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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Anthropology comparison Foucault Hinduism Islam nationalism power/knowledge

Why Write a Genealogy of Indian Sociology? Or, the Argument

This article writes a genealogy of Indian anthropology-sociology.¹ I begin with ‘why does one write?’ Responding to ‘why I write story (afsāna)’, the noted Hindi–Urdu writer Premchand (n.d., p. 11) observed: My pen does not even move unless I express a philosophical or emotional truth (ḥaqīqat) in a story. To Saadat Hasan Manto (1954, p. 228), writing was like an addict drinking wine: ‘I don’t write afsāna; in reality, afsāna writes me’. In ‘why I write?’ Eric Blair, who later became George Orwell (1942/2002, pp. 1082, 1085), listed four motives: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. Elaborating the fourth, Orwell held how injustice and the urge to expose a lie moved him to write. He concluded, rather audaciously, that those of his writings lacking in political impulse were no more than ‘purple passages, sentences without meaning’.

Absent in Orwell is metaphysics. Agnostic about religion, including his native Anglican Christianity, but ‘anti-Catholic’ (Spiller, 2003, p. 151, cf., Goodhew, 2023), Orwell’s prose is all about that which is earthly, betraying any imprint of the heavenly. Like writers bewitched by the Enlightenment and for whom earthly pursuit itself became divinised, Orwell stood ‘for democratic Socialism’ (1942/2002, p. 1083). Born in Motihari (Meyers, 2000)––adjacent to my birthplace, Dumri, Sheohar––he took it as given to think and write in English. However, to think and write in Urdu is different; so is to shift, as I did, to writing in English but continuing to think in Urdu. Contra the received wisdom, language is both carrier and constituent of thought; indeed, after Wittgenstein (1980, p. 46e), ‘words are deeds’. Orwell was also insufficiently alert to ‘democratic’ states oppose thinking. His Animal Farm had a preface published posthumously in 1972. It discusses censorship. Four publishers had rejected it, one after ‘consultation’ with the British Ministry of Information. However, Orwell (1972) seemed uncritical of the state, saying it ‘has behaved well’. He instead criticised ‘voluntary’ censorship: ‘it is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady’. What escaped Orwell was that the state in a national democracy need not forbid everything, for, people know its might well before it is unleashed. That is, people in a democracy act to be ‘smarter’ than the state (see the ‘Conclusion’ section).

To write a genealogy of Indian sociology is not the same as writing its history, which exists in plenty (e.g., Atal, 2015, pp. 25–36; Singh, 1986a; Singhi, 1996; Srinivas, 1987; Thakur, 2018; Uberoi et al., 2007).² While I value Foucault’s outline of genealogy in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and in the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1977), I find his preoccupation with discontinuity misleading. Discontinuity, which he reads as ‘stigma’ in traditional history, becomes honorific in his genealogy (1972, p. 8). Subject to an inquiry’s aim, scope, horizon and temporal–spatial scale, genealogy, I contend, should utilise both continuity and discontinuity, which Foucault imprecisely takes as ‘break’, ‘rupture’, ‘mutation’, ‘division’ and ‘difference’ (1972, p. 5; 1977, p. 142, note 14). It is plausible, then, to study continuity along with, not against, discontinuity.³ Foucault is right to question the search of origins and teleology. So is his proposition of ‘knowledge as perspective’ (1977, pp. 156, 142, 144). However, to venerate ‘chance’, ‘accident’ such that itinerary of ideologies and its operations stands banished is to enact an analytical extremism. Moreover, I find such claims by Foucault flawed: ‘all knowledge rests upon injustice … and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)’ (1977, p. 163). How does Foucault know all knowledge the world over? And why say ‘instinct to knowledge’? Long before Bourdieu, from al-Fārābi to ‘Abduh, scholars saw, following Aristotle, intellectual pursuit as a mark of malaka, habitus, not of instinct (Ahmad, 2024). Problematic too is Foucault’s self-elevation as mankind’s envoy. While his text is anchored in Europe, he arrogates to himself the right to speak on behalf of ‘mankind’ (1977, pp. 159–160, 162). In the same essay, note this too, as a bolt from the blue: ‘Plato, at Syracuse, did not become Mohammed’ (1977, p. 140). There is no Islam before or after this sentence.

Notably, in ‘What is critique?’, Foucault practices ‘history proper’ (1972, p. 7) than genealogy. There, his concern is ‘the historical origins of the critical attitude … in the West’ (Foucault, 2024, p. 50), which unfold thus: before the 16th century, the church regulated every aspect of one’s life. Reformation was the first critical moment of reason to quiz the Bible, leading to ‘secularization’ (ibid., pp. 22–23) and the Enlightenment, which for Kant (1784/2007, p. 31) was making ‘public one’s use of reason at every point’. To Foucault, the Enlightenment and critique were the same (2024, p. 48). So devoted was Foucault to this Eurocentric telos (Ahmad, 2017a) that in Genealogy of Morals, which is central to his own account, he does not see Nietzsche (2003, p. 80) cite Luther, who called reason ‘the sly whore (Frau Klüglin)’.

