Toward a Genealogy of Indian Sociology: Knowledge as Nationalism, Nationalism as Knowledge

This article scripts a genealogy of Indian sociology radically different from its regnant history. Its fundamental thesis is that Indian/Hindu nationalism and knowledge are entwined such that to view them separately is to understand neither. To substantiate this thesis, it focuses on the othering of Islam/Muslims. Far from being accidental, this othering is organised and so ‘naturalised’ in the histories of sociology and majoritarian nationalism––itself reworked from Indology––that it defies the ‘divide’ between traditionalist, Hindu revivalist and ‘communal’, on one hand, and Gandhian, Nehruvian, ‘secular’ and ‘liberal’, on the other. The first section discusses an early global moment when the Empire hired Patrick Geddes to found the first department of sociology in India and who worked for settler Zionism. The second section discusses sociology’s treatment of Islam in the catalogues of silence, erasure and assimilation. Vis-à-vis D. P. Mukherjee’s insistence on sociologist becoming Indian first, the third section compares the nexus between knowledge and Indian nationalism with the one in Germany and the USSR. Invoking Ghalib, who recognised colossal challenges to becoming human first, the article concludes by urging sociologists to become human first and then study nationalism, rather than making the former hostage to the latter to enact dehumanisation. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how the power/knowledge matrix works in sociology.