P. Murkerji has written that it is not enough for the Indian sociologist. He must be an Indian first, that is he is to share in the folk-ways to mores, customs and traditions, for the purpose of understanding his social system and what lies beneath it and beyond it.” In keeping with this view, he believed that sociologists should learn and be familiar with both ‘high1 and ‘low’ languages and cultures - not only Sanskrit. Persian or Arabic, but also local dialects.

(iv) To understand true nature of Indian culture which in having cultural group patterns and hardly deviates from it : D.P. argued that Indian culture and society are not individualistic in the western sense. The average Indian indidual’s pattern of desires is more or less rigidly fixed by his socio-cultural group pattern and he hardly socia deviates from it. Thus, the Indian social system is basically oriented towards group, sect or caste-action, not ‘Voluntaristic’ individual action. Although ‘voluntarism’ was beginning to influence the urban middle classes, its appearance ought to be itself an interesting subject to study for the Indian sociologist.

2. Detail study of rural India will provide first hand knowledge of village society. If scholar and researchers go for experience of field work in village and rural area of India. Their experiences of field work would provide detail and upto some extent for complete information and knowledge about rural sociology.

3. Village studies use important if we want to challenge the incomplete and wrong factual and informative knowledge of factual and informative knowledge of western sociologist who had done their research work keeping in view the imperial interest, ideologies and policies of the British government as well as colonial outlook and wrong policies of the western parts.

4. Role played by M.N. Srinivas promoting village studies : (i) M.N. Srinivas produce a significance body of work on certain themes related with Indian society and certain issues related with rural life of India.

(ii) M.N. Srinivas had strong connections in British social anthropology as well as American anthropology. Like G.S. Shurye and the Lucknow scholars. Srinivas succeeded in training a new generation of sociologist who were to become leaders of the discipline in the following decades.

(iii) The Indian village and village society remained a life-long focus of interest for Srinivas. Although he had made short visit to villages to conduct surveys and interviews, it was not until he did field work for a year at a village near Mysore that he really acquired first hand knowledge of village society. The experience of field work proved to be decisive for his career and his intellectual path.

(iv) Help and encouragement of other sociologist : Srinivas helped encourage and coordinate a major collective effort at producing detailed ethnographic accounts of village society during the 1950s and 1960s. Along with other scholars like S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar, Srinivas was instrumental in making village studies the dominant field in Indian sociology during this time.

(i) M.N. Srinivas favoured to take the Indian village on a subject of sociological research because village society remained a life long focus of interest for Srinivas. He wrote on the Indian village in detail. His writings were of two broad types. There was first of all ethnographic accounts of fieldwork done in villages or discusstions of such accounts. A second kind of writing included historical and conceptual discussions about the Indian village as a unit of social analysis. In the latter kind of writting, Srinivas was involved in a debate about the usefulness of the village as a concept. Arguing against village studies.

(ii) Caste is more important : Some social anthropologists like Louis Dumont thought that social institutions like caste were more important than something like a village, which was after all only a collection of people living in a particular place. Villages may live or die, and people may move from one village to another, but their social institutions, like caste or religion, follow than and go with them whenever they go. For this reason Dumont believed that it would be misleading to give much importace to the village as a category.

(iii) A Relevant Social entity : As against this view, Srinivas believed that the village was a relevant social entity. Historical evidence showed that villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity was quite significant in rural social life.

(iv) Wrong picture presented by the colonial offices : Srinivas also critised the British administrator anthropologists who had put forward a picture of the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient, “Little republics”. Using historical and sociological evidence. Srinivas showed that the village had, in fact, experienced considerable change. Moreover, villages were never self-sufficient, and had been involved in various kinds of economic, social and political relationship at the regional level.

(v) Advantages : The village as a site of research offered many advantages to Indian sociology. It provided an opportunity to illustrate the importance of ethnographic research methods. It offered eye-witness accounts of the repid social change that was taking place in the Indian countryside as the newly independent nation began a programme of planned development.

1. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye went on exploring newer domains of social-cultural life in India and the world. An important field was literature and society.

2. G.S. Ghurye become one of the first Indian sociologists to have utilized literature in sociological studies. Ghurye with his vast knowledge of Sanskrit literature extensively quoted from the Vedas, shastras, epics, and poetry of Kalidasa or Bhavabhutie to shed light on the social and cultural life of Indians.

3. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye made use of the literature in vernacular, e.g. Marathi, and cited from the literature of modern writers like Bankimchandra Chatterjee as well.

