The Global Transition and the Challenge
to Social Sciences
Sujata Patel
Introduction
Five concerns direct the arguments presented in this chapter. First, if we agree that the main task of sociologists is to engage with and reformulate the substantive theories of modernity, then, second, it becomes equally important to confront and contest the universalizing ‘episteme’ that has organized these theories since the late 19th and early 20th centuries and which relate to the global unequal division of knowledge production in that period. This is known in social theory as Eurocentric methodology (Wallerstein, 1997, 2006) or coloniality of power (Quijano, 1993, 2000, 2007). Third, a critique of this episteme emerged in various parts of the world and particularly in India from the decade of the forties to sixties; the chapter discusses this critique and its limitations. Fourth, the chapter deliberates on the present interventions from scholars in the South on this theme (in terms of provincialism Chakrabarty, 2008), endogeneity (Hountondji, 1995, 1997) and the trans-modern perspective (Dussel, 1993, 2000, 2002; Mignolo, 2002), and argues that these resources provide a possible way to move forward in the reformulations of this critique. Fifth, I suggest that the present moment provides an opportunity to move beyond the trappings of the received episteme and the chapter spells out possible strategies for the same.
These concerns direct me to make an historical assessment of the framing of social science theory in the world and particularly in India; the focus is on the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. I argue that 19th century social science structured the disciplines in terms of a hierarchy based on an epistemic difference, of modern and pre-modern/traditional and reduced this episteme to spatial distinctions: the west and east. I suggest that this epistemic hierarchy continues to structure disciplines and knowledge systems today and are a hindrance to the growth of global social science interdisciplinarity.1 Colonial Modernity and the Formation of Anthropology Anthropology was the fi rst discipline or knowledge system to be established in India, and I start my discussion with an assessment of its Eurocentric epistemic moorings located in 18th century discussions of European modernity. Lévi-Strauss famously stated: anthropology was a handmaiden of colonialism and it is to this issue I now turn my attention.
Samir Amin (2008) is the fi rst theorist who presents a historical argument regarding the growth of the Eurocentric episteme in the 18th century, when he argues that this episteme is entwined in the twin processes of crystallization of the European society and Europe’s conquest of the world. Eurocentrism, Amin argues, clothes these twin processes by emphasizing the fi rst and disregarding the signifi cance of the latter in the formation of the fi rst.
Amin’s argument is presented at three levels: First, he contends that Europe was the periphery of the Mediterranean tributary states (the other being that of the Afro-Asiatic region) whose centre was at its eastern edge. Scholastic and metaphysical culture of these tributary systems created four systems of scholastic metaphysics: Hellenistic, Eastern Christian, Islamic and Western Christian. While all of these contributed to the formation of culture and consciousness of Europe, it was the contribution of Egypt and later of medieval Islamic scholastics which was decisive in changing Europe’s culture from being metaphysical to scientifi c. (Amin, 2008: 38). Second, he shows how since the period of Renaissance, this history of Europe has been distilled and diluted to be replaced with another history that narrated its growth as being the sole consequence of its birth within the Hellenic-Roman civilization. Third, through the means of what the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel (2000: 465) has called ‘semantic slippages’, Amin argues that the European narrative made Europe the centre of the world and of modern ‘civilization’, the distinctive characteristic of which was science and ‘universal reason’. The rest of the world was constructed to be its peripheries, which, it was argued could not or did not have the means to become modern.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1997, 2006) has extended this perspective to suggest that Eurocentrism is also a theory of social science. As latter, it is able to ‘naturalize’ the distinctions between ‘scientifi c universalism against essential particulars’ as it develops a discourse in the 19th century through the mode of historiography, the analysis of (Western) civilization, through Orientalism, and its attempts to impose a theory of progress (Wallerstein, 1997: 94). These trends crystallized an ‘original epistemology’ (Wallerstein, 2006: 48), which becomes ‘a key element’ in maintaining the reproduction of modernity. This argument is further extended by Enrique Dussel and Anibal Quijano when they assert what Amin had said earlier – that Eurocentrism was a theory of constructing a self-defi ned ethnocentric theory of history, that of ‘I’. They also affi rm, in a manner similar to Amin, that the European narrative and thus its theory of history simultaneously makes invisible and silences events, processes and actions of violence against the rest of the world, without which Europe could not have become modern. They extend this thesis to suggest that Eurocentrism is not only a theory of history but also an episteme, a theory of power/knowledge. If this episteme theorized the ‘I’, it also theorized the ‘other’, the ‘periphery’. Thus, Dussel argues:
…modernity is, in fact, an European phenomena, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-modern alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe appears itself as the ‘centre’ of World history that it inaugurates; the periphery that surrounds this centre is consequently part of its self-defi nition. The occlusion of this periphery … leads the major thinkers of the centre into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity.
