Yogendra Singh, who played a seminal role in reorienting and modernizing Indian sociology as a discipline and authored the path-breaking and bestselling, Modernization of Indian Tradition, passed away after a heart attack at his south Delhi residence on Sunday. He was 87.
Yogendra Singh, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and New Delhi and also its founder.
He was born on 2nd November, 1932 in a Jamindar family of a village in the Basti district of Uttar Pradesh. He obtained his Master’s and PhD degrees from Lucknow University.
Methodology:
Yogendra Singh was neither functionalist nor Marxist but he emphasizes theory in relation to context. Therefore, he related structural-functional, structuralism, structural-historical, culturalism and Marxist orientation and constructs in the study social stratification.
He applied integrated approach for his analysis of social stratification, modernization and change in Indian society.
Singh has published extensively in national and international scholarly research journals. He is also author of many books.
His main works are:
- Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973)
- Essays on Modernization (1977)
- Social Stratification and Social Change in India (1978)
Image of Man: Ideology and Theory in Indian Sociology (1984)
- Indian Sociology: Social Conditioning and Emerging Concerns (1987)
- Social Change in India: Crisis and Resilience (1993)
- Culture Change in India: Identity and Globalization (2000)
Ideology and Theory in Indian Sociology (2004)
- Social Aspects of Scientific and Technological Revolution (co-author) (1978)
- Sociology of Non- Violence and Peace (co-author) (1968)
- Traditions of Non- Violence (co-author) (1972)
- The Sociology of Culture (co-author) (1991)
- Towards a Sociology of Culture in India (co-editor) (1965)
- For a Sociology of India (co-editor) (1967)
In his studies, Singh has concentrated his focus on the following aspects of Indian society:
- Social stratification
- Social change
- Modernization
- Indian sociology
- Culture change
Social Stratification:
Stratification is the social process through which rewards and resources such as wealth, power and prestige are distributed systematically and unequally within are among societies. The sociology of social stratification hinders many basic and complex theoretical issues.
These relate to the nature of social order, social equality and inequality, social justice, power and the nature of man. In sociology, these issues relate to questions of theory, structure and process of social stratification.
The three are organically interrelated, though heuristically distinct. In this context, Singh offers a basis for the analysis of substantive as well as theoretical issues in social stratification.
Singh has analysed the studies on social stratification and social change conducted in the 1950s and in the 1970s.
Singh (1977) reviews the trend of sociology of social stratification on India focusing upon some of these specific structural units of stratification.
These are mainly:
(i) Caste system and social stratification, and
(ii) Class structures and social stratification.
Caste System and Social Stratification:
The theoretical position of caste in the analysis of Indian social system is highly complex. It constitutes both a structural unit of social stratification as well as a system. The distinction between the two would depend upon the level of analysis involved. Sociologists who look across the cultural view of caste have, right from the beginning, associated it with an autonomous principle of stratification.
Singh (1969) conducted a study of caste and power structure in rural society. His study of caste and its changing forms and functions refers to the implication of the system for Indian social stratification. It is not meant to be a review of caste studies as such.
Caste system is seen here as a status principle of social stratification, for sociology of social stratification in India, the treatment of caste becomes unavoidable as a standard to measure changes with reference to other principles of stratification such as of wealth (class) and power (elite). These new principles only sometimes operate autonomously; more often they operate contingently together with the caste principle of social stratification.
Class Structures and Social Stratification:
The class element in the social stratification in India is organically connected with the caste stratification although for heuristic purposes a conceptual distinction should be made. An important theoretical issue that arises in this context is of the nature of class, whether it is a universal or particularistic category. In Marxist as well as non-Marxist sociology, class is viewed as a universalistic phenomenon.
Singh (1977) finds that a series of overlapping or intermediary structural forms exist in India that range from caste, ethnic group to class without having been individually crystallized.
Social Change:
Singh (1973) labels social change as ‘ideology’. If the relevance of the concepts of sanskritization and westernization is not as analytical proposition but ‘truth asserting concepts’ as Singh has aptly characterized them – sanskritization, westernization, parochialization, universalization, little and great traditions, rural-urban dichotomy or continuum, etc. enriched the body of sociology of knowledge.
At the very beginning of re-emergence of the cognitive-historical trend, some of its proponents, who later made a significant contribution to the development of Indian sociology, were still strongly influenced by the prevailing trend of the structural-functional approach and the behaviour outlook.
