Assignment Code: CSO-004/AST/TMA/2022-23

Course Code: MSO-004

Assignment Name: Sociology in India

Year: 2022-2023

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Answer any five-question selecting at least two from each Section. Your answer should be in about 500 words each.

Section-I

Q1) Describe and discuss the socio-historical background of the emergence of Sociology in India.

Ans) Sociology is a social science that focuses on people. So, even when it tries to make broad statements about how people are connected, it must take into account the different ideas and ideals, values and goals, problems and dilemmas of specific groups of people in specific times and places. Because of this, sociology doesn't really fit the mould of a natural science, and the way sociology has changed in different countries has been affected by certain historical events and cultural settings.

Even now, people in India don't know much about sociology, so it's hard to talk about an Indian tradition. However, you could talk about a German or American tradition. This is mostly because Indian sociologists haven't come up with their own ideas, methods, and theories. Instead, they've taught and done research based on those used in the West. Sociologists rarely do work in this area that is different from what physicists, biologists, or even economists do.

Sociologists have a different kind of reason for being worried. In the human sciences, facts, ideas, methods, and hypotheses are not related in the same way as they are in the natural sciences. Andre Beteille points out that when an Indian physicist comes up with a general rule or principle, like the Saha Equation or the Chandrasekhar Limit, he thinks that physicists all over the world, not just in India, will use it.

True, Indian sociologists didn't have to fight as hard as their European counterparts did in the 1800s to prove that sociology was a valid intellectual field, because they already knew about Western sociology and its basic ideas and categories. But they forgot that sociology in the West was an intellectual and cognitive response to the problems that society was facing because of industrialization and the kind of social upheaval and revolution that was happening. They put too much faith in the Western explorers.

Sociology started in India because Indians didn't agree with how the West saw their society and culture, especially after the British took over India and made it a colony. Like sociology, anthropology has changed a lot because of how Europeans colonised the world over the past three or four hundred years. Since they had to rule over people from many different races and cultures, European kings felt compelled to learn about the lives and cultures of the people they ruled.

The colonial masters were just as interested in learning about Indian life and culture as the rest of the West was. This was the start of sociology and anthropology in India. It is undeniable that later, honest scientific research improved both fields, and that this happened in the context of modernity in the West. But you can't ignore the fact that sociology in this country started out in a colonial setting. Sociology in this country often looks like it came from Western sociology because it doesn't take into account this dual aspect of the environment in which it grew.

Q2) Discuss with suitable examples the major research trends in Sociology in India.

Ans) Since the 1960s, interests and specialisations in important areas of study and education have continued to grow and change. M.S.A. Rao says that village community studies were the focus of most research before sociologists and social anthropologists started to pay more attention to things like agrarian relations, land reforms, peasants, agricultural labourers, scheduled castes, and tribes. Reviewing the 1970s could be done in three ways: by looking at areas of interest and specialisation that become well-known, at areas of interest that are new but not yet well-known, and at new ways of doing things in well-known fields.

In the 1970s, a lot of specialised research was done on the social structure of rural areas and on the lives of peasants. These studies were different from other village community research because they focused on caste and how well the village worked together. But there were still sociologists who were interested in studying rural areas. Some sociologists became interested in the study of peasant movements, which has a lot to do with the field of peasant studies. Agrarian history has been very interesting to both sociologists and historians. But the study of peasant movements is only a small part of the larger study of social movements, which came together in the 1970s. Studies have been done on many different kinds of movements, like those of the poor and of religious groups.

N.R. Sheth and P.J. Patel have written books and articles about industrial sociology that show how the field is growing. Studies have been done on industrial relations and labour unions. Industrial sociology is taught at the M.A. and M.Phil. levels in a few university departments. Because people thought that most Indians lived in the country, urban sociology in India had been ignored for a long time. But in the 1970s, it became more important. Sociologists and social anthropologists were interested in issues like people moving from the country to the city, the growth of cities, and slums. Researchers have looked at urban sociology from many different angles, such as rural-to-urban migration, neighbourhood demography, slums, stratification, education, conflict between different ethnic groups, etc.

