Manish K. Thakur

Representing Village Text and Context of Rural Development Programmes in India

Rather than focusing on the impact of development on the village in substantive terms, this article critically explores the discursive implications of rural devel–opment. While taking note of the attendant changes in the wake of state–directed process of planned intervention and social reconstruction, it underscores the manner in which the rural development discourse reconfigures the meanings of village in our social imagination. Irrespective of whether rural development programmes fall short of accomplishing their goals, or succeed in meeting the desired targets, they lead to a certain transformation of the terms in which the village is talked about. The village becomes a marker of social difference in the overall context of development and modernization. It is employed as a term of social classification with connotations of the presence, absence or degrees of development. Yet, rural development is the medium in which village is placed in relation to national development. More often than not, village in contemporary times turns out to be a ‘governmentalized locality’.

Democracy, Pluralism and the Religious Minorities: The Muslim Question in India

On the basis of a critical examination of the report of the high-level committee on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims in India (also known as the Sachar Committee Report) and the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission Report, the article foregrounds issues relating to the perceived appeasement, marginalisation, discrimination and social exclusion of Muslims in India. Despite being the largest religious minorities group in the country, the reports show them to be the most deprived of India’s social groups and communities, with an appalling social, occupational and economic profile. Whereas a very large section of the Indian Muslim population is being left behind in the drive towards development, they equally bear the wrath of right-wing Hindu fundamentalist groups that perceive them as anti-nationalists and cultural outsiders. These identity-related issues offer us an opportunity to address the public policy challenges of ‘mainstreaming’ and inclusiveness of a minority group in a multicultural national setting. Specifically, this article looks at the ways and means of enhancing diversity in different spaces by way of public policy interventions and the challenges therein. Viewed thus, the article proposes to anchor the conceptual richness of the debate surrounding pluralism, democracy and citizenship to the realist world of public policy-making. In a related vein, it goes beyond an understanding of the formal processes and procedures of the acquisition of citizenship rights and focuses on substantive sources of mainstreaming and political exclusion. In the process, it revisits our conceptualisation of the cultural ingredients of a democratic nation-state, albeit from the perspective of a numerically preponderant (but otherwise powerless) minority. Through its analytical focus on the largest religious minorities group in India, the article intends to illuminate the complex political debates about minority rights in a democratic polity.

Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Quest for an Indian Sociology

