INDIAN SOCIOLOGY : AN INFLUENCE AND RESPONSE TO THE CAPTIVE MIND

 

CAPTIVE MIND- INDIAN SOCIOLOGY – AN INFLUENCE AND RESPONSE TO THE CAPTIVE MIND

 

CAPTIVE MIND= ACADEMIC IMPERALISM

Historically : Sociology and social sciences mainly developed in the West to encounter the problems of Industrial revolution, French revolution and Enlightenment. (in the form they are institutionalized)

Auguste Comte: in his Course de philosophie Positive (1830) sought to reconstruct social order through the ‘positive’ and ‘exact’ science of sociology free from other modes of explanation like theology and metaphysics. The discipline of sociology emerged out of

1                    the forty years of intellectual anarchy that prevailed following French Revolution

2                    solutions to problems thrown up the Industrial Revolution

Western construction of sociology was replicated through European colonialism in the rest of the world. 

ü  India being a colonial nation not only inherited the British University system, but also European or American influences largely conditioned our courses, curriculum and research methods.

ü  Western paradigms by and large, guided our intellectual inquiries and provided the basis for contestations on ideological and theoretical grounds.

ü  From the late 1960s till the mid 1980s there was intense debate over the importation and relevance of Western social sciences.

ü  Prominent critiques included C.T. Kurien (1968), Kiku Yamaoka (1968), S.C. Dube (1978), John Sammy (1978) and Yogesh Atal (1981) ably captured the mood and temper of the times of these and other scholars.

ü  Syed Hussein Alatas : The Malaysian sociologist and politician conceptualized CAPTIVE MIND approach to capture the phenomena.

ü  According to him the product of higher institutions of learning either at home or abroad whose way of thinking is dominated by Western thought in an imitative and uncritical manner. It is uncreative and incapable of raising original issues.

ü   Incapable of separating the Particular from the Universal and consequently fail to adapt the universally valid corpus of knowledge to particular local situations.

ü  It is fragmented in outlook.

ü  It’s method of thinking depends on current stereotypes

ü  Alienated from the major issue of sociology

ü  Alienated from its own national traditions

ü  Result of Western dominance over the rest of the world.    

The Hegemony of institutions

ü  It is virtually impossible for a mind to be called CAPTIVE unless it has been systematically conditioned by a structure or system.

ü  The best way to condition it the education system especially higher education system.

ü  It is evident that many scholars from the non-western world they go to the western countries and receive their education and their training. When they come back to their own countries their mind are conditioned by a certain training, by a certain system.

ü  The scholars from the Western world go to other countries to investigate issues or to write about any social phenomena, they start discourse which is conditioned by their own countries of origin.

ü  So overall the conditioning of their mind/training or their intellectual system creates a kind of hegemony which is not sane.

ü  In his article The Captive Mind and Creative Development Syed Hussein Alatas clarifies that his quarrel is not with imitation per se but with the particular uncritical manifestation of it that plagues academia in the non-west.

ü  He made a clear distinction between ‘constructive imitation’ and ‘negative imitation’ and insists that no society can progress purely through its own inventions, without adopting and assimilating useful aspects of other societies and cultures.

Indian context

ü  The captive mind syndrome operated in India with starting consequences.

ü  The communal fraticidal frenzy that ripped the subcontinent and led to one fo the largest transfer of population.

ü  The linguistic agitation not considered as subject matter of sociology.

ü  The insurgent unrest in the North-East remains unattended for long.

ü  The caste inequalities overshadowed poverty concerns.

ü  Study of social movements acquired centrality when western social sciences defined it as the subject matter of sociology.

ü  Indian sociologists had not responded to the social crisis of society like Europeans when they confronted with the growing problems of industrialization.

ü  The lead given by the pioneers of Indian sociology were overtaken by the paradigmatic power of social sciences crafted in the west.

Satish Saberwal (Sociologists and Inequality in India : 1979) observes “as long as there is goodness of fit between choice of theories and concepts and the evidence being considered”.

ü  Social scientists in India had not any complaint on the exercise of their autonomy in the pursuits of social sciences.

ü  Nor have their concepts and theories necessarily lacked goodness of fit with the explanation of substantive issues.

ü  How then Indian sociology defaulted on the substantive problems of poverty, partition, communalism, linguistic separation, gender issues and so on; when these staring all Indian on their faces. The problem therefore is not autonomy but of the captive mind.

Yogesh Atal (1981) who headed UNESCO Asian office in Bangkok for two decades argued that the indigenization movement began “to gain momentum in early 1970 when indigenous scholars from the third world raised their voice against the implantation of social sciences perpetuating captive mind.”

S.C. Dube the leaders of social sciences have not been able to decolonize their minds in respect of theory or methods.

Yogesh Atal talked about indigenization but also advised to avoid narrow parochialism “emancipate the mind and improve the quality of profession praxis”.