How would you appropriate to characterise G. S. Ghurye as a practitioner of ‘theoretical pluralism’? (2025)
Theoretical pluralism describes a scholar who refuses to be bound by one theory or technique and selects whatever illuminates the problem in hand. G. S. Ghurye fits exactly: trained in Sanskrit and in Cambridge anthropology, he practised a disciplined eclecticism whose theoretical position bordered on laissez-faire.
The plurality of his methods
- Indology. Sanskrit sources — Vedas, Smritis, Puranas, the epics, the poetry of Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti — read as an archive of the normative order, supplemented by Marathi and by modern writers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
- Historical-comparative method. Caste and Race in India (1932) treats caste historically, comparatively and integratively; Family and Kin in Indo-European Culture (1955) sets Indian kinship beside Greek and Indo-Iranian material.
- Diffusionism. Under W. H. R. Rivers at Cambridge, and through the diffusionist theories of Grafton Elliot Smith, he read Indian history as waves of culture contact and absorption rather than internal contradiction.
- Ethnography and survey. The monograph on the Mahadev Kolis (1963), the 1957 re-survey of Lonikand village in Pune district against an 1819 colonial account, and his field survey of the sex habits of middle-class Bombay respondents show he was no armchair textualist.
- Other evidence. Epigraphy, iconography, temple architecture, costume, even H. H. Risley’s anthropometric data — used while rejecting Risley’s pan-Indian racial theory of caste.
Plurality of subject matter
Caste and tribe; gotra and charana; the Indo-European family; rural-urbanisation and cities; sadhus and sects (Indian Sadhus, 1953); costume (Indian Costume, 1951); Rajput architecture; post-independence conflict (Social Tensions in India, 1968). Few sociologists have ranged so widely.
Principled eclecticism or theoretical drift?
- For the defence. No single theory could handle a civilisation whose evidence is textual for two thousand years and ethnographic for one. His pluralism bred intellectual freedom: his students M. N. Srinivas, A. R. Desai and K. M. Kapadia worked in wholly different traditions, and several broke with him.
- For the prosecution. Pluralism shaded into inconsistency. He accepted structural-functionalism broadly yet never conformed to it; Srinivas and M. N. Panini noted that he insisted on fieldwork while remaining an armchair scholar; and in survey work he generalised from scanty, unrepresentative evidence, as in Social Tensions in India.
The pluralism was also predictive. Reading caste associations in the 1930s, Ghurye foresaw that caste would become a political resource — vindicated as Census 2027 prepares to enumerate caste for the first time since 1931.
Conclusion
Ghurye is best characterised as a methodological pluralist holding a single substantive thesis — that Hinduism is an assimilative civilisation producing cultural unity. The methods were many; the conclusion was always one. That is both the strength and the limitation of his pluralism.