In the 1970s, people paid a lot of attention to and studied social stratification. In the 1970s, many investigations were published, such as those by Andre Beteille, Yogendra Singh, and Victor D'Souza. In the 1970s, a number of studies on elites came out. Social stratification is a common sociology topic that is taught in almost all universities and colleges. During this time, many studies were published in a wide range of fields, such as sociology of development, sociology of education, and so on. There are now many new areas of study, such as the study of women, medical sociology, sociology of organisations, and the sociology of professions.

Sociologists and social anthropologists have looked at the caste and stratification systems from many different angles. In the 1950s, political changes in India, the effects of community development programmes, Panchayati raj, democratic decentralisation, and many other things had a wide range of effects. Sociologists and social anthropologists in India wanted to know how these changes might affect social structures in both rural and urban areas. Studies about the caste system and the order of power in rural society began to move to the front of the stage.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a new wave of sociological research in the field of rural sociology. The new interests centred on how land reform policies put in place after independence had changed the social structure of rural areas in big ways. The new trends focused more on the emergence of new contradictions in rural areas, class divisions among peasants, and social mobility among different rural strata. Analytical tasks were moved from the "micro" level to the "macro" level by this new pattern.

Q3) Define the concept of caste and discuss the colonial perspective on caste with suitable examples.

Ans) Caste is a type of social stratification that includes endogamy, the passing down of a way of life that often includes a job, ritual rank in a hierarchy, customary social contact, and exclusion based on cultural ideas of purity and contamination. The Hindu society in India, with its strict social divisions that go back to ancient South Asian history and still exist today, is a good example of an ethnographic norm. Sociologists and anthropologists have paid a lot of attention to the Hindu caste system, and sometimes they use it as a way to study social differences that are similar to castes but don't come from Hinduism or India. In "eusocial" insects like ants, bees, and termites, groups based on how they look are also called "castes."

Colonial Perspective on Caste

Hinduism before British colonialism will be looked at in terms of how it developed from the Indus Valley, how it got along with Islam, and how it worked as a religion. The Sanskrit language will also be shown to bring people together. To show that there was no large, unified, self-governing "Hindu" religious group before the British took over, you have to look at Hinduism before they got involved. This would support the idea that the idea of a single Hindu religion was mostly made up by British colonialists at some point in the past.

Professional historians and linguists like Nicholas Dirks, GS Ghurye, Richard Eaton, David Shulman, and Cynthia Talbot have looked at royal court documents and traveller accounts from before colonisation. They have found little or no written evidence of caste. Social identities were always changing. "Slaves," "menials," and "merchants" became kings; farmers became soldiers, and soldiers became farmers; one's social identity could change as easily as moving from one village to another; there is little evidence of systematic and widespread caste oppression or mass conversion to Islam as a result. All the evidence we have points to a fundamental rethinking of social identity in India before it was colonised. With a convenient ideology and an absurd (and changing) method, the colonisers used the census to simplify, categorise, and define what they barely knew.

During a time that roughly spanned the 19th century, the colonisers made up or created Indian social identities based on convenient categories. This was done to help the British Indian government, which wanted to create a single society with a common set of laws that was easy to run. A very large, complicated, and regionally different system of religions and social identities was simplified in a way that probably has never happened before in the history of the world. This was done by making completely new categories and hierarchies, putting together parts that didn't go together, making new boundaries, and making flexible boundaries harder.

Over the next century and a quarter, the made-up categories became linked to real rights, making the system of categories more rigid. In British India, voting was based on religion, and in independent India, reservations were based on caste. This made vague categories more clear. Being in one group (like the Jain or the Scheduled Caste) instead of another came to have real, physical effects. As it turned out in India, categorising was a matter of fate. The large amount of research done in the last few decades makes it clear that the British colonists wrote the first and most important version of Indian history.

Section-II

Q1) What are the major agrarian classes in India? Discuss with reference to the contributions of different Sociologists.

Ans) Traditional Indian society was built around the idea of castes. The rules of the Jajmani system made it possible for farmers to work together. In the years after independence, the Indian State took steps to modernise and build up the country, which hurt the traditional social structure even more. Even though caste is still a big part of Indian society today, it is not as important as it used to be as a way to organise the economy. Even though the traditional cultivating caste groups still own most of the farmland in India, the rules of the caste system about how they should treat landless labourers are no longer in place.

