sociologists-from-india

"The opinions of best researchers in the matter of the age of the Ṛgveda differed not by a few centuries but by a few thousands of years."

"Now it is clear that the presumption of 200 years for each of the literary epochs in the birth of the Veda is purely arbitrary... it was strangely forgotten on how weak a footing the prevailing view actually stood...” (Ketkar 1987:272)"

"Intensive studies of individual tribes are very important and I think ASI (ie. the Anthropological Survey of India) will always help scholars studying tribal society in different parts of the country. We should not leave the study of Nadars of Tamil Nadu or Patidars of Gujarat to foreign scholars. We should study them ourselves. This is very very necessary particularly because their intellectual and political perspectives are different from our own."

"| want to assert this because nowadays under the influence of some theory of the other from the west we forget our basic task, which is to record the life of our people as truthfully, as honestly, as we can do."

"It has been said in recent times that alternative visions of the human future must derive their ideas of spontaneity and play from the child. Implied in this very proposal is the tragedy of Western adulthood which has banished spontaneity and play to a small reservation called childhood, to protect the adult world from contamination."

"While societies which have built upon the traditions of hyper-masculinity have conceived of adulthood as the ultimate in the human life-cycle because of its productive possibilities, many of the older cultures of the world, left out of the experience of the industrial and technological revolutions, refuse to see childhood as merely a preparation for, or an inferior version of, adulthood. Nor do they see old age as a decline from full manhood or womanhood. On the contrary, each stage of life in these cultures is seen as valuable and meaningful in itself. No stage is required to derive its legitimacy from some other stage of life, nor need it be evaluated in terms of categories entirely alien to it."

"For those who dare to defy the given models of defiance."

"Perfect adulthood, like hyper-masculinity and ultra-normality, has become the goal of most over-socialized human beings, and modern societies have begun to produce a large number of individuals whose ego-ideal includes the concept of adult maturity as defined by the dominant norms of the society."

"Childhood has become a major dystopia for the modern world. The fear of being childish dogs the steps of every psychologically insecure adult and of every culture which uses the metaphor of childhood to define mental illness, primitivism, abnormality, underdevelopment, non-creativity and traditionalism."

"Younger children do not often have the option of breaking out of the social or educational traps set for them. Their physical, emotional and socioeconomic vulnerability does not give them much chance of escape and they have to play out the institutional games devised for them. In many societies, by the time they gain social and economic autonomy, it is already too late for psychological autonomy; they continue to carry within them the passions, hates and loves of their earliest authorities."

"[I]n religious matters, the present-day Hindus are the descendants of the Indus valley people."

"Clearly, there has been no dip in the misdemeanor of men in all these years. There is still no difference between the man on the street and the man in the Supreme Court."

"Every idea worth its name will get exploited. I am not saying it is good. But it is not something we need to stress on, as long as it doesn't appropriate the language of our struggle."

"Among the academicians manipulatively shaping Dalit Studies, Gail Omvedt occupies a very important place. She is a sociologist from the University of California at Berkeley, and became an Indian citizen in 1983. She combines nineteenth-century colonial categories with Marxist subaltern constructions, seeing Indian culture as a creation by the upper castes to subjugate the lower castes for thousands of years. Anything that united Indians in their fight against colonialism is merely ‘high-caste symbols’. She attributes the attitudes of Aryan supremacy to even Mahatma Gandhi, saying that he ‘saw Aryans as his ancestors. As against what he saw as the evils of industrialism, he wanted to go back to an idealised, harmonious village society in which tradition ruled. This he called Ram Rajya’... While she argues against the Indian state and criticizes Indian industrialists, she favors globalization of the Indian economy in ways that would make India subservient to the West. Her former leftist colleagues analyzing her stand on globalization, find a striking continuity in her writings. They point out how she puts into the mouths of Dalits words of appreciation for British rule."

"Such a position authorizes Omvedt’s recent pro-liberalization stance: neo-colonialism and economic dependency are abstract, academic concepts irrelevant to the lives of the peasant masses. 140"

"“Islamic radicalisation is not a new phenomenon in Kerala, where Muslims account for 26.56 per cent of the total population or around 9 million people,” says Dr N.P. Hafis Mohamad, a sociologist and author based in Kozhikode. “When the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was established in 1977, a few students in Kerala joined it and the organisation had units in many campuses in the state. However, during the past four decades, only a tiny section within the community has opted for a radical path, while 99 per cent of Muslims in Kerala remained secular and contributed to the social-cultural-economic development of the state.”"

