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Celebrating 50 years of Contributions to Indian Sociology

When Louis Dumont and David Pocock founded Contributions to Indian Sociology in 1957, they probably did not anticipate that it would continue to exercise such an influence over the discipline for the next fifty years. A 50th anniversary, our readers will agree, needs both celebration and introspection. Both these were in evidence at the day-long symposium organised to mark the event on 6 December 2007 at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. The symposium used the occasion of Contributions’ anniversary to review the field of sociology and social and cultural anthropology in India and to reflect on the role of social science journals in the intellectual life of the academy. The discussion was organised into two panels, each composed of distinguished scholars and editors. In this issue of Contributions, we have reproduced the keynote address given by T.N. Madan who founded the new series in 1967. In his lucid account of the journal’s inception, readers will discover much that they did not know about Dumont, journal publishing and the serendipitous history of intellectual exchange. Louis Dumont’s imprint is still to be found in our journal’s dialogical orientation to theory and ethnography. The first panel, chaired by Saurabh Dube, situated Contributions within the changing contours of Indian sociology. As Satish Deshpande explained, Contributions has been a transnational enterprise from birth. Indeed, that has been its strength. The world has become even more globalised since Dumont’s time. This transformation has made the location of ‘a sociology of India’ more uncertain and fluid. Within this context, the relationship between place and voice has become more charged than ever. Given the inequalities in academic places and the resources that they command, how does a journal balance the need to be programmatic