As a result, their efforts to Indianize Indian sociology were hesitant and their attempt to cut across the overpowering dominance of the ‘western’ viewpoint was not altogether successful.
A notable example in this context may be Yogendra Singh’s monograph on the Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973), which was written during 1966-67. It contains many insights into the Indianization of Indian sociology.
The Trend Report on the Concepts and Theories of Social Change further substantiates it. Singh (1974) viewed that studies on social change in India have been fragmentary. These studies usually refer to isolated aspects such as caste, family, occupation, etc., and these elements themselves are usually found to have been studied in a local setting – at most at a regional level, and not for India as a whole.
However, it was by an impressionistic amalgamation of these separate factors and their placement on the axis of the twin social processes of sanskritization and westernization (or, modernization) that social change in India has predominantly been interpreted, with the ‘dominant caste’ serving as the lever of change.
Singh found that the process of sanskritization is not merely a positional change in the caste hierarchy but a strategy on the part of those in the lower echelons to challenge the status of those in the higher echelons by adopting their ‘way of life’ (Singh, 1968).
To Singh (1994: 6), “The specific sense of sanskritization lies in the historicity of its meaning based on the Hindu tradition. In this respect, sanskritization is a unique historical expression on the general process of acculturation as a means of vertical mobility of groups…. We may call them ‘historical specific’ and ‘contextual specific’ connotations of sanskritization.”
The Indian sociological formulations of the concept of social change find a beginning in the writings of the British and Indian scholars following the last quarter of the nineteenth century and onwards. Gradually, these concepts and formulations got differentiated and a variety of approaches emerged.
For a brief survey, Singh (1977: 95) classifies these approaches into the following types:
- Evolutionary approaches
- Cultural approaches:
Sanskritization-westernization; little and great tradition, and multiple traditions
- Structural approaches:
Differentiation and mobility analysis
- Dialectical-historical approaches:
This classification is purely heuristic. It represents the dominant theoretical or conceptual orientation found in the writings of the sociologists concerned. Traditionally, social change in India was very slow but it accelerated after independence due to democratic system, secularism, economic development, social justice and socialism.
To Singh, social change has been observed much more in social, cultural, political and economic fields. Singh (1993: 12) discusses two types of tendencies of social change in modern India: “First, there has taken place a substantial change in the social structure without simultaneously bringing about a structural change in the society. It results into tensions and often builds up social crisis. Secondly, there has taken place a sea-change in the subjective domain or the consciousness of the people in respect of social change.”
In his book on Social Change in India: Crisis and Resilience (1993), Singh discusses social change in India on following aspects:
(1) Contradictions and challenges of social change,
(2) Social transformation of the Indian society,
(3) Contemporary social crisis and its dimensions,
(4) Economic development and changing family system,
(5) Law and social change,
(6) Structure, traditions and Indian societal resilience,
(7) Ethnicity, unity and Indian civilization,
(8) Social processes and dimensions of Indian nationalism,
(9) National integration of Indian society,
(10) Concept of social structure, and
(11) Social stratification.
Toward an Integrated Approach:
According to Singh (1973), some major concepts and approaches about social in India can be grouped as:
(i) sanskritization and westernization;
(ii) little and great traditions consisting of (a) processes of parochialization and universalization, and (b) cultural performances and organization of tradition;
(iii) multiple traditions;
(iv) structural approach, based on (a) functional model, and (b) dialectical model; and
(v) cognitive historical or Indological approach. Singh reviews each of them to find common grounds for a conceptual integration.
After the evaluation of these approaches, Singh found that each one of them has advantages of its own for the study of social change, but these advantages are limited as none of them provides a comprehensive perspective on social change in India.
Therefore, a series of concepts related to social change could be integrated into a logical system on the basis of similarities in theoretical formulations. Singh presented a paradigm for an integrated approach to analyse social change in India:
The paradigm is a logical corollary of Singh’s analysis about the levels at which an integrated view on social change in India can be achieved.
According to Singh, this approach can be seen in the following theoretical perspectives:
- The causation of social change is to be sought both from within and without the social system or the tradition. For this we find the concepts employed by Redfield and Singer as being particularly useful and make a distinction between the heterogenetic or exogenous and orthogenetic or endogenous sources of change.
