Teaching sociology in India: negotiating decolonization, indigenization, and Indianization

Rakesh M. Krishnan

Chapter 16 in Teaching Introduction to Sociology, 2026, pp 185-195 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Introducing sociology at the undergraduate level in India presents a significant challenge: how to characterize the nature of the social in terms of a vocabulary of concepts while addressing the demands of “decolonizing the mind” and “indigenizing the knowledge production processes,” often risking ethnocentric tendencies and the erasure of politically inconvenient themes. Undoubtedly, this climate is the dominant trend in India's socio-political spheres, and young 18-year-olds in universities and colleges are fully exposed to it, with some being influenced by these political projects. For instructors, the classroom becomes a difficult space requiring negotiation between two tasks: (a) the global decolonial attempts and introducing “Indian thoughts and concepts,” and (b) to fend off ethnocentric attempts and retain the global nature of the discipline for communication and understanding beyond national boundaries. The chapter will address these dilemmas, which instructors face when introducing sociology as a subject in the Indian context.

Keywords: Decolonization; Colonial Modernity; Indian Sociology; Contextualization; Comparative Methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035355778
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