4. However, the scholars say that Govind Sadasiv Ghurye’s knowledge was encyclopaedic. His method was eclectic. The research and writings of Ghurye and his disciples opened new vistas of sociological inquiry in India.

5. Through understanding of India's ancient tradition and its linkage with today's India Ghurye’s contribution must be followed carefully.

1. Tribes constitute a significant part of the Indian population. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye noted with anxiety that some anthropologists and British administrators advocateed a policy of isolation for the tribals. They asserted that the seperate identity of the tribal should be maintained at any cost. They mentioned many causes for it.

2. These causes can be discussed as follow:

First, the tribals were different from the non-tribals or Hindus.

Secondly, the tribals were the original inhabitants of the country.

Thirdly, they are unlike the Hindus, animists.

Fourthly, the tribals are different from the Hindus on linguistic grounds also.

Fifthly, tribals contact with the non-tribals had been harmful for the culture and economy of the tribals. The tribals lost their land and other resources to the greedy, cunning and exploitative non-tribals.

3. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye referred to the long process of Hinduization of the tribes of India in different parts of India.

(i) Some tribes had been integrated with the Hindu society.

(ii) Some others remained loosely integrated.

(iii) Many tribal peoples like the tribes living in the recesses of hills and the depths of forests were barely touched the Hinduism. They were the “imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu society.” The tribes, therefore, according to Govind Sadashiv Ghurye were backward Hindus.

4. The tribes embraced the Hindu social order mainly for following two causes :

(a) Economic reason : The first reason was the economic motivation. As the tribals adopted Hindu religion, they could come out of the narrow confines of their tribal crafts of a rudimentary nature. They then adopted specialised types of occupation which were in demand in the society.

(b) Catholicity of Caste System : The second reason lay in the catholicity of caste system to the tribal belief and rituals.

5. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, has confessed that some tribals fell prey to the deceit of the non-tribals or Hindu-money-lenders and land grabbers. But, it was the result mainly of the drawbacks of the British system of revenue and justice.

6. Ghurye further admitted that the policy of the British Government in relation to forests caused hardship for the tribals. But, the poor non-tribals also equally suffered the damages done by these policies. The system of exploitation that operates in society does not make any distinction between the tribal and non-tribal.

1. G.S. Ghurye did not entertain the pessimistic view that urban or metropolitan growth resulted in depersonalisation of men and women. For him the large with its big complexes of higher education, research, judiciary, health services, and print and entertainment media is made of innovations that ultimately serve cultural growth.

2. The function of the city is to perform a culturally integrative role, to act as a point of focus and the centre of radiation of the major tenets of the age.

3. Not any city, but large city or metropolis having an organic link with the life of the people of its region can do this work well.

4. Any urban planner must, according to Ghurye, tackle the problems of (i) Lack of sufficient supply of drinking water, (ii) Human congestion, (iii) Traffic congestion, (iv) Regulation of public vehicles, (v) Insufficiency of railway transport in cities like Mumbai (vi) Erosion of trees, (vii) Sound pollution, (viii) Indiscriminate tree felling, and (ix) Plight of the pedestrians.

5. G.S. Ghurye was a staunch advocate of urbanisation. He, however, remained preoccupied for life with the idea of urbanisation securing the advantages of urban life simultaneously with nature's greenery.

6. Urbanization in India was not a simple function of industrialization. A large city or metropolis also functioned as the centre of culture of the territory encompassing it.

7. Link between urban centres and villages : The organic link between the urban centres and the villages was ignored during the British rule. Towns and cities began functioning as centres for producing industrial goods and for marketing industrial products made in India or in the U.K. to the rural masses.

3. His work was much appreciated by British anthropologists and administrators of the time, and later he was also invited to help with a similar ethnographic survey of Mysore state.

4. L.K. Ananthakrishna Iryer was probably the first self-taught anthropologist to receive national and international recognition as scholar and an academician.

5. Ananthakrishan Iyer was invited to lecture at the University of Madaras, and was appointed as reader of the University of Calcutta, where he helped set up the first post-graduate anthropology department in India.

6. Anathakrishna remained at Universtiy of Calcutta from 1917 to 1932.

7. Though he had no formal qualifications in anthropology, he was elected president of the Ethnology section of the Indian Science Congress. He was awarded a honorary doctorate by a German university during his lecture tour of European universities. He was also conferred the titles of Rai Bahadur and Dewan Bahadur by Cochin state.

