Indian Sociologists

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: GS1 asks whether caste is fluid or static, whether it has lost its relevance, whether India's diverse tribes can be treated as one category, and how Indian society keeps its traditions while changing. The founders of Indian sociology framed each of these debates: Ghurye on caste and on tribes as "backward Hindus", D.P. Mukerji on living tradition, A.R. Desai on the state, and M.N. Srinivas on the village. The chapter is unchanged in substance in the 2026-27 reprint. This page teaches it in full and adds the sourced dates of the founders' key books, the outcome of the tribe debate in Nehru's five principles, and one correction to NCERT's box on Srinivas.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

A young discipline in a colony. Interest in sociological thinking in India is a little over a century old; formal university teaching began only in 1919 at the University of Bombay, followed in the 1920s by Calcutta and Lucknow. The first Indian sociologists faced three questions with no ready answers: what role sociology could play in India, where modernity arrived together with colonial subjugation; what social anthropology, born of European curiosity about "primitive" cultures, could do in an ancient, advanced civilisation that also had "primitive" societies within it; and what sociology could offer a sovereign India about to begin planned development and democracy.

Indianising the discipline. The questions took shape only through "doing" sociology in India. The pioneers were self-taught; the founders who followed, born in the 1890s and the 1910s, built its institutions and each gave a different answer: Ghurye brought knowledge of classical texts to the questions western anthropology set; D.P. Mukerji, a thoroughly westernised intellectual, rediscovered Indian tradition without being blind to it; A.R. Desai offered a Marxist critique of the state; and Srinivas adapted British social anthropology to a new agenda centred on the village.

Learn by criticising. NCERT ends on a sign of a discipline's health: succeeding generations "learn from and eventually go beyond their predecessors". Each founder's view is offered as one way of Indianising sociology, to be weighed against others.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

The Six at a Glance

Key Terms at a Glance (NCERT's definitions)

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

The Pioneers: Accidental Anthropologists

In the beginning, Indians became sociologists and anthropologists "mostly by accident".

L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937) began as a clerk, became a school teacher and then a college teacher in Cochin state (present-day Kerala). In 1902 the Dewan of Cochin asked him to assist with an ethnographic survey of the state, one of the surveys the British government wanted in all princely states and presidencies. He did it voluntarily: a teacher at the Maharajah's College at Ernakulam during the week, the unpaid Superintendent of Ethnography at weekends. His work was praised by British anthropologists and administrators, and he was invited to help with a similar survey in Mysore. He was probably the first self-taught anthropologist to gain national and international recognition: he lectured at the University of Madras, was appointed Reader at the University of Calcutta, where he helped set up the first post-graduate anthropology department in India, and stayed there from 1917 to 1932. Without formal qualifications he was elected President of the Ethnology section of the Indian Science Congress, received an honorary doctorate from a German university, and was given the titles Rao Bahadur and Dewan Bahadur by Cochin.

Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942), a lawyer, was another "accidental anthropologist". After graduate and postgraduate degrees in English and a law degree from Calcutta's Ripon College, he went to Ranchi in 1898 to teach English at a Christian missionary school, and stayed for forty-four years, becoming the leading authority on the tribal peoples of the Chhotanagpur region (present-day Jharkhand). His interest grew from his legal work: practising at the Ranchi courts and appointed official interpreter, he needed to interpret tribal customs and laws to the court. He travelled extensively and did intensive fieldwork on an "amateur" basis, publishing more than a hundred articles in leading Indian and British journals and famous monographs on the Oraon, the Mundas and the Kharias. He founded the journal Man in India in 1922, the earliest journal of its kind in India and still published.

Both were born, lived and died under British rule, and practised a discipline that did not yet exist in India and had no institutions. The four founders who followed were born a generation later: Ghurye and D.P. Mukerji in the 1890s, Desai and Srinivas about fifteen years later. They came of age in the colonial era, worked on into independence, and built the discipline's first formal institutions.

G.S. Ghurye: The Founder of Institutionalised Sociology

Ghurye can be considered "the founder of institutionalised sociology in India". He headed India's first post-graduate department of sociology, at Bombay University, for thirty-five years, guided many research scholars who became leaders of the discipline, and founded the Indian Sociological Society and its journal Sociological Bulletin. At a time of scant support for research he nurtured sociology as an increasingly Indian discipline. His department was the first to combine teaching and research in one institution and to merge social anthropology and sociology into a composite discipline. Best known for his writings on caste and race, he also wrote on tribes; kinship, family and marriage; culture, civilisation and the historic role of cities; religion; and the sociology of conflict and integration. His influences included diffusionism, Orientalist scholarship on Hindu religion and thought, nationalism, and the cultural aspects of Hindu identity.

