https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2265-2101
Abstract
This special section brings together the work of historians, anthropologists and museologists, exploring how anthropological and sociological knowledge has been produced, consumed and reproduced in India. In particular, the special section is interested in analysing how these academic disciplines consolidated themselves as sciences informing the way a newly independent nation-state was to define its future, present and past in social and cultural terms. Anthropology and sociology were seen as tools to understand the diverse ethnic, religious and cultural background of India. Scholars used these disciplines to define what aspects of society were foreign or indigenous; what cultures, religions and languages were to be preserved; and what aspects of society were to be eliminated or integrated in order to achieve ‘progress’. Thus, anthropology and sociology shaped and continued to shape how we see India as a country and society. To understand how this process took place, the articles forming this special section are organised under three main categories: genealogies, methods and museums. The section on genealogies explores the way the first generation of Indian anthropologists and sociologists simultaneously challenge racial hierarchies coming from Europe while accepting caste and racial differences in India. The ‘methods’ sections looks at the trend of action anthropology in this case through social science approaches to ‘marginal’ citizens, whose cultures were explored as part of a larger citizenship complex stressing modernity, assimilation and secularism. The museum section contextualises a wide variety of national, state and house museums within the post-independence tribal integration policies and explores indigenous critiques that decolonise essentialising narratives of the state and nation.
Historians and anthropologists have been known to freely delve into each other’s disciplines, although as anticipated by D.P. Mukerji in the 1940sFootnote1 and popularised by Bernard Cohn in the 1980s,Footnote2 the interventions of anthropologists in their own discipline’s histories have been more plentiful. Historians, on their part, have examined anthropology and the work of anthropologists largely from the position of its knowledge production rather than its intellectuals and their networks, by examining the ontological bases of colonialism, especially in its high phase of racial and ethnic profiling over the turn of the nineteenth century. This special section, the outcome of historians’ engagement with India’s social sciences, moves beyond these traditions by examining how anthropology mediated the relationship between the state, society and the concept of the nation during India’s transition from colony to democratic republic. Despite the impact of postcolonial studies worldwide after the 1970s, the history of anthropology in the subcontinent in this period is relatively unexplored. Previous works have focused mainly on the impact of colonial ethnographers and the writings of Western anthropologists. In contrast, rather than simply looking at anthropology as an outgrowth of colonial ideas, our special section explores the many circulations, networks and movements of ideas, intellectuals and their practices in forming distinctive academic fields, especially in relation to institutions like museums. We see this as a vital means of tracing the distinctive intellectual and ideological underpinnings of the concept of the state, independently and autonomously from the West.
The well-known works of Cohn and Nicholas Dirks have focused on the role of colonial ethnographers and the legacy of the colonial state, but there is an important gap in the literature surrounding the production of anthropological knowledge in India. Their studies have furthered our understanding of the role of colonial officials in what Dirks termed the ‘ethnographic state’,Footnote3 especially the impact of the census on the consolidation of our modern understanding of caste. However, as shown by Susan Bayly, the focus on British ethnographers has downplayed or eliminated the role of key Indian intermediaries and informants (including the role played by intermediate public institutions) in the production of anthropological studies in the subcontinent.Footnote4 There are a few exceptions that challenged the focus on colonial ethnographers in the growth of anthropology in India. The earliest attempt was made by L.P. Vidyarthi in 1978. An anthropologist himself, Vidyarthi assembled two volumes on the most important works by Indian anthropologists during the twentieth century.Footnote5 While rich in detail, Vidyarthi’s work stops short of offering a coherent overarching analysis. It was also written before the important work done since then on colonial anthropology and its systems of knowledge, which has transformed the ways in which we position Indian intellectuals. Patricia Uberoi et al. co-edited a volume recovering the contributions of several important Indian scholars of the twentieth century.Footnote6 Yet their book focuses on individual genealogies rather than exploring social sciences as a part of larger processes of knowledge complexes, state changes and social interactions with the intellectual.Footnote7 Other recent work has tended to focus on individual scholars rather than intellectual trends and their connections to large-scale social and political change.Footnote8 More recently, C.J. Fuller, Edward Simpson and Alice Tilche have offered new perspectives on the subject, arguing (in Fuller’s case) for a new vision of the works of colonial ethnographers by challenging the works of Dirks and Cohn.Footnote9 Simpson and Tilche, too, have returned to the research sites of scholars such as F.G. Bailey, A.C. Mayer and David Pocock in the postcolonial state.Footnote10 Despite their fresh approach, the works by Fuller, Simpson and Tilche still focus on Western anthropologists. Thus, a gap remains in our knowledge of the development of anthropology and sociology in India.