II. Practice of social anthropology by Sarat Chandra Roy : 1. The lawyer Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942) was another ‘accidental anthropologist’ and pioneer of the discipline in India.

(ii) Before taking his law degree in Calcutta's Ripon College, Roy had done graduate and post graduate degrees in English. Soon after he had begun practising law, he decided to go to Ranchi (now a capital town of Jharkhanda) in 1898 to take up a job as a English teacher at a Christian Missionery school. This decision was to change his life, for he remained in Ranchi for the next forty-four years and became the leading authority on the culture and society of the tribal people of the Chhotanagpur region (present day Jharkhand).

(iii) Sarat Chandra Roy became deeply interested in tribal society as a byproduct of his professional need to interpret tribal customs and laws to the court. He travelled extensively among tribal communities and did intensive fieldwork among them. All of this was done on an ‘amateur’ basis, but Roy's diligence and keen eye for detail resulted in valuable monographs and research articles.

(iv) Literary work : During his entire career, Roy published more than one hundred articles in leading Indian and British academic journals in addition to his famous monographs on the Oraon, the Mundas and the Kharias. Roy soon became very well-known amongst anthropologist in India and Britain and was recognised as an authority on Chhotanagpur. He founded the journal man in India in 1922, the earliest journal of its kind in India that is still published.

(v) Conclusion : (a) Both Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy were true pioneers. In the early 1900s, they began practising a discipline that did not yet exist in India, and which had no institutions to promote it. Both Iyer and Roy were born, lived and died in India that was ruled by the British.

(b) The four Indian sociologists you are going to be introduced in this chapter were born one generation later than colonial era, but their careers continued into the era of independence, and they helped to shape the first formal institutions that established Indian sociology.

(c) G.S. Ghurye and D.P. Mukerji were born in the 1890s while A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas were about fifteen years younger, having been born in the second decade of the 20th century. Although they were all deeply influenced by western traditions of sociology, they were also able to offer some initial answers to the question that the pioneers could only begin to ask: what shape should a specially Indian sociology take ?

2. Roy travelled extensively among tribal communities of Jharkhand and did intensively field work among them. All of this was done on an amateur basis, but Roy's diligence and keen eye for detail resulted in valuable monographs and research articles.

3. G.S. Ghurye was second best known sociologist for his writtings about tribal people of India. He became very popular specially for his debate with Varrier Elwin which first made him-known outside sociology and the academic world.

4. In the 1930s and 1940s there was much debates on the place of tribal societies within India and how the state should respond to them. Many British administrator-anthropologists were specially interested in the tribes of India and believed them to be primitive peoples with a distinctive culture far from mainstream Hinduism. They also believed that the innocent and simple tribal would suffer exploitation and cultural degradation through contact with ‘Hindu culture and society. For this reason, they felt that the state had a duty to protect the tribes and to help them sustain their way of life and culture. Which were facing constant pressure to assimilate with mainstream Hindu culture.

(v) The debate about the tribal people of India during fourth and fifth decades of the first half part of twentienth century. Put a great challenge before the nationalist Indian. They were equally passionate about their belief in the unity of India and the need for modernising Indian society and culture. They believed that attempts to presserve tribal cultures were misguided and resulted in maintainning tribals in backward and in need of reform, they felt that tribes, too, needed to develop.

(vi) G.S. Ghurye became the best known exponent of the nationalist view : Due to arguments and debates among the different groups of scholars, sociologist and colonial supporters of western ideology gave and opportunity to Ghurye to become the best known exponent of the nationalist view. He insisted on characterising the tribes of India as ‘backward Hindus' rather than distinct cultural groups. He cited detailed evidence from a wide variety of tribal culture to show that they had been involved in constant interactions with Hinduism over a long period. They were thus simply further behind in the same process of assimilation that all Indian communities had gone through. This particular agrument namely, that Indian tribal were hardly ever isolated primitive communities of the type that was written about in the classical anthropological texts-was not really disputed.

(vii) Main point of difference which came out from the debate related to tribal communities : The differences were in how the impact of mainstream culture was evaluated. The ‘protectionsist’ believed that assimilation would result in the severe exploitation and cultural extinction of the tribals. Ghurye and the nationalists. On the other hand, argued that these ill-effects were not specific to tribal cultures, but were common to all the backward and downtrodden sections of Indian society. These were the inevitable difficulties on the road to development.

(viii) Conclusion : Today we still seem to be involved in similar debates. Discuss the different sides to the question from a contemporary perspective. For example, many tribal movements assert their distinctive cultural and political identity - in fact, the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were formed in response to such movements.

1. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye’s work, caste and race in India (1932) skilfully combined historical, anthropological and sociological approaches. He was concerned with the historical origin of caste and as its geographical spread. He also tried to examine its contemporary features including changes in it because of the impact of British rule. In the later editions of the book he also explained how it underwent changes in free India.

2. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye recorded insightfully the persisting, changing, and the emerging features of complicated caste system of India.

3. As a rationalist, Govind Sadashiv Ghurye was firmly opposed to the caste system. He was hopeful that it would weaken in the urban environment and among groups receiving modern education.

4. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye also noted pai*** growth of “Caste patriotism” or caste consciousness and the transformation of caste into a community or ethnic group. In later editions of his book, Ghurye fully developed such themes as the role of the caste in politics.

5. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye studied caste system from a historical comparative an integrative perspective. Later on, he made a comparative study of Kinship in Indo-European cultures. Through the comparative study of Caste and Kinship, Ghurye stressed two significant points :

(i) The kin and caste network of India had parallels in some other societies also.

(ii) The kinship and caste in India served in the past as integrative frameworks. The evolution of Indian society was based on the integration of diverse racial and ethnic groups through these networks.

6. It is to be noted that Govind Sadashiv Ghurye demonstrated, through textual evidence, the dynamism of the caste system. The caste system had not remained static. Ghurye showed that in the early centuries of the Christian era, the Vaishyas were reduced to the position of the Sudras and the Sudras were elevated to the Vaishyas.

7. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye examined the caste system from both cultural and structural points of view. The Hindu society was governed by the ideal pattern of caste.

(a) Herbert Risley, a British colonial official who was deeply interested in anthropological matters, was the main proponent of the dominant view. This view held that human beings can be divided into distinct and separate races on the basis of their physical characteristics such as the circumference of the skull, the length of the nose, or the part of the skull where the brain is located.

(b) Risley and other believed that India was a unique ‘laboratory’ for studying the evolution of racial types because caste strictly prohibits intermarriage among different groups, and had done so for centuries. Risley’s main argument was that caste must have originated in race because different caste groups seemed to belong to distinct racial types.

(c) In general, the higher castes approximated Indo-Aryan racial traits while the lower castes seemed to belong to non-Aryan aboriginal, Mongoloid or other racial groups. On the basis of differences between groups in terms of average measurments for length of nose, size of cranium, etc.

(d) Risley and others suggested that the lower castes were the original aboriginal inhabitants of India. They had been subjugated by an Aryan people who had come from elsewhere and settled in India.

II. The position of G.S. Churye on the relationship between race caste in India :

(a) G.S. Ghurye’s academic reputation was built on the basis of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, which was later published as Caste and Race in India (1932). Ghurye’s work attracted attention because it addressed the major concerns of Indian anthropology at the time. In this book, Ghurye provides a detailed critique of the then dominant the theories about the relationship between race and caste.

(b) Ghurye did not disagree with the basic argument put forward by Rishley but believed it to be only partially correct. He pointed out the problem with using averages alone without considering the variations in the distribution of a particular measurement for a given community.

(c) Ghurye believed that Risley’s thesis of upper castes being Aryan and the lower castes being non-Aryan was broadly true only for nothern India. In other parts of India,the inter-group differences in the anthropometric measurements were not very large or systematic.

(d) This suggested that, in most of India axcept the Indo-Gangetic plain, different racial groups had been mixing with each other for a very long time. Thus, ‘racial purity’ had been preserved due to the prohibition on intermarriage only in ‘Hindustan proper’ (North India). In the rest of the country, the practice of endogamy (marrying only within a particular caste group) may have been introduced into groups that were already racially varied.

III. Conclusion : 1. Today, the racial theory of caste is no longer believed, but in the first half of the 20th century it was still considered to be true. There are conflicting opinions among historians about the Aryans and their arrival in the subcontinent.

(ii) However, at the time that Ghurye was writing these were among the concerns of the discipline, which is why his writings attracted attention.

I. Introduction : G.S. Churye is popular for offering a comprehensive (or detailed) definition of caste. His definition stress six characteristics of caste. We can write in short these all features in the following way:

II. Man features of Caste :

(a) Caste is based on segmental division : Caste is an institution based on segmental division. This means that caste society is divided into a number of closed, mutually exclusive segments or compartments. Each caste is one such compartment. It is closed becasue caste is decided by birth–the children born to parents of a particular caste will always belong to that caste.