NCERT's box: born 12 December 1893 in Malvan, in the Konkan; B.A. with Sanskrit Honours from Elphinstone College, Bombay (1916) and M.A. in Sanskrit and English (1918); a University of Bombay scholarship (1919) took him to L.T. Hobhouse at the London School of Economics and then to W.H.R. Rivers at Cambridge, whose diffusionist perspective deeply influenced him; Ph.D. submitted under A.C. Haddon after Rivers's sudden death in 1922 (1923), its manuscript accepted for a Cambridge series as Caste and Race in India; Reader and Head of the Department of Sociology at Bombay in June 1924; Ph.D. programme launched in 1936, the first Ph.D. in sociology at an Indian university going to G.R. Pradhan under his supervision; a full eight-course M.A. in 1945; founding President of the Indian Sociological Society (1951), whose Sociological Bulletin began in 1952; retired in 1959, writing 17 of his 30 books afterwards; died in 1983, aged 90.

Ghurye and the Tribe Debate

Ghurye first became known beyond the academy through his writings on "tribal" or "aboriginal" cultures, and his debate with Verrier Elwin. In the 1930s and 1940s there was much debate on the place of tribes in India and the state's response. Many British administrator-anthropologists saw tribes as primitive peoples with a culture far from mainstream Hinduism, who would suffer exploitation and cultural degradation through contact with Hindu society; the state, they felt, had a duty to protect them and help them sustain their way of life against pressure to assimilate. Nationalist Indians were equally passionate about India's unity and the need to modernise; they believed preserving tribal culture kept tribes backward as "museums" of primitive culture, and that tribes, like features of Hinduism itself, needed reform and development.

Ghurye became the best-known exponent of the nationalist view, insisting that the tribes of India were "backward Hindus" rather than distinct cultural groups. He cited detailed evidence that tribal cultures had interacted with Hinduism over a long period and were simply further behind in the same process of assimilation all Indian communities had gone through. That tribes were hardly ever isolated primitive communities of the classical anthropological kind "was not really disputed". The difference lay in evaluating the impact of the mainstream: the protectionists feared severe exploitation and cultural extinction; Ghurye and the nationalists replied that these ill-effects were common to all the backward and downtrodden sections of Indian society, "the inevitable difficulties on the road to development".

NCERT's activity brings the debate to the present: many tribal movements assert a distinctive cultural and political identity, and the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were formed in response to such movements; and tribal communities have borne a disproportionate burden of big dams, mines and factories.

Ghurye on Caste and Race

Ghurye's academic reputation rested on his Cambridge dissertation, published as Caste and Race in India (1932), a critique of the then dominant theory of the relation between race and caste. Its main proponent was Herbert Risley, a British colonial official with anthropological interests. On this view humans could be divided into distinct races by physical characteristics such as skull circumference, nose length or cranium volume. Risley and others thought India a unique "laboratory" for studying racial evolution, because caste had prohibited intermarriage for centuries. Caste, Risley argued, must have originated in race: higher castes approximated Indo-Aryan racial traits, lower castes non-Aryan aboriginal, Mongoloid or other types; the lower castes were the original inhabitants, subjugated by Aryans who came from elsewhere.

Ghurye did not reject this outright but thought it only partially correct. He pointed out the problem of using averages without considering variation within each community, and held that Risley's thesis was broadly true only for northern India: elsewhere, inter-group differences in measurements were neither large nor systematic, suggesting that racial groups had long been mixing. "Racial purity" had been preserved by the prohibition on intermarriage only in "Hindustan proper"; in the rest of the country endogamy may have been introduced into groups already racially varied. NCERT adds that "today, the racial theory of caste is no longer believed", and that historians hold conflicting opinions on the Aryans and their arrival.

D.P. Mukerji: Tradition and Change

Between the 1920s and the 1950s Indian sociology was equated with two departments, Bombay and Lucknow, both beginning as combined departments of sociology and economics. Lucknow had a famous "trinity": Radhakamal Mukerjee (the founder), D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar. D.P., as he was known, was perhaps the most popular and among the most influential scholars of his generation, inside and beyond the academy, less through his writings than through his teaching, lectures, newspaper articles and radio programmes. He came to sociology via history and economics and kept wide interests: literature, music, film, western and Indian philosophy, Marxism, political economy and planning. He was strongly influenced by Marxism, with more faith in it as a method of analysis than as a programme of action, and wrote in English and Bengali; his Introduction to Indian Music is a classic.

