Sociology and Social Sciences in India: Connections and Closures

Social Sciences witnessed tremendous growth in post-Independence India owing to a variety of factors. The inauguration of a democratic polity and the attendant democratization of higher education facilitated the creation of a congenial institutional setting wherein social sciences could go for massive growth and expansion. India’s preoccupation with planned economy propelled economics on a higher pedestal among the social sciences. However, other social sciences like sociology, political science and psychology could also partake of the state-bestowed legitimacy and support by making their claims for ‘relevance’ through their contributions to our understanding of cultural impediments to development, challenges of nation-building and social psychological aspects of development and change in general. Invariably, the historical trajectories of development of the social sciences have been uneven. Whereas economics has been the most prestigious as a policy science with firmer institutional scaffolding, sociology, political science and psychology have primarily grown around university and college departments. Indeed, some of them have also found a secondary place along with economics in interdisciplinary research institutes and public policy think tanks.

Expectedly, the differing status of social sciences has impacted on the nature of conversations among them: economics being most insular as a confident social science and sociology being most open given its perpetual quest for a distinctive identity as an academic discipline. Political science and psychology figure somewhere in between along this disciplinary spectrum. Based on the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) Surveys of Research in these four disciplines, this paper proposes to synoptically map out the contemporary state of connections and closures among these four academic disciplines.