As the article’s title affirms, my genealogy is about knowledge and nationalism, on which Foucault has little to say. This genealogy does not presuppose a routinely narrated (or, parroted, if you like) ‘origin’; nor do I take it as a high point from which to read downwards the present. Genealogy instead foregrounds the present to work back towards the past. It has no a priori corrupt past linearly yoked to the glorious future in the same way it does not assume a golden past and its downfall since, and the prophesied shiny morrow. It instead studies the very catalysts, motives and effects of such ‘opposing’ positions to feature, if applicable, criss-crosses. Thus, aware of heterogeneity of languages, regions, departments and so on that mark sociology, I am interested in singularity vis-à-vis Islam and discourses of the nation; ergo, of sociology. Heterogenous singularity is what I call to describe practices of Indian sociology in relation to Islam. This genealogy ultimately identifies ‘subjugated knowledge’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 41), as also its mystique for insurrection.

The article is organised into three sections: the first section maps a moment in ‘wirkliche Historie’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 154) when Patrick Geddes, while working for Zionism in Palestine, founded the Department of Sociology at Bombay University. The second section discusses the (mis)treatment of Islam in tripartite permeable catalogues of silence, erasure and assimilation. The third section compares the nexus between knowledge and nationalism in India, Germany and the USSR. Invoking poet Ghalib, the ‘Conclusion’ section underlines the primacy of becoming human first and then studying nationalism rather than subordinating the former to the gory goals of the latter. My exposition runs counter to the naval-gazing, celebratory image sociologists themselves have fabricated of their discipline as the most reflexive one (Patel, 2011, p. 427; Uberoi, 2000). I also find exaltation of ‘schools’ such as Bombay School, Mysore School, Calcutta School and Lucknow School (National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), 1990, pp. 33–34; Patel, 2002, p. 273; Thakur, 2014) at best as distraction, for they all view Islam as ‘other’. Differently put, as power/knowledge matrix (Foucault, 1980), sociology shapes and is shaped by nationalism with ethnicisation intrinsic to it. With case studies of Adivasis, Dalits and Muslims, elsewhere I name Hindu Orientalism (Ahmad, 2025) as the foundation of this power/knowledge matrix, which encompasses disciplinary knowledge, media, policy, popular culture, Bollywood, tourism, ecology (Sharma, 2023) and much more.⁴ Obviously, sociological discourses on Dalits, tribes and others also signify otherness. However, the differentia specifica of Islam’s otherness revolving around its ‘foreignness’ obtains neither vis-à-vis Dalits nor tribes. Notably, this premise informs the founding fathers as well as the current generation.

Sociology and Its Replaceable Father: The British Zionist Connections

Currently, G. S. Ghurye is consensually regarded as the father of sociology. However, this was hardly the case earlier. Desai (1996), a student of Ghurye, wrote about sociology’s ‘founding fathers’ rather than its father. The 1982 sociology book by the NCERT (1982) did not even name him. Eight years later, Sociology: An Introduction (NCERT, 1990, p. 33) described Patrick Geddes, G. S. Ghurye, Radhakamal Mukerjee, D. P. Mukherjee and A. R. Wadia as ‘propagators of sociology’. As Chandrasekher (1976, p. viii) had noted, the father of sociology was Patrick Geddes. However, the NCERT (2006, p. 85) textbook described Ghurye as the ‘founder of institutionalized sociology’, as did Patel (2010, p. 282) and others. In most contemporary accounts, Geddes is seldom mentioned (NCERT, 2006, ch. 5), for his influence is considered ‘negligible’ (Munshi, 2007, p. 174). I contest this position.

A Scot, Geddes’s field was town planning. In 1903, he became the founder member of the British Sociological Society (Scott & Bromley, 2013). Crucial to his approach to city-making was respect for the past. Geddes paid ‘rich tributes to Indian civilization’, praising the ‘proud place given to the venerated tulsi plant (symbol of the well-kept Hindu home)’ (Munshi, 2007, p. 185). In 1914, the governor of Madras invited Geddes to show his town-planning exhibition. For the next several years, Geddes worked for the British Empire and local power elites. To the king of Indore, Geddes suggested a university scheme, a copy of which he sent to his friend David Eder, a British representative of the Zionist Executive in Palestine. As early as 1910, Geddes had become a partisan of Zionism (Payton, 1995). After the Balfour Declaration and occupation of Palestine by Britain, in 1918, Geddes made suggestions for planning Jerusalem. Chaim Weizmann, chief of the Zionist Commission to Palestine, recruited Geddes to plan Hebrew University and new colonies (Rubin, 2011, pp. 234–235). Geddes’s correspondence with Zionists took place during his stay in India, where he gave lectures at Bombay, Calcutta, Darjeeling and Lucknow. In 1919, the Bombay University offered Geddes professorship to launch sociology. As Figure 1 shows, his time was divided between India and Palestine. Accounts of Geddes by Munshi (2007) and Madan (2011) do not mention––let alone situate––Geddes’s imperialist role.

