The 1970s were a turning point for Indian sociology. For decades, the discipline had been preoccupied with village studies – microscopically examining rural communities as the central lens through which Indian society was understood. But as India moved into the seventies, this focus began to crack open. A new generation of sociologists found themselves confronting a rapidly changing country – agrarian unrest, expanding cities, and deeply entrenched social hierarchies demanding fresh scrutiny. The research trends that emerged from this decade did not merely add new topics to the discipline. They fundamentally reshaped what Indian sociology was about.
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From village studies to broader societal questions
Prior to the 1970s, village community studies dominated sociological research in India. The village was treated as the ideal unit of analysis – self-contained and representative of Indian social life. But this framework was increasingly insufficient for understanding a society experiencing rapid industrialization, rural displacement, and political upheaval. The seventies saw a continued diversification of interests and specialization in substantive areas of research and teaching, with sociologists shifting focus toward agrarian relations, land reforms, peasants, agricultural labourers, and scheduled castes and tribes. This shift was not accidental – it was a direct response to what was happening on the ground in India.
The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) played a significant institutional role during this period, funding and sponsoring studies that pushed sociological inquiry beyond the village and into broader national questions. The discipline was maturing, and with that maturity came new theoretical tools, new areas of concern, and a growing willingness to engage with structural contradictions rather than simply describe cultural patterns.
Peasant movements: sociology enters the fields
One of the most consequential shifts in 1970s Indian sociology was the serious engagement with peasant movements. These were not abstract academic exercises – peasant and farmers’ movements emerged in the 1970s and gained further momentum in the 1980s, exposing newer contradictions of Indian agrarian society. Sociologists were compelled to take notice.
The problems of rural society were increasingly formulated within the Marxian framework of analysis, emphasizing conflicts and contradictions rather than the structural-functionalist consensus that had previously shaped much Indian sociological thinking. This was a significant theoretical departure. Where earlier studies of the Indian village had often focused on cultural integration and social cohesion, the new scholarship asked harder questions: Who owns the land? Who benefits from agrarian policy? And who is left behind?
A.R. Desai, from the 1970s onwards, conducted penetrating analyses of contemporary Indian class structure, documenting agitations and protests emerging in the countryside – including the growth of the Naxalite movement – alongside urban unrest such as the railway strike and protests against slum demolitions. Desai’s two-volume compilation on Peasant Struggles in India (1979) became a landmark text, bringing together detailed material on agrarian conflicts during both colonial rule and after independence. His work showed that peasant movements were not peripheral events but windows into the structural contradictions of Indian rural society.
The analytical focus on peasant movements also opened new questions about leadership, political organization, and the relationship between agrarian struggles and national democratic processes. Mass movements during this period included agitations by tillers and small peasants for fair prices and land rights, and tribal communities against displacement and to demand resources. For Indian sociology, documenting these movements was not just descriptive work – it was about understanding power, inequality, and the limits of post-independence development promises.
Urban sociology: the city as a site of inquiry
As peasant movements drew sociologists into the countryside, India’s rapidly growing cities created a parallel demand for sociological attention. Urbanization was accelerating, and with it came a host of new social problems that neither economists nor planners alone could address. Urban sociology was among the areas of interest that crystallized in the 1970s, marking a formal recognition within the discipline that cities were not just the backdrop to social life – they were major forces reshaping it.
A rich body of historical and sociological work in the 1970s and 1980s traced the emergence of urban centres from pre-colonial settlements or colonial economic and administrative imperatives, analysing continuities and ruptures in their industrial structures, labour politics, and sociocultural identities. These studies did not treat the city as a self-contained unit cut off from rural life. Instead, they examined how rural-urban connections – through migration, kinship, and cultural practice – shaped urban social organization.
The rural-to-urban migration that accompanied industrialization was a key research concern. Sociologist Ramkrishna Mukherjee examined patterns of migration to urban areas in West Bengal and Bihar, seeking to understand whether such movements reflected a rural-urban dichotomy or a rural-urban continuum. His analysis challenged simplistic assumptions about urbanization as a linear process of modernization and cultural replacement. The city, he argued, could not be understood in isolation from the agrarian world from which it drew its population.
Desai’s treatment of urban slums and their demographic problems, based on Marxist historical-dialectical methods, brought attention to the conditions of the urban poor – a population that colonial-era sociology and post-independence development discourse had largely overlooked. As cities grew, so too did their informal settlements, and Indian urban sociology in the 1970s increasingly had to grapple with poverty, displacement, and the limits of urban planning.
