CONFLICTS AND CONFLUENCES

The sociological study of contemporary Hindu society has suffered from many con¬straints, some of which—most notably, borrowed para¬digms of social order and social change—have been by now widely recognized; others have received less attention. Thus the implica¬tions of the fact that most sociologists and social anthro¬pologists of the last fifty years have been high caste Hindus of middle or upper-middle class urban background have not been examined. This is, of course, true of all social scientists including econo¬mists; but unlike in, say, eco¬nomics, where progressive quantification of data and major advances in theory-building have to a large extent curbed subjective judgments, in sociology the narrative literary mode and theoretic uncertainty have remained pervasive. This is also true of history; we all remember the furious controversies of recent years about history text-books which, alleging ideological biases in historiography, underscored the importance of the socio-cultural background and ideological commitment of the historian. The existence of similar biases in the choice and exposition of sociological themes has not received comparable attention. There have been a few scholars though who have focused attention on this methodological problem. One of them is K. Ishwaran, one-time professor of social anthropology at Karnataka University, and currently professor of sociology at York University, Toronto.