NCERT Solutions for Class 11 Sociology Chapter 5: Indian Sociologists
These Class 11 Sociology Chapter 5 solutions cover Indian Sociologists from Understanding Society, the NCERT textbook for the 2026–27 session. The chapter introduces the founding figures who shaped and ‘Indianised’ sociology — the early pioneers L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy, and the four major sociologists G.S. Ghurye, D.P. Mukerji, A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas. Below you get step-by-step, exam-ready answers to all nine end-of-chapter Exercises, plus key concepts, extra practice questions, MCQs, Assertion–Reason questions and FAQs.
Class: 11Subject: SociologyBook: Understanding SocietyChapter: 5Chapter Name: Indian SociologistsSession: 2026–27
Chapter 5, Indian Sociologists, traces how sociology took root in India — formal university teaching began only in 1919 at the University of Bombay, followed by Calcutta and Lucknow in the 1920s. The chapter shows that early Indians became sociologists and anthropologists ‘by accident’: the self-taught L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer and the lawyer Sarat Chandra Roy were pioneers who practised a discipline that had no institutions yet. It then profiles four founding figures who ‘Indianised’ the discipline: G.S. Ghurye, the founder of institutionalised sociology, known for his work on caste, race and tribes; D.P. Mukerji, who stressed a ‘living tradition’ and the centrality of the social in India; A.R. Desai, the Marxist critic of the ‘myth’ of the welfare state; and M.N. Srinivas, who made village studies central to Indian sociology. Together they gave the discipline a distinctive Indian character in a newly independent, modernising nation.
Key Concepts & Terms
Administrator–anthropologists: British administrative officials of the 19th and early 20th centuries who took a keen interest in anthropological research — surveys and censuses — such as Herbert Risley, Edgar Thurston, William Crooke and J.H. Hutton.
‘Accidental’ anthropologists: early Indian pioneers like Ananthakrishna Iyer (a clerk turned teacher) and Sarat Chandra Roy (a lawyer) who entered the discipline through professional or administrative work rather than formal training.
Anthropometry: the branch of anthropology that measured the human body — the cranium, the circumference of the head, the length of the nose — to classify human ‘racial’ types.
Caste (Ghurye’s six features): segmental division; hierarchy; restrictions on social interaction (purity and pollution); civil and religious disabilities/privileges; lack of choice of occupation; and restrictions on marriage (endogamy).
Endogamy: marriage only within a defined social or kin group, such as one’s own caste. Exogamy: the rule that marriage must take place outside a defined group (e.g. sagotra or village exogamy).
Assimilation: a process by which a dominant culture gradually absorbs another, so the absorbed culture is no longer visible at the end.
Living tradition (D.P. Mukerji): a tradition that keeps its links with the past through repeated retelling, yet adapts to the present and evolves over time — combining old and new elements.
Shruti, smriti and anubhava: the three principles of change D.P. Mukerji identified in Indian traditions; of these, anubhava (personal experience), which flowers into collective experience, is the revolutionary principle.
Welfare state (A.R. Desai): a positive, interventionist, democratic state with a mixed economy; Desai called its claims a ‘myth’ because such states fail to remove poverty and inequality.
Laissez-faire: a doctrine (literally ‘leave alone’) advocating minimum state intervention in the economy and faith in the free market.
Sanskritisation context & village studies (M.N. Srinivas): Srinivas treated the village as a relevant social entity and made detailed ethnographic village studies the dominant field of Indian sociology in the 1950s–60s.
“Exercises” — Full Solutions
All questions below are reproduced verbatim from the NCERT textbook’s end-of-chapter Exercises section. Answers are original, written in exam-ready style.
1. How did Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy come to practice social anthropology?
ANSWERBoth men were ‘accidental anthropologists’ who entered the discipline through their work rather than through formal training, at a time when sociology and anthropology had no institutions in India.L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861–1937) began his career as a clerk, then became a school teacher and later a college teacher in Cochin state (present-day Kerala). In 1902 the Dewan of Cochin asked him to assist with an ethnographic survey of the state. He did this work on a purely voluntary basis — teaching at Maharajah’s College, Ernakulam, during the week and serving as the unpaid Superintendent of Ethnography at the weekends. His work was appreciated by British anthropologists and administrators; he later helped with a survey in Mysore, lectured at Madras, and set up the first post-graduate anthropology department at Calcutta University, becoming the first self-taught anthropologist to win national and international recognition.Sarat Chandra Roy (1871–1942) was a lawyer who, after degrees in English and a law degree from Calcutta, went to Ranchi in 1898 to teach English at a missionary school and then practised law in the Ranchi courts, where he was appointed official interpreter. Interpreting tribal customs and laws to the court drew him into the study of tribal society. He did intensive fieldwork among communities of the Chhotanagpur region (present-day Jharkhand) on an ‘amateur’ basis, publishing famous monographs on the Oraon, Munda and Kharia, over a hundred articles, and founding the journal Man in India in 1922.
