Tracing the Origins: Early Sociological Beginnings in India

Sociology in India did not emerge from a single moment of academic inspiration. It grew, slowly and unevenly, out of a collision between colonial administration, nationalist awakening, individual curiosity, and the urgent need to understand one of the world’s most complex societies. The story of its early beginnings is one of accidental pioneers, institutional firsts, and visionary scholars who built a discipline almost from scratch – often without formal training, formal support, or even a clear map of where the field was headed.

The colonial context: where it all began
The “accidental” pioneers: Iyer and Roy
Establishing the first university departments
G.S. Ghurye: building the discipline from Bombay
The Lucknow school: Radhakamal Mukerjee and the “trinity”
Two schools, one discipline

The colonial context: where it all began

Long before sociology had a name in India, systematic observation of Indian society was already underway – driven largely by the needs of British colonial administration. When the British arrived in India, they encountered a society vastly different from their own, and that difference demanded documentation. The Asiatic Society, established in 1774 by Sir William Jones, became an early platform for publishing articles on Indian tribes and communities. Much of this early writing came not from trained anthropologists but from British administrators and missionaries who needed to understand and govern the people they ruled.

Among the most influential of these colonial-era scholars was Herbert Hope Risley, a British civil servant who arrived in Bengal in 1873 as an Assistant Magistrate. His posting to tribal areas sparked a lifelong fascination with Indian communities. Risley argued that the caste system was fundamentally a racial hierarchy, a theory that would prove enormously influential – and deeply contested. He was appointed Census Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India, using his anthropological frameworks to classify castes and tribes across the subcontinent. His multivolume work The Tribes and Castes of Bengal and later The People of India were landmarks in colonial ethnography, even as later scholars criticized them for reinforcing racial and caste-based divisions. Critics have pointed out that such ethnographic work institutionalized caste distinctions, making them more rigid and serving administrative convenience over social accuracy.

The decennial censuses beginning in the 1870s were particularly significant. They forced a systematic reckoning with India’s social categories, and the data they produced, however imperfect, became foundational raw material for the sociological and anthropological work that followed.

The “accidental” pioneers: Iyer and Roy

Some of the most important early contributions to Indian sociology came from people who never set out to be sociologists at all. L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937) began his career as a clerk, then became a schoolteacher, and later a college teacher in Cochin state in present-day Kerala. In 1902, the Dewan of Cochin asked him to assist with an ethnographic survey of the state – a task he took on voluntarily, working on weekends while continuing his teaching duties. His work was much appreciated by British anthropologists and administrators, and he was subsequently invited to conduct a similar survey in Mysore. Though he had no formal qualifications in anthropology, Iyer is considered likely the first self-taught anthropologist in India to win scholarly and academic recognition on a national and international scale. He was later appointed as Reader at the University of Calcutta, where he helped establish the first postgraduate department of anthropology in India, and was even awarded an honorary doctorate during a lecture tour of European universities.

Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942) had a similarly unlikely path. A lawyer by training, his professional work at the Ranchi courts required him to interpret tribal customs and laws – and that practical necessity ignited a deep scholarly interest in tribal society. During his career, Roy published over a hundred articles in Indian and British academic journals, along with monographs on the Oraon, the Mundas, and the Kharias communities. He founded the journal Man in India in 1922, the earliest journal of its kind in the country and one that continues to be published today. Both Iyer and Roy are rightly called “accidental anthropologists” – they stepped into a discipline that did not yet formally exist in India, with no institutions to back them up, and still left lasting legacies.

Establishing the first university departments

Sociology had its first formal institutional beginning in 1917 at Calcutta University, due largely to the efforts of philosopher B.N. Seal, though the subject could not sustain itself there. The more durable institutional start came in Bombay. Bombay University began teaching sociology through a government grant in 1914, and the Department of Sociology was formally established in 1919 with Scottish urbanist Patrick Geddes at its head.

Patrick Geddes was an unconventional choice – a Scottish urban planner and social thinker rather than a trained sociologist. He held the Chair of Sociology and Civics at Bombay University from 1919 to 1924, bringing with him an emphasis on the connections between place, people, and environment – what he called the “Place-Work-Folk” framework. His influence extended beyond Bombay: key figures in early Indian sociology, including both G.S. Ghurye and Radhakamal Mukerjee, credited Geddes with shaping their methodological thinking. By the 1920s, universities at Calcutta and Lucknow had also established programmes in sociology and anthropology, creating the institutional infrastructure for the discipline to grow.

