Decolonizing in Hindsight - Documenting Everyday Challenges of Doing Sociology

This paper draws upon my experience teaching sociology in a well-known public university in India for more than three decades. And making sense in ‘hindsight’ of the challenges one faced teaching some of the courses that I taught, namely: (i) Sociological Theory; (ii) Concepts and Theories of Social Change in India; (iii) Women and Society in India. The central effort here is to document the difficulties that I faced at different levels: beginning with the making of the reading list; the rationale of inclusion and (more importantly) exclusion of texts that had a global circulation (usually stemming from the global North); and finally communicating to a very unequal and diverse class in English, a language long associated with colonial legacy, privilege and social mobility. These were students in the MA programme and what would be recognized as graduate students in the global (North) but with local specificities that mark them off from graduate students in the North even as they share similarities. I use the term ‘hindsight’ after careful consideration. For central to this paper is my effort to document the everyday transactions of doing decolonizing sociology in a context that were uninformed by the term ‘decolonizing’. Yet doing sociology in a society that was colonized for two hundred years entailed an everyday struggle with what were termed as “alien concepts”, “imperial categories” by some and “indigenous categories” by others. There was a widely felt angst, often expressed as either a sense of “lack” that reduced the global South as a site for empirical data generation and the global North as the high table of theorizing. Or more lately, (though always a presence in India) wherein Indian sociology too becomes a site of “triumphant cultural nationalism” .