(b) Its acquiring base is birth : On the other hand, there is no way other than birth of acquining caste membership. In short, a person's caste is decided by birth at birth: it can neither be avoided nor changed.

(c) Caste is bassed on hierachical division : Caste society is based on hierarchical division. Each caste is strictly unequal to every other caste, that is, every caste is either higher or lower than every other one. In theory (though not in practice), no two castes are ever equal.

(d) It imposes restriction an social interation : The institution of caste necessarily involves restrictions on social interaction, specially the sharing of food. There are elaborate rules prescribing what kind of food may be shared between which groups. These rules are governed by ideas of purity and pollution.

(e) Institute of untouchability : Due to caste system of very objectionable institution in India develop. It come up in the form of restriction of social interaction. It is known as the institution of untouchability, where even the touch of people of particular castes is thought to be polluting.

(f) Different Rights and Duties for different caste : Following from the principles of hierarchy and restricted social interaction, caste also involves differential rights and duties for different castes. These rights and duties pertain not only to religious practices but extend to the secular world.

(g) No choice of occupation : Case restricts the choice of occupation, which, like caste itself, is decided by birth and is hereditary. At the level of society, caste functions as a rigid form of the division of labour with specific occupations being allocated to specific castes.

(h) It Imposes strict restrictions on marriage : Caste involves strict restrictions on marriage. Caste ‘endogamy’, or marriage only within the caste, is often accompanied by rules about ‘exogamy’, or whom one may not marry. This combination of rules about eligible and non-eligible groups help reproduce the caste system.

III. Conclusion or benefits of definition given by Ghurye : (i) Ghurye’s definition helped to make the study of caste more systematic.

(ii) His conceptual definition was based on what the classical texts prescribed.

(iii) In actual practice, many of these features of caste were changing, though all of them continue to exist in some form.

(iv) Ethnographic field work over the next several decades helped to provide valuable accounts of what was happening to caste in independent India.

(i) D.P. Mukerji felt that the crucial distingushed feature India was its social system. The decisive aspect of the Indian context was the social aspect, hisory, politics and economics. According to him in India these three aspects were less developed in dimension comparing with the west. But the social dimession comparisonth the west. But the social of India are over developed.

(ii) The second feature of Indian culture and society is that these are not individualistic in the western sense but they are having group pattern. The Indian social system is basically oriented towards group, set or caste - action not voluntaristic individual action.

(iii) Indian culture and society is a living tradition according to him that the root meaning of the word tradition is to transmit. Its Sanskrit equivalents are either parampara, that is, succession, or aithiya, which come from the same root as itihas or history. Traditions are thus strongly rooted in a past that is kept alive through the repeated recalling and retelling of stories and myths.

(iv) Adaptability : D.P. Mukerji believes that Indian society and culture does not favour only to have like with the past but it favours and beliefs in the process of adaption. Internal and external sources of change are always present in every society. The most commonly cited internal source of change in western societies is the economy, but this source has not been as effective in India.

(v) Dynamic Indian Sociology : Class conflict, D.P. believed, had been “smoothed and covered by caste tradition' in the Indian context, where new class relations had not yet emerged very sharply. Based on this understanding, he concluded that one of the first tasks for a dynamic Indian sociology would be to provide an account of the internal, non-economic causes of change.

(vi) It recognises three things – Shruti, Smriti and Annubhava : D.P. Mukerji believed in Indian tradition, namely, shruti, smriti and annubhava of these the last annubhava or personal experince is the revolutionary principle. However, in the Indian context personal experience soon flowered into collective experience. This meant that the most important principle of change in Indian society was generalised anubhava, or the collective experience of groups.

(vii) The high traditions were centred in smriti and sruti, but they were periodically challenged by the collective experience of groups and sects, as for example in the bhakti movement.D.P. emphasised that this was true not only of Hindu but also of Muslim culture in India. In Indian Islam, the Sufis have stressed love and experience rather than holy texts, and have been important in bringing about chage.

(viii) Experience and love are superior agents of change : According to D.P. Mukerji the Indian context is not one where discursive reason (buddhi-vichar) is the dominant force for change, anubhava and prem(experience and love) have been historically superior as agents of change.

(ix) Conflict and rebellion in the Indian context have tended to work through collective experience. But the resilence of tradition ensures that the pressure of conflict produces change in the tradition without breaking it. So we have repeated cycles of dominant orthodoxy being challenged by popular revolts which succeed in transforming orthodoxy, but are eventually reabsorbed into this transformed tradition. This process of change–of rebellion contained within the limits of an overarching tradition-is typical of a caste socity where the formation of classes and class consciousness has been inhibited.

