Examine the utility and limitations of indological source material to understanding of Indian Society. (1993)
Indological source material is the record India left of itself: the Vedas, Dharmashastras and Manusmriti, the Arthashastra, the Puranas and epics, the Buddhist Pali canon and Jain Agamas, Sangam poetry, inscriptions from the Ashokan edicts to temple grants, and travellers’ accounts from Megasthenes to Al-Biruni. G. S. Ghurye built a sociology on it. Whether it bears that weight depends on what is asked.
Its utility
- It is the only evidence for most of Indian social history. For two millennia there is no census, survey or informant; Ghurye’s reconstruction of gotra and charana exogamy, and of the joint family in Family and Kin in Indo-European Culture (1955), was possible only because texts survive.
- It gives the normative order. The Dharmashastras state the obligations of varna, ashrama, purushartha and rina — the moral grammar in which conduct was justified. Louis Dumont drew the purity–pollution opposition from this material in Homo Hierarchicus (1966).
- It supplies indigenous concepts. Dharma, karma, jati and sanyasa let Indian society be theorised in its own vocabulary — the point Yogendra Singh and Radhakamal Mukerjee pressed.
- It permits the study of change. Robert Redfield and Milton Singer’s great-and-little-tradition frame and McKim Marriott’s universalisation and parochialisation (Village India, 1955) presuppose a textual tradition local practice orients itself towards.
- It is not only scripture. Inscriptions are dated, located and administrative — land grants, guild records and endowments document economy and status as scripture cannot; and the Pali and Jain texts, with the Therigatha‘s verses by Buddhist nuns, record dissent against the Brahmanical order.
Its limitations
- Prescription is not description. The Smritis state what ought to be done; read as reports they yield the “book view” of a static four-varna India that M. N. Srinivas’ field view demolished, finding thousands of jatis, real mobility and dominant castes rarely Brahmin.
- Dating and authorship are insecure. Most texts are composite, orally transmitted, undated and anonymous, so a practice cannot be assigned confidently to a period or region.
- The authorship is elite and regionally narrow. Sanskrit is a priestly and courtly language, so the corpus reports the self-image of a literate Gangetic minority; women, Shudras, untouchable communities, forest peoples and the vernacular south appear as objects of regulation, not as speakers.
- It is partly a colonial construction. Bernard S. Cohn, Ronald Inden (Imagining India, 1990) and Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind, 2001) argue that colonial administration selected and hardened Brahmanical texts into “Hindu law” and a rigid caste order; read alone, the corpus turns a changing society into an unchanging essence.
Courts have had to weigh precisely this. In the Ayodhya judgment of 9 November 2019 the Supreme Court treated the Archaeological Survey of India’s report as more than ordinary opinion, held a historians’ report to be “at the highest… an opinion”, and decided title on continuous possession and worship rather than on texts or excavation alone.
Conclusion
Indological material is indispensable as evidence of ideology and indefensible as evidence of behaviour. Used with source criticism — dated against inscriptions, cross-read against heterodox and vernacular traditions, tested against fieldwork — it remains the deepest archive any society holds of itself. The error was never using the texts, but using only the texts.