Partha Nath Mukherji

N. Jayaram

Bhola Nath Ghosh

This volume includes fourteen essays by eminent sociologists in memory of Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1919–2017), the last of the founding architects of sociology in India. It also includes two interviews with Ramkrishna Mukherjee by senior sociologists. The essays cover a variety of themes and topics close to the works of Ramkrishna Mukherjee: the idea of unitary social science, methodology of social research, the question of facts and values, rural society and social change, social mobility, family and gender, and nationalism. In the two interviews included here Mukherjee clarifies his intellectual trajectory as well as issues of methodology and methods in social research. Overall, this volume endorses his emphasis on the need for social researchers to transcend the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to ‘why’ in the pursuit of sociological knowledge. The volume is a valuable addition to the history of sociology in India. Students of sociology and other social sciences will find it useful as a book of substantive readings on social dynamics; those researching the social world will find in it a useful guide to issues in designing and execution of social research projects.

Essays in Memory of Ramkrishna Mukherjee

Understanding Social Dynamics in South Asia

Chandan Sengupta

Emerging out of the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, the set of disciplines that got institutionalised as the social sciences were fashioned in Europe. However, what were areas of scholarly inquiry responding to specifically Western problems and concerns, laid claim to universality in course of time and were uncritically accepted as being so until they began to be challenged by non-Western thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century. Bringing together 18 essays by distinguished social scientists, this volume is a major contribution to the debate on the indigenisation of the social sciences. It addresses two central questions from a primarily Asian perspective: - Are the social sciences that originated in the West, and are essentially indigenous to it, universal for the rest? - Can the universal explain the particular, unless the universals in the particulars of different cultural contexts contribute to the construction of the universal? Some of the issues explored in this twin framework are: - The de-parochialisation of Western social science. - The concept of the ‘captive mind’, which fails to fathom its captivity. - The limitations of Western social sciences on crucial issues such as modernisation, economic liberalisation and structural adjustment. - The validity and potential of indigenous models of development as demonstrated by Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness. - Oral traditions and their potential for universal knowledge.

Partha Nath Mukherji

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