"Dr Mohamad, 65, who conducted an in-depth study on the migration of Kerala’s Muslims to radical path after 21 youths joined Islamic State territories in Afghanistan, feels that counter radicalisation efforts by the state have checked the problem effectively. “Less than 60 persons from Kerala have joined the IS, with another 100 from the Gulf. These numbers do not reflect the mindset of the majority of Muslims in Kerala. In fact, there is an effort by certain vested sects to brand Kerala as breeding ground of Islamic terror outfits to meet political targets. They paint the actions of a tiny section of people as the mindset of the community,” he points out. He adds that the fall of Afghanistan into hands of Taliban forces again triggers debate on the links between some of Kerala’s people with radical Islamic groups. “Gulf money, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the ban on SIMI led to the mushrooming of radical Islamic outfits in Kerala. Ex- SIMI members raised various platforms and recruited youths to serve their purpose,” he concluded."

"Science was woven into philosophical thought - The study and cultivation of exact sciences in India was a part of search for truth and reality. From Vedic times onwards, investigations into the realm of the spiritual included those of the physical. The whole of the philosophical literature is replete with and based on some of the tenets of science as we understand it today. It has been an unmitigated calamity for India that it were the philologists, both eastern and western, who became the first interpreters to her ancient Sanskrit literature. India's Sanskrit literature came to be interpreted in an apologetic tone and from the standpoint of the western achievements. Some of the sublimities of the Hindu thought, far ahead of the prevailing times, were considered as oddities belonging to primitive past. The great Orientalists were philologists, not philosophers. India was called the Bharat Varsha, the "country that embraces all in one bond," and she was selected to become the embodiment of that immutable, eternal, law of the universe, Santana Dharma - dharma is that which "holds together" - which makes the universes run in their orbits. It was this principle of dharma, synthesis, balance, harmonious relationship between various forces and factors, between various individuals and groups, that came to be the corner-stone of her civilization." "India has been known as the moksha-bhumi and karma-bhoomi, the Land of Liberty, spiritual and temporal, gained through service of fellowmen. India was not thought of as a bhoga-bhumi, a pleasure-resort for a single life-time allowed to the mortals. India is the only country in the world where civilization has revolved round this fundamental spiritual nucleus, where the greatest concentration of intellect has centered round the basic human problem of existence... In India, religion became scientific and philosophical; science received religious sanction and philosophic support, and philosophy became religious, with a practical bearing on the problems of daily life. Here lies the secret of India's uniqueness and greatness. India saw Reality as a whole; there was no partition walls in the world of the One. With this universality, humanity and sublime idealism India offered a challenge to time."

"The current welfare system cannot deal with the Covid-19 crisis. [...] During a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude, the need of the hour (and by now the days, weeks, and months) is to move to a demand-based system of relief and welfare, where those in need of food and cash, whether or not they are currently listed as beneficiaries, are able to reach out, ask for and access it. But this is in fact the complete antithesis of the current welfare system, which has been constructed by successive Indian governments. It also goes against some fundamental and longstanding assumptions. One, that we don’t have the . Two, that we don’t have the implementation capacity. And therefore, three, that we have no choice but to limit the beneficiaries in any given scheme through processes of enumeration, identification and authentication. The problem is that in the absence of strong, decentralised and responsive administrative capacity, these very processes of identification and verification exclude many intended beneficiaries at any given time. So, in practice, infrequently revised quotas mean that even those identified as legitimate beneficiaries must routinely be kept pending until others drop out or are bumped off the list."

"The lockdown and its humanitarian consequences have begun to fundamentally challenge the mind-set and modalities of India's welfare architecture. We can no longer afford to live with or simply look away from the exclusion 'errors' of the past. Many of the most painful and humiliating effects of the lockdown are likely to remain simply unacknowledged, let alone adequately accounted for or compensated. But, ensuring that people have enough food and cash to survive the crisis should remain non-negotiable. [...] The lesson we are learning now is that for India to actually release the grain to citizens, she requires the entire system to go against the grain of deeply entrenched state beliefs and practices. After decades of distrust, it’s time to cultivate some moral fibre."