2. What were the main arguments on either side of the debate about how to relate to tribal communities?
ANSWERIn the 1930s and 1940s there was intense debate about the place of tribal societies in India and how the state should respond to them. There were two main positions.The ‘protectionists’: many British administrator–anthropologists held that tribes were primitive peoples with a distinctive culture far from mainstream Hinduism. They feared that contact with Hindu society would lead to the exploitation, cultural degradation and even extinction of the innocent, simple tribals. So they argued that the state had a duty to protect the tribes and help them sustain their own way of life and culture.The nationalists (including Ghurye): nationalist Indians believed passionately in the unity of India and the need to modernise Indian society. They argued that attempts to preserve tribal culture were misguided and kept tribals in a backward state, as ‘museums’ of primitive culture. Ghurye, the best-known exponent of this view, insisted that the tribes of India were ‘backward Hindus’ rather than distinct cultural groups, citing evidence of their long interaction with Hinduism. He held that the ill-effects of assimilation were not specific to tribes but were common to all backward and downtrodden sections — inevitable difficulties on the road to development.
3. Outline the positions of Herbert Risley and G.S. Ghurye on the relationship between race and caste in India.
ANSWERHerbert Risley’s position: Risley, a British colonial official, was the main proponent of the then-dominant view that human beings can be divided into distinct races on the basis of physical characteristics such as the circumference of the skull, the length of the nose or the volume of the cranium. He argued that India was a unique ‘laboratory’ for studying racial types because caste strictly prohibited inter-marriage and had done so for centuries. His central claim was that caste must have originated in race: the higher castes approximated Indo-Aryan traits while the lower castes belonged to non-Aryan aboriginal or other racial groups, the lower castes being the original aboriginal inhabitants subjugated by Aryan settlers.G.S. Ghurye’s position: Ghurye did not reject Risley’s basic argument but believed it to be only partially correct. He criticised Risley’s use of averages alone, without considering the variation in the distribution of a measurement within a community. Ghurye held that Risley’s thesis was broadly true only for northern India (the Indo-Gangetic plain or ‘Hindustan proper’). In the rest of India the inter-group anthropometric differences were not large or systematic, which suggested that different racial groups had been mixing for a very long time. ‘Racial purity’, he concluded, had been preserved by the ban on inter-marriage only in north India; elsewhere, endogamy may have been introduced into groups that were already racially mixed.
4. Summarise the social anthropological definition of caste.
ANSWERGhurye offered a comprehensive definition of caste that emphasised six features and helped make the study of caste more systematic:(i) Segmental division: caste society is divided into a number of closed, mutually exclusive segments or compartments; caste is decided by birth and can neither be avoided nor changed.(ii) Hierarchy: castes are arranged in a strict hierarchy in which every caste is either higher or lower than every other; in theory no two castes are ever equal.(iii) Restrictions on social interaction: there are elaborate rules, governed by ideas of purity and pollution, about the sharing of food and other interaction — seen most dramatically in untouchability, where even the touch of certain castes was thought to be polluting.(iv) Differential rights and duties: following from hierarchy and restricted interaction, different castes have different civil and religious rights and duties, extending into the secular world.(v) Restricted choice of occupation: occupation, like caste itself, is decided by birth and is hereditary, so caste functions as a rigid form of the division of labour.(vi) Restrictions on marriage: caste involves strict endogamy (marriage only within the caste), often combined with rules of exogamy, which together reproduce the caste system.
5. What does D.P. Mukerji mean by a ‘living tradition’? Why did he insist that Indian sociologists be rooted in this tradition?
ANSWERLiving tradition: By a ‘living tradition’, D.P. Mukerji means a tradition that maintains its links with the past but does not merely repeat it — it also adapts to the present and evolves over time. Traditions are rooted in the past, kept alive through the repeated recalling and retelling of stories and myths, yet they constantly absorb internal and external sources of change. The very root of the word ‘tradition’ (Sanskrit parampara, succession; or aitihya, from the same root as itihas) means ‘to transmit’ — a living, changing process rather than a frozen one.Why he insisted on it: D.P. felt the crucial distinctive feature of India was its social system; history, politics and economics were ‘under-developed’ while the social dimensions were ‘over-developed’. He therefore argued it was the first duty of an Indian sociologist to study and know the social traditions of India. As he wrote, the Indian sociologist “must be an Indian first” — sharing in the folk-ways, mores, customs and traditions in order to understand the social system from within. He wanted sociologists to be familiar with both ‘high’ and ‘low’ languages and cultures (Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic as well as local dialects), and to avoid unthinking borrowing from western intellectual traditions.