NCERT's box: born 5 October 1894 in a middle-class Bengali Brahmin family with a tradition of higher education; science, history and economics degrees from Calcutta University; lecturer in economics and sociology at Lucknow (1924); Director of Information under the first Congress-led government of the United Provinces (1938-41); member of the U.P. Labour Enquiry Committee (1947); professor at Lucknow by special order of the Vice Chancellor (1949); professor of economics at Aligarh Muslim University (1953); presidential address to the newly formed Indian Sociological Society (1955); throat-cancer surgery in Switzerland (1956); died 5 December 1961. His other books include Modern Indian Culture (first edition 1942) and Diversities (1958).

D.P. turned to sociology through dissatisfaction with Indian history and economics. India's distinctive feature was its social system: history, politics and economics were less developed than in the west, but the social dimension was "over-developed". He wrote: "... my conviction grew that India had had society, and very little else. In fact, she had too much of it. Her history, her economics, and even her philosophy, I realised, had always centred in social groups, and at best, in socialised persons" (Mukerji 1955: 2). So the first duty of an Indian sociologist was to study India's social traditions, and this study was sensitive to change: tradition was a living tradition, linked to the past but adapting to the present. "It is not enough for the Indian sociologist to be a sociologist. He must be an Indian first, that is, he is to share in the folk-ways, mores, customs and traditions, for the purpose of understanding his social system and what lies beneath it and beyond it." Sociologists should know both "high" and "low" languages and cultures, Sanskrit, Persian or Arabic and local dialects.

Indian culture and society, D.P. argued, are not individualistic in the western sense: the average Indian's pattern of desires is fixed by his socio-cultural group, so the social system is oriented to group, sect or caste action, not "voluntaristic" individual action, though voluntarism was beginning to touch the urban middle classes, itself worth studying. The root meaning of tradition is to transmit; its Sanskrit equivalents are parampara (succession) and aitihya, from the same root as itihas (history). Traditions are kept alive by retelling stories and myths, but this link with the past indicates adaptation, not the absence of change. The economy, the commonest internal source of change in the west, had been less effective in India, where class conflict was "smoothed and covered by caste traditions". So a dynamic Indian sociology must first account for internal, non-economic causes of change.

D.P. identified three principles of change recognised in Indian tradition: shruti, smriti and anubhava. The last, personal experience, is the revolutionary principle, but in India personal experience flowered into collective experience, so the key principle was generalised anubhava, the collective experience of groups. High traditions centred in smriti and shruti were periodically challenged by the collective experience of groups and sects, as in the bhakti movement; in Indian Islam, the Sufis stressed love and experience over holy texts. For D.P., discursive reason (buddhi-vichar) was not the dominant force for change in India; anubhava and prem (experience and love) had been historically superior. The resilience of tradition means conflict changes tradition without breaking it: repeated cycles of orthodoxy challenged by popular revolts that transform it and are reabsorbed into the transformed tradition, typical of a caste society where class formation and class consciousness have been inhibited. This led him to criticise unthinking borrowing from the west, including in development planning: tradition was "neither to be worshipped nor ignored", and modernity was needed but not to be blindly adopted.

A.R. Desai and the Welfare State

A.R. Desai (1915-1994) was one of the rare Indian sociologists directly involved in party politics: a lifelong Marxist from his undergraduate days at Baroda, member of the Communist Party of India (1934-39) and later of non-mainstream Marxist groups, including the Revolutionary Socialist Party (1953-81). His father, a middle-level civil servant in Baroda state, was a well-known novelist sympathetic to socialism and Gandhian nationalism; having lost his mother early, Desai led a migratory life with his father. He studied under Ghurye at Bombay; his doctoral dissertation on the social aspects of Indian nationalism (1946) was published as The Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948), probably his best-known work, a Marxist analysis giving prominence to economic processes and divisions while accounting for British colonialism; it went through numerous reprints. He also wrote on peasant movements and rural sociology, modernisation, urban issues, political sociology, forms of the state and human rights: Rural Transition in India (1961), State and Society in India: Essays in Dissent (1975), Peasant Struggles in India (1979) and Agrarian Struggles in India after Independence (1986). He joined the Bombay faculty in 1951, became Professor and Head in 1967, retired in 1976, and died on 12 November 1994. Because Marxism was not prominent in Indian sociology, he was perhaps better known outside the discipline than within it, though he was elected President of the Indian Sociological Society.

