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M.N. Srinivas' practice of social anthropology in India is featured. His career as a social anthropologist started when he finished his graduate work in sociology under GS Ghurye in Bombay India. After eight years, he became disappointed with diffusionism and unfocused ethnography that he went to Oxford to become a structural-functionalist and worked for AR Radcliffe-Brown and EE Evans-Pritchard. In 1951, he returned to India to teach sociology and promote his kind of anthropology which focuses on the study of Indian culture, rather than any distant Other.

This article presents the text of the inaugural speech given by the author at the XI World Congress of Sociology held in New Delhi, India on August 1986. There is now an impressive body of literature on the sociology of sociology in India. Early Indian thinkers speculated abundantly about the origins of civil society and its management, the ideal kind of relationship that should prevail between religious forces as represented by the Brahmin, on the one hand, and secular forces as represented by the king, on the other, and kindred matters, but a systematic history of Indian social thought is yet to be written. Coming to recent times, there is no doubt that the Indo-British encounter was in many ways conducive to the growth of sociology and social anthropology. The conquest of the country by an alien power was humiliating to politically conscious Indians whose numbers increased with the development of communications and the spread of education. Such humiliation was compounded by the racial arrogance of the rulers, and by European missionary attacks on Indian religions, in particular, Hinduism, and on Indian customs and way of life.

This article attempts to trace the development of two closely-linked and overlapping social sciences, viz., sociology and social anthropology in India, and in that process to try to explicate the relationship between their development and the cultural milieu in which it has occurred. That milieu has changed much and radically during the last six decades or so when both the disciplines developed to their present stage. Indian sociology brought about remarkable change in post-independent India. The coming into existence of the Indian Council of Social Science Research is itself a testimony to this fact. Anthropology, as is well known, was the product of European expansion over the world during the last three or four centuries. The origins of sociology in India go back to the days when British officials discovered that knowledge of Indian culture and social life was indispensable to the smooth functioning of government. Indological studies received considerable stimulus from the efforts made by British scholars and officials to become more familiar with the life and culture of Indians. In the early days of British rule in India, Sanskrit pundits and Arabic scholars were employed to assist British judges to decide cases involving religious practices, customs and laws.