- A distinction between cultural structure and social structure is also made to focus upon the need to observe changes at the level of these two relatively independent substantive domains. Again, following Redfield, cultural structure has further been sub-divided into the categories of the little tradition and the great tradition. Similarly, the social structure is divided to form categories of micro-structure and macro-structure.
- These distinctions follow from the need to focus upon the contexts, through which processes of change could be evaluated in matters of spread and depth.
- Finally, the direction of change is represented in a linear evolutionary form from ‘traditionalization’ toward ‘modernization’. Traditionalization comprises the total range of changes governed by orthogenetic patterns in the cultural and social structures. Modernization similarly represents the net balance of changes following from heterogenetic contacts.
The causal forces, substantive domain, contexts and direction of change provide us the logical boundaries within which the more specific processes of social change in India could be observed and described. These specific processes and the relevant concepts describing them have been noted in the paradigm in each appropriate cell. Singh examines the significance of the specific concepts in course of the analysis of change pertaining to the relevant substantive domain.
Modernization in India:
Modernization is a composite concept. It is also an ideological concept. The models of modernization co-vary with the choice of ideologies. The composite nature of this concept renders it pervasive in the vocabulary of social sciences and evokes its kinship with concepts like ‘development’, ‘growth’, ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’. The basic problematic of modernization in the Third World nations is ideological, particularly when we examine the modernization ideology in India.
In the book on Essays on Modernization in India (1977), Singh has analysed the varied and complex processes involved in the modernization in India, the forces released by it and their bearing on the stability, creativity and development in India as a dynamic nation and composite civilization.
Indian Sociology:
The writings of Yogendra Singh are in many ways sociology of Indian sociology. They offer a profile of Indian sociology exposing the foundations of concepts and theories on which most Indian studies on social stratification and change are based.
Ideology and Theory in Indian Sociology:
Sociology, like most social sciences, is embedded in ideology. Ideology and Theory in Indian Sociology (2004) is a collection of essays, which offers insight into the normative and ideological underpinnings of the Indian sociology in the context of its growth and the challenges that it has encountered in the realms of theory and methodology. These issues have been analysed in the perspective of the western sociology and its own theoretical and methodological evolution.
Culture Change in India:
The study of culture changes has not drawn the attention of sociologists in the same measure as that of the changes in the social structure and its processes. The compilation of essays by Yogendra Singh on Culture Change in India: Identity and Globalization (2000) is an effort to focus upon some of the significant processes of changes in the domain of culture in India.
To begin with, “The Significance of Culture in the Understanding of Social Change in Contemporary India” deals with various orientations in the work of Indian sociologists in their study of culture, the new challenges that such study may now encounter due to the new processes of culture changes through the emergence the ‘information society’ and its consequences leading to the resurgence of the consciousness of the identity among ethnic groups, minorities and weaker sections of society. It also refers to various facets of relationship between culture, its patterns and the processes of economic and political institution building in the Indian society.
Singh views that globalization expands the scope and speed of cultural interaction across societal boundaries; the incidence of migration and emergence of cultural diaspora bring about intense cultural, social and economic interaction. This is made possible due to the telecommunication revolution but the cultural processes that it sets into motion acquire significance, related as these are to the possibilities of cultural assimilation, adaptation, integration or conflict in course of such cultural contacts.
Culture Change and the Analytical Categories:
The choice of analytical categories or concepts circumscribes the scope of thematic treatment of a problem. It also defines the premises and assumptions, which underly the treatment of the cultural phenomena. The preference for a particular set of concepts for analysis of culture has also latent in its epistemological structure and the choice of ideologies. On this basis, the value-neutrality of ‘scientific categories’ for analysis of phenomena has been widely challenged.
Issue of Identity:
The issues of cultural identity in the process of globalization derive from their legitimation from the complexity, which is inherent in the rational utilitarian foundation of choices of values and life goals in our contemporary life.
It is imperative that we come to terms with this reality while analyzing the nature of culture change, as also the questions of new resurgence of the consciousness of cultural and social identities based on micro-situations, whether of locality, region or religion etc. The process of cultural globalization and its myriad challenges should be observed and analysed in the context of substantive and methodological problems which recognize this reality.
The volume offers a critical evaluation of changes in cultural values, institutions and ideologies, which constitute India’s response to the contemporary challenges from the forces of cultural and economic globalization.
Now he is gone. But a generation of JNU students and others he interacted with would always remember the ease with which he explained complex sociological concepts and that ever-present twinkle in his eyes. His death marks the end of an era.
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