A more thorough engagement with the lives and careers of Indian academics is necessary to reveal that the tensions of anthropological knowledge in India were not merely a European problem, nor were they resolved by Independence. In fact, after 1947, these tensions were often exacerbated by new questions about decolonisation, development, national unity and ‘modernity’. Unlike British ethnographies, which were designed to classify and rule the colonial ‘Other’, Indian intellectuals found in anthropology a way to understand themselves and the problems of their society. They used their discipline to contest ideologies of racial superiority and to reconstruct what they saw as ‘Indian tradition’. This process was not easy. The first generations of Indian social scientists, such as L.K.A. Iyer and G.S. Ghurye, owed much to their British education and often accepted and reproduced many of the theories coming from the West, including trends linking caste and race hierarchies. Yet, the rise of nationalist politics awoke these intellectuals to the problems of colonial knowledge. Through their works, these scholars shaped the way India was to be defined at home and abroad. They were also instrumental in forging the Nehruvian/Congress narrative of ‘unity in diversity’.
The legacy of these ideological innovations and trends in India’s social sciences is paramount. It may be found not only in the writings of these scholars but also in the institutions they left behind. Organisations such as the Anthropological Survey of India, the Indian Sociological Society, the Bombay Anthropological Society and the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, for example, played a significant role in defining the new objects of study in Indian social sciences, whether it was Adivasis, Dalits or the Denotified Tribes. Often with strong links to the government, these institutions defined the main characteristics of Indian culture and discarded what they saw as foreign elements. The institutions also had strong connections abroad. Their staff collaborated with foreign organisations such as the Ford Foundation and UNESCO in village development programmes and assisted in curating anthropological collections like the Museum of Man in Bhopal, India, and the Pitts Rivers Museum in Oxford. That is to say, the history of anthropology in India has strong political and international features. Aware of the complex nature of anthropology in India, this special section will adopt a holistic approach that combines elements of intellectual history, cultural studies and museology.
The articles in this special section are grouped into three broad themes—firstly, ‘genealogies of sociology and anthropology’ (Bandeh-Ahmadi and Cháirez-Garza), secondly, ‘action anthropology’ (Bhukya and Gould), and thirdly, ‘anthropological knowledge and the museum’ (Bates and Ikegame, Joshi and Tankha). One of the main critical references from across the papers on anthropology and ethnographic museums is the paradoxical continuities of colonial, eugenicist and progressivist ideas within the postcolonial framing of anthropology and ethnography. The third grouping, ‘anthropological knowledge and the museum’, comprises three papers that contextualise the concept of museums within the evolving politics of post-Independence tribal integration and, conversely, the several indigenous nationalist positions that critique the essentialising narratives of the state. The papers included here locate the current decolonial initiatives within the nation-state framework identifying the state and the nation themselves as colonially derived categories which perpetuate certain essentialist narratives, making it imperative for indigenous communities and their cultural practitioners to strive and negotiate for space and voice within museum narratives through innovative and locally grounded means.
