In the month of (August, 2021) I had to deliver a keynote speech at a brainstorming session on “Research And Methodology in Law and Social Sciences” organized by school of Law and Humanities at a high end private university located in National Capital Region .
The university was established with an objective to work for porous borders between the campus and the real world .The speaker has to be conscious of this highly desirable objective of a new era university while navigating a key note speech. In recent years the workshops on “Research Methodology” have gained significance for very genuine reasons.
The young passionate research students need better training and exposure as they are facing tough times marked by cut-throat competition.
There is an old Chinese saying , “May you live in interesting times”, and frankly we do live in such times as we experience the incremental change in the nature of certain categories in academia ,viz, student, teacher and the university/college.
There are reasons for this change and it is not possible to count them in a small piece of writing. To my understanding the primary reason for the change is shift from state-led model of development to one of neo-liberalism which privileges privatisation as the preferred mode of development.
This major shift has posited the above categories as conflictual rather than cooperative and more vertical than horizontal. The student in my class today is a passive agent, buyer of knowledge/information or skills and is loved for being what in Kashmiri parlance is called “Songubur” (calm, disciplined). The teacher is more a seller of knowledge, machine-like, remote and disconnected, less passionate and more a coaching centre Guru.
The university/college is a place where students come not for dialoguing or debating the world around them but for buying something and keeping parents in temporary comfort zone. This should be the context for any discussion on “Methodology” and “Research Methods” in contemporary social sciences.
These are interesting times also as we need to maintain physical distance from each other with due regard to the Covid-19 protocol. All through our career as a research students we were trained by our supervisors to understand the complexity of social reality by forging close ties with the society, systems and institutions, and more importantly with people.
Our understanding of social sciences, we were told, is incomplete unless we align with society, and its different institutions including the political process as a human activity. Late professor M N Srinivas the doyen of Indian sociology came to “Rampur village” in Mysore with twenty pieces of luggage and in essence adopted the village. He conceived and conceptualized the “Dominant Caste” category in the same village.
The Social Scientists have at huge risk to their lives went into deep Andaman Nicobar Islands to study the life and traditions of people living there. Now due to Pandemic we encounter , as political Scientist Gopal Guru calls, “clash of protocols”. The COVID-19 and social science protocols are in conflict albeit temporarily.
Hence the social scientists are called upon to rethink the dialectics between the need of the hour and the demand of the traditional norm. We understand in sub-continental tradition the practice of reasonable physical proximity is valued as against the idea of isolation and social distancing.
But the pandemic protocol has universality and is recommended for all irrespective of region, religion and country. Hopefully the situation may turn for the better but meanwhile we do see problems being faced by researchers whose work demands more empirical approach and hence more closeness with society and its institutions.
Further, we need to take note of an independent and native methodological voice being raised by social scientists living in what nowadays is called as “Global South”. They find limitations with scholarship more glued to universalist positioning ignoring particularity of a social reality. The specificity or particularity of a phenomenon can be examined better if looked at from a certain standpoint and hence emergence of “standpoint Theory”.
What “Democracy has done to India and what India is doing to Democracy” is an appropriate example of understanding the relevance of specificity. In 1980s many Indian social scientists wrote about “moving the centre to our location”. During this time many writings on “Native roots of social sciences” also caught our attention which also emerged more in reaction to over dependence on western paradigms.
This trend emerged in tune with the theory of indigenisation of social sciences but partly is reflection of the difficulty of employing western paradigms to explain third world problems.
While one can understand the nuances of this contestation there is a compelling case for us to keep the eyes wide open while researching a complex social reality. In retrospect Saintism or Sufism could have been a better conceptual alternative to secularism in South Asia and India in particular.
Secularism ran into rough weather in the turbulent Indian politics and found a place in the preamble of Indian constitution only in 1974. In India secularism is not the result of a clash between church and the state but an ideological convenience owing to a political urgency. For some people it was placed in the constitution for lack of a better word.
“Research Methodology” pertains to adoption of a theoretical formulation that underlies our quest. It is concerned with what brand of theoretical framework is pressed into service to dig into a research problem? By way of example Feminism – much loved framework in social sciences as an intervention in history has led to feminist theorization as advocated by Sandra Harding (1987) which looks at women as oppressed and hence a category who possess better insight into social reality.
All this is prudent and safe research journey but care is to be taken that merely feminist theorisation is not adequate unless we take cognisance of its various strands viz, Liberal Feminism, Socialist Feminism, Theory of Patriarchy, and Theory of Gender in order to situate ourselves safely while working on a problem.
The “Method” simply deals with techniques of data collection which of course are numerous. During pandemic years field visits and face to face interviews/interactions by research students have diminished but technology has in a big way come to their rescue. Telephone interviewing, mining online reports about migrants, domestic help, working women etc., has filled-up the gap.
But the significant question is how respondents respond to questions by making use of technology especially in times of democratic backsliding in many parts of the world? Further how far all the technology driven research will help us in the “guided encounter” with social reality in order to remove the monopoly of textual knowledge in our social science research as also to steer clear of value-based research.
There is no other way to make social sciences participatory except by making our students to move over to villages, small towns and the bazaar to have face-to-face and even closed door meetings with people, castes and communities.