Figure 1.

New York Times’ 1919 Announcement of Patrick Geddes’s Employment by International Zionist Convention and Bombay University.

At Bombay, not only did Geddes launch sociology, but he also mentored scores of students––Ghurye and N. A. Toothi among them. He arranged scholarships for both to study in the United Kingdom. On return, Toothi propagated Geddes’s ideas. Geddes saw Ghurye, who earned his doctorate from Cambridge, as a future collaborator (Munshi, 2007). Geddes influenced Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968), ‘founder of the Lucknow school’ of sociology (Joshi, 1986). Later to become vice chancellor of Lucknow University and director of JK Institute of Sociology and Human Relations, Radhakamal (to avoid confusion among three Mukherjis, I use their first names) described Geddes as ‘one of the greatest minds’ (in Madan, 2011, p. 121). Though Ghurye dismissed Geddes’s weight (ibid., 2011), I document a union amongst Geddes, Radhakamal and Ghurye about their conceptualisation of nation-society, its past, temporality, tradition and civilisation––one instituted at the very moment of sociology’s birth and which decisively shaped the discipline in the so-called post-colonial era.

Sociology’s Three Catalogues About Islam: Silence, Erasure, Assimilation

As put to work in Palestine, Geddes’s notion of the past meant installing an ancient Hebrew civilisation, the biblical people who supposedly formed the earliest phase of the Western civilisation. Geddes suggested destroying all that was alien to that biblical civilisation like the Ottoman clock tower (Rubin, 2011, pp. 235–236). To him, what was ‘beautiful of the past’ derived from the settler Zionist design in which all that was Islamic was silenced. A similar notion of India’s past and tradition was evident in Ghurye, Radhakamal and several others.

The Catalogue of Silence

Central to Ghurye’s (1968, pp. 113, 426) sociology was to depict ‘the unity and antiquity of Indian civilization’ where Islam figured only as detrimental, for ‘Hinduism is at the centre of India’s civilizational unity’ from which the nation-state, ‘Bharat’, flowed (Upadhya, 2007, p. 215). Describing Muslims as ‘conquerors’, Ghurye (1968, p. viii) argued that the ‘native Hindu’ and ‘incoming Muslims’ remained ‘separate’. He wrote: ‘Just like the lotus leaf in water Hindu … architectural talent have kept themselves above the water of dilution and untainted by it’ (ibid., p. 258). Radhakamal’s notion of past was similar: ‘social sciences … should be rooted in the specificities of Indian culture, which for him meant … Hindu culture’ (Madan, 2011, p. 135). In A History of Indian Civilization, he noted the ‘advancing sword of Islam’, to spotlight ‘historiography … embodied in the Purāṇas and Itihāsasa’ with ‘cultural cycles of four world-yugas’ (Mukerjee, 1958, pp. 17, 55; cf. Thakur, 2012).

N. K. Bose (d. 1972) edited Man in India (from 1951 to 1972); he also directed the Anthropological Survey of India. He served as the Bengali interpreter of Mohandas Gandhi, who, Bose (1929/1961, p. 82) held, ‘tacitly formed an alliance with those who believed in a restoration of Hindu domination’. Discussing Clark Wissler’s definition of culture, Bose offered his own (in Saraswati, 2002, pp. 10–11):

In the Hindu scriptures, the desires of mankind are classified into three categories … (1) Artha or economic needs, (2) Kama or sexual desires, and (3) Moksha or … spiritual emancipation … The observance of culture thus can be reduced to … Arthdharma, Kamadharma, Mokshadharma.

Based on this definition, Bose’s Cultural Anthropology silenced how Muslims’ traditions construed culture differently from Brahmanical Hinduism. To ‘Muslim conquest’, Bose attributed the downfall of Hindus: ‘The depression of the Sudras, the abolition of mixed marriages, the custom of suttee and similar other devices were Brahmanism’s attempts to save itself from the mire of post-Mohammedan decadence’ (Bose, 1929/1961, p. 87). In Problems of Indian Nationalism, Bose wrote that while Hindus readily adopted modernity, ‘entrenched in Islam’, Muslims did not, thereby ‘the Moslem became more Moslem, while the Hindu became less of a Hindu’ (1969, pp. 16–17). Vitally, he called Bengal peasants ‘Wahhabi’, a term used by W. W. Hunter (1871), a colonial bureaucrat. Hunter’s use of ‘Wahhabi’ was part of the imperialist strategy to classify global resistance by Muslims against Western imperialism into one enemy, that is, Islam (Ahmad, 2015). Bose’s (1969) debt to Orientalist episteme was so firm that he did not consider the protest led by Dudu Mian as ‘revolt’, for those enacting it were mostly Muslims. On Islam, Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1976), president of the Indian Sociological Society in the early 1970s, held a similar view.

