Sociology in Post-Independence India: Evolution and Professionalization

When India gained independence in 1947, it inherited more than a colonial administrative structure – it inherited a deeply contested intellectual legacy. Sociology and anthropology, the very disciplines meant to understand Indian society, were viewed with suspicion by many in the new nation. They had spent decades serving colonial interests. What happened next – the slow, sometimes painful, but ultimately significant professionalization of sociology in independent India – is a story worth understanding in detail.

A discipline born in colonial service 🔗

To understand sociology’s post-independence trajectory, you have to reckon with what came before. The origin of sociology and social anthropology in India is directly tied to British colonial administration. After the revolt of 1857 exposed how little the British understood about Indian society, ethnographic studies took on urgent importance. Scholars like Herbert Risley documented caste, tribes, and customs – not out of academic curiosity alone, but to provide the colonial state with tools for governance and control.

This history left a lasting mark. Indian society and culture became, in the words of scholars, a testing ground for colonial theories – on religion, land tenure, poverty, village organization, and racial hierarchies. The knowledge produced was useful for British rule, but it was shaped by external, often distorted perspectives on what India was and how it worked.

Formal teaching of sociology in Indian universities began only in the second decade of the twentieth century – at the University of Bombay in 1914, Calcutta University in 1917, and Lucknow University in 1921. Even then, there was no independent department of sociology anywhere. At Bombay and Lucknow, it was grouped with economics; at Calcutta, with economics and political science; at Poona, with anthropology; and at Mysore, with philosophy. Strong scientific and empirical traditions had not emerged before independence, and sociology was considered a mixed bag without a proper identity of its own.

The slow emergence of autonomous departments 🔗

Independence in 1947 did not immediately transform sociology’s institutional standing. Change came, but gradually. Prior to 1947, only six universities were teaching sociology at all, and none had a dedicated, standalone department. The discipline remained bundled with other social sciences, and its practitioners were often trained in economics, history, or philosophy before turning to sociological questions.

After independence, the picture began to shift. New sociology departments were established at the University of Delhi, Banaras Hindu University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University. Specialized research institutions also emerged – the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) were created to support sociological research and connect it to policy. These were meaningful steps, but the process was slow and uneven. Economics and political science continued to dominate policy circles and command greater institutional prestige. Sociology had to assert its relevance in a climate where development planning – not social inquiry – was the state’s priority.

Policymakers of independent India pursued goals of economic regeneration and social development, and they defined the new task of sociology as social engineering and social policy science – a framing that pulled the discipline toward applied, state-sponsored research rather than critical or theoretical inquiry. Significant external funding from bodies like the Ford Foundation also steered many sociologists toward community development research, reinforcing this policy-oriented direction.

The shadow of colonial association 🔗

Perhaps the most significant challenge sociology faced in post-independence India was not institutional – it was reputational. Because sociological and anthropological knowledge had been so closely tied to colonial governance, many in the new nation regarded the discipline with outright suspicion. If ethnography had helped the British document and categorize Indians in order to rule them, what place did it have in a free India?

This was not a paranoid concern. As scholar Pathy argued, anthropology was shaped by and partly existed to serve colonial expansion, and its post-independence existence was to some extent conditioned by neo-colonial interests. The funding patterns, the choice of research themes, and the theoretical frameworks – especially structural functionalism, which dominated early post-independence Indian sociology – tended to analyze Indian society as a stable, functioning system rather than one marked by inequality, exploitation, and the need for structural change.

This meant that the discipline inherited not just colonial-era methods and data, but also colonial-era blind spots. The methodological frameworks of early Indian sociology were shaped by colonial administrative agendas, with epistemological biases rooted in caste hierarchies that often left Dalit, minority, and women’s perspectives at the margins. Rebuilding the discipline’s credibility meant grappling honestly with this inheritance – a process that took decades and remains ongoing.

Key scholars and the turn toward indigenous inquiry 🔗

Despite these constraints, several pioneering scholars worked to establish sociology as a distinct, intellectually serious discipline rooted in Indian realities rather than colonial categories.

G.S. Ghurye and the Bombay school 🔗

G.S. Ghurye succeeded Patrick Geddes at the University of Bombay in 1924 and is widely regarded as the founding figure of Indian sociology. Over a 35-year career, he guided around 80 research theses and authored 32 books. His Indological approach drew on Sanskrit texts, ancient history, and epics to understand caste, kinship, tribes, and religious culture. He also founded the Indian Sociological Society in 1951 and launched the journal Sociological Bulletin, giving the discipline its first formal professional infrastructure. His students – including M.N. Srinivas, Iravati Karve, and A.R. Desai – went on to shape Indian sociology for generations.

That said, Ghurye’s approach was not without criticism. His sociology adopted an Orientalist vision of Indian society rooted in Vedic civilization, and later scholars argued that his framework reflected upper-caste assumptions that silenced Dalit and minority voices. His work illustrates both the achievements and the limitations of early Indian sociology.

M.N. Srinivas and the field view 🔗

M.N. Srinivas attempted to break from earlier text-based methods through his emphasis on direct fieldwork – what he called the “field view” as opposed to the “book view.” His studies of village communities in Coorg and his concepts of Sanskritization, dominant caste, and Westernization became central to how Indian sociologists analyzed social change. Srinivas insisted that understanding Indian society required living within it, not interpreting it from a distance through historical texts alone.