Our knowledge systems according to some scholars lack the site of the “Commons” which refers to natural resources that are neither private nor controlled by the state. In 1960s Mao- Zedong decided to empty the cities of their youth and send them around amongst the peasants to be re-educated. Mao always used to say that “I studied at the university of green forests”.
In a recent paper, noted sociologist Sukhadeo Thorat did a comprehensive review of social science research and examined some issues useful for its growth in India. He rightly seems to be disillusioned by present status of social sciences in India in comparison to China which seems to be a legitimate comparison.
The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) funds partially only 26 research institutes in India. It came into being in 1969 and its research agenda is shaped by “National Social Science Policy”. In comparison the Chinese Academy of social sciences (counterpart of ICSSR) has 35 research institutes and 45 research centers.
In China there are National and Provincial Social Science Academies. The Chinese Academy of social sciences has 3,200 researchers which averages to 12 per institute.
It was described by “Foreign Policy Magazine” as a top think tank in Asia. It has linkages with 140 countries in the world. The provincial Shanghai institute has 550 researchers with an average of 40 per institute. In India the Institutes/centers are mostly concentrated in National Capital.
The poor infrastructure, declining number of faculty members and rise of illiberal culture and neo-liberal turn in political economy has limited the space for social science research in Indian universities where the number of faculty members working on substantive basis in university departments has come down from seven in 2016 to near about four in 2020.
The establishment of social science institutes outside Delhi is mostly limited to states viz, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat and West Bengal. In other parts of the country there are as such no autonomous institutes/centers and social sciences mostly are done within university departments.
In recent years emergence of some think tanks with or without state support with fairly quality human resource has made visible impact. Some high profile private universities viz, Ashoka, Jindal and Krea too are making a huge difference.
All said and done one cannot discount the wonderful work still being done in some public sector universities viz, JNU, Delhi University and many outside the National Capital. Prof Thorat quotes American Psychologist Gordon W Allport who in his masterpiece “Nature of prejudice” writes:
Social sciences cannot catch up overnight. It required years of labour and billions of dollars to gain the secret of atom. It will take still greater investment to gain the secrets of man’s irrational nature. It is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice”.
Social Scientists are criticised by many actors viz, political class, bureaucracy, policy planners, NGOs and opinion leaders for not writing in response to social needs and not producing socially useful knowledge. They are accused of being just armchair scholars looking at society and its problems from the rooftops and are not taking interest in day-to-day problems of the people.
They produce books and research articles through which they speak to themselves according to Edward Saed. All this intellectual work essentially helps them in career advancement and has no impact on interests, actors, actions or agencies within the social system.
People supportive of “Left Political Project” are disgusted with these writings and blame social scientists for discovering regularities in social life and thereby consciously or unconsciously endorsing the capitalist structure. In contemporary times the criticism has turned more sharp as the funding from MHRD and ICSSR is going down and much of social science research is donor-driven.
The fact of the matter is that social science research in Indian universities is still carried out within the framework of university autonomy and hence critically essential to push the frontiers of knowledge.
There are of course issues which have a bearing upon the future of research in public universities particularly at the periphery. There are issues related to training, teaching, touring and temperament. All these should factor seriously in any social science policy to be pursued in a university. For a long time research training remained a neglected area.
It is next to impossible to have quality research without quality teachers. In peripheral universities there is acute shortage of good teachers who can ignite the minds of young and open the windows of their minds in all directions. Teaching is essential for producing good researchers.
Prof Amrita Sen has dedicated all his books to his students with this understanding, and he always felt grateful to his students for enriching his understanding of men and matters. The problems faced by Prof MN Srinivas were clarified by his mentor Radcliffe Brown at Oxford even after when he had completed his doctorate in India.
Workshops on “Research Methodology” in a bookish style have limitations in shaping soft skills of our students unless complemented by rigorous field work and face to face interactions with actors, institutions and individuals in a given social setting.
Finally, many of us do not acknowledge the link between science and social sciences. In any university where social science cannot grow Sciences also cannot grow. Many top world entrepreneurs have team members with liberal education. Steven Paul Jobs-an American business magnate stated: part of the reason what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets and artists and zoologists and historians.
They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world”. Late Maulana Wahiddudin Khan talked of “re-engineering of mind” which to him can happen only if we stress more on informal education which comes through debates and meetings. A type of education full of pleasure. Education in present times unfortunately has become war and is devoid of joy and humor.
Someone, somewhere needs to come out to tell our students: “Go up the Mountains and Go down the Mountains and get re-educated by daily conversation with Aam Adami and Aam Aurat who are the prime movers of history”.
The New Education Policy 2020 aptly states that the very idea that all branches of creative human endeavor-including mathematics, science, vocational subjects, professional subjects, and soft skills – should be considered ‘arts’, indeed has distinctly Indian origins.
This notion of knowledge of many arts – what in modern times is called the ‘liberal arts’ ( i.e. liberal notion of the arts) – must be brought back to Indian education, as it is exactly the kind of education that will be required for the 21st century.
Prof Gull Wani is teaching political Science at Kashmir University
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK..