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Bhupendranath Datta: An Unnoticed Indian Anthropologist
Bhupendranath Datta: An Unnoticed Indian Anthropologist
Abhijit Guha2019, Bulletin of the Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture(December 2019)
Bhupendranath Datta is still a missing hero in Indian anthropology. His nationalist and revolutionary activities as well as dedicated scholarship in the different branches of knowledge including anthropology remained unnoticed by the doyens of Indian anthropology. He viewed, in an original way, the origin and transformation of the caste system through class struggle and critiqued western anthropological theories of race as early as 1935. Datta’s study on the personality of his eldest brother Swami Vivekananda is unique and neglected in the curriculum of Indian anthropology and sociology.
Related Papers
2020 •
Bhupendranath Datta is still a missing hero in Indian anthropology. His revolutionary activities and dedicated scholarship from a Marxist perspective in different branches of knowledge including anthropology remained unnoticed by the doyens of Indian anthropology. He viewed the origin and transformation of the caste system through class struggle and critiqued western anthropological theories of race as early as 1935. Datta’s study of the personality of his eldest brother Swami Vivekananda from a Marxist sociological angle is unique and neglected in the curriculum of Indian anthropology and sociology.
Book chapters
B.N.Datta & T.C.Das in Architects of Anthropology in India,2021. (Volume -I) edited by Sarthak Sengupta2021 •
These are my two book chapters on Bhupendranath Datta and Tarak Chandra Das in a book edited by Sarthak Sengupta published in 2021. Both Datta and Das still remains neglected personalities in the curriculum of Indian anthropology. I wrote and spoke extensively on T.C.Das and his contributions in Indian anthropology and also on Bhupendranath Datta. Both these anthropologists were nationalists in the true sense of the term who looked at the problems of nation building in India from an Indian perspective.Datta studied caste system from the class angle while Das constructed ethnographies of individual tribes and the Bengal famine from applied anthropological perspective.
2022 •
Dr Bhupendranath Datta, the youngest brother of Swami Vivekananda is a much less-known figure than his illustrious brother but had a life which was far from ordinary. He had been a revolutionary driven to long years in exile, an active participant in early years of the International Communist Movement, a worker for the cause of peasants and workers in India, and a scholar of considerable accomplishment. In this essay as we look at his life and contributions, we also get glimpses of the Bengal revolutionary movement, the efforts of the revolutionaries in exile during the First World War, the beginnings of Indian labour movement and Communism, and his brother Vivekananda through his eyes. Early Life Bhupendranath was born on 4th September, 1880 in Calcutta. His father, Biswanath Datta, was an attorney at the Calcutta High Court. He was youngest among his siblings (three brothers and
In this article I discussed the anthropological and sociological contributions of Dr.Bhupendranath Datta,which remained unnoticed and neglected in the history of anthropology in India. Bhupendranath was a pioneering and remarkable scholar in anthropology and he was also a revolutionary who participated in the freedom struggle of India. Datta's contributions should be recognized and his books should be republished and should be included in the curriculum in anthropology and sociology at the college and university levels in India.
2019 •
Gandhi’s writings and contribution occupy a marginal place in mainstream anthropology, including what has come to be known as the ‘Indian anthropology’.Besides Gandhi’s views on tribal people with the study of which the anthropologists are most concerned, some of Gandhi’s ideas have great anthropological relevance.Gandhi staunchly believed in what in the language of anthropology is called ‘learning from the field’. He would shun pre-conceptions and stereotypes about the people or events, thus form his understanding from the sustained interactions he had with people.
Saurabh Dube (ed.), Historical Anthropology (Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv + 427 pp. Notes, index. `595 (hardback). DOI: 10.1177/006996671004400314 At the very first glance, Saurabh Dube’s volume tells us that on offer here is a very unusual mix of essays under the rubric of ‘historical Downloaded from cis.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on January 30, 2015 432 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 44, 3 (2010): 425–466 anthropology’. Clearly, much thought has gone into the choice of what is ‘representative’ of the field and why. Indeed, by his very choice of essays, Dube has effectively told the complex story of how, through time, an interdisciplinary domain is produced by a variety of academic practitioners, sometimes consciously, sometimes in spite of themselves.
2012 •
A survey of the changing aspects of different disciplines-belonging to different faculties-informs us of the impact that anthropological methods, perspectives, theories, and the conclusions of their cross-cultural studies have exercised on them, which indirectly confirms the analytical strength, explanatory power, and methodological sophistication of anthropology. Notwithstanding this, the growth of anthropology in India has been both uneven and slow, a consequence of which has been the 'interiorisation' of anthropologists, or which T.H. Ericksen has termed 'inward-gazing'. Contemporary anthropologists have become aware of what they have been passing through, and are striving their best to recover the past glory of their discipline when they were active participants in public debates. One of the points that this article puts forth is that anthropologists are 'dispassionate observ-ers' as well as 'citizens'. In the first role, they are committed to understanding the social and cultural processes; in the second, like any other conscientious citizen, they expect all societies and states to be just, civil, and inclusive. In the dialectics of these roles, the state of contemporary anthropology can be properly located.
2018 •
Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, in a somewhat uncertain phase in the history especially of anthropology but also of the social sciences in general, "anthropology in India" needs to be reassessed in its current global context. Much more is now known about the history of the discipline in other non-Western and ex-colonial contexts, not to speak of the West itself. Having gone through an extended period of turbulence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology is still assimilating the cumulative impact of numerous powerful interventions telegraphed through book titles and labels such as Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Orientalism, Writing Cultures, colonial discourse, postcoloniality, multiple modernities, the politics of location, and, most recently, the world anthropologies project. Needless to add that "India," the stage on which anthropology has been (and is being) enacted, has also been changing rapidly and comprehensively. Given so much change, it is necessary to begin by reexamining the older reasons why anthropology in India seemed so distinctive. This disciplinary history needs to be framed within a broader history of ideas that is itself embedded in the story of the subcontinent's successive encounters with colonialism, nationalism, the developmental state, the neoliberal market, and globalization. However, issues of content and scope need to be settled before proceeding further. This entry offers an overview of a field that would be called social anthropology in contexts outside India (and especially in the West). In India, much of social anthropology is practiced under the disciplinary label of sociology, and influential voices in the academy beginning with M. N. Srinivas have insisted on the indivisibility of the two. The main argument offered in defense of this stance is that the conventional division between these disciplines based on the distinction between "primitive" and "advanced" societies is no longer tenable even in the West (where it originated) and has never made sense in non-Western contexts such as India. However (as acknowledged by Srinivas himself), in the mid-twentieth century, educated Indians disliked anthropology because they saw it as a condescending colonialist discipline eager to portray "natives" as backward, and so it was also expedient to rename anthropology as "sociology." In terms of institutional practice, the two disciplines lead parallel lives without much explicit interaction. Of the "four fields" of traditional (Boasian) anthropology, the Indian discipline today focuses on variants of physical and cultural anthropology, with archaeology and especially linguistics having become separate disciplines. Historically, physical anthropology has been a strong subdiscipline in India, particularly anthropometry.
Contributions to Indian Sociology
Book Review: Birendranath Datta. 2012. Cultural Contours of North-East India2015 •
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1999 •