In his essay "The myth of the welfare state", Desai identifies three features of the welfare state from the sociological literature:

1. A positive state: unlike the laissez-faire state of classical liberalism, which does only the minimum to keep law and order, it is interventionist and uses its powers to design and implement social policies.
2. A democratic state: formal democratic institutions, especially multi-party elections, are thought essential, which is why liberal thinkers excluded socialist and communist states.
3. A mixed economy: private capitalist enterprise and public enterprise co-exist; the state concentrates on basic goods and social infrastructure, private industry on consumer goods.

He then proposes five tests: does it ensure freedom from poverty, social discrimination and insecurity for all citizens; does it remove income inequality by redistribution and prevent concentration of wealth; does it transform the economy so that the profit motive is subservient to the community's real needs; does it ensure stable development free of booms and depressions; does it provide employment for all? Examining the states most often called welfare states, Britain, the USA and much of Europe, he finds their claims "greatly exaggerated": they fail to provide minimum economic and social security to all, cannot reduce inequality and often encourage it, have not escaped market fluctuations, and live with excess capacity and high unemployment. Hence "the notion of the welfare state is something of a myth". Desai is not one-sided: writing on the Marxist theory of the state, he openly criticises Communist states and insists that political liberties and the rule of law be upheld in all genuinely socialist states.

NCERT's activity sets Desai, who wants the state to do more, against those who say it should do less and leave things to the market, and asks students to list the services the state provides in their neighbourhood and how opinions on them differ by class.

M.N. Srinivas and the Village

Probably the best-known Indian sociologist of the post-independence era, M.N. Srinivas (1916-1999) earned doctorates from Bombay and Oxford. A student of Ghurye, he was transformed by his years at Oxford's department of social anthropology, then the centre of western anthropology. His Oxford dissertation, published as Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, made his international reputation with its detailed ethnographic use of the structural-functional perspective. Appointed to a new lectureship in Indian sociology at Oxford, he resigned in 1951 to head a new sociology department at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and in 1959 moved to set up the department at the Delhi School of Economics, soon one of India's leading centres. He complained that institution-building left him little time for research, yet produced a significant body of work on caste, modernisation and social change, and village society; built strong links with British and American anthropology, especially the University of Chicago; and trained a generation of leaders of the discipline.

NCERT's box: born 16 November 1916 in an Iyengar Brahmin family in Mysore; M.A. under Ghurye, published as Marriage and Family Among the Coorgs (1942); Ph.D. at Bombay under Ghurye (1944); to Oxford under Radcliffe-Brown and then Evans-Pritchard (1945); D.Phil. in social anthropology (1947); Lecturer in Indian Sociology at Oxford and fieldwork in Rampura (1948); Baroda (1951); Delhi School of Economics (1959); left Delhi University in 1971 for the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore; died 30 November 1999.

The Indian village remained Srinivas's life-long interest. Short survey visits gave way, in his year of fieldwork at a village near Mysore, to first-hand knowledge that proved decisive for his career. He helped encourage and coordinate a major collective effort of village ethnography in the 1950s and 1960s; with S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar he made village studies the dominant field of Indian sociology in that period.

His writings on the village were of two kinds: ethnographic accounts of fieldwork, and historical and conceptual discussions of the village as a unit of analysis. In the second he debated Louis Dumont, who argued against village studies: institutions like caste mattered more than the village, "only a collection of people living in a particular place"; villages may live or die and people move, but caste and religion go with them, so the village category misleads. Srinivas held that the village was a relevant social entity: historical evidence showed villages had served as a unifying identity and village unity mattered in rural life. He also criticised British administrator-anthropologists' picture of the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient "little republics": villages had changed considerably and had never been self-sufficient, being tied into regional economic, social and political relationships.

The village as a research site offered Indian sociology several advantages: it showed the value of ethnographic methods; it offered eye-witness accounts of rapid change in the countryside as planned development began; and its vivid descriptions were "greatly appreciated" by urban Indians and policy makers wanting to know what was happening in the heartland. Village studies gave sociology a new role in an independent nation: not only the study of "primitive" peoples, but relevance to a modernising society.

NCERT's activities ask for five clues to identify a village, and whether urban Indians are as interested in villages today as in the 1950s.

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Applying the Chapter

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: match person to fact: formal sociology teaching began at Bombay in 1919; Iyer (Cochin survey, Calcutta's first post-graduate anthropology department), Roy (Man in India, 1922; Oraon, Munda, Kharia monographs), Ghurye (Caste and Race in India, 1932; Indian Sociological Society, 1951; Sociological Bulletin, 1952), D.P. Mukerji (living tradition; shruti, smriti, anubhava; Lucknow trinity), Desai (Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 1948; welfare-state myth), Srinivas (Coorgs, 1952; "dominant caste"; Rampura; Delhi School of Economics, 1959). Nehru's five principles appear in his foreword to the second edition of Elwin's A Philosophy for NEFA (1959).

