Sociological Traditions May Well Become the Most Influential of Madan’S Many Excellent Books
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The title of this artfully written book is a subtle play on words—it is about both the sociology of traditions and the traditions of sociol- ogy. The author is one of India’s premier sociologists, and to read his interpretations is to see a master at work. Madan explores significant features of the social body of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, and also of Gandhian ideals and Indian secularism. He discusses various approaches to their study, and makes us reconsider what is distinc- tive about India’s understanding of the relationship between religious traditions and the secular state. The second half of the book is devoted to four scholars who have greatly influenced the field of Indian sociology. Madan skilfully pres- ents the perspectives of Radhakamal Mukerjee who strove for inter- disciplinary integration; D.P. Mukerji, who applied interests of class formation to India’s religious communities; M.N. Srinivas, who gave us a sophisticated understanding of the role of religion and caste in changing society; and Louis Dumont, who unearthed the religious assumptions underlying India’s enduring social structure. Madan ends with reflections on the development of the most im- portant journal, Contributions to Indian Sociology, and on his own intellectual autobiography as a cultural anthropologist and socio- logist. Sociological Traditions may well become the most influential of Madan’s many excellent books. Mark Juergensmeyer Professor of Sociology University of California Santa Barbara This marvellous book is T.N. Madan’s journey through the sociology of Indian sociology. As researcher, teacher, and founder-editor of the second series of India’s premier journal of sociology, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Madan has redrawn the contemporary landscape of the discipline. It is only appropriate that he should now look back on it with intimacy and professional detachment. And he does so with unfailing sensitivity to the ways in which cultures of knowledge and individual biographies intersect. The first half of the book can be read as a comparative perspective on some of the major concerns of Indian sociology. The emphasis is on how the larger issues of social change and modernization in India have been refracted through, and epitomized by, the changing per- spectives on the study of religion. The second half explores, through the intellectual biographies of four intriguing but gifted exemplars, the emergence of a new social science, and new, often strange, tem- plates of scholarship in a less than appreciative, somewhat wary, intellectual climate. Together, the two parts of the book constitute a fascinating cultural biography of a knowledge system and recon- firm Madan’s stature as one of the most insightful intellectuals of our time. Ashis Nandy Emeritus Senior Fellow Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Delhi Sociological Traditions T.N. Madan Sociological Traditions Methods and Perspectives in the Sociology of India Copyright © T.N. Madan, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2011 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12.5 Times New Roman by Tantla Composition Services Pvt. Ltd., Chandigarh and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Madan, T.N. Sociological traditions : methods and perspectives in the sociology of India / T.N. Madan. â p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sociology—India. 2. Religion and sociology—India. I. Title. HM477.I4M33â 301.0954—dc22â 2011â 2011002887 ISBN: 978-81-321-0575-6 (HB) The SAGE Team: Gayatri Mishra, Madhula Banerji, Amrita Saha, and Deepti Saxena In Memoriam P.S. Jayasinghe, Ravi Dayal, and Tejeshwar Singh Architects of Social Science Publishing in India Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest. —WITTGENSTEIN, Culture and Value And yet a line of thought that has matured over many years has its own stability. —HANS-GEORG GADAMER, Truth and Method Thank you for choosing a SAGE product! If you have any comment, observation or feedback, I would like to personally hear from you. 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Contents Preface xi Acknowledgements xix PART I Cultural Traditions, Sociological Perspectives ONE Indian Secularism in a Post-secular Age 3 TWO Hinduism: The Book View and the Field View 23 THREE Islam: The Universal and the Particular 45 FOUR Sikhism: The Sacred and the Secular 75 FIVE Gandhi and Weber: The Work Ethic, Capitalism, and Conscience 101 PART II Sociological Traditions: Exemplars, Interpreters SIX Radhakamal Mukerjee and His Contemporaries 119 SEVEN D.P. Mukerji: Towards a Historical Sociology 146 EIGHT M.N. Srinivas: Empiricism and Imagination 174 NINE Louis Dumont: The Man and His Work 195 TEN Contributions to Indian Sociology: Towards Methodological Pluralism 217 x Contents Epilogue: Engagements and Passages— An Exercise in Reflexivity 240 References 266 Index 290 About the Author 307 Preface This is a book about tradition—about dynamic cultural traditions as subjects of study and about intellectual traditions as evolving approaches to their study—in the context of the sociology of India. I do not employ the term ‘tradition’ to suggest the completeness or closure of a stock of ideas and perspectives, or an unthinking ad- herence to particular styles of thinking. In his celebrated book, The Sociological Tradition (1966), Robert Nisbet did indeed suggest that a set of core concepts (namely, community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation) may well be said to constitute the socio- logical tradition. Needless to emphasize that, for him, the Western sociological tradition is universal. I do not follow that trail in this book, although I am very much concerned in it with the idea of the sacred in non-Christian cultural traditions and the crafting of appro- priate methods for its study. To use the phraseology of an earlier, related book of mine, Path- ways: Approaches to the Study of Society in India (1994c), the pres- ent work is about sociological ‘pathways’ and ‘path makers’. The foregoing clarifies, I trust, my use of the term ‘tradition’. It suggests that significant ideas usually emerge from collective endeavours or may be put forward by gifted individuals who never are so original as to be wholly independent of their sociocultural and intellectual settings. Such ideas grow by being interrogated and refined by in- terested interlocutors and interpreters. Thus conceived, intellectual traditions are alive and, therefore, as much contemporary as they are of the past. xii Sociological Traditions Edward Shils insightfully observes in his masterly book Tradition (1981) that social scientists generally have been wary of traditional- ism and self-consciously ‘progressivistic’ in their outlook (p. 137); yet, and ironically, they have transformed this critical attitude itself into a tradition. Generally agnostic, they have recognized the role of religious traditions in history, whether as inhibiting or promoting social progress. If Marx believed that in his times religiosity served the interests of the exploiter class in European bourgeois society by drawing a veil upon social reality, standing it on its head as it were, Weber thought that religious values bestow meaning and significance on human existence, and Durkheim saw in them the moral basis for sociality. What is more, sociologists throughout the twentieth century and today have been so rooted in the ideas of the founding fathers as to invite the charge of necrophilia! In the field of sociology, Shils ob- serves, Weber and Durkheim are studied with the same seriousness as Kant and Hegel among philosophers, or Machiavelli and Hobbes among political theorists. ‘Their own past is still very much alive in the thought of contemporary social scientists and they do not hide it from themselves’ (Shils 1981: 140). What is true of the ‘greats’ of the Western sociological tradi- tion everywhere is not, however, similarly true of the founders of other sociological traditions. In India, succeeding generations have condescendingly neglected the work of their predecessors. As far as I know, only one formal account of the genesis of the discipline in India is available. Ramkrishna Mukherjee’s ‘Trends in Indian Sociology’ (1977) devotes a twenty-four-page chapter to the ‘pio- neers’. As for books other than college-level textbooks, I know of only three studies: Swapan Kumar Bhattacharya’s painstaking Indian Sociology: The Role of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1990); S.K. Pra- manick’s Sociology of G.S. Ghurye (1994); and Surajit Sinha’s rather slim Nirmal Kumar Bose: Scholar Wanderer (1986). A more recent volume, Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology (2007), edited by Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar, and Satish Deshpande, contains some excellent essays.