About Guest: Dr. Dev Nath Pathak is a distinguished sociologist at South Asian University, a founding faculty member of the Department of Sociology, and the current Dean of Social Sciences. He teaches experimental, imaginative courses to MA and PhD scholars, and guides research on popular culture, performance, media, language, and everyday social life. His own work spans the philosophy of social sciences, methodology, and over a decade of research on folklore and Mithila traditions.He is the author of Living and Dying: Meanings in Maithili Folklore, In Defence of the Ordinary, and To Be or Not To Be Sociological, along with several edited volumes. He also serves as an editor of the journal Society and Culture in South Asia and is the founding editor of Galp Lok, known for its thoughtful conversations during and beyond the pandemic. Dr. Pathak completed his PhD, MPhil, and MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, specialising in folklore, performance, popular culture, and theoretical issues in social sciences.
How to Think Sociologically Today | Dr. Dev Nath Pathak | Peer Voices Monthly – Podcast Series.
Here is the text version of the above podcast.
1. If you had to describe yourself in just three words, what would they be?
Difficult to reduce myself into three words. But if I try hard, it would be try, try and keep trying.
2. How do you personally practice sociology in your everyday life?
I listen. I try to listen.
Listening is very sociological to me. Everything around me, all kinds of sound. Listening is also a way of seeing. Listening is not just hearing. Listening is also an act of operationalizing your vision. So listening is a broader act for me. All sorts of things, everything around me, I try to make sense of them.
Even myself, I am not apart from society. If society is good, I am good. If society is bad, I am bad. If society is ugly, I am ugly. I try to make sense of all good, bad and ugly. They all are equally important to me.
3. You have also written a lot about art like we should not see art as an only aesthetic thing but beyond that art is something more art poetry music like they are clearly important in your work. Can you recall a moment when art helped you to understand society in a deeper way?
Yeah it does it it does every now and then I see a work of art in terms of visual art
I listen to a piece of music, I watch something on television, in cinema, I read a novel, I read a poem. Every now and then I get a sense that social sciences in general and sociology in particular is far far behind in terms of the profundity of meanings, the kind of profound meanings that emerge from the field of art. Sociology, anthropology, social sciences in general, we are yet to match up, match with artists, musicians, poets, literators.
4. What are your thoughts on sociology in South Asia?
Good question. which also includes me, myself and a lot of my peers all around the world who I know, all of us put together. I think all of us suffer from the same old syndrome which some of the earliest doctors of sociology tried to diagnose. Alvin Goldner in America, C. Wright Mills, Pierre Bourdieu, And closer home, some of these pioneers in sociology, they try to make sense of the pretence of a sociologist. A sociologist pretending to be a superior creature, that is something I find is a great bottleneck for sociology in South Asia. It does not allow sociologists to see, explore very many domains of meanings. Many areas of inquiry remain marginal precisely because we have this strong pretence that we are socialists and we tend to think that we are doing sociology, but basically we are mostly reproducing, repeating. This is a very common problem across South Asia. We tend to work with the same known themes of inquiries. Our methodology are almost static for ages. We have not been doing any methodological innovation. I do not see, even in the recent research papers, There is no sign of playful experimentations in methodology, in theories, in concepts. Although there may be a conference on theorizing from the South, global South, decolonizing, big words, but it does not result in any kind of experimentation. And that’s where I am slightly pessimistic about the way standardized version of sociology prevails upon us in the region of South Asia. We also do not see, because of the heavy standardization, we also do not see a possibility of meaningful creative dispute. Intellectual disputes are missing. This has been a concern for a very long time. Occasionally we felt that there would be some kind of dispute which would lead us from the status quo of sociology to some kind of advancement but it doesn’t work out. It dies down. There is no space for dispute. If you try to intellectually disagree, it immediately results into some sort of casualty for your network. And the network mindset is so strong that meaningful disagreements are totally out of fashion. Also I see another thing being played out in the name of sociology across the institutions of higher education is certain kind of gimmick, certain kind of games, certain kind of moves, posturing, certain kind of very poorly thought out intellectual politics.
To sum it up, I would say that Sociology in South Asia may create a slogan for academic freedom but it does not practice academic freedom within the realm of sociological practices. We do not see that academic freedom. We do not see that freedom translating into taking risks and play with all kinds of new possibilities. unless we apply that academic freedom within sociology, our demand from academic freedom outside sociology will be only considered hollow or rhetorical demands, meaningless demands.
5. Insightful, sir. My next question to you is that in your work on to be or not to be sociological, methodological ways of seeing, you see methodology as not mere tools and techniques, but a dynamic field of reflexive sociology. Would you like to share a few ideas about this understanding of methodology?
See, methodology is not just method and technique. Unfortunately, it has been reduced into just method and technique. Methodology is a larger field of understanding of perspectives. I tend to propose that methodology is our way of seeing and it involves our vision, it involves our ideology and utopia, it involves our unstated belief system with which we work. And in that area, that methodology is relatively under-discussed, under-developed. There is no promotion for inquiries into methodology.