To close this section, I discuss Deshpande’s (2003) Contemporary India. In it, he occasionally mentions Muslims but only as an object of Hindutva, with no subjectivity of their own. His overall argument goes like this: since the 19th century until the death of Nehru, India’s first prime minister, the nation was imagined as an economy (chapter 3); the rise of Hindutva marked a shift to a religious identity (chapter 4). This is flimsy; the era of economy was also the era of religious mobilisation because religious identity is enmeshed in economy as economy is inextricable from religion. Deshpande, moreover, repeats the myth of ‘Nehruvian era of … secularism’ (ibid., pp. 53, 72) without saying why secularism entered the Constitution only in the 1970s, long after Nehru’s death (Ahmad, 2022b).

The Catalogue of Alienness

An influential sociologist, S. C. Dube wrote, among others, Indian Society, read by tens of thousands preparing for civil services exam.⁵ Calling Muslims ‘invading Arabs’, he held that Islam spread due to violence. Curiously, in Dube’s reading, while the British simply ‘came to India’ (1990, pp. 27, 23), Muslims invaded it.

For nearly 3 centuries, the aggressive designs of Islamic invaders were blunted, but later they could not be contained. What had happened in half of the world earlier was then repeated in India … India had known other conquest … the confrontation with the Islamic invaders was longer and more bitter as they brought with them their own theology and considered only their religion as true.

Dube restated a position central to India’s ‘liberal’ renaissance.⁶ So did Iravati Karve, described as India’s ‘first woman anthropologist’ by Sunder (2007). However, others more accurately described Karve as ‘an Indian racial anthropologist’ (Maksudyan, 2023, p. 155) who, during her training in Berlin at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, upheld, as did Turky’s Seniha Tunakan and Afet İnan (Ataturk’s adopted daughter), a racist ideology at the service of an ethnic nation-state. Karve wrote:

They [Mohammedans] created the first breach in the cultural unity of India. … their religious centre is outside India and their co-religionists have spread all over the world … This consciousness of solidarity with outside Muslims … and religious fanaticism which sets at naught all human values arising out of thousand years of association, make it almost impossible to arrive at cultural compromise with this element in the Indian population. They neither respect nor understand the religious, ethical … creation of other people. … They have left terror and destruction in their wake. (Karve, 1947, pp. 45–46; emphasis added)

Karve’s anthropology based on enmity against Islam belies Spencer’s (2007) claim that anthropology will object to the politics of friend and foe. She anthropologically voiced what V. D. Savarkar (d. 1966), an ideologue of ethnic Hindutva, did politically: ‘Their [Muslims’] holy land is far off in Arabia and Palestine. Consequently, their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin. Their love is divided’ (in Jaffrelot, 2007, p. 95).

Muslims as alien are equally prominent in Modernization of Indian Tradition by Yogendra Singh, founder of sociology at JNU. It aimed to explain ‘social change … from within and without’. For changes from within, Singh used the term ‘orthogenetic’, whereas he termed sources of change from outside heterogenetic (1986b, p. 25). In Oxford English Dictionary, heterogenetic in philosophy relates to ‘external origination’ and in medicine to ‘infection from outside the body’. Singh termed Islam ‘heterogenetic’; in so doing, he thus rendered Islam external and threating at once. Like his predecessors and contemporaries, he referred to Muslims as ‘colonizers and conquerors’ (ibid., p. 60). Dumont, who greatly influenced sociology in post-1947 India, too contributed to Islam’s alienness. Muslims appear in Homo Hierachicus (Dumont, 1970) at the far end. Imtiaz Ahmed (1972, p. 173), deemed as ‘the authority’ on Muslims, found Dumont ‘in a hurry to finish the discussion’. Contra Ahmed, Dumont’s reason was conceptual. According to Dumont, Muslims did not matter for they were ‘foreign’ but subsumed within Hinduism.

