ABSTRACT
The intellectual encounter between the Durkheimian School of Sociology and the French Sanskrit scholarship on India, at the turn of the twentieth century, has long exercised a generative power over the knowledge of Indian society in France and also in other national academic spaces, particularly after World War II. The innovative feature of the French tradition of sociology of India lies in its link between empirical materials collected in the field and textual studies of the higher literary tradition as revealed in the Sanskrit literature. At the same period, the genesis of Indian sociology followed different paths in British India and Germany for example. Although British administrators were closely associated in their daily colonial routine with petty Indian bureaucrats mostly drawn from the Brahman elites, their information on caste derived first from the empirical material collected during the regular censuses and other ethnographical enquiries.1 If the colonial understanding of the caste system was not free of the literati representation of Indian society, we should admit that the census apparatus had its own practical (i.e. statistical) logic that remains to be studied as its data cannot be mechanically related to the corpus of the Sanskrit texts. In Germany, in contrast to France, Max Weber’s opus Hinduismus und
Buddhismus, published around World War I, did not lead to any methodological alliance between sociologists and classical scholars on India, although the German Sanskritists were numerous and intellectually powerful in their national academic space at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the reception of Weber’s book was almost a failure in France, although the conditions of its reception would have appeared favourable in the 1920s and the 1930s when Sylvain Lévi, Marcel Mauss and Célestin Bouglé were active in the field of Indian scholarship and sociology, and well informed of the state of their respective disciplines in Germany or, later on, in the 1950s, when Louis Dumont launched his own sociology of India, to name a few. In this sense, the disciplinary setting and intellectual legacy of the French tradition of scholarship on India is quite singular. Contrasting this sociological tradition with the work of Max Weber and
considering the scant reception of Hinduismus und Buddhismus in France before and after World War II, the aim of this chapter is to shed light on
some epistemological issues which are involved in the sociological understanding of Indian society, particularly its social morphology, the caste system, most often conceived as a model integrating the various Indian social groups in both a functional and a symbolical way. Linked with this appreciation of the caste system is the supposed lack of historical consciousness of its Brahman elites, a feature that has been belaboured by European scholars throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analyzing as a case study the genesis of the sociology of India in a specific national and historical setting and introducing a comparative view point, allows us to break with wide generalizations regarding the field of production of knowledge regarding India; it also gives us the opportunity of elaborating what Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar have labelled “the third coordinate of Orientalism,”2 that is the essentialization of the social and cultural differences between social formations and, more generally, the interplay between the universal and the particular in the understanding of non-European societies.