(Dussel, 1993: 65)
Second, this episteme now termed ‘categorical imperative’, simultaneously creates the knowledge of the ‘I’ (Europe, the moderns, the West) against the ‘other’ (as the peripheral, non-modern and the East). This perspective legitimizes a theory of the separate and divided nature of the knowledge of the West and the East. It divides the attributes of the West and the East by giving value to the two divisions; while one is universal, superior and ‘emancipatory’, the other is particular and non-emancipatory and thus inferior. Dussel quotes Immanuel Kant who argued that while European ‘Enlightenment is the exodus of humanity by its own efforts from the state of guilty immaturity’…‘laziness and cowardice are the reasons why the great part of humanity remains pleasurably in the state of immaturity’ (Dussel, 1993: 68). This inferiority, a condition of its not becoming modern, in turn further legitimates the need to emulate the
‘moderns’ and to accept the colonizing process as a ‘civilizing’ process.
This was the myth of modernity and led, according to Dussel, to the management of the world system’s ‘centrality’:
If one understands Europe’s modernity – a long process of fi ve centuries – as the unfolding of new possibilities derived from its centrality in world history and the corollary constitution of all other cultures as its periphery, it becomes clear that, even though all cultures are ethnocentric, modern European ethnocentrism is the only one that might pretend to claim universality for itself.
Modernity’s Eurocentrism lies in the confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center.
(Dussel, 2002: 222)
Third, as mentioned above, Eurocentric knowledge is based on the construction of multiple and repeated divisions or oppositions which gets constructed as hierarchies. These oppositions, Anibal Quijano (2000) argues are based on a racial classifi cation of the world population. This principle becomes the assumption to further divide the peoples of the world into geo-cultural terms, with which are attached further oppositions, such as reason and body, science and religion, subject and object, culture and nature, masculine and feminine, modern and traditional. While European modernity conceptualized its growth in terms of linear time, it sequestered the (various) East(s) divided between two cultural groups, the ‘primitives’/
barbarians and the civilized as being enclosed in their (own) spaces. No wonder this episteme could not provide the resources to elaborate a theory of space, affi rming David Harvey’s insightful statement of ‘annihilation of space by time’.
The consolidation of these attributes across the West–East axis and its subsequent hierarchization across spatial regions in the world allow for social science to discover the ‘nature’ of the various peoples, nations and ethnic groups in the world in terms of the attributes of the binaries. This structure of power, control and hegemony termed by Quijano as ‘coloniality of power’ is founded on two myths:
…fi rst, the idea of the history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe; second, a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europe as natural (racial) differences and not consequences of a history of power. Both myths can be unequivocally recognized in the foundations of evolutionism and dualism, two of the nuclear elements of Eurocentrism. (Quijano, 2000: 542)
These seminal assumptions were embodied in the framing of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology in late 19th century. Sociology became the study of modern (European – later to be extended to western) society, while anthropology was the study of (non-European and non-Western) traditional societies. Thus, sociologists studied how the new societies evolved from the deadwood of the old; a notion of time and history was embedded in its discourse. Contrary anthropologists studied how space/place organized ‘static’ culture that could not transcend its internal structures to become modern.