(x) Tradition should neither be worshipped nor should be ignorde : D.P. Mukerji’s views on tradition and change led him to criticise all instances of unthinking borrowing from western intellectual traditions, including in such contexts as developing planning. Tradition was neither to be worshipped nor ignored, just as modernity was need but not to be blindly adopted. D.P. was simultaneously a prudent but critical inheritor of tradition as well as an admiring critic of the modernity that he acknowledge as having shaped his own intellecltual perspective.

II. Desai criticism of the claims made by welfare state : The modern capitalist state was one of the significant therms that interested A.R. Desai. As always, his approach to this issue was from a Marxist perspective. In any essay called “The myth of the welfare state”,Desai provides a detailed critique of this notion and points to it many shortcomings. After considering the prominent definitions available in the sociological literature, Desai identifies the following unique features of the welfare state :

III. Functions of the state and its areas :

(i) A welfare state is a positive state. This means that unlike the ‘laissez faire’ of classical liberal political theory, the welfare state does not seek to do ‘only the minimum necessary to maintain law and order. The welfare state is an interventionist state and actively uses its considerable powers to design and implement social policies for the betterment of society.

(ii) Democracy as an essential condition : The welfare state is a democratic state. Democracy was considered an essential conditions for the emergence of the welfare state. Formal democratic institutions, specially multiparty elections, were thought to be a defining feature of the welfare state. This is why liberal thinkers excluded socialist and communist states from this definition.

(iii) Followers of mixed economy (private as well as public sectors are allowed to work simultaneously) : A welfare state involves a mixed economy. A ‘mixed economy’ means an economy where both private capitalist enterprises and state or public owned enterprises co-exist. A welfare state does not seek to eliminate the capitalist market, nor does it prevents public investement in indusry and other fields. By and large, the state sector concentrates on basic goods and social infrastructure, while private industry dominates the consumer goods sector.

(iv) Text criteria of performance of the state : Desai then goes on to suggest some test criteria against which the performance of the welfare state can be measured. These are :

(a) Freedom from poverty, discrimination and security for all : Does the welfare state ensure freedom from poverty, social discrimination and security for all its citizens ?

(b) Equality of Income : Does the welfare state remove inequalities of income through measures to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, and by preventing the concentration of wealth ?

(c) Preference to real needs of community : Does the welfare state transform the economy in such a way that the capitalist profit motive is made subservient to the real needs of the community ?

(d) Stable development : Does the welfare state ensure stable development free from the cycle of economic booms and depressions ?

(e) Employment : Does it provide employment for all ?

Conclusion : Based on above arguments A.R. Desai concludes that the nation of the welfare state is the something of a myth. Desai also favours maintenance of political freedom, equality and some other democratic norms and values even under communalism. He strongly argues that political liberties and the race of law must be upheld in the genuinely socialist states.

1. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye made a notable departure from his co-professional in making a study of the ascetics and sadhus of India. His Indian Sadhus (1953 and 1964) is an excellent sociography of the various sects and religious centres established by the great Vedantic philosopher Sankarcharya and other notably religious figures.

2. In this work G.S. Ghurye highlighted the paradoxical nature of renunciation in India.A Sadhu or Sannyasin is supposed to be detached from all castes, norms and social conventions, etc. He is outside the pale of society. Yet, strikingly enought since the time of Sankaraharya the Hindu society has more or less been guided by the Sadhus. These Sadhus are not the lonely hermits. Most of them belong to monastic orders, which have distinctive traditions.

3. The monastic organisation in India was a product of Hinduism and Buddhism. The rise of Buddhism and Jainism (in 6th century B.C. and afterward) marked the decline the individual ascetics like Viswamitra.

4. Indian Sadhus have acted as the arbiters of religious disputes, patronized learning of scriptures and the sacred lose and even defended religion against external attacks.

1. Social reality has many and different aspects. It has its traditions and future.

2. To understand social reality one should have a comprehensive and synoptic view of (i) the nature of interactions of its different aspects and (ii) the interplay of its tradition and the forces leading to a changed future.

3. Narrow specializations to particular disciplines cannot help the understanding of social reality. Sociology can be of great help here.

4. Sociology has a floor and a ceiling like any other discipline. However, the speciality of sociology “consists in its floor being the grounds floor of all kinds of social disciplines and its ceiling remaining open to the sky.”