6. What are the specificities of Indian culture and society, and how do they affect the pattern of change?
ANSWERAccording to D.P. Mukerji, Indian culture and society have distinctive features that make their pattern of change different from the West:Group orientation rather than individualism: Indian society is not individualistic in the western sense. The average individual’s pattern of desires is fixed fairly rigidly by his socio-cultural group, so the social system is oriented towards group, sect or caste action rather than ‘voluntaristic’ individual action.Non-economic sources of change: in the West the most commonly cited internal source of change is the economy, but in India class conflict had been “smoothed and covered by caste traditions”, and sharp class relations had not yet emerged. So one of the first tasks of an Indian sociology is to account for the internal, non-economic causes of change.Collective experience as the agent of change: of the three principles of change in Indian tradition — shruti, smriti and anubhava — the revolutionary one is anubhava (personal experience), but in India it soon flowers into collective experience, as in the bhakti movement and among the Sufis in Indian Islam. Change works through anubhava and prem (experience and love) rather than discursive reason.Resilience of tradition: conflict and rebellion produce change within tradition without breaking it. There are repeated cycles of dominant orthodoxy being challenged by popular revolts that transform it but are then reabsorbed — rebellion contained within an overarching tradition, which is typical of a caste society where class consciousness has been inhibited.
7. What is a welfare state? Why is A.R. Desai critical of the claims made on its behalf?
ANSWERWhat a welfare state is: A.R. Desai identifies the unique features of a welfare state. (i) It is a positive state — unlike the laissez-faire minimal state, it is interventionist and actively uses its powers to design and implement social policies for the betterment of society. (ii) It is a democratic state, with multi-party elections seen as a defining feature (which is why socialist and communist states were excluded). (iii) It involves a mixed economy, in which private capitalist enterprises and state-owned enterprises co-exist, with the state concentrating on basic goods and social infrastructure.Why Desai is critical: Writing from a Marxist perspective in his essay “The myth of the welfare state”, Desai sets up test criteria and finds the claims greatly exaggerated. He asks whether the welfare state ensures freedom from poverty and security for all; removes income inequality by redistribution; makes the capitalist profit motive subservient to community needs; ensures stable development free from booms and depressions; and provides employment for all. Examining Britain, the USA and Europe, he finds that these states fail to provide minimum economic and social security to all citizens, are unable to reduce inequality (and often encourage it), and suffer recurring unemployment and market fluctuations. He therefore concludes that the notion of the welfare state is ‘something of a myth’. Desai also criticised the shortcomings of Communist states, insisting that political liberties and the rule of law must be upheld even under socialism.
8. What arguments were given for and against the village as a subject of sociological research by M.N. Srinivas and Louis Dumont?
ANSWERLouis Dumont’s argument against the village: Dumont thought that social institutions like caste were more important than the village, which was after all only a collection of people living in a particular place. Villages may live or die and people may move from one village to another, but their social institutions — caste, religion — follow them wherever they go. For Dumont, therefore, it was misleading to give much importance to the village as a category.M.N. Srinivas’s argument for the village: Srinivas believed the village was a relevant social entity. Historical evidence showed that villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity was significant in rural social life. He also criticised the British administrator–anthropologists who had portrayed the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient “little republics”; using historical and sociological evidence, he showed that villages had in fact experienced considerable change and had never been self-sufficient, being tied into economic, social and political relationships at the regional level.
9. What is the significance of village studies in the history of Indian sociology? What role did M.N. Srinivas play in promoting village studies?
ANSWERSignificance of village studies: The village as a site of research offered several advantages to Indian sociology. It provided an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of ethnographic research methods; it offered eye-witness accounts of the rapid social change taking place in the countryside as the newly independent nation began planned development; and these vivid descriptions allowed urban Indians and policy-makers to understand what was happening in the heartland of India. Village studies thus gave sociology a new and relevant role — instead of being restricted to the study of ‘primitive’ peoples, the discipline became relevant to a modernising society.Srinivas’s role: M.N. Srinivas made village studies the dominant field in Indian sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. His own year-long fieldwork in a village near Mysore gave him first-hand knowledge of village society and proved decisive for his career. He encouraged and coordinated a major collective effort — along with scholars like S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar — to produce detailed ethnographic accounts of village society. His writings were of two kinds: ethnographic accounts of fieldwork, and historical and conceptual discussions of the village as a unit of social analysis (including his debate with Dumont). Through his international contacts and his training of a new generation of sociologists, he helped place Indian sociology on the world map.
