(a) Discuss the intellectual origins of sociology and the historical antecedents of its evolution as a distinct field of study…

(a) Intellectual origins and historical antecedents of sociology

Thesis: sociology emerged in nineteenth-century Europe from the meeting of the Enlightenment's faith in reason with the upheaval of the "dual revolution" (Eric Hobsbawm), the French and the Industrial. Auguste Comte named it in 1839.

Intellectual origins:

• Early precursors: Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (1377) proposed a science of society built on asabiyyah (group solidarity).

The Enlightenment:

• reason, progress, secular explanation and the idea of a science of society;
• Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748), an early comparative sociology of laws and institutions;
• Rousseau on the social contract and Condorcet on progress;
• the Scottish moralists: Adam Ferguson (An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767), Adam Smith and John Millar on ranks and the division of labour.

The conservative reaction:

• de Bonald and de Maistre defended community, religion and authority against the Revolution;
• Robert Nisbet (The Sociological Tradition, 1966) shows that their "unit-ideas" of community, authority, status, the sacred and alienation organised classical sociology.

Positivism and evolutionism:

• Saint-Simon's vision of industrial society;
• Comte's Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42), with the law of three stages, social statics and dynamics, and the hierarchy of the sciences;
• Herbert Spencer's organic analogy and evolutionism, strengthened by Darwin.

Historical antecedents:

• The French Revolution (1789): it destroyed the old regime and raised the problem of order, meaning how society can hold together without tradition.
• The Industrial Revolution: it produced the factory, wage labour, class conflict, urban slums and the "social question".
• Longer-run enablers: the Commercial Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution made a secular science of society thinkable.

Empirical inquiry into visible social problems:

• poverty, crime and suicide became visible problems;
• Quetelet's "social physics" and the "average man";
• Le Play's family budget studies;
• Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London (from 1889) and Rowntree's poverty survey of York (1901).

Colonial expansion: the encounter with non-European societies supplied comparative data, along with an evolutionary bias.

Becoming a distinct discipline:

• Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel defined its core problems: class and capitalism, solidarity, rationalisation, and forms of interaction;
• Durkheim secured its academic status: he taught at Bordeaux from 1887, set out a distinct object ("social facts") and method in The Rules (1895), and founded L'Année sociologique in 1898;
• the Chicago department opened in 1892;
• in India, Bombay University's department began in 1919 under Patrick Geddes, and Lucknow developed under Radhakamal Mukerjee.

Conclusion: sociology had a double parentage: the Enlightenment ambition for a science of society, and the conservative concern for the community that industrial capitalism was dissolving. The tension between order and change has shaped the discipline ever since.

(b) The mode of production debate

The concept: a mode of production is the historically specific unity of forces and relations of production. What distinguishes one mode from another is how surplus is extracted. Marx's 1859 Preface listed Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes, a scheme that opened a long controversy rather than settling one.

Structuralist perspective: Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar argued that a social formation articulates several modes at once, under the dominance of one.

The Asiatic mode of production:

• Marx's writings on India described self-sufficient villages, no private property in land, and a state taking surplus as tax-rent;
• Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic despotism" (1957) extended this;
• critics called it empirically wrong and orientalist. D.D. Kosambi (An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 1956) and Irfan Habib (The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1963) rejected the idea of a static India.

The transition debate:

• Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 1946) located the dynamic in feudalism's internal class relations;
• Paul Sweezy stressed trade and external commerce;
• Robert Brenner (1976) argued that the balance of class forces, not demography or markets, explains why Europe took divergent paths.

The Indian feudalism debate:

• R.S. Sharma (Indian Feudalism, 1965) pointed to land grants, declining trade and fragmented sovereignty;
• Harbans Mukhia ("Was There Feudalism in Indian History?", 1981) disputed this, as did Irfan Habib's account of the Mughal agrarian order.

The dependency and world-systems perspective:

• Andre Gunder Frank's "development of underdevelopment" and Wallerstein's world-system define capitalism by market exchange and a global division of labour;
• Ernesto Laclau (1971) objected that this confuses a mode of production with a system of exchange and ignores relations of production.

The Indian agrarian debate (EPW, 1969–1980s):

• Ashok Rudra (with Majid and Talib) used Punjab survey data to question whether a distinct capitalist farmer class existed;
• Utsa Patnaik used wage labour, accumulation and reinvestment as the criterion of capitalism;
• Amit Bhaduri argued that semi-feudalism prevailed: sharecropping and usury let landlords profit without investing, which blocked technical change;
• Jairus Banaji distinguished relations of production from forms of exploitation;
• Hamza Alavi proposed a "colonial mode of production";
• Alice Thorner's review (1982) summed up the debate;
• Political stake: whether India's principal contradiction, and so its revolution, was anti-feudal or anti-capitalist.

Critical assessment:

• Strengths: it drove serious empirical agrarian research and comparative historical rigour.

Weaknesses:

• circular definitions and economism;
• difficulty classifying hybrid agrarian structures;
• neglect of caste and gender as relations of production in their own right, a point pressed by Gail Omvedt and feminist scholars.

Later work: research on the "agrarian question of labour" and on informal work (Harriss-White, Jan Breman) carries the debate forward.

Conclusion: the debate is most useful not as a taxonomy of stages but as a method: asking how surplus is produced, appropriated and legitimated. That question is still live for informal, contract and platform labour.

(c) New cults, sects and inter-caste relations

Definitions: in the church–sect typology (Weber; Ernst Troeltsch, 1912; Becker; Stark and Bainbridge):

• a sect is a schismatic, often egalitarian breakaway from an established tradition;
• a cult is a new or imported movement.
• In India these appear as panths, sampradayas and deras.

Historical pattern:

• the Bhakti sects of Kabir, Ravidas, Basava's Lingayats and Nanak;
• Narayana Guru's SNDP ("one caste, one religion, one god for man");
• the Satnamis of Chhattisgarh, the Ad-Dharm movement of Punjab, and the Matuas among Bengal's Namasudras;
• Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur in 1956.

How they affect inter-caste relations:

• De-legitimation and dignity: their own gurus, scriptures and shrines end the upper-caste priestly monopoly and open a route to status that bypasses Sanskritisation. For Dumont, the renouncer stands outside caste.
• New solidarities: shared worship and commensality cross caste lines and turn scattered low castes into organised constituencies with political leverage.
• Consolidation: when members come mainly from one caste, the sect hardens caste identity, and sects can become castes over time, as the Lingayats did.
• Conflict: Dalit-majority deras in Punjab have clashed with dominant castes and religious orthodoxy. After violence in 2009, Dera Sachkhand Ballan declared a separate Ravidassia religion in 2010.
• Routinisation of charisma (Weber): the protest sect becomes an institution with property and hierarchy, and its egalitarianism is blunted.

New cults and sects loosen ritual hierarchy while often re-creating caste boundaries in new forms. The net effect depends on who joins and on how far the sect routinises.