5. Neglect of social base generally leads to arid abstractions as in recent Economics. On the other hand, much of empirical research in Anthropology and in Psychology has been rendered useless because of its narrow scope.

6. Sociology assists us in having an integral view of life and social reality. It will look into the details but it will also search for the wood behind the trees.

7. Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji learnt from his teachers as well as from his peers the need for a synoptic view of the vast canvas of social life. He, therefore, consistently harped on the synthesis of social sciences. Sociology might help this attempt at synthesizing.

2. The first task of sociologist is to understand the particular nature of all forces that sustain a specific society over the forces that sustain a specific society over the time. For this reason he emphasizes that sociologists of our country must understand the nature f tradition, which has conserved Indian society for centuries.

3. D.P. Mukerji believes that Sociology is never a defence of the statusquo. He stresses that “Sociology should ultimately show the way out of the social system by analysing the process of transformation.

4. Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji’s sociological analysis of the Indian society has the merit of showing that Indian society is changing but without much disintegration. He was, therefore aware that the study of the Indian social system needs a different approach to sociology because of its traditions, its special symbols and its patterns of culture and social actions.

5. The impact of economic and technological changes on Indian traditons, culture and symbol follows thereafter. D.P. Mukerji observes, “in my view, the thing changing is more real and objective that changing is more real and objective than change per se”.

6. According to D.P. Mukerji, the Indian Sociologists will try to synthes the of two approaches.

(a) He will adopt a comparative approach. A truly comparative approach will highlight the characteristics shared by the Indian society with other societies and also the specificity of its traditions.

For this cause, the sociologists will aim at understanding the meaning of tradition. He will carefully examine its symbols and values.

(b) Indian Sociologists will also take a dialectical apprach to understand the conflict and synthesis of the opposing forces of conservation and change.

1. D.P. Mukerji says that tradition performs the act conserving. But it is not essential conservative.

2. D.P. Mukerji asserts that traditions do change. There principles of change are recognized in Indian tradition : (i) Sruti, (ii) Smriti, (iii) Anubhava. It is anubhava or personal experience, which is the revolutionary principle. certain Upanishads are totally based on it.

3. Personal experience of the saint founders of different sects or panths soon blossomed forth into collective experience producing change in the prevailing socio-religious order.

4. The experience of prem or love and sahaj or spontaneity of these saints and their followers was noticeable also in sufis among the Muslims.

5. The traditional system slowly accomodated the dissenting voices. Indian social action has given latitude to align rebel within the limits of the constitution. The resultt has been the caste society blunting the class consciousness of the disadvantaged.

6. The power of the Indian tradition lies in its crystalizaiton of values emerging from past happenings in the life-hapits and emotions of men and women. Thus, our country has deninitely preserved many values (some good and other bad also). The point, however, is 'that of utilizing the forces which are foreign to Indian traditions, e.g.(i) technology, (ii) democracy, (iii) urbanization, (iv) bureaucratic rule, etc.

II. D.P. Mukerji’s views about Modernity :

1. D.P. Mukerji claimed that adjustments will certainly take place. It is almost guaranteed that Indians will not vanish as primitive tribes have done, at the touch western culture. They have suffient flexibilty for that Indian culture had assimilated tribal culture and several of its endogenous dissents. It had developed upto Hindu-Muslim cultures and modern Indian culture is curious blending, varnasankara. Traditionally, therefore, living in adjustment is in India's blood, so to speak.

2. D.P. Mukerji does not worship tradition. His idea of “fullman” or “well-balanced perosnality” calls for a blend of (i) moral fervour and aesthetic and intellectual sensibility with (ii) the sense of history and rationality.

The qualities of the second category are stressed more by modernity, than by the Indian tradition. Hence, the dialectics between tradition and modernity, herein lies the need for understanding the tradition.

3. D.P. Mukerji observes that 'the knowledge of tradition shows the way to break them with the least social cost.'

4. The encounter of Indian tradition with that of the West has unleashed several forces of cultural contradiction. Also, it has given rise to a new middle class. The rise of these forces generates according to D.P. Mukerji, a dialectical process of conflict and synthesis, which must be given a push by the conserved energies of the class structure of Indian society.

1. The urban industrial order introduced by the British in India set aside the older institutional networks. It also dissolved several traditional castes and classes. It called for a new kind of social adaptation and adjustment. In the new set-up the educated middle classes of the *** of India became the focal point of the society.

2. The new middle class of India come to command the knowledge of the modern social forces, i.e., science and technology, democracy and of a new sense of historical development, which the west stood for.