ions from a different culture and they cannot be applied to the Indian society. Mukerjee’s synthesis of Vedantic philosophy with Hegelian dialectics should be seen in this context. However, to expect of a social scientist like Mukerjee, howsoever eminent, to offer a full-blown indigenous alternative to western modernity is to go against the grain of intellectual and cultural history of modern India. It has been asserted that ‘the challenge to cultural identity that British colonialism posed to India was met not by professional social scientists but by litterateurs, social reformers and political agitators’ (Yogendra Singh 1984: 156). It will be no exaggeration to argue that the cultural and political elites, and not the social scientists, first responded to the challenge of colonialism and the threat to Indian identity. Social sciences in India not only lagged behind in responding to this challenge, but also evaded it for long. Social scientists, of course, could not be blamed for this, since social science as a profession itself was a byproduct of colonial impact rather than the anti-colonial struggle (ibid.). This historical conditioning of the role of social sciences in India has had a marked bearing on the degree and extent of indigenisation in relation to models of studying Indian society (see Yogendra Singh 1986). This fact has to borne in mind while assessing Mukerjee’s response to western modernity in general and social sciences in particular. A deep sense of ambivalence towards western social sciences is as true for Mukerjee as for his contemporaries and followers alike. Arguably, the great bulk of the 19 century social scientific studies in India originating from western sources (with the exception of the Orientalists) tended to deny, rather than affirm, the identity of India as a 104 Manish K. Thakur nation. Without negating this colonial legacy lock, stock and barrel, Mukerjee and his fellow social scientists continued to function within the broad parameters of social sciences laid down by the western metropolitan centres. Thus, we see the paradox of the national selfawareness, on the one hand, and the dependence upon the western tradition of social science, on the other, as a central feature of Indian social scientist’s contributions, including Mukerjee’s (ibid.). As colonialism progressed, a dual tension with regard to the West and to indigenous culture came about. With the intensification of political conflict against the alien rule, the emotional need for cultural belonging deepened. At the same time, and paradoxically, familiarity with indigenous culture diminished progressively. The state of being organically and unselfconsciously linked to one’s culture was passé. The nature and direction of social change unleashed during the colonial rule necessitated conscious efforts on the part of Indians to belong to their ‘national’ culture. Interestingly, as the political confrontation with the colonial regime gained momentum, the intellectual proximity with the West – the centre of modernity – became greater and far-reaching. In other words, colonial period also witnessed the increasing impact of the West upon indigenous social consciousness along with politicoeconomic and cultural critique of the West. For the majority of the ‘enlightened’ Indians, neither an unquestioning rejection of modernity nor a blind advocacy of the indigenous seemed to provide the way out of the cultural impasse that they lived and experienced as a colonially subjugated lot. True, cultural closure was not their ideal. It would be labouring the obvious to argue that they were neither mesmerised by the West and nor by indigenous cultural moorings in toto, though they acutely felt a strong alienation from their own tradition and culture. The point is that the tradition they wished to belong to was not a pristine and pure tradition, but a newly created tradition – a tradition that they consciously created under the weight of the given historical conjunctures. We should not forget that it was colonial mediation that helped create in Indian minds the idea of a traditional India. Therefore, to read the Indian mind of the colonial times calls for an acknowledgement of the historically generated cultural ambivalences. The colonised Indian mind was neither resigned to uncritical acquiescence to western modernity nor to its disproportionate valorisation at the expense of tradition. Moreover, the very framework of (indigenous) tradition and (western) modernity has an inherent danger of charactering the lived experiences in terms of invented categories, which the people themselves might not be familiar with. It amounts to explaining past events, Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Quest for an Indian Sociology 105 happenings, beliefs, and attitudes in terms of invented categories. Indian responses to western modernity, as also to indigenous and traditional culture, need not to be seen as exclusive options. The acceptance of the one did not mean automatic rejection of the other. Most of the educated Indians exhibited a certain mixture of the two. This pragmatic approach towards their existential dilemma does not obliterate the momentous epistemological changes unleashed by western modernity. These changes while overshadowing the pre-colonial ways of living and thinking also imparted to the Indian mind new sense of history and time. As a consequence, Indian intelligentsia, through a process of selective appropriation and reorganisation, could project an indigenous account of Indian tradition and culture for the resumption of the lost self-pride and for challenging the colonial cultural onslaught (see Chandra 1992: 6). Thus, the contributions of an Indian social scientist are intimately linked by his/her approach and orientation to western modernity. No one can deny that most of the conceptual categories used by Indian social scientists are precipitates of the western social, intellectual, and academic history that rarely fit Indian definitions of reality. They treat Indian cultural realities in western framework and very often impose an alien epistemology on Indian reality (Marriott 1990: 1). In this context, it is only appropriate to ask if Mukerjee’s conceptual and theoretical innovations should be treated as rejection of western modernity lock, stock and barrel or only as refutations of western ethno-social sciences. Some Concluding Observations Undoubtedly, Mukerjee questioned the western social sciences’ claims to analytic universality. He proposed new interpretative approaches and categories for the analysis of Indian society and culture. Also, his vast corpus of work displays his interests in indigenous cultural concepts. He has been foremost among Indian social scientists to work out the deeper implications of the use (and abuse) of western models for the construction of Indian reality. Not only has he been critical of the application of concepts and methods of western origin for the study of historically distinct entity such as India, but also underlined the ethnocentrism of the western social theory that placed India in a relationship of cultural inferiority and dependence vis-à-vis the West. Coming down heavily on the ideological interpretation of India in imported theories, he rejected their insipid thesis. Moreover, he was against the extension of positivistic-utilitarian tradition of the western social science as it has been based on certain nominalistic philosophical assumptions. These 106 Manish K. Thakur assumptions accorded a place of pride to the concept of individual that, for Mukerjee, did not gel well with Indian values and traditions. But then, as Yogendra Singh (1984) avers, at the meta-theoretic level, the effort to incorporate western concepts with Indian modifications has been the most common practice among Indian social scientists. Mukerjee is no exception to this trend. One finds in him attempts to indigenise western concepts, an ideological selfconsciousness about the legacy of western modernity, and a tentative outline of indigenous responses to the category and structures of ideas inherited from the West. This has obviously given rise to many cognitive and paradigmatic tensions in his writings. Although, like his fellow sociologists, Mukerjee too treated sociology as a style of cultural critique or reformative ratiocination, his contribution to social science was more substantial and enduring. Besides, as a creative writer and literary critic, his contributions reveal responsive yet critical note on western interpretations of the Indian society, institutions, and cultural patterns. So far as sociology as a discipline is concerned, Mukerjee (as most of its patrons) had come from outside this discipline and was not initiated into its logic or methodology (see Yogendra Singh1984: 15–16). Despite this obvious handicap, Mukerjee’s voluminous writings display the blending of contemplation with fact-finding. He is regarded as an original and creative thinker by many of his students (Joshi 1986a, 1986b). Gifted with powerful intuition and imagination, he was also extraordinarily productive. His powers of synthesis were equally great. As part of his attempted critique of western modernity, Mukerjee laid emphasis on the uniqueness of Indian value system, the centrifugal communalistic non-hedonistic character of Indian culture and polity. Towards this end, he worked tirelessly to make Indian sociology absorb social philosophy. He comes out with a clear-cut rejection of the western conception of man and social order, including the Marxist idea of class conflict and communism, for which he offers alternative concepts of the sangh or the collectivity. According to Mukerjee, sangh is characterised by non-hedonism and sustained by a spiritual tradition rather than being based on a materialistic conception of man and society (see Yogendra Singh 1967: 166–67). This perpetual quest for indigenous modes of thought and methodological o

Dalit politics and the Indian State : Changing landscape, emerging agendas

The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond the pale of the agency of the modernising State and firmly place it in the arena of global civil society, and the frequent appeal to the United Nations or the international human rights bodies to pressurise and morally coerce the Indian State, is part of the new dalit political tactics. This dampens the formation of a critical dalit consciousness by altering the flow of discontent from the State towards an incipient global civil society. Downgrading those struggles which are political / economic in nature or seek to capture State power, the new dalit activism tries to hegemonise the entire dalit movement.

Book Review: Roma Chatterji (ed.). Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance

Roma Chatterji (ed.). Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2015, vii + 481 pp., ₹1,295 (hardback). ISBN 978-81-250-5733-8.

The Changing Rural-agrarian Dominance: A Conceptual Excursus

Based on a review of extant literature, this article entreats for thorough-going empirical investigation of rural-agrarian dominance in the context of the fundamental transformation of the ‘village’ from the spatial habitat of the traditionally ‘dominant’ to the ‘waiting room’ for the aspiring and the despairing. 1 Against the backdrop of the cultural devaluation of agriculture as an unrewarding profession and the village as the dark underbelly of a shining India, it underlines the need to revisit the conventional political economy models of rural-agrarian dominance. We argue that the triad of caste, land and political power does not exhaust the emergent constituents of rural-agrarian dominance. The aspirational surge towards middle-classisation, even among the village dominants, has unleashed forces and processes whose ramifications have to be meticulously thought through. The three-class dominant social coalition model prevalent in the political economy literature largely fails to take into account the inherent dynamism of the village dominants and their deep-seated propensity for middle-classisation.

Book Review: B. B. Mohanty (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Agrarian Transition: India in the Global Debate

B. B. Mohanty (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Agrarian Transition: India in the Global Debate. New Delhi: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2016, xxviii + 300 pp., ₹895 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-138-66860-7.

(Invisible) Disciplines: Sociology and Management

As an academic discipline, sociology has been a part of management education for long. Its intellectual and institutional legacies have been an inalienable part of American management schools after which business schools in India and IIMs, in particular, have been modelled. This chapter discusses the place of sociology in management education in India. It highlights some of the peculiarities of the location of sociology within the IIM system delineating the distinctive Indian twist to the American model in the early years after independence when the Indian state vociferously talked a language of development, modernization and democracy. The chapter evaluates the practices of the discipline in its varied manifestations—teaching, research, training and consultancy—on the basis of professional experience of fellow sociologists, irrespective of their location in a separate centre for sociology or in any other interdisciplinary group in an IIM.

The State of Management Education in India: Trajectories and Pathways

Management education in India, especially the one offered at the IIMs, is the most sought-after professional choice among the youth pursuing higher education and attracts some of the best and the brightest students. Despite the popularity and centrality of the management education in the higher education landscape, a serious assessment of the field of management education in India has been rather few and far between. While there had been sporadic reflections and occasional critiques, a critical stocktaking of the institutional and disciplinary aspects of management education has been long wanting. This introductory essay gestures towards an interrelated array of factors that have a bearing on the overall purpose, and future direction, of management education in India. Besides presenting synoptic overview of the essays collected in the volume, it particularly underlines the global geopolitics of the theory and praxis of management and underlines the need to incorporate the perspectives of the Global South to move beyond the prevailing Western ethnocentrism.

The Politics of Indigenous Social Science: Invoking a Lucknow Sociologist

A deep sense of ambivalence towards the Western social scientific categories has been a characteristic feature of the growth and development of social sciences in postcolonial societies. Indian sociologists, in particular, have frequently turned their critical gaze on the ethnocentrism of the Western social sciences. In fact, there have been extreme responses on the issue—from the impossibility of an Indian sociology to the calls for an Indian ethno-sociology. At the core of such responses is the contestation over ones approach and orientation to Western modernity. Against this backdrop, the present paper selectively invokes Radhakamal Mukerjees axial concerns and analytical thematics with a view to demonstrate the general contour of a long-raging debate on the indigeneity question in Indian sociology.