SYMPOSIUM

OPEN PAGES IN SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES (22-23 JANUARY, 2019)

Organised by
The Centre for South East Asian Studies & Department of Foreign Languages, Gauhati University, India
and
The International Centre for South Asian Studies and the Faculty of International Relations and Area
Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia

PAPER TITLE
Beyond National Academic Borders: Connecting Sociology between India and Nepal

ABSTRACT
This paper claims that the prospects of imagining South Asia as a sociological construct gets largely
impaired by nationalist foundation of the social sciences in general and sociology in particular. This
emerges as obvious though not an eternal trope in the way sociology as a discipline has been practiced
and gained maturity in postcolonial South Asia. Against this backdrop this paper proposes to examine the
possibilities of considering sociology as a discipline whose academic boundary does not necessarily
collapse with the boundary and boundedness of what we know as national space and time. What is worth
noting is the fact that sociologists in South Asia feel contented in treating Western sociological ideas as
universal epistemological categories and therefore readily subscribe-able, irrespective of the fact that
much of such ideas were teleologically rooted in certain national praxes. Do we have any such
sociological idea – developed by an Indian/ Nepali sociologist – that may claim a South Asian
qualification? If we share common social realities and common social problems then why cannot we
share the inferences of the discipline beyond conferences? Can’t the patterns of socialities across South
Asia be grasped by a common sociological frame of reference (when they do share a common
foundation)? How to do that? What we have done so far on that? Can anything at all be done like that? By
addressing questions of this sort possibly we may gauge the prospect of South Asian sociology, if any and
that precisely is the purpose of the present paper.

AUTHOR DETAIL
Prof. Swatahsiddha Sarkar
Centre for Himalayan Studies,
University of North Bengal,
District Darjeeling,
West Bengal – 734013.

Email: ss3soc@gmail.com Mobile: +919474585883/ 9593048797