D.P. Mukerji and the Lucknow school 🔗

D.P. Mukerji’s sociology tried to merge traditionalist and modernist concerns, developing what he called a sociological language based on Indian conditions and civilization. He was acutely aware of the country’s poverty and colonial exploitation, and he asked a fundamental question: what kind of social science language could genuinely address India’s problems? His work at Lucknow, alongside Radhakamal Mukherjee and D.N. Majumdar, built a school of sociology that was attentive to agrarian conditions, economic relations, and the lived realities of workers and peasants.

Professionalization: what it looked like in practice 🔗

The markers of sociology’s professionalization in post-independence India were concrete. Beyond the founding of the Indian Sociological Society in 1951, R.N. Saksena organized the first All-India Sociological Conference in 1956, and the two organizations merged in 1967 into a single all-India professional body of sociologists. University departments multiplied. Graduate and then undergraduate courses were introduced across the country. By the 1990s, some Indian states had even introduced sociology at the higher secondary school level.

According to sociologist Rao, the post-independence period reflected three key changes: sociology achieved greater academic status; it established its own identity by separating itself from psychology, anthropology, social philosophy, and social work; and it developed a diversified curriculum spanning rural and urban sociology, kinship, religion, education, stratification, and social demography.

Research interests also broadened significantly. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the focus had shifted from descriptive single-village studies to comparative, analytical work across time and space. Women’s studies grew substantially. Scholars began working on education, urban sociology, social movements, voting behavior, and the sociology of medicine and law. The discipline was no longer the colonial tool it once risked becoming – it was actively examining power, inequality, and social change within Indian society.

Continued work on fundamental social institutions 🔗

Throughout this period of institutional development, scholars continued what is arguably sociology’s most enduring task in India: making sense of the country’s foundational social institutions. Caste, family, kinship, religion, tribe, village community, and gender – these remained core concerns. What changed was the approach. Where earlier scholarship had often treated these institutions as static structures to be described and catalogued, post-independence sociologists examined them as living, contested, and changing realities.

Research on caste and stratification continued, but the approach shifted from functional to conflict perspectives. Descriptive studies gave way to analytical comparisons of social structure across different contexts and time periods. The sociology of peasant movements, industrialization, gender, and urbanization reflected the actual transformations Indian society was undergoing – not just the theoretical frameworks imported from Europe or America.

The tension between using Western sociological frameworks and developing indigenous ones that could better capture India’s social realities became a defining debate in this period. The Indological tradition, which studied Hindu ideology, values, institutions, and cultural norms through classical texts, had been shaped partly in reaction to the Eurocentric categories imposed by colonial scholarship. But this same tradition could also narrow the scope of inquiry, privileging Hindu upper-caste perspectives while marginalizing the experiences of Dalits, minorities, and women. Pushing sociology toward a genuinely inclusive understanding of Indian social life remained – and remains – an unfinished project.

The weight of economics and political science 🔗

One structural challenge that shaped sociology’s development in independent India was its subordinate position relative to economics and political science. These disciplines had a clearer and more direct connection to the state’s developmental agenda. Five-year plans needed economists; electoral politics needed political analysts. Sociology occupied a more ambiguous space – important for understanding social texture, but harder to fit into the framework of national planning.

This meant that for much of the early post-independence period, sociological research was either conducted under the umbrella of economics or shaped by the priorities economics set. The research focus was largely conditioned by the Indian state’s policy of centralized planning, which needed information for designing social and economic policies – and in that context, economics occupied the dominant position. Sociology often followed rather than led.

Only as the discipline accumulated its own institutional infrastructure – departments, journals, professional bodies, research centers – did it begin to assert a more independent intellectual identity. And even then, the influence of economics and political science on the questions sociologists asked, the methods they used, and the audiences they wrote for remained considerable.

A discipline still finding its footing 🔗

What the post-independence history of Indian sociology shows is that professionalization is never just an academic affair. It is shaped by colonial legacies, state priorities, international funding flows, and the political economy of knowledge itself. Indian sociology emerged from a colonial encounter, struggled to shed the suspicion that entailed, and gradually built the institutions and intellectual traditions needed to ask genuinely critical questions about Indian society.

The work of scholars like Ghurye, Srinivas, D.P. Mukerji, Iravati Karve, and A.R. Desai was foundational – not because they answered all the right questions, but because they took seriously the task of understanding India from within, on its own terms, even when the frameworks available to them were imperfect. That commitment to rigorous, grounded inquiry is what made post-independence Indian sociology worth building – and worth continuing to refine today.

What do you think? Given that sociology in India developed partly under colonial influence and partly in reaction to it, how should Indian sociologists today approach the tension between global theoretical frameworks and locally grounded methods? And do you think the discipline has done enough to center the experiences of marginalized communities – Dalits, Adivasis, women – in its mainstream scholarship?

References

1. https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/development-of-sociology-in-india/35016
2. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/indian-sociology
3. https://rajras.in/development-sociological-thought-india/
4. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp4/chapter/49/
5. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/c40863a9-a115-4350-8721-777622d82d75-MECA.pdf?abstractid=6034534&mirid=1
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._S._Ghurye
7. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40711-020-00140-9
8. https://www.dpublication.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ICRSH159.pdf
9. https://ijsdr.org/papers/IJSDR2010004.pdf