“In the Context of globalization, has the scope of Sociology been changing in India? Comment” (2020)
- Indian sociology’s founding scope was set by G.S. Ghurye‘s Indological reading of caste and civilisation and by M.N. Srinivas‘s field-view, village-centred vision built around Sanskritisation and the dominant caste, both rooted in relatively bounded local communities.
- Post-1991 liberalisation and the subsequent acceleration of globalisation have not replaced this baseline so much as forced Indian sociology to widen its lens well beyond the village-caste-kinship triad that defined its first half-century.
- The claim this answer develops: globalisation has opened genuinely new substantive terrain for Indian sociology — migration and diaspora, platform and gig work, digital community, environment and climate-linked displacement, gendered work-family reorganisation, consumption-driven class formation, and media-amplified identity politics — even as caste and kinship remain live, now globally inflected, objects of study.
- The evidence favours reading this as continuity through expansion rather than rupture: old questions about hierarchy and community persist, but across a far wider and more interconnected set of sites.
The Baseline Being Expanded: Village, Caste and Kinship
- Ghurye approached Indian society through its Sanskritic textual tradition, treating caste, kinship and civilisational continuity as sociology’s core objects.
- Srinivas shifted the discipline’s centre of gravity to intensive village fieldwork, giving it concepts such as Sanskritisation and dominant caste that explained mobility and power within a locally bounded social universe.
- This baseline assumed a relatively closed, agrarian, locality-bound society — an assumption globalisation has visibly strained, since the “local” Srinivas studied is now continuously interpenetrated by transnational capital, migration circuits and digital media.
Migration, Diaspora and the Reorganisation of Work
- Liberalisation-driven labour mobility — from Kerala’s Gulf migration to the IT-sector diaspora in North America and Europe, and the circular and reverse migration exposed sharply during the COVID-19 lockdowns — has made the sociology of migration and diaspora a substantive field in its own right, engaging remittance economies, transnational kinship and diasporic identity in ways classical village studies never had to address.
- Within India, globalisation has generated an entirely new object of study: the gig and platform economy of ride-hailing, food-delivery and e-commerce logistics workers, a workforce policy estimates project could exceed twenty million by the end of this decade, raising sociological questions of informality, algorithmic control and precarity that sit outside the formal/informal binary Indian sociology inherited from earlier industrial-class studies.
- Daniel Thorner‘s agrarian class categories and older studies of the organised industrial working class supply useful comparative baselines, but the platform worker’s dispersed, app-mediated relationship to a faceless employer is a structurally new social form demanding its own conceptual vocabulary.
Digital Society, Caste Networks and Consumption Culture
- Social media and smartphone penetration have transformed how caste and community operate — matrimonial platforms, caste associations, and Dalit digital assertion movements now organise identity and solidarity online in ways Srinivas’s fieldwork could never have anticipated, simultaneously reinforcing endogamous caste boundaries and providing new tools for anti-caste mobilisation.
- The rise of a globally-oriented, consumption-driven middle class has made the sociology of consumption and lifestyle a legitimate field, tracking how brand culture, shopping malls and digital platforms reshape aspiration and status display beyond the older ritual idiom of Sanskritisation.
- Globalised media has sharpened the sociological study of communalism and identity politics, as WhatsApp-driven misinformation, round-the-clock television and algorithmic social media amplification have altered how communal and religious mobilisation spreads — a live concern for the contemporary sociology of politics and religion in India.
Environment, Gender and the Limits of Continuity
- Globalisation’s environmental footprint — extractive industry, climate-linked displacement, and disputes over land and resources connected to global supply chains — has established environmental sociology as indispensable to understanding contemporary rural distress, extending older agrarian-structure questions into a climate-change register.
- Globalisation has reorganised gendered work and family patterns: rising female workforce participation in export-oriented and service sectors, transnational marriage markets, and the strain dual-earner households place on the joint-family ideal are now central to the sociology of gender, updating Srinivas’s largely locality-bound treatment of patriarchy.
- None of this displaces caste, kinship and the village as objects of study — global capital and caste hierarchy continue to interact, as seen in the persistence of caste-based labour recruitment even within globalised industries — but it does mean caste and kinship are now studied as globally embedded phenomena rather than as self-contained local systems.
- The scope of Indian sociology has genuinely widened under globalisation, not by abandoning Ghurye’s and Srinivas’s founding concerns but by resituating them within transnational flows of capital, labour, information and culture that a village-bounded field-view alone cannot capture.
- The discipline today studies essentially the same underlying question — how India’s social hierarchies reproduce and transform themselves — but across a far wider set of sites: the migrant hostel, the delivery rider’s app, the WhatsApp group, the flood-displaced village.
- This expansion is best read as continuity through transformation rather than rupture: the questions Ghurye and Srinivas asked about hierarchy, community and change remain sociology’s core business, even as globalisation supplies them with unprecedented new settings and stakes.