Pioneers and Ghurye on tribes

Formal university teaching of sociology in India began in 1919 at the University of Bombay. In the 1920s, Calcutta and Lucknow universities also began teaching and research in sociology and anthropology. Today almost every major university has such a department.

Early Indian sociologists had to answer questions no one had asked before:

• Western sociology grew to make sense of modernity; India met modernity as a colony, so its modern experience was tied up with colonial rule.
• Western social anthropology arose from European curiosity about 'primitive' cultures; India was an ancient, advanced civilisation that also had tribal societies within it.
• What role could sociology play in an independent India about to begin planned development and democracy?

The 'accidental' pioneers. In the beginning, Indians often became sociologists and anthropologists by accident.

• L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937) was a clerk, then a school and college teacher in Cochin (present-day Kerala). In 1902 the Dewan of Cochin asked him to help with an ethnographic survey of the state; he worked unpaid as Superintendent of Ethnography at weekends. With no formal training in anthropology, he became probably the first self-taught anthropologist to win national and international recognition, helped set up India's first post-graduate anthropology department at Calcutta University (1917-1932), and was later invited to help with a survey in Mysore.
• Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942), a lawyer, went to Ranchi in 1898 to teach English at a mission school and stayed for 44 years, becoming the leading authority on the tribes of Chhotanagpur (present-day Jharkhand). He wrote famous monographs on the Oraon, Munda and Kharia and more than a hundred articles, and in 1922 founded the journal *Man in India*, the earliest of its kind in India and still published.

G.S. Ghurye (1893-1983) can be considered the founder of institutionalised sociology in India.

• He studied in Bombay, then at the London School of Economics and at Cambridge, where he was influenced by W.H.R. Rivers's diffusionist views.
• He headed India's first post-graduate department of sociology at Bombay University for 35 years (from 1924), combining teaching and research and merging sociology and social anthropology. The first Ph.D. in sociology at an Indian university was awarded under his supervision (1936).
• He founded the Indian Sociological Society (1951) and its journal *Sociological Bulletin* (1952). He wrote 30 books, 17 of them after retiring.

Ghurye on tribes. In the 1930s and 1940s there was a sharp debate about how India should treat its tribal communities. Ghurye's best-known opponent was Verrier Elwin.

• Many British administrator-anthropologists saw tribes as primitive peoples with a culture far from mainstream Hinduism, who would be exploited and lose their culture through contact with Hindu society. These 'protectionists' wanted the state to shield tribes and help preserve their way of life.
• Nationalists believed in India's unity and in modernising society. They thought preserving tribal culture kept tribes backward, as 'museums' of primitive culture.
• Ghurye, the best-known nationalist voice, called the tribes 'backward Hindus': he showed with detailed evidence that tribes had interacted with Hinduism for a very long time, and were simply further behind in the same process of assimilation all Indian communities had gone through. He argued that the ill-effects of development were not special to tribes but common to all backward and downtrodden sections.
• Example (new): the same debate continues today, for instance over whether a forest-dwelling community displaced by a mine should be helped to keep its way of life or helped to join the wider economy, and on whose terms.