Search

MN Srinivas' concept of 'the dominant caste' has rightly been highly influential. The forms that dominance takes have changed a good deal since his day, but inequality and hierarchy have persisted. Modern ideological justifications of dominance are frequently at variance with those of former times, leading to plenty of paradoxes. These paradoxes are illustrated with examples from Nepal, but their application is much wider. Thanks to Nepal's different political history, the Nepali case can very usefully be contrasted with India and other parts of South Asia to highlight how, and in which contexts, hierarchy as a value persists even when equality is written into numerous constitutional provisions and laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract 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 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]