Tarak Chandra Das: the worst sufferer of academic amnesia in Indian Anthropology
Tarak Chandra Das: The worst sufferer of academic amnesia in Indian Anthropology by Prof. Abhijit Guha Amnesia The celebrated sociologist and social anthropologist André Béteille in one of his articles published in the Sociological Bulletin in 1997 wrote: In India, each generation of sociologists seems eager to start its work on a clean slate, with little or no attention to the work done before. This amnesia about the work of their predecessors is no less distinctive of Indian sociologists than their failure to innovate (Béteille 1997:98). Béteille’s observation on Indian sociologists however, was not novel. About twenty five years before his pronouncement a doyen of Indian anthropology, Surajit Sinha in his insightful article published in the Journal of the Indian anthropological Society (hereafter JIAS ) observed that despite considerable growth in research publications and professional manpower in social and cultural anthropology during the last 100 years the Indian
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