Thorner suggested that India's farmers be put into different class groups based on three factors. First, the kind of money that land brings in. The second thing is what kind of land rights are held. Third, the amount of work that was actually done in the field. Based on these traits, he came up with the following model of India's agrarian class structure.

1. Maliks, whose main source of income is from owning land, all want to keep rents high and wages low. They get rent from renters, subtenants, and sharecroppers.

2. Kisans are peasants who work hard and mostly use their own labour and that of their family members. They own small plots of land. Compared to the Maliks, they control much less land.

3. Mazdoors, who don't own their own land and depend mostly on their work as wage workers or as sharecroppers with others.

Students who study India's agrarian transition haven't been too happy with how Thorner describes the agrarian population. The growth of capitalist relationships in the agricultural sector of the economy has also changed the way classes used to work. For example, most of India's provinces are now run by Malik farmers who are business-minded. In a similar way, most mazdoors who don't own land or who work as sharecroppers have started working as wage labourers. Also, contrary to what some Marxist scholars thought would happen, the development of capitalism in agriculture has not led to the kind of differences between peasants. On the other hand, growers in the middle level have gotten bigger.

Students of India's changing agrarian social structure have found that dividing the agrarian population into five or six groups works better. All of these groups came from the Lenin-Mao schema, but when it comes to putting them into practise, they are always based on who owns the land, which also determines how they relate to other groups of people in the village and outside of it.

The top landowners are still around in different parts of the country. They own huge amounts of land, sometimes more than 100 acres. But, unlike ancient landowners, they do not always give their land to tenants and sharecroppers. Some of them run their farms in a way that is similar to how modern industry works, with a manager and paid workers. They make things to sell on the market. Their number as a percentage of all farmers has dropped by a huge amount over time. The country's less developed areas are becoming more and more aware of their existence.

Q2) Discuss the main features of middle class in India with suitable examples.

Ans) Many of the problems that the middle class brings to the attention of social scientists have a big city feel and a national scope. C. Wright Mills says that you can classify a city's population based on things like who owns property, what they do for a living, or how much money they make from either or both. Information on these bases, which isn't always just about the present, can include things like the origins, marriages, and jobs of people in a certain strata.

Depending on who does the interview, each person may be asked to rate themselves, the interviewer may rate each person intuitively, or each person may be asked to stratify the population and then give his opinion of the people on each level. According to Dahrendorf, there are four different ways to look at the situation of the new middle class. The first argument says that the new middle class is just a bigger version of the existing capitalist ruling class. This is because most middle-class jobs are structurally different from those that belonged to the ruling class in the past.

The second argument says that since neither class owns the means of production, they are more alike than they are different. Any feeling of belonging to the ruling class is just an illusion that will go away when the middle class realises that its interests are the same as those of the working class. A third point of view says that there is no middle class. Instead, there are two separate groups with different goals: white-collar workers, who are part of the proletariat class, and bureaucrats, who have power over the ruling class.

John Urry, who talks more about the rise of the middle class, says that Marx explained it in terms of a growing surplus that required a class or classes to consume more than they produced and an increasingly complex industrial structure that needed non-productive functionaries to support it. Urry, who was influenced by Marx, said that a historical look at how the middle class grew had shown that the market system had led to the rise of a very important middle class that did not own the means of production but had a powerfully favoured status in the workplace.

Most sociologists today think that economic factors are the most important way to divide social classes, just like Marx and Weber did. Anthony Giddens says that in an advanced capitalist society, there are three main classes. People could be put into the upper class, middle class, or working class based on whether or not they owned the means of production, had a good education or technical skills, or had the physical strength to do manual labour. Giddens says that you can tell who is in each of these classes by how they relate to the forces of production and how they make money in a capitalist society.

The functional perspective is a different way to look at class. It says that different professional incentives depend on how well society works. A different explanation is that power is a factor in professional incentives. This very simple explanation of what it means to be middle class brings up the "middle class in India." It's important to look at how the middle class in India has grown first