Another common concern between the three groups in this special section is the exploration, though variously conceptualised, of the construction of the ‘other’ within the Indian context. In this sense, the ‘other’ was envisioned through anthropology’s disciplinary focus on ‘development’-oriented progress, which informed conceptualisations of ‘national standards’ and museum narratives. Notions about India and its population were to some extent shaped by a governmental focus on research that measured, theorised and represented an ideal of progress which required the invention of an ahistorical and static ‘other’ as a standard for comparison (Bates and Ikegame; Tankha). The different disciplinary remits of sociology and anthropology in the Indian academic and administrative context also contributed to the persistence of ‘physical anthropology’ as a standard means to measure ‘progress’ with the ‘deeper concepts of colonial primitivism’ still prevalent within current social practices.Footnote11
Taking this into consideration, the papers that open this special section, namely the articles by Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi and Jesús Cháirez-Garza, show a similar exploration of how racial sciences and concepts such as race and eugenics, to different degrees, permeated the works of some of the key founding figures of Indian anthropology and sociology, including P.C. Biswas, G.S. Ghurye, Radhakamal Mukherjee and D.N. Majumdar. These scholars were involved in the foundation of some of the most important sociology and anthropology departments and ‘schools’ in India, including those in Delhi, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Lucknow. Perhaps reflecting the transition from a colony to an independent nation, Bandeh-Ahmadi and Cháirez-Garza show the tensions in how these scholars engaged with anthropological and sociological theories in the early twentieth century. For instance, while some of these sociologists and anthropologists were aware of the problems of theories endorsing European superiority, these ideas were not rejected altogether. Instead, the rejection of racial superiority only included upper-caste communities, while ‘the masses’ were seen as an obstacle in India’s path to progress.
First, Bandeh-Ahmadi offers an in-depth analysis of the physical anthropologist Profulla Chandra (P.C.) Biswas and the legacy of his ideas in the field of physical anthropology in India. Biswas, who earned his PhD under the supervision of the Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer at the University of Berlin in the 1930s, became the first professor of Anthropology in one of the largest departments in the subcontinent, at Delhi University. Unlike traditional narratives highlighting the British colonial connections with Indian anthropology, the case of Biswas offers an ‘unexpected link’ or a history that has been often forgotten and overlooked between Nazi Germany and India. Through a combination of historical and ethnographic methods, Bandeh-Ahmadi presents Biswas as a Nazi sympathiser and as an academic who was versed in racial science and eugenics. Like many racial scientists or eugenicists of the time, Biswas was interested in studying the racial hierarchies of his own society and exploring different possibilities to improve the different ‘stocks’ of his own country. As Bandeh-Ahmadi illustrates, these concerns are reflected in Biswas’ writings about dermatoglyphics and eugenics. For instance, following the suggestion of Fischer, Biswas conducted an experiment in which he studied the fingerprints of 50 Indian students and contrasted them to other racialised groups. He was convinced that fingerprints were markers of heritage and could provide clues about the past of specific communities. In this case, Bandeh-Ahmadi argues, Biswas wanted to show how Indian fingerprints were very similar to those of European subjects and had little in common with prints collected from ‘Mongolian’ or ‘yellow races’. In essence, this was a racial argument to show that Indian students (implying elite, upper-caste males) were closer to the supposedly superior Aryan people.
Biswas’ interest in eugenics followed a similar pattern. He believed that humans could be divided into ‘stocks’ ranging from the best stock, those with superior qualities; to the good stock, law-abiding citizens; to the bad stock, the paupers, criminals and insane among others. According to Biswas, if the reproduction of the bad stock was not controlled, the world would be at risk of self-destruction. This led him to support eugenicist policies, including mass sterilisation, to eliminate unwanted sectors of Indian society. While Biswas attributed some of these ideas to what he had seen in Nazi Germany, he also argued that the caste system provided a useful blueprint for eugenicist policies. Regardless of how abhorrent we might find these ideas, Biswas was not shunned from academic circles. Throughout his career, Biswas was part of larger international scholarly networks interested in heredity and physical anthropology. Similarly, his methodology, rather than being explicitly rejected, was silently pushed to the sidelines. Due to this, even when racial science declined across the world, as Bandeh-Ahmadi shows, some of the methods and ethical legacies associated with physical anthropology á la Biswas can still be observed in present-day India.