These frames also constructed the academic knowledge of India as elaborated by colonial anthropologists and administrators, who further divided the East that they were studying in separate geo-spatial territories with each territory given an overarching cultural value. In the case of India, it was religion: Hinduism. The discourse of coloniality collapsed India and Hinduism into each other (Patel, 2006, 2007). Later those living in the subcontinent were further classifi ed geographically in spatial cultural zones and ‘regionally’ subdivided by its relationship with Hinduism.
Those that were directly related to Hinduism, such as castes and tribes were termed the ‘majority’ and organized in terms of distinct hierarchies (castes were considered more superior than tribes who were thought to be
‘primitive’), while those that were not were conceived as ‘minorities’, these being mainly groups who practiced Islam, Sikhism and Christianity (Patel, 2006).
Fourth, this classifi catory schema, that of the use of the attribute of race to divide the peoples of the world, found its own ‘local’ legitimation, its own articulation and a ‘voice’, once colonial authorities had imposed these to divide the ‘natives’. Thus, this project found an expression (ironically and paradoxically) in the work of indigenous intellectuals in the subcontinent searching to fi nd an identity against colonialism. For them, the immediate necessity was to locate ‘our modernities’. Thus, unlike the Europeans for whom, ‘the present was the site of one’s escape from the past’, for the indigenous Indian intellectuals ‘it is precisely the present [given the colonial experience] from which we feel we must escape’. As a result the desire to be creative and search for a new modernity is transposed to the past of India, a past ironically constructed by orientalist colonial modernity. Thus, Chatterjee argues, ‘we construct a picture of “those days” when there was beauty, prosperity and healthy sociability. This makes the very modality of our coping with modernity radically different from the historically evolved modes of Western modernity’ (Chatterjee, 1997: 19). This past was now rarefi ed to understand the present and the future; an orientalist imagination came to defi ne the so-called indigenous expression.
In a different way, the historian Sumit Sarkar makes a similar argument when he suggests that while modern Western history writing has generally been state oriented (with an understanding of nation as a refl ection of the nation-state), the historical consciousness of the Indian intelligentsia, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was oriented to the valorization of culture against the state. He states:
In this period samaj (society, community) came to be counterpoised to rashtra or rajshakti (state, the political domain). The real history of India, it was repeatedly asserted, was located in the fi rst, not the second, for samaj embodied the distinctive qualities peculiar to the genius, culture and religion of the Indian people. and
…. samaj was simultaneously all too often conceptualised in Hindu, high caste gentry, and paternalistic terms…. (Sarkar, 1997: 23).
Obviously, racial constructions of ‘difference’ found a new legitimacy within a Brahminical casteist ideology as these two overlapped each other to organize the study of social sciences through new reconstructed major-itarian and or/casteist positions or through rationalist and ‘secular’ silences of this process that, in turn, allowed its legitimation.
‘Eurocentric episteme’ thus became part of the ‘background understandings’ and ‘beliefs’ and have obfuscated a critical look at knowledge production of social sciences in India. In the case of India, this knowledge (a) was produced as part of colonial politics of rule, (b) was expressed and organized in terms of values that were in opposition to modernity, (c) used disciplinary practices such as Indology and ethnography to elaborate these positions, (d) was codifi ed with the help of native intelligentsia, especially the Brahmins, and (e) thus refl ected the social order as represented by this group both in its expressed articulations (in anthropology and later social anthropology) and in its silences (in economics) and (g) lastly, mitigated an examination of the way classifi cation systems of the state organized new forms of inequalities in the colonial territory.
Endogenous Critique of Colonial Social Sciences The legacy of Eurocentrism was thus not only in creating a global hierarchy of knowledge divisions in terms of universal and particular but also to ensure that this episteme is diffused across the colonial space and through this process obfuscate an analysis of the principles organizing the transition process across the colonized globe.