For Mains: NCERT's ten exercises ask how Iyer and Roy came to anthropology, the arguments on both sides of the tribe debate, Risley's and Ghurye's positions on race and caste, the anthropological definition of caste, D.P.'s living tradition and why Indian sociologists must be rooted in it, the specificities of Indian culture and their effect on change, Desai's critique of the welfare state, the Srinivas-Dumont debate on the village, and the significance of village studies. Present each founder's argument in his own terms, then weigh it.

Avoid: calling Ghurye's view that tribes were "backward Hindus" a protectionist view (it was the nationalist one); saying Ghurye rejected Risley entirely (he thought him partly right for north India); crediting "dominant caste" to anyone but Srinivas.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains items 1 to 8 are NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. The journal Man in India, described by NCERT as the earliest journal of its kind in India, was founded in 1922 by:
   (a) L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (b) Sarat Chandra Roy (c) G.S. Ghurye (d) D.N. Majumdar

2. In the debate on the place of tribes in India in the 1930s and 1940s, G.S. Ghurye:
   (a) argued that tribes should be isolated to protect their culture
   (b) characterised tribes as "backward Hindus" and was the best-known exponent of the nationalist view
   (c) held that tribes had never interacted with Hinduism
   (d) supported the British administrators' protectionist policy

3. Consider the following statements about Ghurye's view of Risley's theory as presented by NCERT:
   

   1. Ghurye rejected Risley's thesis completely for all of India.
      
   2. Ghurye thought the thesis of upper castes being Aryan and lower castes non-Aryan was broadly true only for northern India.
      
   3. Ghurye criticised the use of averages without considering variation within a community.
      Which of the statements given above are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3

4. According to D.P. Mukerji, the revolutionary principle of change among shruti, smriti and anubhava is:
   (a) shruti (b) smriti (c) anubhava (d) buddhi-vichar

5. Which one of the following is NOT among A.R. Desai's features of the welfare state?
   (a) It is a positive, interventionist state (b) It is a democratic state (c) It involves a mixed economy (d) It abolishes the capitalist market

6. Who argued against village studies on the ground that institutions like caste matter more than the village, "only a collection of people living in a particular place"?
   (a) M.N. Srinivas (b) S.C. Dube (c) Louis Dumont (d) Herbert Risley

Answers: 1 (b); 2 (b); 3 (b); 4 (c); 5 (d), since the welfare state keeps the capitalist market alongside public enterprise; 6 (c).

Mains:

1. How did Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy come to practise social anthropology? (150 words)
2. What were the main arguments on either side of the debate about how to relate to tribal communities? (250 words)
3. Outline the positions of Herbert Risley and G.S. Ghurye on the relationship between race and caste in India. (250 words)
4. Summarise the social anthropological definition of caste. (150 words)
5. What does D.P. Mukerji mean by a "living tradition"? Why did he insist that Indian sociologists be rooted in this tradition? (250 words)
6. What is a welfare state? Why is A.R. Desai critical of the claims made on its behalf? (250 words)
7. What arguments were given for and against the village as a subject of sociological research by M.N. Srinivas and Louis Dumont? (250 words)
8. What is the significance of village studies in the history of Indian sociology? What role did M.N. Srinivas play in promoting them? (250 words)
9. "Independent India's tribal policy steered between isolation and assimilation." Examine with reference to the Ghurye-Elwin debate and Nehru's five principles. (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Understanding Society (Class XI), ch. 5 "Indian Sociologists", Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF; pre-2022 text in the book archive, Wayback copy of November 2020.
• G.S. Ghurye, The Aborigines "So-called" and Their Future (Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona, 1943): Internet Archive.
• Verrier Elwin, A Philosophy for NEFA, 2nd revised edition (Shillong, 1959), with Jawaharlal Nehru's foreword of 9 October 1958: Internet Archive.
• Constitution of India, Article 244 and the Fifth and Sixth Schedules; First Schedule footnotes on Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand: Legislative Department, Constitution of India.
• D.P. Mukerji, Modern Indian Culture, 2nd edition (1948; first edition 1942): Internet Archive; Diversities (People's Publishing House, 1958): Internet Archive.
• M.N. Srinivas, "The Dominant Caste in Rampura", American Anthropologist 61(1), 1959, pp. 1-16: DOI 10.1525/aa.1959.61.1.02a00030; The Remembered Village (University of California Press, 1976): Internet Archive record.
• Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, "About ISEC": isec.ac.in.
• Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Gallimard, 1966; English translation, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970): Internet Archive.