Cháirez-Garza continues to explore the influence of race and racial science by examining the way British and Indian sociologists understood the concept of untouchability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that far from thinking of it as a religious or cultural category, scholars such as Ghurye, Radhakamal Mukerjee and D.N. Majumdar conceived untouchability as a racial concept. Embedded in racial understandings of the caste system, popularised by H.H. Risley, untouchability presented itself as a complex sociological and anthropological problem for Indian scholars. At a time when scientific racism, evolutionism and diffusionism were still used to explain the development of human populations across the world, anthropologists and sociologists from India, and from the Global South, had to engage with racial theories rather than reject them altogether. In this vein, Indian sociologists had to explain the racial status of their society vis-à-vis the affirmations of colonial rulers about their alleged mental and physical superiority.
While the theory of Aryanism seemed to offer an explanation for why upper-caste (and ‘purer’) Indians were of a similar status to their European counterparts, the existence of untouchability left important questions unanswered. For instance, untouchability was a thorny issue for those sociologists, usually with a nationalist outlook, who were interested in showing the importance of Hinduism as a religion or culture. On the one hand, sociologists had to explain why Dalits had not been completely assimilated into Hindu society after centuries of interaction; on the other, they had to answer why the existence of untouchability was not linked to an inherent ‘Hindu’ belief in inequality.
It was here that conceiving untouchability as a racial concept proved fruitful. Scholars like Ghurye and Mukerjee imagined Dalits as a group indigenous to the subcontinent who never mixed with the Aryans or Dravidians. This meant that Dalits were essentially different from the rest of the Hindu population. The inferior status of Dalits was therefore not linked to Hinduism as a religion or culture but could be explained through racial understandings of the world. As Cháirez-Garza argues, this vision of untouchability was only possible because ideas coming from Dalits were excluded or overlooked. In this sense, returning to the work of Dalit scholars such as B.R. Ambedkar and C. Parvathamma may offer new avenues to reimagine the history of untouchability as a concept.
Our special section next explores the wider applications of social sciences in mid twentieth century Indian governance. William Gould and Bhangya Bhukya are concerned with the applications of anthropology and sociology to concepts and policies of welfare or social policy, and both explore the incomplete or limited nature of social scientists’ interventions in these areas. In the case of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf in Hyderabad state from the late 1930s into the 1940s, this was rooted in the anthropologist’s adoption of what Bhukya identifies as ‘Anthropological Developmentalism’. This nuanced form of ‘applied anthropology’ meant, as the author suggests, that Haimendorf was never fully noted for his specific intellectual contributions to the discipline. Instead, his approach drew on longer- and shorter-term theoretical and practical contexts, which rooted him clearly in British anthropological traditions.
Firstly, Haimendorf clearly developed his analytical research approach around evolutionist assumptions about Adivasi communities in Hyderabad state. This led him to advocate a ‘protectionist’ approach to community life, but also to subscribe to tribal taxonomies that reinforced the notion of separation or distinction from caste-based societies. Secondly, he was clearly responding to the immediate political challenges that the princely state faced from the late 1930s, in the form of Gond uprisings and other methods of political resistance. Haimendorf was blind, Bhukya shows, to the claims for political autonomy and sovereignty, instead assuming that local rights and material goods were the root cause of the Gond rebellion. Yet, despite the ways in which Haimendorf created a parallel tradition of applied anthropology to that initially conducted in British India, he continued to be commemorated and celebrated by Gond communities after his death. Bhukya also confronts this paradox by exploring the complex responses of Gond communities to the anthropologist as researcher—the dynamic of the other from within.
While Haimendorf’s vision of Adivasis was informed by a larger intellectual concept of society that identified the marginal subject as distinct, separate and prior to Hindu caste-based society at large, sociologists and anthropologists after 1947 were influenced by related frames of reference. William Gould explores how a normative idea of the Indian citizen shaped welfare research around beggars, by focussing on a pivotal study by the Delhi-based sociologist M.S. Gore in the city of Delhi. In the mid 1950s, Gore’s team of social workers undertook a wide-ranging survey not only of the spatial and demographic characteristics of beggars in the capital, but also followed methods of participant observation, exploring ‘beggar motivation’, points of origin and family circumstances of vagrants, the communities and milieu created by beggar societies, the meaning of ‘giving’ and ‘charity’ and the question of the ‘reformability’ of individual beggars. Gore’s team, formed out of the Delhi School of Social Work, made direct reference to sociological traditions, not least in the delineation of village-like communities, formed around the specific circumstances of the beggar society.
