ABSTRACT
Ratna Naidu is one of the early women sociologists who never made a claim to be a feminist nor worked on issues concerning women. But her long struggle to get a permanent academic position in spite of having a PhD from a reputed university abroad and consistent academic publications which included books which received recognition and awards and articles in reputed journals can be considered as symptomatic of the struggles which early women sociologists had to endure in a largely male-dominated world of sociology in India. Her academic writings span a wide range of issues, from making a critique of Parsonian action schema and what she considered as Parsons’s inability to adequately differentiate between values and norms to writings on issues concerning communalism, for which she had undertaken extensive fieldwork in both India and Malaysia and come up with conceptual schemas which used both the sociological and the psychoanalytical traditions, to her writings on the issue of secularism in which she critiques the tendency to make a dyadic differentiation between the sacred and the secular and finally her writings on urban issues, especially on the walled city of Hyderabad, which used to witness communal strife in the 1980s.
