ABSTRACT
Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1977: 47) used the term ‘modernizers’ for the sociologists who came to dominate the field of sociology in India soon after independence, and ‘denounced the historical approach as pseudo-scientific and adopted the “structural-functional” approach guided by a positivist orientation.’ Yogendra Singh (1967b: 181) had also observed before that
All the sociological studies which have been produced in India since independence, whether in the field of rural sociology, or community studies, or family sociology, or study of urban communities and crime and social pathology, etc.; have employed either the statistical or structural-functional methods.
Dhanagare (1993: 74) contends that ‘An over-commitment to ‘structural-functionalism’ as a theoretical orientation has… gradually alienated the twin-disciplines (sociology and social anthropology) from history’. However, the old issues such as caste and stratification, family and kinship, religion and ritual, village social organization, and others continued to dominate the domain of sociological research after independence (Ibid.: 51).