Partha Chatterjee (1997: 19) has reminded us that ‘… [T]here is no promised land of modernity outside the network of power’ and one may add, outside its discourse. Modernity brought together for the once colonized two promises: the struggle for ‘dreams of freedom’ and, at the same time, the experience of being ‘victims of modernity’; its episteme organized both the ‘desire for power’ and the ‘resistance of power’. No wonder the discussion on modernity in India has been steeped in ambiguity given colonialism’s framing of modernity, as a discourse simultaneously of freedom and of subjugation. Nationalism structured an understanding of being both unfree and free to change the world. In doing so, it now reconstructed the colonial binary in a new context, that of the nation-state. How did this ambiguity play itself out in context with the faming nationalist social sciences?
As in the case of many countries, and so was it in India, social science disciplines were moored in the project of nationalism. And because nationalism in India evolved into three different currents, we fi nd similar trends also within social sciences. These were the modernists, the traditionalists and modern-traditionalists. (Parekh, 1995). There was little disagreement between the three on the causes of the nation’s degeneration and decadence.
All three agreed that these were related to colonialism, domination by the British, the extraction and control for imperialist purposes of India’s rich material resources and the destruction of its vitality and ideas by the colonial elite. However, there were differences regarding the possible solutions.
The ‘modernists’ wanted India to identify with the future and with progress. They argued that the problem was with the past, with Indian culture which had made the ‘Indian’ people passive, lifeless and non-productive. They advocated the path set by Europe earlier and wanted India to have a new industrial economy, free from agrarian dependencies.
It is no coincidence that these ideas became the source for building a new discipline of economics and helped to chart the knowledge regarding planning and developmental in independent India. This knowledge, we know, has rarely engaged with and most often been silent regarding the issues of pollution and purity as they structure and organize inequities in the country. It is in this silence that it continues to accept the ‘colonial episteme’.
The modernist perspective was countered by the ‘real traditionalists’.
They argued for a need to draw out concepts and theories from the past –
from that of India’s rich histories and its civilization. Though this civilization had suffered a decline, it was essentially and fundamentally sound and was embodied with much strength. These strengths had kept the ‘Indian’
people together over centuries and these ideas will continue to bind them together in the future. The Indian society had a distinct character and history and had evolved in interaction with its people and its agencies. Indians and its social sciences needed to mobilize their society’s creative resources for its regeneration without losing its coherence and inner balance. They also cautioned Indians not to imitate the West, take its language and its values. India has to work out its own salvation in its own terms – its tem-peraments, traditions and circumstances. This set of ideas framed sociological language in India and can be best seen in the work of G.S. Ghurye (1893–1983), the ‘father’ of Indian sociology, who was the Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Bombay, for 35 long years and trained most of the next generation of sociologists in India.
He used an Orientalist methodology to discuss indigenous concepts that organized Indian traditions: such as caste, tribe and family system and Hinduism3 (Patel, 2013a, 2013b). Even today, his theories are considered to have foundational implications for the study of Indian society. How did he understand civilization and how did this affect the sociological study of India?
For Ghurye, culture and civilization were understood as being the same: as a complex of ideas, beliefs, values and social practices (Upadhya, 2002: 44). His work rarely mentions any material practices. He eschews any discussion on livelihoods, control over resources or classes. Briefl y, Ghurye argued that India was a civilization. He suggested that Indian civilization drew its unity from Hinduism and that Brahminism, and its ideas and values provided the core values of this Hindu civilization. Brahmins were considered ‘natural’ leaders, the torch bearers of this civilization and its
‘moral guides’. As a result, sociology in India was initiated with the Orientalist idea that the territory of the nation state is equivalent with its culture.