"To understand why this welfare system persists, we need to acknowledge that at its root, targeting and its attendant exclusions are ultimately also justified and sustained by a sense of suspicion that implicates both the public and the state’s own functionaries. So, delivery is designed on the assumption that dominant local elites and intermediaries — who will otherwise use every opportunity to exploit the poor and while diverting and extracting entitlements and benefits — must be, at least in theory, excluded and bypassed. The poor themselves, even if materially deprived, are often cast as morally undeserving, susceptible to manipulation, expedient, and irresponsible (one only had to witness the discourse around Monday’s nationwide run on liquor stores for proof). And finally, that corrupt and rent-seeking bureaucrats and who only work the system rather than keep it working must have their discretion clipped. The result is a welfare architecture that is so invested in minimising errors of inclusion that it continuously chooses fiscal, bureaucratic and technological ‘solutions’ that systematically enable ‘errors of exclusion’ to multiply."

"The table for Bengal shows that the Chandal who stands sixth in the scheme of social precedence and whose touch pollutes, is not much differentiated from the Brahmin (…) In Bombay the Deshastha Brahmin bears a closer affinity to the Son-Koli, a fisherman caste, than to his own compeer, the Chitpavan Brahmin. The Mahar, the Untouchable of the Maratha region, comes next together with the Kunbi, the peasant. They follow in order the Shenvi Brahmin, the Nagar Brahmin and the high-caste Maratha. These results (…) mean that there is no correspondence between social gradation and physical differentiation in Bombay."

"Father Hermanns is particularly angry with a publication titled The Adivasis — So-Called by G.S. Ghurye, the great social scientist who had mapped the nasal indexes and skull indexes of all the communities in India. Speaking with authority, Ghurye rejects the motivated notion of “adivasi”: as the article’s title eloquently says, the so-called adivasis are not more adivasi than the targeted non- adivasis. Nearly all Indians are sons of the soil, and no one in India has any more right to call himself a true native than the next man. The pure race is a myth, a myth that has become frowned upon thanks to Hitler's terrible use of this myth. But in India, interested quarters continue to use this myth of “racial integrity”. Father Hermanns calls it an “aboriginal claim”, though it is in fact a Western notion attributed and taught to the tribals by the missionaries, because this myth has been serving them so well for over a century now."

"It is significant that the vast majority of the numerous publications on caste fail to mention Ghurye’s important work even in their biblography; as for Ambedkar, his explicit rejection of the AIT-cum-racial explanation of caste goes equally unmentioned in the copious pro-Dalit and Indian Marxist literature."

"But Ghurye was a great man, author of ten thousand pages on subjects as diverse as caste and costume, Shakespeare and sadhus.... Ghurye’s extraordinary productivity (his bibliography lists 30 books) reflected his mode of production. He dictated his later work, and careful study has shown that his basic theoretical stances did not change through- out his career. He remained faithful to Rivers’s diffusionism despite the parade of functionalism, structuralism, Marxism, and postcolonialism across the landscape of Indian sociology during his long life. Caste and Race is his best book, for it was written rather than dictated, and its argument is fresh and passionate in a young scholar’s mind. Had Ghurye written nothing else, this book alone would have made him an important figure."

"The recent five-judge bench Supreme Court judgment in Chebrolu Leela Prasad Rao and Ors v State of AP and Ors, shows us once again how little the 5th Schedule of the Indian constitution which is meant to protect adivasi rights is understood. The reasoning in the judgment – which struck down an Andhra Pradesh government order from 2000 providing 100% reservation for Scheduled Tribe teachers in of the state – moves perilously close to dismantling the entire edifice of the 5th Schedule. If 100% reservation for teaching jobs is not permissible, the next step will be for someone to argue against the ban on alienation of tribal land, or overturn the Samata judgment prohibiting mining leases being given to non-tribals in 5th Schedule Areas in undivided Andhra Pradesh. After all, both these ‘discriminate’ against non-tribals. As non-adivasis from other districts flood scheduled areas leading to clear demographic change, the clamour to do away with the protective provisions of the 5th Schedule is only getting louder."

"Judging by the continued over-representation of Hindu upper castes in gainful employment in this country, one might well say that the same has come to be fixed in a "highly unreasonable and arbitrary manner" and there is no rhyme or reason to the upper caste Hindu conviction that it is only they who have the natural right to rule over, provide justice to, or teach in this country, and that children of all other castes and religions must be grateful for the education and justice they get."

"[I]t is important to remember that when the law-making power of the governor under the 5th Schedule was discussed in the constituent assembly’s Sub-Committee on Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas, the concern raised was not whether s/he could or should make fresh law, but that this power should not be used undemocratically, exercised over and above the elected legislature. It is for this reason that a Tribes Advisory Council was created and the governor was required to refer matters to it. (Para 11b of the sub-committee report). In this case, the Tribes Advisory Council had concurred with the 100% rule. On the question it posed to itself – of whether the legislative powers of the governor under Section 5 of the 5th Schedule could override fundamental rights – the Supreme Court answered in the negative."

