Write short notes with a sociological perspective: Salient features of A.R. Desai’s Marxist Sociology. (2016)
What makes A. R. Desai‘s work Marxist is not only its conclusions about India but its position on sociology itself. Writing when American structural-functionalism and British functionalism dominated the discipline, he observed that the approaches ruling Indian sociology were non-Marxist and that Marxism had been dismissed in advance as dogmatic, value-loaded and deterministic. His reply supplies the salient features.
Marxism claimed as the relevant approach for the discipline
Desai argued that only a Marxist approach could study what Indian sociology was avoiding: government policy, the classes entrenched in the state apparatus, and India’s political economy. He asked practitioners to break through the prevailing allergy towards it, since it helps the researcher raise the right questions, frame adequate hypotheses, evolve proper concepts and locate the central tendencies of transformation. It is a research programme, not a creed.
Rejection of value-neutrality
For Desai the mainstream’s methodology already carries the ideology of capitalism, so its neutrality is a false finding. A sociology that declines to name the class character of the society it studies does not stand outside that society; it reproduces its self-image. Knowledge is therefore judged by what it exposes, and sociology is an instrument of transformation rather than a mirror.
Critique of structural-functionalism
Village studies, in this view, mistook a unit of administration for a unit of society and converted domination into interdependence, describing ritual reciprocity where there was surplus extraction. Modernisation theory fared worse: it smuggled in modernisation on the capitalist path as a desirable value premise, and so served as an ideological vehicle for the ruling class. Conflict, exploitation, history and the state are the blind spots this critique names.
Critique of Indology
Against the textual tradition, Desai held that tradition in India is secular and economic in origin — found in family, village and work rather than in scripture, ritual or festivity — and that it will change as economic relations change. On this basis he expected caste to weaken as industry, education and new material conditions spread. Textual India, for him, was the self-portrait of a dominant order, not evidence about society.
Historical specificity and empirical application
The approach gives central importance to property relations, insists on the historical location of every social phenomenon, and registers both evolutionary change and revolutionary rupture between social formations. Desai was also among the first to carry it into archival and field research — on nationalism, agrarian struggles, labour movements, slums and the urban family — and he dissented openly from party orthodoxies such as the two-stage theory of revolution, using Marxism as method rather than catechism.
Limitations
Yogendra Singh held that the assertions often lack the empirical support they require; later assessments add that Desai opened research fields more successfully than he executed rigorous class analysis; and caste has refused the derivative role assigned to it.
Conclusion
Desai’s lasting service was to make the political economy of the Indian state a legitimate sociological object. The value of that move is visible now, when Rajasthan in 2023 and Karnataka in 2025 legislated for platform-based gig workers by creating welfare boards financed by a levy on aggregators, while declining to call these workers employees at all — precisely the question about relations of production that his sociology insisted on asking.