Such foreignifications of Islam rest on the premise of ‘home’ and ‘host’. In Religion in India, Madan (1991, p. 15), the founding editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology (New Series) from 1967 up to 1991, states: ‘India is the home of many religions and long-time host to some’. Veena Das’ (1984, p. 293), rejoinder to Robinson, with whom the next sub-section starts, partakes in the nationalist language of home as she wrote about Islam’s ‘original home’. Das’s choice of ‘original home’ is not incidental; it is central to the European colonial imagination in which Muslims were designed as ‘always outside … in the Arab world, not in the subcontinent’ and that the myth of Muslims’ ‘homeland’ as outside India was bound up with ‘the paradigm of Muslim conquest’ and the liberation of ‘native’ Hindus from Muslims by the British (Asif, 2020, p. 44). To return to Madan, his ‘home’ and ‘host’ are at the core of nationalism that sociology/anthropology (re)played rather than investigate (Ahmad, 2013a). The sociological doxa that Muslims are foreigners erase the fact that most Muslims are converts from ‘indigenous’ Hindus (Nadvi, 1992, pp. 182–183). This doxa, however, continues to classify religion into ‘Indic’ and ‘non-Indic’. While Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism are deemed Indic, Christianity and Islam are foreign (Madan, 2003).

With Islam’s foreignness enshrined in Indian sociology, the discipline has logically made massive investments to render it ‘Indic’. There is a variety of ways in which this indigenisation is enacted; the discourse of syncretism, discussed below, is one principal medium.

The Catalogue of Erasure: Syncretism as Assimilation

In 1983, Robinson’s article in Contributions to Indian Sociology generated much debate. Robinson contested the framework of volumes edited by Imtiaz Ahmed, key proponent of the idea that Muslims in India are syncretic and not like those in the Middle East and that there is an Indian Islam inescapably influenced by Hinduism deemed as tolerant. Repeating sociological doxa of Islam’s alienness/intolerance, and calling it ‘an extremely reified religious tradition’, Ahmed (1981, p. vii; emphasis added) stated:

Unlike Hinduism, Islam was intrusive in India. It arrived in the midst of an established civilization …. Because of … the recruitment to it of a large indigenous population which brought along previous religious beliefs and orientation into the faith upon conversion, the Islamic faith in India acquired a typically indigenous flavor.

As it is evident, Ahmed’s conceptualisation of Muslims illustrates nation-thinking yoked to a nationalised geography, the imaginative capacity of which can express itself only in the idiom of ‘arrival’, ‘indigenous’, ‘outsiders’, ‘original’, ‘heartland’ and so on. Also, read this:

the version of Islam which had been introduced into India was quite different from what it had been in its original heartland. On arrival in India, it had been further diluted through conversion to its fold of large groups of local converts who were bound to bring their pre-conversion beliefs and practices into the faith. Thus, it was almost inevitable that the religious tradition of the Muslims in India should comprise two distinct elements: one ultimate and formal, derived from the Islamic texts; the other proximate and local, validated by customs. (Ahmed, 1981, p. 15; emphasis added)

Clearly, a dichotomised understanding hostage to the binaries such as ultimate-formal versus local-customary––central also to accounts by Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz (Asad, 1986)––is conceptually impoverished. It remains important to interrogate rather than reproduce the foreignness of Islam. To legitimise the colonial rule, the British fashioned the myth that they were not the first outsiders to rule India; Muslims too were outsiders/foreigners (Nasr, 1999, p. 581). The rehearsing of the colonial myth by post-colonial Indian sociology makes the ‘post’ in post-colonial suspect. Indeed, the recent move by J. S. Deepak, Vikram Sampath and Arvind Sharma to decolonise India is, in many ways, neo-/re-colonial (Ahmad, 2025, 2026).

As regards the conceptualisation of the ‘original heartland’ of Islam by Ahmed, his nationalism presupposes rather than examine a reified Arab Islam as intolerant, exclusive and formal. This also explains the notions of an Indonesian or Bangladeshi Islam, and more recently, an ‘Euro-Islam’ (Ahmad, 2013b). Indeed, solidification of a ‘tolerant’ Turkish Islam opposed to the conservative Arab Islam under Kemalism (Ozdalga, 2006) is a perfect analogy to Ahmed’s sociological project of enshrining Indian/Hindu nationalism. To Ahmed (1986, p. 207), castes among Muslims ‘demonstrate nearness of Muslim communities … to the … Hindu cultural ethos’. The covers of Ahmed’s volumes (1973, 1977, 1981) carried the image of Ashoka’s wheel (in colour), a sign on India’s national flag.

That traditions interact with one another is an anthropological truism. That Muslims have influenced and haven been influenced by non-Muslims is scarcely surprising. However, syncretism preceding nationalism becomes a different beast when it gets hooked to nationalism with its ethnic impulse for uniformity and assimilation. It is this particular meaning of syncretism aimed at effacing the Muslim difference that I elaborate below.

