Explain the significance of empirical approach to the study of Indian society. How does the use of historical approach enrich empirical orientation. (1995)
Indian sociology was born textual. Its empirical turn in the 1950s replaced the shastric norm with observed conduct in a located community, giving the discipline a means of verification. But fieldwork sees a society only at the moment of looking; history alone tells whether that moment is immemorial or twenty years old.
What the empirical approach displaced
Generalisation had rested on scripture and colonial compilation; G. S. Ghurye built Caste and Race in India (1932) largely on textual and historical-comparative material. The shift M. N. Srinivas named, book-view to field-view, made observation in a named village the test of a proposition, and propositions therefore falsifiable.
What fieldwork established
- Varna dissolved into jati — the all-India scheme proved a frame of reference through which local groups made themselves legible, not a working order.
- Sanskritisation, from Srinivas’s Coorg study (1952), found mobility where the texts asserted fixity; dominant caste, from his Rampura material (The Remembered Village, 1976), found that land, numbers and power, not ritual rank, decided who commanded a village.
- S. C. Dube at Shamirpet (Indian Village, 1955), F. G. Bailey at Bisipara (Caste and the Economic Frontier, 1957), Oscar Lewis near Delhi (Village Life in Northern India, 1958) and André Béteille at Sripuram (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) recorded factionalism, regional variation and class cutting across ritual standing.
Its significance is double: a method of verification, and concepts grown from Indian evidence rather than borrowed.
The limit fieldwork cannot cross
Fieldwork yields a synchronic slice: the observer cannot tell whether an arrangement is structural or merely conjunctural, and informants naturalise recent settlements as ancient custom.
How the historical approach enriches it
- Long duration. Land settlements, commercialised agriculture, famine and migration explain how the present arrived; D. D. Kosambi and Romila Thapar established that Indian institutions have a datable history, not a timeless essence.
- Convergence of disciplines. Bernard S. Cohn (An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays, 1987) treated the anthropologist’s village and the historian’s archive as one object at different scales. D. P. Mukerji had already insisted the Indian sociologist must first be a historian, tradition being dialectical, not fixed.
- Demonstration. Béteille explained Sripuram historically: the Brahmin agraharam‘s standing traced to royal land grants, its erosion to land transfers and non-Brahmin mobilisation. The restudy institutionalises this — villages surveyed by Gilbert Slater‘s students in 1916 were re-examined across a century, Iruvelpattu again in 2008 by John Harriss and colleagues, who found landlord authority intact while labour markets tightened and Dalits mobilised.
- Trend against snapshot. The Household Consumption Expenditure Survey of 2023-24 puts rural monthly per capita expenditure at Rs 4,122 against Rs 6,996 urban, the gap down from 83.9 per cent of rural expenditure in 2011-12 to 69.7 per cent — a convergence only a series reveals.
Conclusion
The empirical approach gave Indian sociology its evidence; the historical approach gives that evidence direction. Fieldwork without history describes a structure it cannot date; history without fieldwork reconstructs a society nobody has watched behave. Cohn’s historically informed ethnography — the village read as a moment in a process, not a specimen — is the defensible position.