However, juxtaposed with this detailed and extensive fieldwork, the Delhi study situated the condition of the beggar in the wider urban milieu of ‘giving’, ‘charity’ and social distinction. In other words, Gore was keenly aware of what he described as the ‘society of the beggar’, which was not only the result of proximate changes in the city’s connection to the countryside, but also to deeper temporalities around religious tradition, and the pressures brought on their form by urban environments. As a result, the condition of beggary for this study and others like it formed around an idea of the evolving regime of secular citizenship: begging was a sociological condition, which developed or could be reformed in relation to the changing idea of a modern citizenry.
Bhukya and Gould show then that mid twentieth century Indian social scientists, while frequently debating the requirements of new interdisciplinary approaches and contexts of social change under democratic dispensations, still drew to a great extent on older traditions in colonial ethnography. In many ways, this paradox lay at the heart of Indian social scientists’ exploration of how they imagined their research connected to the priorities of the new state. Alongside a desire for social integration, via instruments of technological change, they relied on older survey methods of aggregated populations that drew on earlier methodologies on the one hand, and on deeper concepts of colonial primitivism on the other. As Bhukya’s and Gould’s pieces both go on to explore, this period in the self-conscious application of anthropological and sociological approaches as policy instruments, created inward-facing and outward-facing debates about the role of anthropology and sociology in India. These were not just concerned with what a specifically Indian disciplinary tradition could be, in relation to comparators in the northern hemisphere, but also implied active engagement of marginal Indian citizens with the national project.
In our third theme, ‘Anthropological knowledge and the museum’, Bates and Ikegame’s paper shows how the practice of decolonisation on the Indian museum sector is approached through several related but diverse types of museums. These are either state-owned or centrally regulated, focusing on anthropological exhibits and the category of the ‘tribal’ and their own institutional and disciplinary objectives. This paper considers the nationalisation of ‘colonial museums’ from erstwhile princely states that feature personal ideologies of collectors, as well as ones set up by the colonial administration and their evolution in the postcolonial phase after Indian Independence. Bates and Ikegame identify a contradictory challenge facing these museums, which aims to demonstrate the diversity of the peoples of India while narrating a story of the integration of these different peoples into a nation. What emerges in this research is the continuance of the ‘tribal’ as a category of the ‘other’ within the national community. The urban, upper-class and upper-caste Indian, seen mostly as the consumer of the museum experience, embodies a delocalised and disembodied surveyor that creates, transmits and circulates knowledge about the tribal ‘other’. Social Darwinism, the Victorian stadial theory of human evolution and the integrationist approach of the colonial and Nehruvian governments, which viewed tribal religions in India as backward, anachronistic and static, still form the core of a vast majority of such national and state museums’ curatorial narrative. Through an ethnographic study drawing on several interviews and conversations, Bates and Ikegame show how this essentialist view of tribal cultures is further perpetuated by the developmental agenda of government funding in this sector.
Bates and Ikegame contrast the persistence of the diorama with its anthropometric tendencies in the ethnographic galleries of postcolonial urban museums in India, with new-age museums like the Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum (MPTM). The MPTM explores the idea of making the museum itself a part of the display that contextualises the museum artefacts within narratives of cultural use and community curated representations of tribal life utilising the materiality of the museum space itself. However, the museum’s involvement in navigating and acknowledging dissensions and privileged narratives within such tribal communities are not adequately transparent in the curatorial process. Bates and Ikegame describe the failings of decolonial approaches in the postcolonial Indian museum context by identifying the uncritical use of colonial anthropological science-based assumptions that underwrite practices of misrepresentation, improper labelling, essentialising and clubbing of different ‘types’ of exhibits under vague regional descriptors in current practice.
