USE OF NATIVE CATEGORIES IN THE ANALYSIS OF INDIAN SOCEITY

 

USE OF NATIVE CATEGORIES IN THE ANALYSIS OF INDIAN SOCIETY

 

ü  During the colonial period many British and European scholars were writing on Indian society and culture. They used conceptual categories which were Eurocentric in nature. For example the word ‘caste’ came from Portuguese word ‘casta’. Britishers used it both for Varna and Jati.

ü  It created confusion because they were different concepts and products of different period.

ü  Some of Western scholars tended to distort history and imputed meanings to Indian reality in the abstract as it to perpetuate colonialism.

ü  According in Yogendra Singh (Atal, 2003) most of the categories used to understand Indian society have also some Western  influence.

ü  Initially, categories like caste, tribe and nation; caste class and power; mind, body and wealth were used by the researchers without following a rigorous methodology that requires conceptual clarity and dependable tools for investigation.

ü  Concepts such as ‘caste’, ‘tribe’, ‘village community’, ‘family’, ‘kinship’ etc were defined as segmentary entities often analogous to their socio-historical equivalents in European society.

ü  The emphasis was on showing how each of these social entities affirmed the principles of segmentation and autonomy rather than being parts of an organic whole.

ü  This bias which had its roots probably in the colonial ideology of the British social anthropologists and administrators is obvious in their treatment of ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ as discrete structural and cultural formation.

ü  Prof. G.S. Ghurye drew attention in 1943 in his THE ABORIGINES-SO CALLED AND THEIR FUTURE IN response to Verrier Elvin’s THE ABORIGINALS.

ü  He attempted to demonstrate continuities and linkages between the tribal and caste structure and tradition in Indian society.

ü  The conceptual framework developed by the British administrators turned ethnographers and by anthropologists was inspired by the then prevailing model in anthropology.

ü  Inspired by Western model tribal communities were treated as isolates, tribals as Nobel savages and the primitive condition was described as a state of American simplicity.

ü  Similar a historicity and segmental treatment of concepts can be seen in the colonial administrators turned sociologists’ view of village communities in India. Henry Maine: Ancient Law, Charles Metcalfe called Indian villages as Little Republic; William Wiser : Hindu Jajmani system; These scholars treated the village community as an autonomous sociological isolates.

ü  Bernard S. Cohn has analyses three such important orientation toward Indian society:

THE ORIENTALISTS: took a textual view of India offering a picture of its society as being static, timeless and spineless. Indian society was seen as a set of rules which every Hindu followed.

THE MISSIONARY VIEW: saw all the roots of degeneration and evils in Indian society in its religion (Hinduism) and offered conversion to Christianity. According to Cohn the differences in the perspectives of India between the missionaries and the orientlists rested on differences in their social origin.

THE ADMINISTRATIVE PERSPECTIVE: was grounded in the British utilitarian tradition which also viewed traditional institution in India as impediments to development of a rational modern society.

ü  Thus the sociology of India from roughly 177-1940 to which Cohn refers was conditioned by the social background, ideology and preferred methods of collection of data.

ü  D.P. Mukherjee interprets SANGHA as being devoid of the notion of individual. The absence of the notion of individual in the Indian tradition was later reiterated by Louis Dumont in his concept of Homo-hierarchicus. The collective principles not only operated at the normative level but also at the level of market and economy.

ü  During 1950 and 1960s much literature generated by social anthropologists, economists and historians which was away from the myth of autonomy of the basic components of Indian social structure i.e. caste, tribe, kinship, family etc.

ü  Louis Dumont demonstrated the structural similarity between the interregional kinship system.

ü  Kathleen Gough (1979) demonstrated the linkages between these institutions and the modes of production.

ü  I.P. Desai’s study of family cycle in a township effectively understand the theory of continuum in the family change.

ü  But the contribution towards sociology was not entirely free from conscious or unconscious partiality in the portrayal of social reality.

ü  Yogendra  Singh discusses the following conceptual categories which have been broadly used by different scholars for the study of Indian society:

Sanskritization and Westernization: M.N. Srinivas

Little and Great Traditions: McKim Marriott

Multidimensional tradition: S.C. Dube

Theory of structuralism: Richard Lambert, D.P. Mukherjee and A.R. Desai

Historicity of emotions: L. Dumont  

OTHER MAJOR CATEGORIES

Modernization : Yogendra Singh

Dominant Caste and Caste Hierarchy: M.N. Srinivas

Reference group model for the caste: Y.B. Damle

Universalization and Parochialization: McKim Marriott

Concept of Rural Cosmopolitanism: Oscar Lewis

Resource group: K.L. Sharma

All the above conceptual categories are constructed or used by two types of scholars:

The Indian Scholars	The Western Scholars
E.g. M.N. Srinivas (concept of Sanskritization)	Scholars who did field work in India and constructed categories for the analysis of social phenomena Though Western but constructed native categories e.g. McKim Marriott: Little and Great traditions