Ghurye reproduced a design of Indian society as it was represented in Orientalist language.4 Thus for him, Hindu civilization was structured around the caste system wherein if Brahmins were the most civilized, the tribals were the most backward. Other religious groups, such as Muslims, Zorastrians and Christians were deviants from this norm and needed to be assimilated into the Hindu fourfold system. The most diffi cult to assimilate would be the Muslims who were perceived to be separate from Hindus, in culture, ideas and values and who were responsible for the current social evils of India. Indian society was seen as a set of rules which all Hindus followed and Ghurye’s understanding of law was based on a compendium of Hindu laws. No wonder Upadhya can state that
Ghurye’s sociology adopted almost wholesale the Orientalist vision of Indian society as a Vedic civilization and ultimately of the ‘Aryan invasion’. And of Indian civilization as Hindu…. (Upadhya, 2002: 47) The third trend, the ‘modern-traditionalists’ framed the ideas of syncre-tism. The goal of modern-traditionalists was to understand the present and construct a social science language best suited to bring in transformation of the specifi c culture that they were studying: India. Unlike the traditionalists, they did not advocate the necessity to go back to the golden age; some of them even suggested that democracy has indigenous moorings. A focused critique to the traditionalist argument emerged in the work of the historian D.D. Kosambi,5 who critiqued the Indological6 assumption that India did not have a continuous history, that its history was a series of episodes, that the sources of this history can be located within the written texts rather than non-written sources and that culture and religion organize the unity of India’s territory, rather than its diverse material and ecological experiences. He inaugurated a paradigm shift from colonial and nationalist frameworks and the centrality of dynastic history to a new framework integrating social and economic history that related the cultural dimensions of the past to these investigations. Kosambi’s theories displaced the episteme of colonial modernity which coupled place/territory with cultural identity (India as civilization). This position together with his assertion that India had a long history allowed contemporary Marxists (henceforth) to wholly disregard the ‘culturist’ language that structured colonial and nationalist discourse.
For Kosambi, the history of ancient India cannot be extracted from texts written by ‘Brahmins’ and reconstructed during the colonial period as part of its project to codify ‘ancient Indian civilization’. Rather what was needed was the use of combined methods inputting linguistics, archaeol-ogy, anthropology and sociology together in the perspective of the materialistic social theory of history (Thapar, 2008). Third, Marxism was thus seen as a tool to assess and understand the material and environmental history. It was not perceived as an all pervasive ideology or a positivist theory that structured the debates of historical sociology. Given the phenomenal diversity of India, Kosambi completely rejected any unilinear sequence of ‘modes of production’ and argued for the simultaneous presence of several modes of production at any given time in India’s long history (Thapar, 2008).
Kosambi argues that this ‘diversity’ is part of a collective memory of the people of India. Oftentimes this is legitimized by using scriptures that elaborate theories of this ‘diversity’ and thereby allowed certain classes and the elite to relive these precepts as values and ideals. Instead, as a Marxist historian, he would argue that material conditions organizing ancient Indian civilization stagnated and died out, leaving only its ‘culturist’ memories in place. A society, according to Kosambi, is held together by bonds of production. The philosophic individual cannot reshape a mechanized world nearer to heart’s desire by the ‘eternal’ ideologies developed over two thousand years ago in a bullock-cart country (Kosambi, 1956: xiii).
Following him historians of ancient India have tried to demystify the ways in which the past was constructed by Indologists and then used as political ideologies. Thapar (1989) argues that contemporary manifestation of Hinduism has not emphasized, fi rst, the different premises that structured various religions in pre-colonial India. This implies that the Semitic model cannot be applied to India. Second, in the codifi cation of religion, texts received preference over other sources of understanding the religious expressions. Third, these expressions can be seen in the diversity of rituals that expressed religion rather than in its manifestation as theological texts. Fourth, the variety of non-textual sources attest to the fact that these diverse rituals were part of the groups who practiced popular religion called Sramanism rather than Brahminism. And lastly, both these religious expressions changed over space and time as state consolidation took place differentially across the sub-continent, this unevenness and thus practices that became institutionalized as being diverse characterized the experience of religion within pre-colonial India.