Madan’s (2007) D. N. Majumdar lecture splits Islam into Great and Little traditions, a split introduced by Robert Redfield and applied to India by his associates like Singer (1955). The former is orthodox, exclusive and intolerant. The latter is accommodating, syncretic as they are influenced by Hinduism’s putative tolerance. Unlike Great and Little traditions in Hinduism, where both are supposedly indigenous, with the designation of Islam as ‘foreign’ and the valourisation of its Little traditions deemed indigenous (read Hindu), the ground for assimilation is already set. Madan also connects Islam and terrorism, especially in Kashmir. Like Madan, Srinivas (1991, p. 1), a disciple of Ghurye and Radcliffe-Brown, held that the ubiquity of caste in Hinduism fostered tolerance (Srinivas, 2002, pp. 362–363). Like Bose, Ghurye and others, Srinivas maintained that tribes were/are essentially Hindus. The colonial census counted tribes (also Jews) as non-Hindus, an ‘anomaly’, which, Srinivas approvingly wrote, was corrected in the 1961 census. For both Srinivas and the ‘secular’ Constitution of India, ‘Hindu’ includes Buddhist, Jain and Sikh. The fusion between Srinivas’s sociology and Hinduism was blatant. ‘The Concept of the Unity of India’, he wrote, ‘is inherent in Hinduism’ (Srinivas, 1991, pp. 31, 32).

Ghaus Ansari contested formulation like Srinivas’s that tolerance was innate to Hinduism. In Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh, Ansari (1960, pp. v, 66, 67) argued that ‘communalism in India has its roots largely in caste system’. To this end, he showed how Muslims under Hinduism’s influence developed caste-like features. In the foreword to Ansari’s book, J. H. Hutton, a Cambridge anthropologist and ex-colonial officer, rejected his thesis, saying that the merit of Ansari’s book lay in ‘what the two communities have in common’. Sociologists read Ansari’s treatise along the line set by Hutton. Recently, Madan (2007, p. 15) cited Ansari to show caste ‘standing at its [society’s] centre among Hindus as well as Muslims’. It is bewildering that Madan, Imtiaz Ahmed and many others continue to quote Ansari’s ‘pioneering’ work, effacing Ansari’s own avowal that ‘it is more difficult to determine whether the term ‘caste’ can appropriately be applied to … a non-Hindu community’ (1960, p. 2). What was secondary in Ansari’s thesis was turned into primary so as to co-opt it by re-signifying it into a nationalist, ethnic sociology.

To close this section, consider Agehananda Bharati, a Sanskritist anthropologist from Austria. His book is a dossier of syncretism as assimilation. He held that ‘where there is a Muslim majority in any specific region … there is a more rigid ideological separation’. In contrast, ‘tolerance, and … adaptation are strengthened when there is a Hindu majority’ (Bharati, 1981, p. 75). Bharati’s formulation is well alive. During my fieldwork in 2010 on media and terrorism (Ahmad, 2014), I met a journalist in Delhi, who told me: ‘See, where did India have serious problems of terrorism? Kashmir and Punjab, right? In both places Hindus are in a minority’. The politics beneath the syncretism, however, is perversely revealed in media’s framing of Muslims as terrorists. They report about ‘Muslim terrorists’ with no sign of syncretism: linguistic, cultural or otherwise. Across the board, media depict such Muslims interacting only with other Muslims who visit no place other than mosques or madrasas which ‘radicalize’ them (Ahmad, 2014, 2017b).

Anthropology of Nationalism or Nationalism of Anthropology?

The illustration of three catalogues broached in the previous section is a call to sociologise nationalism fervently at work within sociology (cf. Boyer & Lomnitz, 2005). Works I discussed speak in unison vis-à-vis Islam because they share the premise of nationalism with Hinduism as its core. Let us recall Ghurye. For him, Islam did not exist, or it did only as an alien infecting the Hindu nation. Ghurye’s trilogy––Social Tensions in India, Whither India and India Recreates Democracy––represent this position bluntly (Upadhya, 2007). He shaped sociology at Bombay, where, in 1951, he founded the Indian Sociological Society (ISS) and was its president for 15 years. He launched and edited Sociological Bulletin. During the 1950s–1960s, there was no department whose head was not his disciple (Upadhya, 2007). In the first presidential address to the All-India Sociological Conference (in 1966, it merged with the ISS), Dhurjati Prasad nationalised sociology as follows:

it is not enough for the Indian sociologist to be a sociologist. He must be an Indian first, that is, he is to share the folkways, mores, customs and traditions, for the purpose of understanding his social system. (in Mukherjee, 1976, p. 90; emphasis added)

Dhurjati Prasad held that Ghurye was the ‘only Indian sociologist today’; others were mere sociologists in India (in Madan, 1996, p. 400). Ghurye’s Social Tensions in India discussed the 1962 India–China War in the wake of which a defence fund was created. Counting the religion of institutions which donated to the fund and noting that ‘Aligarh Muslim University didn’t figure in the list’, he concluded ‘that the response … was very poor among Muslim … institutions and students’ (1968, pp. 528, 529). Ghurye’s religious cataloguing of donations amounts to subjecting Muslims to write exams of loyalty to the state-nation. Ghaus Ansari, I discussed earlier, left India to lead an anthropological career in the United Kingdom, Austria and the Arab world. In his autobiography, he writes how the Indian embassy in London (in the 1950s) fired him from his temporary clerk position on the allegation of supplying information to Pakistan and the USSR (Ansari, 2004, pp. 34–36).