There is no encouragement. It’s become like if you look at any research proposal coming from be it youngsters or even the seasoned mature professionals, there is no discussion, debate on methodology. It’s just like suggesting that you know this method or that technique will be applied and it is understood that you know the method and technique itself becomes methodology. So my purpose in this book was to help anybody understand that methodology is a significant area of inquiry A, B. There should be more explorations of sources which can provide alternative conceptual apparatus, alternative sources of insights that can help us in developing new methodology, new ways of seeing in social sciences. I also tend to feel that sociology, if ever, was progressive. It was precisely because it worked with a strong sense of ambivalence. And I tried to show in this book that even our classical trinity boasted of that ambivalence. There was this creative ambivalence in classical sociology. As a result, there was a great deal of progress over there in terms of knowledge, in terms of the kind of epistemological milestones they achieved. However, that ambivalence has been, I feel, erased due to a heavily officially standardized version of sociology in which it gets really difficult to forget about ambivalence. It gets really difficult to even take risks and try out new things.
6. If you have to explain sociology to young undergraduates, researchers, what are the ways you would like to adopt to enlighten them? Because for youngsters, sociology is becoming more theoretical these days. And they don’t like going to the field, practicing, as you said, about the methodology. It has become a very compartmentalized understanding of the things. But how do you want to see the young people, researchers, to see sociology and practice it in their work?
See, the first thing I always ask youngsters, who approach me for their master’s dissertation, for their doctoral research, the first thing I ask them to do is to write a diary based on what they think of themselves, where they come from, what all they have gone through, what kind of family they have grown up in, what kind of society they lived in, and what kind of, you know, ideology, ideological positions they have adopted. This is the first thing I ask them to do, an inquiry into themselves, to understand how social they are. All of us are a sociological unit of analysis, so to say, and that would be the first thing any youngster should be doing. Before venturing out, the world outside will be better understood if we understand ourselves first. Right. And I strongly feel that our training programs, our certification is primarily for checking how a student is doing in the world outside, what you call the field. However, the field is not just out there. The field is also here, within everyone. So the inquiry, somehow I feel sociology would be a better place if the inquiry begins with the self. And that does not mean that sociology should become pure psychology. Here the purpose of this self-critical inquiry is to understand what one has been, what one has become, what is belonging to oneself.
And then get to see the rest of the world not as something apart from us, apart from ourselves the world in which we are also located, the world of which we are also parts so that would be my advice to youngsters: Start with yourself and starting with yourself can be through anything. It can be through your hobbies which are closest to your heart, the kind of cinema that you watch, the kind of friends you hang out with, the kind of things that you like to read, the things which you hate, right? Examine your own emotional roots and try to see who you are.
7. Yes, so on the cinema, I would like to ask you what kind of cinema in your view enriches sociological imagination?
All kinds of cinemas. There can’t be classification of good cinema useful for sociology, bad cinema not useful. Even bad cinema is very useful for sociology. You make a list of all the flop films and you will find that they will help you to have very good sociology. You will understand sociology better if you figure out why this film and why it flopped, why did it work with the audience. You will get to do sociology with that kind of film too. And of course with some of the films which are very widely accepted by the audience gives you another kind of you know root for doing sociology. So any kind of cinema is good for making sense of society and applying a kind of sociological imagination in cinema. Unfortunately, these days I notice that when we have to talk about cinema in sociology, in anthropology, we invariably go to documentary films or ethnographic films.
I do not dismiss the importance of documentary and ethnographic films, but it would be misnomer if they tend to think that, you know, the non-ethnographic, non-documentary films are not very useful. The popular films may be equally useful for doing sociology.
8. So in your view, what does it mean to not to be sociological?
Good. it would mean that you do not exist. Every bit of our existence is sociological. Nothing is non-sociological. And with that idea, if you start doing sociology, you will realize that it becomes very easy to answer. Another question, if I flip your question, there will be another question, what is sociological? And if you realize that everything is sociological, your life is easier, right? Even the finest of very psychosomatic experience is available for sociological analysis. Your bodily sensation is available for sociological analysis. The pleasure you get in eating food, the disgust you may develop about a certain kind of smell, everything is for sociology. Everything is available to pave ways for doing different kinds of sociological analysis. So it means nothing if you say what is non-sociological. There is nothing called non-society.
9. Very insightful sir. In the defense of the ordinary, everyday awakening, you highlight how micro events of everyday life carry deep sociological significance, something often overlooked by macro-focused academic sociology. You are also in defense of vulnerability of being confused, imperfect, simple and ordinary. What was the vision behind challenging academic arrogance?