G.S. Ghurye: building the discipline from Bombay

When the Department of Sociology at Bombay University was on the verge of collapse after Geddes’s tenure, it was revived – and transformed – by Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1893-1983). Ghurye was appointed Head of the Department in 1924 and served until 1959, and is now regarded as the real founder of organized sociology at Bombay. Before taking the role, he had trained at the London School of Economics and later at Cambridge under W.H.R. Rivers, gaining rigorous exposure to anthropological fieldwork methods.

Ghurye is widely called the “Father of Indian Sociology,” and the title is well-earned. He blended Indological sources – the Vedas, Smritis, Puranas, and classical epics – with contemporary social science theories to produce a distinctly Indian perspective on topics such as caste, race, tribes, family, and religion. His landmark book Caste and Race in India provided a systematic sociological analysis of one of India’s most complex social institutions, moving well beyond simple description to examine how the caste system functioned and how it was changing. Over his long career, Ghurye guided 80 research theses and authored 32 books, as well as founding the Indian Sociological Society and its publication, the Sociological Bulletin.

His greatest institutional contribution was perhaps his role as a teacher and mentor. He trained a generation of sociologists – including figures who would later define the discipline in entirely new directions – creating what amounts to a genuine intellectual lineage for Indian sociology. However, Ghurye’s legacy is not without criticism. His Hindu-centric framework has been critiqued for overlooking the contributions of Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and Adivasis, and his treatment of caste as a stabilizing institution has been accused of downplaying its deeply exploitative dimensions.

The Lucknow school: Radhakamal Mukerjee and the “trinity”

While Bombay developed under Ghurye’s direction, another major center was taking shape in the north. In 1921, Radhakamal Mukerjee was appointed the first Chair of Sociology at the University of Lucknow, when its Department of Economics and Sociology was created. He would go on to shape what historians call the “Lucknow School” of sociology, alongside colleagues D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar – a trio often referred to as the “Lucknow triumvirate.”

Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968) brought a uniquely transdisciplinary vision to sociology. His thinking was deeply influenced by Brajendranath Seal, who lectured on comparative sociology, and by Patrick Geddes, from whom he absorbed ideas about regional planning and the interconnections between environment, function, and social organism. Mukerjee began his career with a grounding in economics, conducting micro-level analyses of rural land problems, population challenges, and the conditions of India’s working class. His work on agrarian conditions in Oudh in 1929 was a pioneering study that should have set the agenda for rural sociology in India far earlier than it did.

What set Mukerjee apart was his insistence that social reality could not be broken into disciplines. He argued that the distinction between economics, sociology, and culture was fundamentally false, and that human institutions formed an invisible unity of the individual, society, and values. He wrote around 53 books across sociology, economics, ecology, and cultural theory, and played significant roles internationally – including serving as a member of India’s delegation to the World Food Council in Washington in 1947. His ideas on social ecology resonate today with contemporary concerns about environmental sustainability and postcolonial identity.

Like Ghurye, Mukerjee faced criticism. His reliance on Indian mysticism and spiritualism was seen by some as romanticizing tradition, and Marxist scholars like A.R. Desai argued his framework gave insufficient weight to material inequalities and class conflict. Nevertheless, scholars like philosopher Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan praised Mukerjee’s attempt to base his thinking on Indian tradition while insisting that sociology must engage with questions of human values.

Two schools, one discipline

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, Indian sociology was essentially defined by two university departments – Bombay under Ghurye, and Lucknow under its trinity of Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji, and D.N. Majumdar. These two centers represented genuinely different intellectual orientations. Bombay leaned toward Indological methods, emphasizing fieldwork and classical texts. Lucknow was more interdisciplinary and theoretically eclectic, blending economics, ecology, and cultural analysis. Together, they mapped out the intellectual terrain that later Indian sociologists would explore, contest, and build upon. By 1984, India had over 50 university departments of sociology – a dramatic expansion from those two initial centers in 1919.

What makes the early history of Indian sociology particularly striking is the diversity of paths that led scholars into the field – British administrators documenting a society they governed, accidental fieldworkers like Iyer and Roy who stumbled into anthropology through professional necessity, and trained scholars like Ghurye and Mukerjee who deliberately set out to build a science of Indian society. These different entry points produced different blind spots and different insights, and together they gave early Indian sociology both its richness and its complexity.

What do you think? Given that early Indian sociology developed partly in response to colonial rule, how much did the colonial context shape what questions scholars chose to ask – and whose experiences they left out? And as Indian sociology borrowed from both Western social science and classical Indian texts, what might have been lost or gained in that process of integration?

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Table of Contents

The colonial context: where it all began 🔗

The “accidental” pioneers: Iyer and Roy 🔗

Establishing the first university departments 🔗

G.S. Ghurye: building the discipline from Bombay 🔗

The Lucknow school: Radhakamal Mukerjee and the “trinity” 🔗

Two schools, one discipline 🔗