The Politics of Travelling Theory
Till now, the paper has suggested that Eurocentrism was a ‘episteme’ that needed to be contested and indicated how one historian in India was able to displace its coloniality. However, Eurocentrism is not only an ‘episteme’, it is also a way to organize the production, distribution, consumption and reproduction of knowledge unequally across the different parts of the world. The Malaysian thinker Syed Hussein Alatas (1972) and the African philosopher, Paulin Hountondji (1997), have discussed these as the ‘captive mind’ and ‘extraversion’ (or externally oriented knowledge), respectively. They argue that the syndrome of ‘captive mind’ and ‘extraversion’
can be seen in the teaching and learning processes, in the way the curriculum and syllabi is framed; in the processes of research: the designing of research questions and in the methods and methodologies being used; in the formulation of criteria adopted for accepting articles for journals and books, and ultimately in defi ning what and where one publishes and what is academic excellence. The argument here is that the trenches of this ‘episteme’ are deep and layered. Thus, this ‘episteme’ cannot be merely replaced through cognitive supplants of concepts, theories and methods, which was what the best of nationalist social science attempted to do.
The consequence of this dependence has been the ‘infantilization’ of scientifi c practices within the Global South regions. 7 Not only are these at an incipient stage of growth but this very condition also encourages brain drain and further intellectual dependencies. Additionally, an intellectual culture defi ned by northern social science is held out as a model for the rest of the world. It is backed by the sheer size of its intellectual, human,
physical, and capital resources together with the infrastructure that is necessary for its reproduction. This includes not only equipment, but also archives, libraries, publishing houses and journals; an evolution of a professional culture of intellectual commitment and engagement which connects the producers and consumers of knowledge; institutions such as universities and students having links with others based in northern nation-states and global knowledge production agencies. Farid Alatas has called this academic dependency. 8
This is also the history of many newly independent countries such as Nigeria, Brazil or South Africa. Scholars have noted some positive outcomes of this strategy, e.g. the growth of a nationally oriented intellectual infrastructure which include not only universities, research institutes and laboratories, but also journals, publishing houses, together with professional norms and ethics. However, it has also promoted varied but uneven intellectual traditions within different nation states and its professional orientation is very limited. More importantly this strategy has not been able to question that Eurocentrism is an episteme. Institutionalization under the aegis of the elite nationalist orientation has reproduced practices in place across the Global North.
The question that we need to address is how do we confront it?
Present Challenges
Since the late 1970s and particularly after the 1990s, the dynamics of the world have changed. At one level, the world has contracted. It has opened up the possibilities of diverse kinds of trans-border fl ows and movements, of capital and labour and of signs and symbols, organized oftentimes in intersecting spatial circuits. It is no longer north to south, and space no longer encapsulates culture at all points of time. While in some contexts and moments these attributes cooperate, at other times, these are in confl ict and contest each other. Thus, even though we all live in one global capitalist world with a dominant form of modernity, inequalities and hierarchies are increasing and so are fragmented identities. Lack of access to livelihoods, infrastructure, and political citizenship now blends with exclusions relating to cultural and group identity and are organized in varied spatial and temporal zones. Fluidity of identities and their continuous expression in unstable social manifestations and in new geographical regions demand a fresh perspective to assess and examine them. Not only do contemporary social processes, sociabilities and structures need to be perceived through new and novel spaces, prisms and perspectives but also it is increasingly clear that these need to be seen through new methodological protocols. As a consequence, should we not be in search of a new framework that moves beyond the 19th and early 20th century social science language and addresses the new challenges posed by contemporary processes?