"The Supreme Court judgment came in response to an appeal by non-tribals against the majority 2001 high court judgment, which upheld the G.O. of 2000. The Supreme Court verdict essentially replicates the minority view in the high court in favour of non-tribals. The court framed four questions for itself: • the first deals with the power of the governor in 5th Schedule areas to make laws, and whether this can override Part III of the constitution or fundamental rights; • the second, whether 100% reservation is constitutionally permissible; • the third, whether the GO involves a classification under Article 16 (1) dealing with equal access to state employment, rather than under 16 (4) which provides for reservation; • the fourth, to do with the reasonableness of the eligibility requirement for reservation, i.e. continuous residence in the area since 1950. In answering each of the questions, sadly, the court shows itself unmindful of the realities of the country and the history of the constitution it has inherited."

"A standard view is that expressed by Justice S.B. Sinha in his (minority) judgment of the Andhra high court on the same issue in 2001, where non-tribal teachers are axiomatically assumed to be more efficient and meritorious (para 86); and “(f)or upliftment of the educationally backward people, it is necessary to impart education through teachers who are more informed and more meritorious regardless of their caste”(para 126). For the Supreme Court to say, “They are not supposed to be seen as a human zoo and source of enjoyment of primitive culture and for dance performances” (para 107 of Chebrolu) betrays a mentality that thinks of Scheduled Tribes precisely in those terms rather than as people with the right to define their own educational future. For far too long, education in India has been seen by the establishment as a ‘civilising’ mission designed to make adivasis and dalits into mental clones of the upper castes, even if they continue in their subordinate jobs. Merit is defined merely as efficiency in achieving this goal, rather than in terms of success in tapping indigenous ecological knowledge, preserving adivasi languages and culture and giving confidence to adivasi students by acting as s. Even though many adivasi teachers have also internalised this idea of non-tribal superiority, having hundred per cent adivasi teachers in Scheduled areas is a small step towards reversing this condescension."

"The Andhra Pradesh G.O. of 2000 was aimed at promoting education in tribal areas and addressing the problem of rampant teacher . As anyone even slightly acquainted with the problems of tribal areas knows, non-tribal teachers are often reluctant to travel to or live in remote adivasi hamlets. Another big problem is language. Many non-tribals, including lower government officials, have lived for years in tribal areas without feeling the need to learn tribal languages. At the primary level, mutual incomprehension between non-tribal teachers and tribal students hampers the basic education of children. The judges tell us that “It is an obnoxious idea that tribals only should teach the tribals” (para 133), but for far too long, the really obnoxious idea that has pervaded the educational system and is reflected in judgments like this one is that only non-tribals should teach tribals, to “uplift and mainstream” them because “their language and their primitive way of life makes them unfit to put up with the mainstream and to be governed by the s” (para 107)."

"'Every Hindu knew not only that he belonged to a particular caste but also that others belonged to other castes of whose respective places in a broader scheme of things he had some idea, whether vague or stereotyped. Hardly anything corresponding to this exited in the case of those we know today as tribes. The consciousness of the distinct and separate identity of all the tribes of India taken as a whole is a modem consciousness, brought into being by the colonial state and confirmed by its successor after independence."

"I must have been truly excited over those journeys, my heart yearning for the train to steam into Chandannagar station, for even after fifty years, I can still remember the name of every station on the route and in the correct order: Liluah, Belur, Bally, Uttarpara, Konnagar, Rishra, Serampore, Sheorapuli, Baidyabati, Bhadreshwar, Mankundu and then, finally, Chandannagar."

"'In this country, groups which correspond closely to the anthropologists' conception of tribes have lived in long association with communities of an entirely different type. Except in a few areas, it is very difficult to come across communities which retain all their pristine tribal character. In fact, most such tribal groups show in varying degrees elements of continuity with the larger society of India (...) In India hardly any of the tribes exists as a separate society and they have all been absorbed, in varying degrees, into the wider society of India. The on-going process of absorption is not recent but dates back to the most ancient times'. ... 'ethnically speaking, most of the tribes in present-day India share their origins with the neighbouring non-tribal population. India has been a melting-pot of races and ethnic groups, and historians and anthropologists find it difficult to arrange the various distinct cultural, ethnic and linguistic groups in the chronological sequence of their appearance in the sub-continent.'"