All three papers concerning museums have engaged with the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (IGRMS), Bhopal, and used its representative strategy and anthropological narrative as a standard point of comparison or departure. Bates and Ikegame’s paper focusses on the IGRMS’ initiative of creating space and ownership of tribal communities over representative dioramas that include building lived-in houses within the museum complex. However, the performance of ownership through rituals is undermined by the conceptions of tribal art as menial labour and the distinctively poor treatment and financial recompense given to such tribal artists. The claim to ‘authenticity’ in representing tribal life as a lived-in space as part of a decolonial aesthetic is contradicted by the missing or meagre information provided on the provenance, cultural context, and names of artists for objects and spaces on display. The diorama in this case becomes a messy remainder of the past visualisation of the tribal ‘other’ from within the Indian society. Moreover, this immersive ‘tribal exotic’ of new-age museums like the MPTM are not necessarily integrative, but rather translates the local tribal heritage into easily consumable national and international formats that preserve the unique histories of local mythologies and ecologies but also makes them shareable as an experience not limiting objects to data inputs to be catalogued.
Vibha Joshi expands the focus on museums to explore their location within the narrative of colonial ethnographic research. Joshi explores the connection between colonial museum accretion of Naga artefacts in the UK under Henry Balfour at the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) and the ethnographic practice of administrator-anthropologists J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills, who were posted in Naga Hills. She shows how their work, published as part of the Assam administration’s Ethnological Series, developed into a standardised guide for collecting ethnographic information in a manner which would be useful for a ‘scientific study’ of anthropology transnationally. Joshi uses the term ‘salvage collecting’ as an indicator of the early colonial ethnographic intent to preserve and represent people’s material culture, paradoxically, at a time when colonial contact brought about rapid change and so-called acculturation. Like Bates and Ikegame, Joshi references the collection of Naga artefacts at the PRM to show a similar interpretative trajectory where the initial correction of weapons from the Naga community fitted the evolutionary narrative of the slow progression of small arms development over time.
This early context of the substantial collection of Naga items at the PRM helps Joshi to set up a comparative understanding of early colonial ideologies of museum collections. Her current case studies are based on the work of anthropologists working from South Asia, and on South Asian collections in museums of Europe and the UK, who create networks connecting European museums with community representatives from indigenous tribes in India. Joshi presents her own curatorial intervention as decolonial praxis that enabled museum exhibition narratives to be authored by the historic descendants of source communities. Such contemporary insistence on ‘authentic’ community narratives in current co-curation practices exist in an interesting relationship to the early colonial ‘salvage’ anthropology which valued the ‘cultural authenticity’ that Bates, Ikegame and Joshi foreground as the principal concern of nineteenth century colonial museum collection and preservation. This contemporary focus on the ‘authentic’ voice from source communities raises critical questions regarding the power dynamics implicit in current decolonial initiatives from the UK and European countries that need to conceive of robust safeguarding against tokenism and essentialising narratives of ‘cultural authenticity’ in the context of decolonisation and inclusive representation.
Both Joshi and Bates and Ikegame bring to the fore crucial questions regarding repatriation and practice-based decolonisation within the larger political context of Indian museums striving to stay relevant within the current cultural discourse of ownership and representation. Joshi uses examples of repatriation initiatives undertaken by UK-based museums with regional communities in Nagaland to explore and analyse the intersecting and often conflicting national and regional interpretations of such heritage that run counter to nationalist narratives of tribal integration. Joshi, Bates and Ikegame think through the possibilities of such projects foisting yet another identity category onto Indian regional and national understanding of decolonisation, further complicating the possibilities of self-actualisation for marginal communities within the nation-state paradigm.
This challenge is taken up by Akshaya Tankha’s paper, which makes an important intervention in thinking critically about decolonisation in reference to house museums in Nagaland. Tankha uses select examples of ‘house museums’ in Nagaland as a challenge to the colonially derived construct of a homogenous and static ‘tribal culture’ of the Nagas in state museums that censor the historic shifts that have characterised Naga history, especially those related to Christianity and Naga nationalist politics. Tankha formulates the term ‘morung effect’ to show how these house museums derive a ‘ritually constituted iconic quality’ from the village morung, which was the Naga cultural institution of the tribal dormitory that catered to an exclusive or elite and predominantly male membership, while also rendering a ‘secular exhibitionary quality’ to the house museums and its publics. The ‘morung effect’ serves several critical purposes in this essay: it goes beyond the visual architectural similarities between these museums and morungs to ultimately question the idea of ‘rupture’ that characterises scholarly engagements with Indigenous heritage in the South Asian context following Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s framing of heritage as something ‘obsolete’ in a static, unchanging past.Footnote12 The non-state museums are renovated and decorated during festivals, fostering a ritual renewal of their communitarian significance while also depending on a ‘qualified publicness’. This ‘qualified publicness’ is reflected in the remote and withdrawn locations of these museums and the intimacy of curatorial choices that comes from being in someone’s domestic or private space, often familiar only to an intimate and knowing audience.
