Sociology in India and its neighbours

Sociology in India. Colonial administrators and Western scholars often described the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient and outside history. Indian sociology had to correct this picture and show that Indian society had always been changing.

• In the West, sociology studied one's own modern society, while social anthropology studied 'simple', usually non-Western, societies seen as the other, through long fieldwork among them.
• In India there is no rigid divide between the two. As the sociologist M.N. Srinivas observed, in India 'the other' could be found 'literally next door': tribal communities, castes and towns lived side by side and changed together. Studies of tribes, villages and cities all became part of Indian sociology.

Scope. Sociology ranges from small interactions (a conversation between a shopkeeper and a customer) to large processes (national identity, global change). What makes it sociology is not the topic but how it is studied: looking at social relations, institutions and their links.

Sociology and other social sciences study overlapping ground but ask different questions:

• Economics studies production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, often with precise models. Sociology asks how social norms, values and relationships shape economic behaviour: what people buy, save or consider a 'good life'. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that a true economic science would count all the costs of the economy, including crime and suicide, not only the costs that businesses care about.
• Political science studied mainly government, power and political theory. Sociology studies how politics and the rest of society affect each other; political sociology studies actual political behaviour, such as how people vote and why.
• History traditionally studied the past, often kings, wars and dates. Sociology mostly studies the present or recent past and looks for patterns. Today social history studies ordinary life, customs, family and gender relations, so the two have drawn close.
• Psychology studies the individual: intelligence, memory, motivation, the nervous system. Sociology studies how groups and society shape behaviour. Social psychology sits between them. Durkheim's famous study of suicide left aside individual motives and used statistics to show how suicide rates differ between social groups.

Today methods are shared. Sociologists and anthropologists both use surveys and fieldwork, and both quantitative (counting) and qualitative (describing, interviewing) methods.

Example (new): how might different social sciences study a new metro line? Economics: its cost and effect on fares and jobs. Political science: how the decision was made. History: how the city's transport grew. Psychology: how commuters feel about crowding. Sociology: how it changes where people live, who mixes with whom, and women's freedom to travel.