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How did the process of decolonization reframe the social sciences? This article maps the interventions made by theorists of and from the ex-colonial countries in reconceptualizing sociology both as practice and as an episteme. It argues that there are geographically varied and intellectually diverse decolonial approaches being formulated using sociological theory to critique the universals propounded by the traditions of western sociology/social sciences; that these diverse knowledges are connected through colonial and global circuits and that these create knowledge geographies; that collectively these diverse intellectual positions argue that sociology/social sciences are constituted in and within the politics of ‘difference’ organized within colonial, nationalist and global geopolitics; that this ‘difference’ is being reproduced in everyday knowledge practices and is being structured through the political economy of knowledge; and that the destabilization of this power structure and democratization of this knowledge is possible only when there is a fulsome interrogation of this political economy, and its everyday practices of knowledge production within universities and research institutes. It argues that this critique needs to be buffered by the constitution of alternate networks of circulation of this knowledge.

This paper analyzes the work of two Indian sociologists who defined the contours of sociology in India in the immediate post-independence decades, M. N. Srinivas and A. R. Desai. It argues that their scholarship can be linked to sociology’s legacy as anthropology in India and its embeddedness in the episteme of colonial modernity. It contends that Srinivas’s methodology, the field view, attempted to make a break with earlier methods, such as book view. However, his three concepts, that of dominant caste, Sanskritization and Westernization were perceived as civilizational attributes and which had organized social change in India. A. R. Desai, a Marxist historical sociologist, made an incisive critique of capitalist exploitation and elaborated the material conditions that led to peasant and working-class revolts. However, his sociology could not unravel the caste-class linkages that organized the Indian ‘social’ which was embedded in Indian nationalism. This paper suggests that a definitive understanding of modernity emerges in Indian sociology in the late 70s when the feminist, dalit and tribal movements interrogated the material basis of contemporary India’s developmentalism and its capitalist and exploitative character.

This article traces traditions of sociological thinking in India and suggests that in order to write the disciplines’ history, it is important to identify the episteme that governs these traditions. It suggests that there are two broad epistemes that have defined sociology as a discipline in India—colonial modernity and methodological nationalism—and it argues that they organise theories, perspectives, methodologies and methods, teaching and research practices of the discipline. The history of the imprint of these epistemes is investigated at four levels: first, in the way one or both defined the discipline’s identity and, thus, organised its characteristic mode of thinking methodologically; second, in the way this identity defined its theoretical direction and the theories that it borrowed, adapted to and reframed; third, in the way the first two organised its professional orientation and made it choose its identity as an academic discipline whose main role is restricted to teaching and research within academic institutions at an expense of a public orientation; and fourth, the way the aforementioned three defined its geographical compass, limiting its queries to national concerns wherein the macro became reduced to the micro abjuring discussions on global debates. This article suggests that today there is a crisis in the received epistemes, and in this context, it becomes imperative to take command to define a new episteme which intersects the local, regional, national and global concerns, is theoretical and methodologically eclectic and is comparative in nature.

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.

This article examines the evolution of sociological traditions within India in the context of colonization and assesses their continuation in its contemporary practices. It evaluates two new perspectives, indigenization and postcolonial studies, that have emerged to reorganize these traditions. The author argues that the divisions of knowledge and power represented within the disciplines of sociology and anthropology structure the ways in which distinct traditions of sociology have evolved and continue to play a major role in defining theories, perspectives and methods of doing sociologies in the world. How can these perspectives take the challenge of globalization that is reorganizing the distribution of world power, its knowledge and that of its institutions in new and seminal ways? The globalization of knowledge can have two possible effects. It can reconstruct earlier binaries in new ways, refashioning them to maintain the structure connecting knowledge with power. Alternatively, global processes can distil and uncouple these binaries, thereby allowing for the play of plural perspectives, so that all traditions of doing sociology are placed at equal levels and given equal significance. We have to decide the path that we travel.

The Indian Sociological Society was founded in 1951, and in 1967 merged with the All India Sociological Congress. Its development has been very much affected by the cleavage between regional (local-language)and national (English-language) universities, and the tendency for intellectual leaders to make particular departmental schools dominant. After the Delhi World Congress the organization was reconstructed, and became permanently based in Delhi; this is more efficient, and membership has grown, but it has also made it more centralized. The size and diversity of the potential constituency have made it difficult to cater for all interests, and there has also been pressure from a right-wing government with a religious agenda; moves are, however, now under way to bridge the regional and hierarchical divisions.

International audience; Urban governance today is characterised by the multiplicity of actors involved in the management of local affairs. The questions for inquiry are: who are the individuals and institutions, public and private, who actually plan and manage urban affairs? In what ways do they do so? Whose interests are accommodated, and under what conditions can co-operative action be taken? And more generally, in what ways are interactions between the many actors of urban governance patterned? This volume discusses the governance of Indian metropolises with these questions in mind, and focuses especially on changes brought on by policies of liberalisation and decentralisation over the last 15 years. Governance is here analysed through a series of case studies from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Hyderabad, focusing on six collective services: primary education, healthcare, subsidised food, slum rehabilitation, water and sanitation, and solid waste management. The book documents the continued appropriation of the state by an enlarged elite (including the vast middle class) and an incomplete democratisation of urban local bodies (evident in the lack of empowerment of municipal councillors), which goes along with a new economic regime as defined by new modes of engagement between the private sector and the state. Also, the concept of governance as it is operationalized in this volume highlights the importance of class in interactions between actors. By disentangling formal elements of governance (legitimised by the state) from informal ones (involving actors who are beyond the recognition of the state) the book ultimately reveals various power equations at play.