How Surajit Sinha viewed Indian Anthropology? Strengths and Limitations (original) (raw)
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How Surajit Sinha Viewed Indian Anthropology? An Anti-critique
Indian Anthropologist article, 2021
The major objective of this article is to make a critical assessment of Surajit Chandra Sinha's view on Indian anthropology by using secondary sources in the libraries and internet. Surajit Sinha's (1926-2002) vision of Indian anthropology, particularly in post-colonial times is one of the least discussed themes among the anthropologists in India. Sinha held interesting but pessimistic views on Indian anthropology in his articles published during 1970-80. According to him Indian anthropology even after the independence of the country largely remained a 'Western apprentice'. He sharply pointed out the imitative nature of Indian anthropology and was not afraid to raise doubts about the theory of the 'Hindu method of Tribal absorption' propounded by his guru N.K. Bose. But Sinha too had his limitations in the same field. He not only emphasised Indian anthropology as a kind of colonial project like many Marxist and radical scholars, but also failed to discern the secular and nationalist trends in Indian anthropology ingrained in the works of his predecessors and teachers.
Hindu Anthropology in India: An Exploration
Article, 2020
In indian anthropology an idea exists a that an Indian form of Anthropology could be discerned in many ancient Indian texts and scriptures before the advent of a colonial anthropology introduced by the European scholars, administrators and missionaries in the Indian subcontinent. As early as 1938 Jogendra Chandra Ghosh in his interesting article Hindu Anthropology published in the Anthropological Papers (New series) no. 5 of the University of Calcutta tried to show that before 6th Century B.C. the Hindus innovated various measurements on human body and its parts, which in European terms may be called Anthropometry, an important branch of Physical Anthropology. Another later proponent of Hindu Anthropology was the famous anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose who acted as the secretary of Mahatma Gandhi and himself a committed nationalist. Bose in his earliest textbook entitled Cultural Anthropology published in 1929 made a novel attempt to show that the ancient Hindus in their scriptures classified the desires or needs of human beings into artha(economic), kama(sexual) and moksha (spiritual) almost in the fashion of later day functional anthropologists of the West. Bose probably held that the Hindus like the Western anthropologists had their own scheme of understanding human nature and behaviour which existed since long. The dominant discourse in Indian anthropology was saturated with a higher caste Hindu ideology. The ethnographic discourse generated by Tarak Chandra Das that recorded the counter processes of de-Hinduisation and maintenance of ethnic identity by the economically and socially subjugated and marginalised tribals as early as 1930s was largely put into oblivion and overlooked by the then anthropologists in India.
Anthropology in India by Satish Deshpande
Article, 2018
Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, in a somewhat uncertain phase in the history especially of anthropology but also of the social sciences in general, "anthropology in India" needs to be reassessed in its current global context. Much more is now known about the history of the discipline in other non-Western and ex-colonial contexts, not to speak of the West itself. Having gone through an extended period of turbulence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology is still assimilating the cumulative impact of numerous powerful interventions telegraphed through book titles and labels such as Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Orientalism, Writing Cultures, colonial discourse, postcoloniality, multiple modernities, the politics of location, and, most recently, the world anthropologies project. Needless to add that "India," the stage on which anthropology has been (and is being) enacted, has also been changing rapidly and comprehensively. Given so much change, it is necessary to begin by reexamining the older reasons why anthropology in India seemed so distinctive. This disciplinary history needs to be framed within a broader history of ideas that is itself embedded in the story of the subcontinent's successive encounters with colonialism, nationalism, the developmental state, the neoliberal market, and globalization. However, issues of content and scope need to be settled before proceeding further. This entry offers an overview of a field that would be called social anthropology in contexts outside India (and especially in the West). In India, much of social anthropology is practiced under the disciplinary label of sociology, and influential voices in the academy beginning with M. N. Srinivas have insisted on the indivisibility of the two. The main argument offered in defense of this stance is that the conventional division between these disciplines based on the distinction between "primitive" and "advanced" societies is no longer tenable even in the West (where it originated) and has never made sense in non-Western contexts such as India. However (as acknowledged by Srinivas himself), in the mid-twentieth century, educated Indians disliked anthropology because they saw it as a condescending colonialist discipline eager to portray "natives" as backward, and so it was also expedient to rename anthropology as "sociology." In terms of institutional practice, the two disciplines lead parallel lives without much explicit interaction. Of the "four fields" of traditional (Boasian) anthropology, the Indian discipline today focuses on variants of physical and cultural anthropology, with archaeology and especially linguistics having become separate disciplines. Historically, physical anthropology has been a strong subdiscipline in India, particularly anthropometry.
Indian Anthropology Today by Vinay Kumar Srivastava
Article, 2012
A survey of the changing aspects of different disciplines-belonging to different faculties-informs us of the impact that anthropological methods, perspectives, theories, and the conclusions of their cross-cultural studies have exercised on them, which indirectly confirms the analytical strength, explanatory power, and methodological sophistication of anthropology. Notwithstanding this, the growth of anthropology in India has been both uneven and slow, a consequence of which has been the 'interiorisation' of anthropologists, or which T.H. Ericksen has termed 'inward-gazing'. Contemporary anthropologists have become aware of what they have been passing through, and are striving their best to recover the past glory of their discipline when they were active participants in public debates. One of the points that this article puts forth is that anthropologists are 'dispassionate observ-ers' as well as 'citizens'. In the first role, they are committed to understanding the social and cultural processes; in the second, like any other conscientious citizen, they expect all societies and states to be just, civil, and inclusive. In the dialectics of these roles, the state of contemporary anthropology can be properly located.
Article, 2024
Researches on the history of Anthropology in India unlike western countries have not yet become a formidable tradition despite the fact that courses on the growth and development of Anthropology in India had been recommended at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the Model Curriculum Development Report of the University Grants Commission as early as 2001. Under this scenario, the conceptual framework of my discourse was derived from a critical and selective reading of the anthropological texts produced by the Indian anthropologists. This reading of the history of Indian anthropology was based on two sources. One source was the reading of the original texts by pioneering anthropologists which were committed to various tasks of nation building and the other was the reading of literature by anthropologists who critiqued early Indian anthropology as simply following the western/colonial tradition. These two readings of the texts were juxtaposed to write a new and critical history of the discipline, which emphasized the nationalist tradition of Indian Anthropology. On the reverse side of the colonial critique there also existed a view that an Indian form of Anthropology could be discerned in many ancient Indian texts and scriptures before the advent of a colonial anthropology introduced by the European scholars, administrators and missionaries in the Indian subcontinent. I have designated this view as "Hindu Anthropology". Finally, I have argued that anthropologists did make attempts to tackle some of the major challenges (viz. famine, rehabilitation of refugees and development caused displacement) encountered by the country in the early periods of nation building, which I would narrate in some detail in this lecture.. Under the changing times and circumstances, the future of nationalist anthropology in India lies in carrying forward this remarkable tradition of anthropology developed by some of the pioneers and this justified the historical exploration of the nationalist trends in Indian anthropology having present and future implications.
Colonial, Hindu and Nationalist Anthropology in India
Article, 2019
The long-standing critique of Indian Anthropology advanced by some notable anthropologists held that Indian Anthropology is the product of a colonial tradition and the anthropologists in India for various reasons followed their colonial masters in one way or the other. There also exists a view of Hindu Anthropology which holds that an Indian form of Anthropology could be found in many ancient Indian texts and scriptures before the advent of a colonial anthropology introduced by the European scholars, administrators and missionaries in the Indian subcontinent. Both the views ignored the materialistic, socially committed, secular and nationalist trends of Indian Anthropology which was growing in the hands of some remarkable anthropologists before and after the Independence of the country.
An Indian Outlook on Anthropology by Sarat Chandra Roy
An Indian Outlook on Anthropology
The objective methods of investigation of cultural data have to be helped out, not only by historical imagination and a background of historical and geographical facts, but also by a subjective process of self-forgetting absorption or meditation (dhyana), and intuition born of sympathetic immersion in, and self-identification with, the society under investigation. The spread of this attitude by means of anthropological study can surely be a factor helping forward the large unity-in-diversity-through-sympathy that seems to an Indian mind to be the inner meaning of the process of human evolution, and the hope of a world perplexed by a multitude of new and violent contacts, notably between Eastern and Western civilizations.
A Century of Anthropology in India:Searching the Nationalist Trends
The Eastern Anthropologist Lead article, 2022
There is little research on the history of anthropology in India.The works which have been done though contained a lot of useful data on the history of anthropology during the colonial and post-colonial periods have now become dated and they also did not venture into a search for the growth of nationalist anthropological writings by the Indian anthropologists in the pre and post independence periods. The conceptual framework of the discourse developed in this paper is derived from a critical reading of the anthropological texts produced by Indian anthropologists. This reading of the history of Indian anthropology is based on two sources. One source is the reading of the original texts by pioneering anthropologists who were committed to various tasks of nation building and the other is the reading of literature by anthropologists who regarded Indian anthropology simply as a continuation of the western tradition. There also existed a view that an Indian form of anthropology could be discerned in many ancient Indian texts and scriptures before the advent of a colonial anthropology introduced by the European scholars, administrators and missionaries in the Indian subcontinent. I have argued that while criticizing Indian anthropology or sociology the critiques mostly ignored the studies done by the pioneers of the disciplines which were socially relevant and directed to the welfare and betterment of the underprivileged sections of our country and these studies for the betterment of the underdog were often conducted by anthropologists and sociologists who belonged to higher castes occupying elite positions in the society. The critics have only followed the smart way to criticize the pioneers instead of studying the socially committed works of the later and this was one of the reasons that Indian anthropologists failed to honour their nationalist predecessors and depended more on the wisdom of the Western scholars.The new discourse in search of a nationalist trend in Indian anthropology, therefore, is urgently needed for the construction of the historiography of the discipline.