How Surajit Sinha viewed Indian Anthropology? Strengths and Limitations (original) (raw)

How Surajit Sinha viewed Indian Anthropology? Strengths and Limitations

Abhijit Guha
Senior Fellow, ICSSR
Institute of Development Studies Kolkata
e-mail: abhijitguhavuanthro@rediffmail.com

Abstract

Surajit Sinha’s (1926-2002) views on Indian anthropology are one of the least discussed themes among the anthropologists in India. Sinha held interesting and pessimistic views on Indian anthropology in his published articles in 1970 and 1980. According to him Indian anthropology even after the independence of the country largely remained an ‘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 Nirmal Kumar Bose. This was the area of his strength as regards the tradition of Indian anthropology. 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 entrenched in the works of his predecessors and teachers, like S.C.Roy, B.S.Guha and T.C.Das while criticising Indian anthropology. This was the limitation of this great anthropologist of India and one should not forget both the strength and limitation of Sinha’s views on Indian anthropology in order to make a holistic assessment which he liked most and failed to achieve like many other brilliant scholars in the different fields of knowledge.

Key words: Surajit Sinha, Indian anthropology, colonial anthropology, nationalist anthropology, history of Indian anthropology.

Introduction

Surajit Sinha belonged to a period of Indian anthropology when the influence of British and American anthropology on the Indian anthropologists was direct and operated at personal levels of Indian anthropologists and sociologists. At the same time Sinha also saw the attempts by Indian social scientists to build up their own course of development in the context of the nation building after the independence of the country. Trained by both Nirmal Kumar Bose and Tarak Chandra Das and also at a later stage by Robert Redfield Sinha was exposed to a wide arena of global and national anthropology. He completed his major

works on the relationship between tribe and caste in the context of Indian civilizationas as well as state formation by mid 1960s. In 1971 Sinha first wrote a critical review of Indian anthropology and anthropologists in the Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society of which he was the editor and he continued with this theme in his 1980 article published in a book edited by the Marxist anthropologist Stanley Diamond, the editor of Dialectical Anthropology. (Sinha 1971 & 1980). A closer view of his published works revealed that he first presented the idea in a Wenner-Gren Foundation conference held in New York in 1968. (Sinha 1968). In fact, Sinha’s self-critical views on the growth of Indian social science in general and anthropology and sociology in particular could be traced back to his article entitled ‘Involvement in social change: a plea for own ideas’ published in the radical social science journal Economic and Political Weekly as early as 1967. (Sinha 1967:1707-1709). In this article Sinha stated quite categorically

A scholarly tradition of leaning heavily, if not abjectly, on ideas borrowed from the West is growing in this country. This is clear from the post-independence writings of a large number of Indian social scientists and the research policies of some of our modem research institutions.
The borrowed ideas and concepts, when accepted uncritically, obscure the major issues involved in planned social change and stand in the way of posing the right kind of questions in the study of social change. (Ibid 1707).

Sinha pursued with this critique of Indian social science by converging his attack on Indian Anthropology in the subsequent articles about which we will discuss in the next section.

Critique of Indian anthropology by Surajit Sinha

As early as 1971 Surajit Sinha in his insightful article published in the Journal of the IndianAnthropological Society) observed that despite considerable growth in research publications and professional humanpower in social and cultural anthropology during the last 100 years, the Indian anthropologists largely remained dependent on westernand colonial traditions (Sinha, 1971 :1-14). In continuation of his pertinent examination of the colonial dependence of Indiananthropology, Sinha contributed a full chapter entitled ‘India: A Western Apprentice’ in a book, Anthropology: Ancestors and Heirs, edited by the Marxist anthropologist Stanley Diamond in 1980 published by Mouton. In that article Sinha discussed ‘the processnaturalization of the different strands of Western anthropological traditions’ and finally ended with a pessimistic note

For some time, the proliferation of trained manpower, random efforts at catching up with the latest developments in the West and ageneral increase in the number of publications will characterize development of Indian anthropology.

Taking note of his earlier article in the JIAS, Sinha in his ‘Foreword’ of the precious book Bibliographies of Eminent IndianAnthropologists (1974) written by Shyamal Kumar Ray, made a remark
… there was a general reluctance among Indian scholars to take due note of the research publications of Indian pioneers andcontemporaries. As a result, research endeavours of Indian

scholars tend to be derivative, leaving the responsibilities of breaking newgrounds exclusively to western scholars.