Extra Practice Questions
Short Answer Type Questions
Q1. When and where did the formal university teaching of sociology begin in India?
ANSWERFormal university teaching of sociology in India began in 1919 at the University of Bombay. In the 1920s, the universities at Calcutta and Lucknow also started programmes of teaching and research in sociology and anthropology.
Q2. Why is G.S. Ghurye called the founder of institutionalised sociology in India?
ANSWERGhurye headed India’s first post-graduate sociology department at Bombay University for thirty-five years, guided many research scholars, and founded the Indian Sociological Society and its journal Sociological Bulletin. He combined teaching with research and merged social anthropology with sociology, thereby institutionalising the discipline.
Q3. Who were the famous ‘trinity’ of the Lucknow department?
ANSWERThe Lucknow department’s famous ‘trinity’ consisted of Radhakamal Mukerjee (the founder), D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar. The Bombay and Lucknow departments both began as combined departments of sociology and economics.
Q4. What did D.P. Mukerji mean by saying an Indian sociologist must be ‘an Indian first’?
ANSWERHe meant that, given the centrality of society in India, the sociologist must share in the folk-ways, mores, customs and traditions of India in order to understand the social system from within. Only by being rooted in this living tradition could a sociologist grasp what lies beneath and beyond the social system.
Q5. Why was A.R. Desai an unusual figure in Indian sociology?
ANSWERDesai was one of the rare Indian sociologists directly involved in politics as a formal party member, and a life-long Marxist at a time when Marxism was not very influential within Indian sociology. As a result he was perhaps better known outside the discipline than within it, even though he was elected President of the Indian Sociological Society.
Long Answer Type Questions
Q1. Discuss the special challenges that the pioneers of Indian sociology faced in defining the discipline in the Indian context.
ANSWERThe pioneers of Indian sociology faced a unique situation because India differed sharply from the European context in which the discipline arose. First, if western sociology had emerged to make sense of modernity, the Indian experience of modernity was intertwined with colonial subjugation, since India was a colony — so the role of sociology had to be rethought. Secondly, if social anthropology in the West had arisen from European curiosity about ‘primitive’ cultures, India was an ancient and advanced civilisation that also had ‘primitive’ societies within it, raising the question of what role anthropology could play here. Thirdly, the pioneers had to ask what useful role sociology could have in a sovereign, independent India about to begin planned development and democracy. Because there were no ‘readymade’ questions, the early sociologists had to formulate new questions for themselves, and it was only through the experience of ‘doing’ sociology in the Indian context that these questions took shape.
Q2. Explain D.P. Mukerji’s view that the sources and principles of change in India differ from those in the West.
ANSWERD.P. Mukerji argued that change in India follows a distinctive pattern. In the West, the most important internal source of change is the economy, with class conflict driving transformation. In India, however, class conflict had been “smoothed and covered by caste traditions”, and sharp class relations had not yet emerged, so an Indian sociology must explain the internal, non-economic causes of change. He identified three principles of change in Indian tradition — shruti, smriti and anubhava. Of these, anubhava (personal experience) is the revolutionary principle, but in India it quickly becomes collective experience, as seen in the bhakti movement among Hindus and among the Sufis in Indian Islam, where love and experience (anubhava and prem) rather than discursive reason became the agents of change. Moreover, the resilience of tradition means that rebellion produces change within the tradition without breaking it: dominant orthodoxy is repeatedly challenged by popular revolts that transform it, only to be reabsorbed. D.P. therefore criticised both the worship of tradition and the unthinking borrowing of western ideas, calling for tradition and modernity to be balanced critically.
Q3. “The four Indian sociologists each ‘Indianised’ sociology in their own way.” Explain with reference to Ghurye, D.P. Mukerji, A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas.
