Academic dependency on Western disciplinary knowledge and captive mind among South Asian sociologists : a critique

This paper examines academic dependency and its various dimensions in sociology in the South Asian context. It is argued that the global knowledge order constructed during the colonial period and sustained in the post-colonial conditions is an unequal one favouring North American and European centres of learning. It is also argued that the disciplinary knowledge including concepts, theories and methods inherited from metropolitan centres of the global North and maintained by sociologists in the global South do not necessarily provide the tools necessary for grasping the social realities in formerly colonised countries of South Asia. Thus, it is important to rediscover threads of indigenous knowledge and incorporate them in teaching sociology and the conduct of socially relevant research. In this exercise, a survey of views expressed by leading sociologists adopting a post-colonial or pluralist perspective and Southern Theory perspective such as Connell, Santos, Alatas, and Patel is presented. The paper emphasises the need for South Asian sociologists to take serious and systematic steps for developing indigenous sociology based on intellectual traditions in the region instead of continuing to be dependent on the inherited sociology disciplinary knowledge, concepts, theories, methods and approaches as givens.