Celebrated Social Anthropologist and Sociologist Andre Béteille in one of his articles published in the Sociological Bulletin in 1997 wrote

In India, each generation of sociologists seems eager to start its work on a clean slate, with little or no attention to the work done before. This amnesia about the work of their predecessors is no less distinctive of Indian sociologists than their failure to innovate.

Béteille’s observation on Indian sociologists however, was not novel. About twenty-five years before his pronouncement, Surajit Sinha critiqued Indian anthropologists almost in the same manner which has already been mentioned. Another important point regarding the strength of Surajit Sinha’s views on Indian anthropology was his scepticism over the famous and influential theory of the Hindu method of tribal absorption propounded by one of his gurus Nirmal Kumar Bose. Let me explicate. Surajit Sinha who was a student of both T.C. Das and N.K.Bose did intensive fieldwork among the Bhumij in South Manbhum and published his papers based on his Ph.D. thesis at the Northwestern University of Illinois, USA in 1956. In one of his important papers entitled ‘Bhumij-Kshatriya Social Movement in South Manbhum’(1959) Sinha recorded waves of movement among the Bhumij which had a heterogeneous character and could not be put under the broad category of ‘Hindu Method of Tribal Absorption’ and quite interestingly Sinha did not quote Nirmal Kumar Bose’s 1953 article in his paper. Sinha’s characterisation

of the Bhumij social movement recognized not only adoption of higher caste Hindu culture traits but also a counter process among the younger generation of the Bhumij who were more interested to join in a secular movement with other tribes of the region towards their social and educational upliftment. Sinha concluded his paper with a perceptive observation

The worlds of the Bengali Hindu upper castes, the Biharis, State and Union Governments, various political parties, and the pan-Adibasi movement of the Jharkhand Party still remain substantially external to them. (Sinha 1959:32).

Sinha’s conclusion that at least a section of the Bhumij maintained an ethnic identity supported T.C.Das’s observation on the tribe made almost about three decades earlier.

In another important article entitled ‘Space, Time and Ethnicity: Field Study among the Bhumij of Barabhum’ published in 1978 in a book edited by Sinha himself, he narrated how following the suggestions of T.C.Das he was motivated to take up his study on the Bhumij in 1950. Sinha stated

In March, 1950 late Professor Tarak Chandra Das suggested to me that I should take up a study of the Bhumij tribe, an off-shoot of the Mundas of Ranchi District, since this tribe has been drawn very near to the caste system by the process of acculturation.(Sinha 1978:149). Quite interestingly, Sinha despite his deepest reverence for his guru Nirmal Kumar Bose never followed Bose’s ideas of Hindu method of tribal absorption in his paper just quoted above and other famous papers, viz. (i) Tribe-Caste and Tribe-Peasant continua in Central India (1965) and (ii) The Concept of Diku among the Tribes of Chota Nagpur (1969) published in Man in India. Sinha

viewed ‘tribe’ and ‘caste’ as two ideal types in a scheme of social evolution in which actual societies could be plotted on a continuum with their independent existence and without the less complex (the tribe) being absorbed into the more complex (the caste) kind of social organization. (Sinha 1965:57-83). Sinha also found the independent ethnic identity of the tribe being played at the emic level through the use of distinctive linguistic category, viz.diku used by the tribes to refer to their Hindu neighbours. (Sinha 1969: 121-138). Not unsurprisingly, no reference of N.K.Bose’s famous paper on Hindu method of tribal absorption was found in Sinha’s papers written in 1959, 1965, 1969 and in 1978. Sinha made his final pronouncement on N.K. Bose’s ideas with a reasonable amount of doubt in his paper entitled ‘Tribal solidarity movements in India: A Review’ There is an underlying assumption in Bose’s proposition that, on the whole, this process of slow integration provided the tribe with sufficient economic, social and cultural security as not to generate large-scale rebellion. My own impression is that in spite of this general pattern of harmony the tribals are not without an awareness that they were looked down upon and given a low status. (Sinha 1972:413).

This was probably the only sceptical public pronouncement of Surajit Sinha on his guru’s idea of Hindu method of tribal absorption and here lay his strength.

What Surajit Sinha missed?