ANSWERThe four founding figures gave Indian sociology a distinctive character, each in a different way. G.S. Ghurye began with questions defined by western anthropologists — race, caste and tribe — but brought to them his intimate knowledge of classical texts and the sense of educated Indian opinion, founding India’s first sociology department, the Indian Sociological Society and its journal. D.P. Mukerji, a thoroughly westernised modern intellectual, rediscovered the importance of Indian tradition without being blind to its shortcomings, stressing the ‘living tradition’ and the centrality of the social and collective experience. A.R. Desai, strongly influenced by Marxism, offered a critical, materialist view of Indian nationalism and of the Indian state — including his critique of the welfare state as a ‘myth’ — at a time when such criticism was rare. M.N. Srinivas, trained in the dominant centres of western social anthropology at Oxford, adapted that training to the Indian context, championing the village as a relevant social entity and making ethnographic village studies a new agenda for sociology in a modernising nation. Together they are examples of the diverse ways in which sociology was ‘Indianised’.
MCQs & Assertion–Reason
1. Formal university teaching of sociology in India began in 1919 at the University of:
(a) Calcutta (b) Bombay (c) Lucknow (d) Madras
2. Sarat Chandra Roy founded which journal in 1922?
(a) Sociological Bulletin (b) Man in India (c) Indian Sociology (d) Contributions to Indian Sociology
3. Who is considered the founder of institutionalised sociology in India?
For each Assertion–Reason question, choose: (A) Both true and the Reason correctly explains the Assertion; (B) Both true but the Reason is not the correct explanation; (C) Assertion true, Reason false; (D) Assertion false, Reason true.
A-R 1. Assertion: Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy are called ‘accidental’ anthropologists.
Reason: They entered the discipline through their professional and administrative work rather than through formal training.
A-R 2. Assertion: Ghurye fully rejected Herbert Risley’s racial theory of caste.
Reason: Ghurye believed Risley’s thesis was broadly true only for northern India and criticised his use of averages.
A-R 3. Assertion: For D.P. Mukerji, a ‘living tradition’ rules out all change.
Reason: A living tradition keeps its links with the past but also adapts to the present and evolves over time.
A-R 4. Assertion: A.R. Desai concluded that the welfare state is ‘something of a myth’.
Reason: He found that capitalist welfare states fail to remove poverty and inequality or to ensure stable, secure development for all citizens.
A-R 5. Assertion: M.N. Srinivas treated the Indian village as a relevant social entity.
Reason: Historical evidence showed villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity was significant in rural social life.
Answer key: 1-(A), 2-(D), 3-(D), 4-(A), 5-(A).
Exam Tips & Common Mistakes
How to score full marks in this chapter
Learn to match each sociologist to one key theme: Iyer & Roy (the ‘accidental’ pioneers), Ghurye (caste, race and tribes; institution-building), D.P. Mukerji (living tradition and change), Desai (Marxism and the myth of the welfare state), and Srinivas (village studies). Memorise Ghurye’s six features of caste and Desai’s features and test criteria of the welfare state as point-wise lists — they are favourite long-answer questions. For comparison questions (Risley vs Ghurye; Dumont vs Srinivas), use a clear two-sided structure. Quote a fact or two (1919 Bombay; Man in India 1922; Caste and Race in India 1932) to show you have studied the chapter.
Common mistakes to avoid
Saying Ghurye rejected Risley — he accepted the basic argument but held it true only for north India.
Confusing the works: Caste and Race in India (Ghurye), The Social Background of Indian Nationalism (Desai), Religion and Society among the Coorgs (Srinivas).
Mixing up the Bombay department (Ghurye) with the Lucknow ‘trinity’ (Radhakamal Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji, D.N. Majumdar).
Treating a ‘living tradition’ as something fixed — it both retains the old and absorbs the new.
Forgetting that Desai called the welfare state a ‘myth’ from a Marxist standpoint, and also criticised Communist states.
Reversing the Dumont–Srinivas debate: Dumont argued against the village, Srinivas argued for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Chapter 5 of Class 11 Sociology (Understanding Society) about?
Chapter 5, Indian Sociologists, introduces the founding figures of Indian sociology — the pioneers L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy, and the four major sociologists G.S. Ghurye, D.P. Mukerji, A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas — showing how each helped shape and ‘Indianise’ the discipline.
Who are the four Indian sociologists discussed in this chapter?
The four founding sociologists are G.S. Ghurye (caste, race and tribes; institution-building), D.P. Mukerji (tradition and change), A.R. Desai (Marxism and the welfare state), and M.N. Srinivas (village studies). They came of age in the colonial era but shaped Indian sociology after independence.
How many questions are in the Chapter 5 exercise, and are they all answered here?
The end-of-chapter Exercises section of Understanding Society Chapter 5 contains 9 numbered questions, all reproduced verbatim and answered step by step on this page, along with extra practice questions, MCQs and Assertion–Reason questions.
