• The debate on sociology in, of, and for India emerged in 1950.
• Sociology in India focuses on the professional activities of sociologists, particularly teaching sociology in India.
• Sociology of India concerns approaches to the study of Indian society, including researches on topics like caste, kinship, and village studies.
• In sociology of India, Western theories are applied in research, such as the structural-functional approach used by Srinivas and Dube.
• Sociology for India involves developing concepts and theories that are suitable for studying the Indian social reality(Oommen, 1986).
• There is a call for emancipation from colonial sociology.
• Even Dumont, a French sociologist who studied India, disagreed with the concept of inequality in caste, arguing instead for a hierarchy in the structure of Indian society.
• The need for decolonization of thoughts or deconstruction of Western approaches is emphasized.
• Issues for debate in the context of sociology for India include:
  • Emancipation
  • Indological sociology (book view)
  • Contextualization or Indigenization (Indianization, field view).
• These issues have been addressed in the discourse analysis, with the primary focus being on sociology for India.

Ideology, Theory and Methods in Indian Sociology

• India had colonial cognitive traditions and became an independent nation in 1947, providing a new context for sociology.
• A sociology of knowledge perspective requires examination of the continuity/discontinuity in colonial approaches, concepts, and methods.
• Yogendra Singh (1986) observes that the debate on whether sociology has universal concepts or refers to culturally cognitive styles is influenced by the legacy of colonialism in independent India.
• The current tension in Indian sociology is between:
  • The ‘Master Theory’ or ‘General Theory’ and conceptual schemes.
  • The universalism of concepts versus their particularism or contextuality.
  • The role of ideology in theory construction.
• Singh analyzed the debate on sociology for India, a theme that persisted from the 1950s to the 1980s.
• The debate on ‘Sociology for India’ began in the late 1950s and 1960s, with two main directions:
  • The first direction was initiated by Dumont and Pocock, grounded in a structuralist methodology.
  • They argued that Indian sociology should be a sociology of Indian civilization, with Indology and social structures articulating the principle of hierarchy.
• Dumont and Pocock defined ideology as a set of ideas and values, with a focus on hierarchy as the governing component of Indian social reality.
• F.G. Bailey (1959), in contrast, argued that Indian sociology should focus on empirical study of actual behavior patterns, social roles, and structures, rather than representations.
• The debate between Dumont/Pocock and Bailey was framed as a debate between particularistic versus universalisticparadigms in Indian sociology, though neither explicitly favored a particularistic sociology.
• Despite their intentions, Dumont’s ideas sparked a debate about whether Indian sociology should be particularistic.