The otherness of Islam in Indian sociology exemplifying entwinement between nationalism and knowledge informs the discipline’s trajectories across the continents. Hirsch (2005, p. 308) documents the interface between ethnographic knowledge and the Bolsheviks as follows: ethnographers ‘helped subordinate the population to Soviet power and brought about the complete Sovietization of their discipline’. Unsurprisingly, there are ‘national anthropologies’, ‘little nations’ in their own right (Hauschild, 1997, p. 746). In German anthropology, an important debate has been about Volkskunde and Volkerkunde. Whereas Volkskunde was the study of ‘us’ Germans, Volkerkunde studied exotic other outside. The non- European ‘savages’ formed one catalogue of otherness; Jews did another. Neither Volkskunde nor Volkerkunde could, however, claim Jews as a subject of study and they were relegated to a little academic ‘ghetto of spirits’ (ibid., p. 748).

An analogous process is at work in Indian anthropology vis-à-vis Muslims. In their manifesto-like formulation, Dumont and Pocock (1957, p. 9) postulated sociology grounded in Indology. Notably, Indology as a discipline integral to colonial episteme effaced ‘Hindustan’ as a dynamic, inclusive, multi-cultural idea and instead instituted ‘India’ as excusive to Hinduism, itself largely a colonial construct. It became preoccupied with Sanskrit texts and Vedic cosmologies and Hindu civilisation (Asif, 2020). Of course, Indology later got reconfigured as area studies, South Asian and globalisation studies. However, invisibilisation and externalisation of Islam and Muslims, as this article shows, did not.

I graduated reading many works discussed here. They show how sociology disciplines thoughts and practices. There was a radical dissonance between what I learned during my years as a student in an Urdu maktab and madrasa, what my parents, family and community taught about Islam, India and the world, on the one hand, and what sociology at JNU and elsewhere taught me, on the other. In the latter, many like myself appeared as an object of abject othering and mass simplification subservient to a state-nation summoning Muslims to be part of it while constitutively setting them apart from it. Soon after becoming Prime Minister, Narendra Modi aired in Parliament what Bose (Calcutta School), Ghurye and Karve (Bombay School), Radhakamal and Dhurjati Prasad (Lucknow School), Yogendra Singh (JNU), Srinivas (Delhi School of Economics) and many others had already done in sociology long ago. According to Modi, Muslims had enslaved India for twelve centuries (FirstPost, 2014).⁷

In Conclusion: Bringing Human In

The fundamental aim of this article has been to outline a genealogy of Indian sociology to demonstrate affinity between practices, concepts and assumptions of anthropology and Indian/Hindu nationalism. To this end, I focused on the (dis)placement of Islam and Muslims by and in anthropology-sociology. In documenting this affinity, the article departs from the dominant scholarship, which immunises anthropology-sociology from the general nexus between nationalism and knowledge (e.g., Boyer & Lomnitz, 2005). That is, such scholarship disdains sociology within nationalism as well as nationalism within sociology. The rejoinder by Veena Das (1984) to Robinson (1983), mentioned earlier, exemplifies this approach.

Against the dichotomy between elite theology (Robinson) and folk syncretism (Ahmed), Das (1984, pp. 294, 296, 297) offers the alternative of ‘folk theology’. What, however, is the terrain on which this folk theology operates? It is ultimately the nation-state, the substitute term of which, for Das, is ‘Indian society’. This is evident throughout Das’s rejoinder. For instance, like his Orientalist rendition of sharia as ‘holy law’, she does not find it problematic that Robinson (1983, pp. 186, 201) describes Muslim politics as ‘separatist’. Let me stress that in Indian nationalism, ‘separatism’ is a combat concept (Ahmad, 2021) that vilifies any autonomous Muslim politics, while taking politics by Hindus as intrinsic to ‘nationalism’ deemed as benevolent. This nationalism is further manifest in Das’s exposition of folk theology as syncretism. Contra Das, Viswanathan (1995, p. 31) takes syncretism as ‘constitutive of the will to [Hindu] nationhood’. Consider the only examples Das (1984, p. 296) offers of syncretism: ‘the use of Hindu symbols … in sufiana [Sufi] music and poetry’ and ‘one cannot dismiss the engagement of medieval Muslim scholars with Hindu symbols’. As these examples show, Das’s syncretism is a one-way traffic to mark Hinduism’s influence on Islam, not the other way around as syncretism semantically has it. This is similar to Ashis Nandy’s (1988, p. 178) celebration of the 1911 census category of Muslims as ‘Mohammedan Hindus’. Importantly, the dichotomy between elite and folk Das (1984, p. 296) aims to dislodge thrives in her own exposition because she too reads the history of exegesis of the Qur’an as a ‘tension’ between the ulama and the Sufis. Importantly, the opening question of her article––‘does a single, true Islam exist at all?’ (ibid., p. 293)––is mysteriously withdrawn from Hinduism, whose ‘symbols’ she takes as singular. More telling is Das’s response to Robinson’s thesis that anthropology of Islam led by Imtiaz Ahmed and others aims to prove ‘that there is no reason why they [Muslims] cannot be good and loyal citizens of the Republic of India’ (ibid., 1984, pp. 298, 299). Because Robinson connected sociology and nationalism, Das read it as serving ‘extra academic interests’.