Social stratification: moving beyond caste as culture
Social stratification emerged as the third major research trend of the 1970s, and its development reflected some of the deepest theoretical debates within Indian sociology. The study of caste had long been central to understanding Indian society, but earlier approaches tended to treat it primarily as a cultural or ritual phenomenon. The seventies brought a more structural and critical lens – one concerned with how caste intersected with class, power, land ownership, and economic inequality.
Yogendra Singh, in his influential ICSSR Trend Report on the Sociology of Social Stratification (1974), noted that most existing studies had been preoccupied with describing the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of stratification, while the deeper theoretical question of ‘why’ – why do societies rank their members in particular ways, and how does that ranking change – remained largely unanswered. Singh’s critique pointed to a gap between descriptive empirical research and the kind of theoretical frameworks needed to understand stratification as a dynamic social process.
Yogendra Singh prepared multiple ICSSR trend reports on social stratification in 1974, 1977, and 1985, highlighting important theoretical and substantive issues including the nature of social order, social equality, and social justice. These reports were not simply surveys of existing literature – they were attempts to diagnose the state of the field and point toward more rigorous approaches. K.L. Sharma similarly contributed critical volumes exploring stratification through theoretical, ideological, and methodological dimensions, covering caste, tribe, ethnicity, class, power, and social mobility.
One of the central tensions in 1970s stratification research was the relationship between caste and class. The extent to which caste defined the fundamental structure of social stratification in India became a subject of contentious debates, with some scholars seeing caste as a representation of pure status based on religious and ideological grounds, while others emphasized the material dimensions of caste-based inequality. The decade did not resolve this debate – but it sharpened it considerably, producing a body of scholarship that refused to treat caste as a timeless cultural artifact and instead situated it within changing economic and political structures.
The main debates in sociological circles in India during this period were the tradition versus modernity debate and the rural versus urban debate, alongside the conceptual and substantive aspects of the social stratification debate. These were not isolated academic conversations – they were deeply connected to policy questions about reservations, land reforms, affirmative action, and the trajectory of Indian democracy.
New theoretical frameworks and interdisciplinary openings
What made the 1970s particularly significant was not just the emergence of new topics, but the adoption of new theoretical frameworks to study them. The Marxian framework – with its emphasis on class conflict, agrarian contradictions, and structural inequality – provided Indian sociologists with analytical tools that structural functionalism could not. The sociology of development in India emerged as an analytical tool during the 1970s for evaluating the impact of development interventions on forms of social organization and agrarian relations that had hitherto been shaped by rigid caste and religious boundaries.
This theoretical broadening coincided with growing institutional support for sociological research. Several studies directed by sociologists were financed and sponsored by agencies such as the ICSSR and UGC, with an increasing emphasis on examining processes of education as a vehicle of social change affecting the existing system of stratification, women, and less favored segments of the population. Interdisciplinary approaches also began to take root, as sociologists collaborated with economists, historians, and political scientists to address questions that no single discipline could handle alone.
The 1970s also saw new approaches and foci in the large areas of research and teaching such as caste, kinship, religion, politics, and tribal studies. Women’s studies began to gain ground as a recognized field of inquiry. Industrial sociology expanded. The discipline was no longer content to describe Indian society in terms of its traditional structures – it was increasingly asking how those structures were being challenged, reproduced, or transformed by the forces of modernity, democracy, and economic change.
The legacy of 1970s sociological research
The research trends of the 1970s left a lasting imprint on Indian sociology. By taking peasant movements seriously as subjects of academic inquiry, sociologists helped give intellectual legitimacy to the concerns of marginalized rural communities. By engaging with urban sociology, they recognized that India’s future could not be understood through a rural lens alone. And by pushing the study of social stratification beyond cultural description into structural analysis, they opened space for a more critical and politically engaged sociology.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, the growth of social movements of women, tribes, lower castes, and ethnic groups, along with insurgencies and the consolidation of new political formations, had an impact on sociological thinking – building directly on the analytical foundations laid in the seventies. The decade was, in this sense, a bridge between classical Indian sociology’s preoccupation with village life and tradition, and a more contemporary sociology willing to confront inequality, conflict, and structural change head-on.
The 1970s did not produce a single unified theoretical paradigm for Indian sociology. What it produced was something perhaps more valuable: a discipline willing to ask harder questions, explore new terrain, and take seriously the social realities of those – peasants, urban migrants, lower castes – whose lives had been largely absent from earlier sociological accounts of Indian society.
What do you think? How did the shift from village studies to research on peasant movements and urban sociology change the way Indian society understood itself? And do you think the theoretical tensions between caste and class in 1970s sociology have ever been fully resolved – or do they continue to shape debates in Indian social science today?
References
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