The ‘houseness’ of these museums are prioritised over their ‘museumness’, showing how the socio-cultural value of these museums are tied to their collective recognition by the community and not necessarily their footfall count. The ‘morung effect’ implies a departure from Western critical conceptions of house museums to focus on a layering of history implied by the concept of the morung—the ‘house of many’. This allows for a critical conception of the Naga house museums and explicates their relationship to religion, nationalism and political contestation over the mid to late twentieth century in post-ceasefire Nagaland as a non-linear plural history. Such conceptions of the contemporary Naga house museum are further complemented by their open-ended overlapping between ritually constituted and secular frames of reference that Tankha identifies. Tankha’s paper reorients discussions on failure of the museum in India to reproduce the pedagogic outcome of its Victorian counterparts. Instead, he critically reads domesticity and the ‘qualified publicness’ of house museums as specific to the experience and expression of museums and public culture in the indigenously inhabited context of Nagaland, and, by implication, of postcolonial India.
All of the papers in this section have come about as a result of a number of conversations, interactions in workshops and research opportunities created by an Arts and Humanities Research Council supported project. Our work was unfortunately disrupted for a time by the COVID-19 global pandemic, but we are very grateful to all the contributors and a host of other people involved across the world who continued to be connected and active with us. These interactions, and the research that has underpinned them, have allowed us to hopefully pose new questions about the nature of India’s mid twentieth century social sciences, although in opening up new avenues, the requirements of further research have also become clearer. Through the special section, we hope that some of the larger trends around these disciplines and their cognate institutions and intellectuals have started to come more into focus. In this work, we are interested in exploring what is distinctive in Indian anthropology and sociology. By extension, we explore what its connections are to various global intellectual flows and ideas about development, state planning and material culture. But perhaps most importantly, running through all of the work is a final set of questions that we hope to develop further—what the methods and approaches of social scientists meant for the communities that were the subjects of their research, and how it was thereby mediated. These are of course our initial set of provocations that we hope will be taken up by other scholars investigating new avenues about the implications of sociological and anthropological knowledge in India and beyond.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for their support in funding the larger project—‘The Other from Within’—out of which this special section has emerged.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. D.P. Mukerji, Modern Indian Culture: A Sociological Study (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 2nd ed., 1948).
2. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
3. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
4. Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 187–232.
5. L.P. Vidyarthi, Rise of Anthropology in India: A Social Science Orientation, Vols. I and II (Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1978).
6. Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar and Satish Deshpande, ed., Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).
7. There are other important recent works exploring the histories of Indian anthropology and sociology, including Projit Bihari Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Lesley Jo Weaver, ‘The Laboratory of Scientific Racism: India and the Origins of Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 51 (2022): 67–83; and Sujata Patel, ed., Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations and Practices (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011).
8. See, for example, the work of Abhijit Guha, Nation-Building in Indian Anthropology, Beyond the Colonial Encounter (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023).
9. Chris Fuller, ‘Anthropologists and Viceroys: Colonial Knowledge and Policy Making in India, 1871– 1911’, Modern Asian Studies 50 (2016): 17–58.
10. Edward Simpson and Alice Tilche, ed., The Future of the Rural World: India’s Village 1950–2015 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2016).
11. For a historic reading of this, see S.S. Jodhka, ‘Plural Histories of Sociology and Social Anthropology’, Economic & Political Weekly 44, no. 17 (2009): 35–38.
12. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 149.