Against the approach like Das’s, which innocently takes nationalism and knowledge as apart, this article has demonstrated multiple unions between anthropology and Indian nationalism as well as the modality of their operation. I elaborated the othering of Islam evident in three catalogues of silence, alienness and erasure. I discussed texts, figures, institutions, departments, centres, individuals, journals and how they are signed by the Hindu nation.

This article also advances a hypothesis about affinities between the symbolic violence of sociology vis-à-vis Islam and political violence against Muslims, wrongly termed as ‘riot’ rather than ‘pogrom’ (Ahmad, 2022a). A key factor behind the anti-Muslim violence, as many works point out (Brass, 2006; Chopra & Jha, 2014), is the ‘biased’ role of the police, civil, law professionals and other authorities. While writing exams to become civil servants, most such authorities have read (see Note 5) many sociology books I discussed here. Recently, a CSDS study reported that in the police force every second personnel believed that Muslims were ‘naturally prone towards committing crime’ (The Quint, 2019).

Faced with this disciplinary power of anthropology-sociology, should one, then, strive to become Indian first and sociologist second as Dhurjati Prasad mandated? Perhaps there is another path: to resist being chained within and by the nation-state and strive to become a human first, an option Dhurjati Prasad did not (could not?) imagine. Poet Mirza Ghalib (d. 1869) philosophised: ‘Even man is not fated to become a human, ādmī ko bẖī mayassar nahī insāñ hōnā’. Ghalib’s human should not be conflated with the Western Enlightenment’s human (Ahmad, 2017a). The police recently described Ghalib’s poetry as promoting terrorism, hence, anti-national (DNA, 2015). From the perspective of this article, Ghalib and his poems were certainly ante-national (i.e., pre-national). Due precisely to this, they offer signposts to humans to think beyond the violence of nationalism (Ahmad & van der Veer, 2022) and which anthropology-sociology, as this article has demonstrated, authorised and shaped.

To conclude, let us return to Orwell this article began with, and the question of why one writes. To get, retain or enhance one’s position in a ‘job’, the regnant motive to write in academia is to amass ‘points’, itself a pointless exercise when viewed from an anti-capitalist frame and knowledge as wisdom rather than a bundle of mere skills or techniques. Given the bastardisation of knowledge reduced to bare statistics and resulting deification of ‘outputs’, under ‘audit culture’ (Shore & Wright, 1999), writing in itself increasingly seems demoted while ‘publication’ stands promoted. To write, for me, however, is to bear witness, with all its travails, challenges and more (e.g., pain?). In 2021, Australia’s Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP, 2021) made a submission to the Queensland government to highlight ‘hate crimes’ against Hindus, who it termed as ‘the most persecuted … people in the entire history of humankind’. To buttress its claim, VHP also cited my inaugural lecture, ‘Faces of Hindu Orientalism’, organised by the Australia India Muslim Forum.⁸ A year later, TRT World (2022) interviewed Michael Fisher, an American historian; Amita Paliwal, a Delhi-based historian; and me. The occasion was an international symposium on India’s Mughal dynasty. In the 133-second clip featuring the three of us, I pointed out that the depiction of Muslims as the other was not a fringe affair because the prime minister himself in the Parliament termed the Mughal rule as symbolising slavery. After the interview, the Consulate General of India, Istanbul, asked me to meet them. When I solicited the reason for it, the courier told me that the Consulate took my interview as ‘tarnishing’ India’s image abroad. If I wanted to criticise, the courier conveyed it to me, I should go back to India and do it there. That the statement in the Parliament tarnished my own image of what India is or ought to be was unthinkable.

Amidst such challenges, writing is ultimately witnessing. The Urdu word for witness is shāhid, from the root of which stems both shahīd (martyr) and shahādat, affirming the oneness of God and prophethood of Muhammad (Fīrozullog̣hāt Urdu, n.d., pp. 882, 900). Orwell noted with anguish that four publishers had rejected his Animal Farm. My Religion as Critique (Ahmad, 2017a) was rejected by about ten Indian publishers.⁹

Motihari and Dumri are, or so they seem, so close, yet so far.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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