Discussant’s comment II: For and against an ‘Indian’ Sociology: A response to Marilyn Strathern’s ‘What’s in an argument?’

past? Rejecting this idea, they argued that reformers were often ‘desperately superficial’, and that it would be best to keep any reformist intentions outside the bounds of disciplinary sociology (Dumont and Pocock 1957: 22). Uberoi attacked the failures of this vision in his first line: ‘The aim and method of science are no doubt uniform throughout the world but the problem of science in relation to society is not’ (Uberoi 1968: 119). In a subtle move, Uberoi went on to distinguish ‘scientism’ from ‘science’. Scientism assumed that the aims and methods of science were separable; science understood that the problems of research in a new postcolony were not the same as those in the metropole. It was imperative then that any sociology of knowledge should link its aims to those of a recently decolonised society. Crucially, he took to task ‘false cosmopolitanisms’ that emphasised a widely and uniformly ‘shared point-of-view’ between the coloniser and colonised. While they appeared anti-colonial, these imaginations of a shared unified science carried on colonial harms by suppressing the need of a sociology conceptually responsive to Indian conditions. That is, the dependence created by a ‘scientific internationalism’ and global institutions cloaked the deepening dependence of Indian scholars on foreign ideas. Uberoi’s essay comprehensively dismissed the possibility that there could be a reciprocity of scholarly perspectives across a vast geopolitical divide. Much like Strathern’s diagnosis of the UN Working Group, Uberoi took to task jargon familiar to him at the time: ‘international anthropology’, ‘international exchanges’ and ‘two-way cross-cultural research’ (Uberoi 1968: 121). Rejecting such an ‘international anthropology’, Uberoi proposed a national approach.2 Uberoi’s radical critique was precisely the nightmare of fundamentally divergent sociologies that Dumont and Pocock had feared. At the same time, Uberoi’s position was immune to their challenge that such a flourishing of many sociologies would inevitably turn ethnocentric (such as Saran’s). In a characteristic manoeuvre, Uberoi embraced theories and methods that were not ‘home-grown’ in a strictly ethnic or geographical 2 While I have emphasised the national stakes as they appeared in the early issues of CIS, Uberoi’s claim does not predetermine the ‘nation-state’ as a determinant locus for different conceptual viewpoints. Indeed, in the present, one might argue that the continued marginality of Dalit scholarship in Indian sociology constitutes an ongoing manifestation of a problem that still demands a response. For and against an ‘Indian’ Sociology / 41 Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, 1 (2021): 35–44 sense (Uberoi 1974: 136). His project for an Indian sociology claimed for itself an independence of mind and spirit that was not dominated by dominant foreign theories. Such an independence could certainly lead to theories and concepts that originated in different geographies: the crucial thing was not the ethnic origins of a theory, but the freedom of will for Indian sociologists to draw upon those that suited the purposes of a sociology of and for India. He did not seek to claim an independent or unique method for Indian sociology but sought instead a ‘swarajist attitude’ to theories and methods. Such an independence of intellectual attitude would famously draw him both to Goethe and to structuralist theory as two lifelong interlocutors. It was the same independence of will that deepened the grounds of structuralist thought, as he joined Veena Das in domesticating it through Sanskrit grammar. In fact, this approach of taking up structuralism as simultaneously ‘indigenous’ and ‘international’ helped Das and Uberoi formulate a critique of Dumont’s famous Homo Hierarchicus in 1971. Towards conceptual independence By no means is this a comprehensive account of the debates around CIS in the 1960s.3 Rather, I have extracted one transitional moment that reveals deep divergences about what a sociology of India was and could become. I revive these debates and questions here to point to a longer history of the critique of seamless ‘knowledge exchanges’ that Strathern persuasively presents. CIS proves a generative site to think about knowledge exchange particularly because of its contentious history, as it transitioned from Anglo-French to Indian editorship. Staked in this exchange of ideas and ownership was the fundamental nature of sociological inquiry, as well as the question of who its legitimate producers could be. With some hubris, Dumont and Pocock had sought to set the agenda for ‘A Sociology of India’, not only by providing a new forum, but explicitly hoping to prescriptively define its basic ‘concepts’ and ‘facts’ (in their words). Under the unmarked guise of a collective, unsigned project, they attacked the very possibility of an anthropologist ‘native’ to the region they studied. Their disappointment that Indian sociologists did not flock to this project 3 See for examples of discussions of this period of the journal, Madan and Mayer (2018)