Some social scientists have argued that the best way out of this epistemic and methodological diffi culty is to particularize the universals of European thought. Dipesh Chakrabarty, the historian of subaltern studies, has made a similar argument. He coined a new methodology called, ‘provincialization’, and suggested that its quest was the following: To “provincialize” Europe was precisely to fi nd out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from the very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim universal validity. (Chakrabarty, 2008: xiii) I would argue that we have to evolve a twofold strategy. On one hand, there is a need to deconstruct and provincialize Eurocentrism and make discrete its entanglements with casteist and patriarchal ideologies, imager-ies and dispositions in social science theories and practices. This is what Hountondji (1997) means when he advocates the need for endogenizing social science. Suggesting that all nationalist knowledge remain particularistic (he calls it ‘ethnoscience’) and thus part of the colonial and neo-colonial binaries of the universal-particular and the global-national, he presents a new alternative which he calls endogeneity. The latter appropriates and assimilates through a critical mind all international heritage available including the very process of scientifi c and technological innovation and then interfaces it with a critical assessment and re-appropriation of one’s heritage recognizing its adaptability and creativity. ‘This is not traditionalism, but the exact opposite’ (Hountondji, 1995: 9).
Much the same is suggested by Enrique Dussel through his conception of ‘transmodernity’. Dussel suggests a need for a new theory of modernity that simultaneously comprehends the dialectic of exploitation together with the epistemic subjugation and which excavates and builds new versions as these manifest themselves through an exterior reading of its history. ‘Trans’-modernity affi rms ‘from without’ the essential components of modernity’s own excluded cultures in order to develop a new civilization for the 21st century. In the context of India, this perspective implies a necessity to explore not only the pre-modern but also the way colonialism and later nationalism mobilized Brahminical and patriarchal visions together with social science practices which absented an analysis of the same to assess organized inequities and exclusions since the late 19th century.
This implies secondly a need to go beyond the ‘content’ of the social sciences, that is the explanations they offer and the narratives they construct shaped as they are by a genealogy that is both European and colonial. Rather, we need to analyse their very ‘form’ that is, the concepts through which explanations become possible, including the very idea of what counts as an explanation. Obviously, it is not possible to suggest that the social sciences are purely and simply European and are, therefore,
‘wrong’. Such an argument has little relevance given the fact that we are and remain within one world capitalist system. We cannot dispense with many of these categories, but it is important to recognize that they often provide only partial and oftentimes fl awed understandings. We need not reinvent the wheel; however, there is a necessity to generate explanations that are relevant for different contexts.
Notes
1 This chapter is based on earlier published work. See Patel, 2006, 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011a, 2011b, 2013a, 2013b.
2 Ghurye addresses the question of civilization in his Magnus opus, Caste and Race in India (1932).
3 The traditional nationalists suggested that India was a civilization and, thereby, borrowed and reinterpreted Orientalist knowledge to articulate an Indian version. The notion of civilization has a long history in Orientalism. In the late 18th and early 19th century, Orientalists generalized on the basis of the Greek and Egyptian civilizations. Later with the discovery of ‘Indian’ civilization, the study of India was absorbed into the existing discourse about antique civilizations. Early British Orientalists used Sanskrit texts to study this civilization and to place it within the linear theories of history. Some even argued that the high culture of Hindu civilization emerged from Greek infl uence. However, the traditional nationalists inverted this argument to suggest that Greek culture has learnt its science from India.
4 The chapter is, of course, not arguing that such discourses are limited to the theories of sociology in India and the integration of Orientalist thought with it. Ghurye’s perspective may be resonated in other theories.
5
Kosambi (1907–1966) was a mathematician who was an historian by choice.
Contemporary historians have argued that he has reframed Indian historiography (Gurukkal, 2008).
6 In India, Orientalist thought was defined as Indology, a fi eld that laid out the theory and methodology of the study of language, religion and history of India’s past through textual sources.
7 See the UNESCO report on the social science production in India, and Chatterjee (2003) on regional and Delhi-centric bias of Indian social science publishing.
8
Farid Alatas (2003) defines academic dependencies as having six attributes: (a) dependence on ideas; (b) dependence on the media of ideas; (c) dependence on the technology of education; (d) dependence on aid for research as well as teaching; (e) dependence on investment in education; and (f) dependence of Third World social scientists on demand in the West for their skills.