3. The new society of India calls for utilisation of impressive qualities and the useful (new) service of the new middle class people.

4. The problem is that these new middle classes have been soaked with the western ideas and life-styles. And they have remained blissfully, and usually contemptuously, significant of Indian culture and Indian reality.

5. The people of the new middle class are oblivious to the Indian traditions. But, traditions have 'great powers of resistance and obsorption.' Even on the surface of human geography and demographic pattern, traditions have a role to play in the transfiguration of physical adjustment and biological urges.'

6. In India for instance, things like city planning and family planning are to tie up with traditions that the architect and the social reformer can ignore them only at the pawl of other schemes. India's middle classes in this way, would not be in a position to lead the masses to build India along modern lines. They were uprooted from their indigenous tradition. They have lost contact with the masses.

7. India can move on the road of modernity adapting it to her traditions if the middle classes re-establish their link with the masses.

8. The people of new middle classes should not be either apologetic for or unnecessarily boastful of their tradition. They should try to harness its vitality for accommodating changes needed by modernity. A balance between individualisation and association will be achieved thereby. India and the world will be enriched with the new experience.

(i) Segmental Division : Govind Sadashiv Ghurye sees castes as social groupings or segments the membership of which is obtained and fixed by birth. The segmental division of society refers to its division or compartmentalisation into a number of segments or castes, each of which has life of its own.

Each caste provides a centre of its own regarding rules, regulations, standards of morality and justice.

(ii) Hierarchy : The castes or segments are arranged in terms of a hierarchy. Hierarchy is a scheme, which arranges caste in terms of higher or superior and lower or inferior status in relations to each other.

The relative ranking of specific caste groups differed from one place to another. But everywhere, the Brahmans were placed at the top and the untouchables were kept at the bottom of the hierarchy.

(iii) Principles of Purity and Pollution : The above described two features (attributes) reflect the separation or distance between castes. This fact of separation is reinforced by the principles of purity and pollution find their expression in the codes regulating the acceptance of food or drink from other castes. In practice, most castes seem to take no objection to 'Kachcha food' or food cooked with water from a Brahmans. Higher castes take only 'Pucca food' or food cooked in butter (ghee) from lower castes. But nobody will take food or water from an untouchable, whose even touch is polluting.

(iv) Civil and Religious Disabilities and Privileges of Different Sections : (a) A result of the hierarchical division of society is that rights and obligations are unequally shared by different sections of the society.

(b) The ritual status of a caste vis-a-vis the Brahmans and the nature of occupation are the crucial determinants of the nature of these disabilies. The speech, dress and customs of the high castes could not be copied by the lower castes as by doing so they would go against the governing rule of the society.

(v) Lack of Choice of Occupation : (a) Every group or caste was associated with a hereditary occupation. Since distinction was made between clean and unclear and therefore, between pure and impure occupations, the hereditary occupation a caste reflected its status in society.

Example : (a) For instance, the Brahmans were engaged in priesthood, while the lower castes took up occupations such as those of barber, washerman and cobbler.

(b) The untouchable castes would be doing the most unclean jobs. There have, of course, been examples of change over by one caste or from one occupation to another.

(c) Occupational variation has led to the birth of many subcastes, But the profession of priesthood and literary activities had remained the sole preserve of the Brahmans.

(vi) Restrictions on Marriage :

(a) Inter-caste marriage was prohibited. Hence individual married within their own caste grouping i.e. they practised endogamy.

(b) Each caste was segmented into smaller subdivision or sub-castes and these were the units of endogamy. According to Govind Sadshiv Ghurye endogamy is the key factor behind the caste system.

2. Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji confesses that the Indian social life of bees and beavers and the Indians are almost a regimental people.

But 'the beauty of it', in that the majority of us do not feel regimented.

3. Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji doubts whether the western individual man dominated by the market system has any liberty at all. He is exposed to the manipulation of advertisements, press-chains, chain stores and his purse is continuously emptied. All this does not leave much scope for individual's right of choice and consumer's sovereignty.

4.Contrastingly, the low level of aspiration of the average Indian, which is moderated by group norms, results into greater poise in life. This should not be missed in our urge for uplifting the level of wants.

5. The Indian sociologists, in this way, will have to accept the group as units and reject the individual. For that is the tradition of India. The Indian sociologists will have to understand the specific nature of this tradition.

B.

A.

A.

C.

A.

A.

A.

D.

A.

A.

A.

A.

A.

B.

A.

A.

D.

A.