Describe and discuss the socio-historical background of the emergence of Sociology in India.

  Sociology came about as an academic discipline post World War 1, however, it was initially faced by neglect and prejudices. It gained prominence post-independence when new bouts of nationalist and anti-colonial thoughts ensued, as a result of which practices of untouchability were abolished and other measures for the protection of the marginalized societies were being taken up. These measures influenced sociological thought and further the advancement of the discipline Works such as *Orientalist-Eurocentric framing of Sociology in India: A Discussion on Three Twentieth-Century Sociologists’ by Sujata Patel and ‘Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge” by Bernard S. Cohn, help assess the anticolonial sentiments and the emergence and development of sociology as an academic discipline in the Indian Society. The advent of sociological studies and research in the Indian subcontinent was a consequence of the nationalist spirit and the need to erode the narrative cast upon the Indian society through the condemnatory eyes of the West. In the West, India was studied under anthropology, the study of rural societies; and later on, when sociology emerged within India, it took the for of a mix of sociology and anthropology: or social anthropology. “The pressures for rethinking sociology came from two directions. The educated segments of the middle class who had come to occupy the enlarging ranks of the welfare state demanded new information for their programmes and new theories for their justification” (Lele, 1981, p. 42). “The greatest of all the evils that the British did to India, according to Bhaskar Pandurang Tarkhadkar (1816-1847), an uncompromising rationalist at the time; was to falsify her history in order to brighten their own record in the eyes of contemporaries” (Naik, 2002, p. 590) The provocative works of the colonial historians and anthropologists, condemning and castigating everything Indian with a motive to promote and defend the *civilizing mission’ of the colonial rule, provoked the enlightened angered Indians to take a stand to defend the history and culture of their country. Cohn’s work traces the British colonialism in India and the methods that they used to take control such as, by defining and classifying space, creating separations between the private and the public spheres and recording transactions and financial flows. He goes on to explain investigative modalities that the British made use of to collect facts about the Indian society to aid its colonizing mission. “An investigative modality includes the definition of a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification, and then how it is transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazettes, legal codes, and encyclopedias” . It is important for us as a society to be able to possess a highly critical of the various academic and non-academic sources of knowledge that we come across. One must be cautious enough to identify the orientalist lens through which multiple societies are viewed and written on paper. Although there is a lot of scope for new leaming and understandings through various researches, and we must encourage ourselves to explore multiple outlooks on the same society, issue etc. eventually forming an understanding of our own, without our knowledge being tainted by one viewpoint alone.

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