Abstract
Ramkrishna Mukherjee’s published works completely stand apart from those of his contemporaries. He filled up an enormous gap that existed in the analyses of Indian villages by economists and social anthropologists through his methodological eclecticism. From his first book Six Bengal Villages to his last book Why Unitary Social Science? one can discern his commitment to a multidisciplinary orientation. He always considered place, time and people, i.e. contextualisation, as a keynote for social scientific analyses. In turn, this approach helped him grapple with issues such as objectivity in social science, an unsettled issue to this day. Furthermore, he argued and demonstrated that the persisting proclivity in social science’s bifurcation of economy, polity and culture can be and should be done away with. He rejected the puerile controversy relating to quantitative versus qualitative data and argued for a creative blending of the two. For him, theory construction, inductive-inferential method and conceptual formation were inextricably intertwined. A possible way out of this was opting for retroduction; however, he did not take to this approach.
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Notes
- 1.
I contributed a chapter to the book Methodology in Social Research: Dilemmas and Perspectives (Essays in Honour of Ramkrishna Mukherjee), edited by Partha Nath Mukherji (see Oommen 2000).
- 2.
I do not remember to have come across this book in the library of University of Pune or the Gokhale Institute of Economics and Politics, Pune, both of which I used to visit as an MA student.
- 3.
RM and Yogendra Singh were the two sociologists who ‘analyzed Indian Sociology from the perspective of sociology of knowledge’ (Oommen 2007: vi). A revised and enlarged edition of the book was published in 2013.
- 4.
In its 2007 edition, the book is a collection of nine papers and the enlarged edition of 2013 consists of twelve papers.
- 5.
When RM studied the Bengal villages before India’s partition, he was studying ‘his own society’, being a Bengali. However, had he studied these villages after India’s partition, he would be studying the ‘other’ society as an Indian citizen. This vividly brings out the artificiality in equating ‘society’ and the ‘nation-state’ as reported by Bauman (1973).
- 6.
Appraisal is a word that RM frequently invoked in his writings. It is neither a blind appreciation nor an irrational critic, but an effort to situate something in its appropriate context.
- 7.
Ignorant of RM’s perspective (I read Six Villages of Bengal only at the time of preparing this chapter), I published a paper titled ‘Data Collection Techniques: The Case of Sociology and Social Anthropology’ in 1969 (see Oommen 1969) in which I argued that the type of society from which data are collected and the purpose for which they are generated should determine the techniques of data collection, and thus unwittingly advocated ‘methodological eclecticism’.
- 8.
My own experience of venturing into study on social movement in the 1960 s illustrates this. The study could be published only in the early 1970 s by a relatively new entrant into the field of publishing in India (see Oommen 1972) as both the University of California Press and Oxford University Press did not want to publish it.
- 9.
Since there is a chapter by N. Jayaram in this volume dealing exclusively with this book, I refrain from going into the book’s contents.
- 10.
I have argued elsewhere that the changing modes of conceptualising the world have serious implications for social research (see Oommen 2000).
- 11.
Archer (1991), President of International Sociological Association (1986–90), advocated a single sociology for the emerging global society.
- 12.
I have also advocated the need for contextualisation of Indian sociology to render it rooted in Indian society and culture (see Oommen 1983).
- 13.
Predictions, even in physical sciences, are not always reliable as in the case of meteorology.
- 14.
Since Surendra Munshi’s chapter in this volume focuses on this, I am not attempting a substantive analysis of this theme.
- 15.
But I realised later that, in following this line of argument, I had erred because, unlike in the case of African-Americans, the discrimination of the Indian ‘untouchables’ was/is legitimised by Hindu theology. If only I had realised that the caste system constituted the core institutional order of Hindu society, I could have avoided this mistaken assumption.
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Oommen, T.K. (2019). Ramkrishna Mukherjee: An Accomplished Academic Amphibian. In: Mukherji, P., Jayaram, N., Ghosh, B. (eds) Understanding Social Dynamics in South Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0387-6_2
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