There has been a considerable transformation in the institutions and practices of social science research in India in the last two decades. This change has been both quantitative and qualitative. The increase in the sheer range and volume of research output in the various social science disciplines emanating from Indian universities and research institutes is obvious. A large part of this increase is probably accounted for by nothing more than the fact of the expasion in the scale of higher education since the late 1960s and the increasing pressures for the acquisition of higher professional qualifications by college and university teachers, especially in terms of research abilities. But there has also been a significant qualitative shift in the choice of the themes, problems and frameworks of social science research. This shift is not unconnected with new debates about the social condition of India and with new priorities regarding the exploration of that condition.
If there has been one great shift in these priorities since the late 1960s, it is marked by the collapse of the Nehruvian dream of rapid industrialisation as the magic cure for the economic poverty and cultural backwardness of the Indian people. This was the crisis of the mid-1960s, symbolised by Nehru's death, the food crisis, the foreign exchange crisis and the Congress reversals in the Fourth General Elections. A central part of the new thinking which began to stir in various intellectual circles in India was a concern, properly renewed for the first time since independence, with the state of the countryside.
In terms of government policy, the food crisis created pressures for a quick increase in foodgrains production through a strategy now celebrated as the 'green revolution'. The adoption of this strategy created in turn the conditions for a large number of detailed inquiries into the techno-economic feasibility of intensive development of foodgrains production. Inevitably, the findings led to new questions about the relevant disparities between different regions of India in physical and ecological conditions and the variations in the social relations of production.
The second set of questions had also been raised in connection with another debate, this one more political in character. The political response to the crisis of the mid-1960s included major debates within the Indian Left about the character of the Indian state and especially about the nature of social relations within which the overwhelming mass of the Indian people, i.e. the peasantry, lived and worked. Not surprisingly, the pursuit of this 'political economic inquiry led to a serious confrontation with first, the question of the historical evolution of agrarian relations and the impact of the new interventions by the state and the market in the domain of peasant production, and second, the question of regional variations in agrarian structure. This influential literature of the 1970s has now become famous in Indian social science as the 'mode of production debate".
These inquiries have already constituted a large, regionally diverse and multidisciplinary literature. In many ways it represents the best efforts of Indian social science research which will continue to influence scholarly work for many years to come. Arun Ghosh, who as librarian of a social science research institution in Calcutta has been engaged for the last fifteen years in acquiring the rapidly growing material in this field and guiding numerous scholars in finding the necessary books, monographs and papers, has now compiled a handy bibliography on the subject. This is certain to prove of immense help to those now seeking to assess and consolidate the gains made in the last two decades and from there to move on to new questions and new fields.
The new questions are already on the agenda. Our colonial rulers had produced an enormous volume of knowledge about their Indian subjects-observing, recording, classifying and interpreting their customs, institutions and practices in order to constitute through a scientific mode of knowledge the objects of their rule. This body of knowledge still constitutes the core material on which Indian social science continues to work. The new directions we were looking for in our work in the 1970s represented a quest for a knowledge not of the colonised other but of ourselves. This quest has not yet been fulfilled.
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