I will now discuss the limitations of Surajit Sinha’s critique of Indian anthropology. Although Sinha praised N.K.Bose and T.C.Das at the individual levels for their insight and ethnography respectively the critiques advanced by

Sinha in his 1967, 1971 and 1980 articles on the overall achievement of Indian anthropology was quite pessimistic and distressing. For him there was hardly any sign of an independent, let alone nationalist Indian anthropology. In his article entitled ‘Urgent Problems for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology in India: Perspectives and Suggestions’ published in Sociological Bulletin in 1968 Sinha identified three distinct social anthropological ‘vantage points’ to approach the urgent problems in India, which were: (i) study of ‘Primitive Groups’ of tribes, (ii) study of human groups for the theoretical understanding of Indian society and (iii) anthropological study of problems urgently needed for national reconstruction and development. But quite interestingly Sinha left the third area untouched for the purpose of the paper. It was not clear why he had done so and what purpose prevented him to undertake discussion on this vital area. More interestingly, few years later Sinha wrote in the Foreword of a book entitled Bibliographies of eminent Indian Anthropologists

We are also impressed by the fact that these pioneering scholars, often working under severe limitations of resources, were engaged in life-long endeavour in their particular areas of academic interest. Each of them demonstrated a rare quality of mental independence while living most of their lives under colonial rule. (Sinha 1974: iii).

But quite strangely, Surajit Sinha never came up with a comprehensive and overall review of the results of the ‘mental independence’ of his predecessors who lived their ‘lives under colonial rule’. Sinha seemed to satisfy himself only

with the praise of N.K.Bose and occasionally T.C.Das. Under the above scenario, I will argue that while criticizing Indian Anthropology or Sociology Surajit Sinha, like other critiques who happen to follow him 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. Let me now make a list of some of the remarkable scholars of the early Indian Anthropology who though worked during the colonial period tried to build up a nationalist tradition of anthropology. All of the following anthropologists were born in India in the 19th 19^{\text {th }} century and applied their knowledge in Anthropology and Sociology for the cause of the marginalized and exploited tribals and other underprivileged and deprived sections of the Indian population. Although, these anthropologists were influenced by the theory and methodology of the western anthropologists but they used the western knowledge for the cause of the exploited tribals and marginalized communities of India. Here is the list.

1. Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942) is regarded of the father of Indian Anthropology who was a practicing lawyer at Ranchi and began to do research on the society and culture of the tribes of the region not out of ethnological curiosity but driven by his humanitarian passion to deliver justice to the exploited tribals. He was deeply moved by the plight of the Munda, Oraon and other tribal groups, who were subjected to the continued oppression by an apathetic colonial administration, and by a general contempt towards them in courts of law, as “upper-caste” Hindu lawyers had little knowledge of their

customs, religions, customary laws and languages. His keen interest and sympathy of the oppressed tribals inspired him to study their culture and Roy always stood for their cause. (Ray 1974). His house at Ranchi had a set of rooms prepared for his tribal clients so that those who came from far-off villages could stay on while his case was being fought in court. (Ghosh 2008).
2. Bhupendranath Datta (1880 - 1961) who was the younger brother of the famous Hindu revivalist social reformer Swami Vivekananda. joined the anti-British struggle and sent to prison by the colonial government in India, and later he earned an M.A. in Sociology from Brown University, USA and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Hamburg_in 1923. His books Dialectics of Hindu Ritualism (1950) and Studies in Indian Social Polity (1963) although published much later, can be regarded as pioneering works on Indian society and culture from a Marxist perspective.(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhupendranath\_Datta ).Datta presented his research paper on the political condition of colonial India to V.I. Lenin. Lenin gave a reply to Bhupedranath and requested him to collect data on the peasant organizations in India, which was very much appreciated by Datta. His contributions have not yet been included in the curriculum in Indian Anthropology nor the critics of Indian Anthropology mentioned Datta’s name in their critiques of Indian Anthropology.
3. Biraja Sankar Guha (1894-1961) was the founder of the Anthropological Survey of India and was known to the students of Anthropology as a Physical Anthropologist who made a classification of the Indian population on the basis of their Physical features. Very few people know that he first undertook a thoroughgoing field survey on the Social tensions among the refugees of the then East Pakistan

for suggesting the government about how to understand their problem and improve their living conditions.(Guha1954).
4. K.P. Chattopadhyay, (1897-1963) was not only the Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calcutta but was also a life-long fighter for civil liberties movement in West Bengal before and after the Independence of India. .His researches on the jute mill workers and the workers of the then Calcutta Corporation were pioneering in anthropology which broke away from the colonial anthropological tradition.
5. Tarak Chandra Das (1898-1964) who made a marvelous empirical study, still unparallel in global and Indian Anthropology on the devastations caused by the Bengal famine of 1943 during the colonial period. Das was such a courageous academic that he in his Presidential address of the Anthropology section of the Indian Science Congress in 1941 criticized the colonial government and the Christian missionaries for doing a lot of harm to the tribals of north east India. He had a vision for the application of Anthropology for human welfare but that was forgotten by the Indian anthropologists. The critics of Indian Anthropology also did not care to look at the socially relevant and responsible studies of T.C.Das.(Guha 2011).

Conclusion

Surajit Sinha held a critical view on the growth of Indian anthropology in the post-independence period which was largely pessimistic. Sinha viewed Indian anthropology as ‘Western apprentice’ and in the process he never made any attempt to search for the nationalist trends in Indian anthropology although he found some of his teachers, for example N.K.Bose and T.C.Das, had independent ideas. But Sinha never attempted to make any comprehensive and overall review of Indian anthropology from a historical perspective. Had he done so, he

would have found remarkable scholars of the early Indian anthropology who though worked during the colonial period tried to build up a nationalist tradition of anthropology. Sinha sensed their existence but missed them badly.

References

Béteille, A. (1997). Newness in Sociological Enquiry. Sociological Bulletin.
Vol. 46(1): 97-110.
Das, T.C. (1941). Cultural Anthropology in the Service of the Individual and the Nation.PP.1-29. Presidential Address delivered in the Section of Anthropology in the Twenty-eighth Indian Science Congress. Benares.

Ghosh, A. (2008). History of Anthropology in India.http://nsdl.niscair.res.in/jspui/bitstream/123456789/519/1/PDF\\ 4.11HI STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN INDIA01.pdf

Guha, A. (2011). Tarak Chandra Das: A Marginalised Anthropologist. Sociological Bulletin. 60(2): 245-265.

Guha, B.S. (1959). Studies in social tensions among the refugees from eastern Pakistan. Memoir No.1. Delhi: Department of Anthropology, Government of India.

Guha, B.S. (1958). The Role of Social Sciences in Nation Building. Sociological Bulletin. 7 (2): 148-151.

Ray, S.K. (1974).Bibliographies of Eminent Indian Anthropologists (WITH LIFE-SKETCHES) Anthropological Survey of India, Govt. of India, Indian Museum, Calcutta.

Roy, S.C. (1938). An Indian outlook on Anthropology. Man. 38(171-172):146150 .

Roy Burman, B.K. (2000). 'Professor K.P.Chattopadhyaya— A Scientist with Social Concern. In Life and Times of an Indian Anthropologist K.P. Chattopadhyaya: A Collection of Seminar Papers (2000), edited by Gautam Chattopadhyaya. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society.

Sinha, S. (1965). Tribe-Caste and Tribe-Peasant continua in Central India. Man in India. 45 (1):57-83.

Sinha, S. (1967).Involvement in social change: A plea for own ideas. Economic and Political Weekly. 2(37):1707-1709.

Sinha, S. (1968).Urgent Problems for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology in India: Perspectives and Suggestions. Sociological Bulletin. 17 (2):123-131.

Sinha, S. (1969). Sinha, S., Sen,J. and Panchbhai, S. 1969. The Concept of Diku among the Tribes of Chotanagpur. Man in India. 69(2): 121-138.

Sinha, S. (1971).Is there an Indian tradition in social/cultural anthropology: retrospect and prospect? Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society. 6:1-14.

Sinha, S. (1972). Tribal solidarity movements in India: A Review. The Tribal Situation in India. Edited by K.S.Singh.1972.PP. 411-423. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

Sinha, S. (1974). Foreword. In Bibliographies of Eminent Indian Anthropologists (WITH LIFE-SKETCHES). Shyamal Kumar Ray.1974. Anthropological Survey of India, Govt. of India, Indian Museum, Calcutta. Sinha, S. (1978). Space, Time and Ethnicity: Field Study among the Bhumij of Barabhum. In Field Studies on the People of India: Methods and Perspectives. Edited by Surajit Sinha.1978. Calcutta: Indian Anthropological Society. Sinha, S. (1980). India: A Western Apprentice. In Anthropology: Ancestors and Heirs.Edited by Stanley Diamond.1980. Mouton Publishers: The Hague.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the organizers at the Anthropological Survey of India for inviting me to present this paper in the Lecture series on my revered teacher Professor Surajit Chandra Sinha on 25th 25^{\text {th }} July 2018. I am particularly indebted to Dr. K.M. Sinharoy and Professor Vinay Srivastava for giving me the opportunity to talk on my chosen topic.