Gyan ki Rajneeti: Samaj Adhyayan aur Bhartiya Chintan 6 3

Abstract

The notion that the field of social science in India have developed in a colonial situation and carry its imprint even to this day has been an accepted thesis in Indian academic circles. The same holds for the emergence of social science in several post-colonial non-Western nations where social sciences took hold in the backdrop of colonialism. In the late 1970’s in the backdrop of decolonization, and the publication of Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978), there emerged a global debate among academicians of the Global South to indigenize social sciences by moving beyond the modernist-Western paradigm which claimed universality and was based on twin concepts of cartesian dualism and Newtonian physics. Charges of Euro-centrism in social science theories gained ground, and an explosive question cropped up; “the social sciences that originated in the West, are indigenous to the West, or are they necessarily universal for the rest?” (Mukherji, 2004, p. 16). This question intrigued several academicians across the globe, and the question was debated and discussed in seminars and conferences and the case for the indigenization of social sciences was pushed.