Sujata Patel

Beyond Binaries A Case for Self-Reflexive Sociologies

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.

Afterword: Doing global sociology: Issues, problems and challenges

This Afterword maps out the methodological constituents that organize global sociology. It suggests that the starting point for doing global sociology is to deconstruct the inherent Eurocentrism which is there in the discipline’s cognitive frames. Also, it suggests that Eurocentrism is not merely represented in sociological theories and methods but is also enmeshed in practices and sites that administer and govern sociological knowledge, such as journals and curricula. Additionally, Eurocentric frames are organically connected with the discipline of anthropology with which sociology was interfaced through coloniality. It then discusses the other three methodological constituents that help to frame global sociology: provincialization, methodological nationalism and endogeneity. It concludes by suggesting that global sociology is possible if we work with these methodological constituents at many levels.

The Profession and its Association Five Decades of the Indian Sociological Society

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.

Colonial Modernity and Methodological Nationalism: The Structuring of Sociological Traditions of India:

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.

Doing urban studies in India: the challenges

Abstract This paper maps aut the contours of the newly emerging field of Urban Studies in India, arguing for a need to evolve an interdisciplinary historical perspective that can explore the uneven and transitional character of the urban process structured by colonial capitalism. It debates with the European and North American perspectives, discusses the urban experience in India in terms of five themes and argues that these can help to constitute anew this area in India. These themes are: uneven capitalist development and its impact on urbanisation; the nature of urban inequalities; the influence of globalisation on city forms and structures; the intervention of state policies and the impact of collective action; and the various dimensions of urban cultures and modernities. These themes can also become the building blocks for fashioning a new urban sociology not only in India but also in the South.

Comments and Reflections

This special issue of City & Community, edited by Xiangming Chen, comprises four articles that are each strong in their own right, but the singular significance of this issue is that it is greater than the sum of its parts. Considered collectively, the four articles form a compelling comparative analysis of three megacities in Asia—Kolkata, Mumbai, and Shanghai. The beauty of this issue is its substantive synthesis of three cities that have never before been comparatively studied. Individually, however, they have been the subject of some research spanning disciplinary boundaries. The essence of City & Community is conveyed in two of its four essays that provide a comparative look at urbanization processes and housing rights in Kolkata and Shanghai and Mumbai and Shanghai, respectively. This issue is a striking example of how urban scholarship can break new ground using a comparative approach based on ethnographic and institutional case studies. In addition, these essays (jointly and severally) constitute an important contribution to the theoretical discussion on globalization and urbanization—on three key levels. First, they illustrate the increasing impact on cities made by the forces of globalization by identifying the specific actors and institutions that structure and influence both the particular and differential local processes; suggesting that endogenous processes play a significant part in various globalization processes. Second, the articles reveal the correlation between the introduction of policies supporting globalization (e.g., work and housing initiatives) and the slow dismantling of earlier statist systems that were relatively centralized and interventionist—a phenomenon that is conspicuously true in Shanghai, but also a significant factor in the development of Mumbai. This revelation builds a substantive foundation for their excellent discussion concerning how the forces of globalization have affected various segments of the population. Third, these articles indicate how crucial an assessment of the “political”context is to crafting substantive scholarship on cities. Thanks to the diligence paid in defining various political elements of Mumbai, Kolkata, and Shanghai, the authors provide a striking picture of the similar processes at work in these cities. For example, Weinstein and Ren’s article discussing the politics of housing rights in Shanghai and Mumbai is augmented by a keen assessment of the nature and scope of various political forces including the processes, institutions, and positions of authority that confront emerging political actors in each respective city. To better understand the political background, the authors revisit the growth of social movements around consumption, community culture, and political self

Rethinking Urban Studies Today

The article engages with the literature that has emerged since the 1990s in urban studies in India and in this context, discusses the nature of India’s urban modernity. It suggests that scholars in India participate and engage with the global discussion on urban studies by removing themselves from the epistemic confusions of colonial episteme and of methodological nationalism that has bound sociology in India. It suggests that contemporary processes of capitalism have enveloped the entire territory of the country into an urban space with the mobile upper classes termed ‘middle classes’ and the state policies linking unevenly the so-called rural and urban areas through new forms of capitalist accumulation. These organise specific patterns of spatial inequalities and exclusions and in turn fuel contradictory processes of politics relating to gender, caste, ethnicity and religiosities. The focus of the urban studies should be to analyse the way the global intersects with regions and localities as these are being spatially constituted in the context of uneven urbanisation.

Feminist challenges to sociology in India: An essay in disciplinary history

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.

Book reviews and notices : D. PARTHASARATHY, Collective violence in a provincial city. New Delhi: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1997. xiii + 204 pp. Maps, tables, notes, refs., appendices, index. Rs 395 (hardback)

and across the boundary between groups’. Using historical and ethnographic details from Northern Ireland, Wales, and Denmark, he outlines the relationship between local identities, and ethnic, regional and national identities. The discussion also encompasses: ’race’ and nationalism, language and religion, the social construction of national identity in everyday practice, and the role of violence and of ideologies in social categorisation. With an extensive bibliography, the book is likely to be extremely useful as a teaching resource for sociologists/anthropologists.