Yeah, precisely. The reason why the micro has to be highlighted as something very important for doing even macro sociology is because we need to bring down owl of Minerva from a higher pedestal. This has been the case with a lot of sociologists. They conduct empirical research. They have very sophisticated data. They conduct very good data analysis and it seems their job is done. But I find a problem with the best example of the best kind of researcher and research output and that is that it does not represent the vibration, the pulse, the very ordinary, banal experiences coming from the micro context. And that’s where I feel, that’s why I said in the beginning, sociologists in South Asia can be commonly characterized by their pretense. That pretense does not allow one to get into the details of micro. the details of micro would present to us counter narratives it would be difficult to be very conclusive about whatever we are trying to study if we pay attention to the details of micro but then the Weak politics, weak intellectual politics of socialists requires to oversee, to overlook, to ignore, to neglect this pulsating vibration of the micro because they are in haste to offer a grand argument and a grand argument which will be applicable for the macro.
And in that haste, they do not realize that they are not only undermining their understanding of society, they are also undermining their intellectual politics. Unfortunately, these days I notice that youngsters get carried away by the cunningness of society. the pretentious sociologists, right? They get carried away without asking very important questions about the counter narratives which are present in the micro context. They don’t want to pay attention to those counter narratives. And my strong feeling is that, you know, the growth of not only sociological knowledge, growth of knowledge in general depends on our understanding of those counter narratives. It depends on our ability to make sense of the details of micro. As we have, as the saying goes, devil is in the detail. And I believe that devil of the detail can enrich sociology and it’s high time we make friends with that devil.
10. Great sir. My next question to you is that you have studied masks, performances and the hidden sides of everyday life so deeply. So when you walk through ordinary daily life now, does the world feel more clear to you or more mysterious? And what would you feel inside when you sense things beneath the surface?
World would always be mysterious no matter how much you get to know it. And that is the beauty of the world. One should not aspire to get rid of that mystery of world altogether that is impossible humanly and that would also be a great compromise on our existential requirement existentially we need a mysterious world right having said that, Because there is mystery in the world, there would be a need for many more storytellers, a new generation of storytellers, and many more sociologists to keep decoding that mystery of the world. So masks all around us, performances all around us, and we try to understand those performances. But we know that no performance can fully exhaust the enormity of meanings. As a result, we also see that there are always new performances in the making. So from folk theatre to proscenium theatre, now we have come to social media, the social theatre, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on what are the other things, all sorts of platforms. We see those kinds of performances and we realize that those performances are helping us understand certain kinds of mystery while they also enable us to understand that the mystery is yet not completely exhausted. I must add to that, we the sociologists from all over the world, we also tend to be masked people. We have masks on our face. We are also performative. We are performing well. our ideology. We are also performing in very carefully crafted scripted ways and we try to fool each other, give a sense to each other that I am this and that, I’m very progressive, I’m not less progressive. We try to give this kind of, create this kind of, you know, we do presentation of self on screen, off screen, very Goffmanian kind of, you know, thing that we do. And we think that now we have fooled the world, we have created our image and it’s over. But it’s never over. The whole mystery continues.
11. Yes, sir. With the presentation, as you said, even among young scholars today feel a lot of pressure. Like publishing more, count citations, build a CV. You have often questioned this culture. What might a healthier and more meaningful academic model look like?
See, we had a sociologist, michael burawoy, who was a strong votary of public sociology and he strongly believed that sociologists should be writing for the larger public. If you are writing in this kind of very rigid manner which will please the gatekeepers of sociology or any discipline, You are certainly not writing for the larger public, you are only writing for your peers. You would write, it would be considered good in the echo chamber of academics, but it does not go out. So I would believe that the conventional style of talking to the larger public, addressing the larger public, is one way of continuing with scholarly pursuit and yet serving the public. If you’re serving the public, you also have a very different kind of sense of responsibility. If you’re only serving the academic peer, probably your sense of responsibility is different. So I would say that apart from writing for the larger public, almost like a public sociologist, one should also try to reach out to the world at large. It’s so very easy to shout slogans within the safe precincts of higher education. It would be more challenging and more useful to step out and meet people, ordinary folks as well as folks who are really working in society and talk to them, make sense of them and convey what you think about the world. Convey your point. There would be a different kind of, you know, they would not be guided by the same academic demeanor decorum. There would be a different kind of, you know, intellectual disagreement. So those disagreements would prepare us sociologists to be more socially responsible. As of now I see a lot of us are highly self-serving sociologists. We are doing things which will only serve us. We are talking in our echo chambers. We may be saying nice things, right things, but it does not make sense beyond a point. We speak in the language which is loaded with concepts, jargons. We understand each other and we think that our job is done. But that is not the end of the job. We are also humans and we live in this society and we have a larger role to play. And we need to figure out what could be our larger role. And that’s where we need to step out of our comfort zones. We need to also realize that a discipline, a pursuit of knowledge cannot be merely for serving our limited parochial self-interest. It has to be for the larger society.
12. True, sir. My next question is, all of us remember at least one teacher who changed our way of thinking. So for you personally, what makes teaching truly meaningful or good?
Teaching for me is very meaningful, good as well as I would say anything that would be meaningful would be probably good and teaching is good when teaching is truthful. In the name of teaching these days we come across pedagogic cunningness. A lot of demagogues work as pedagogues these days. They are rabble-rousing demagogues. They tend to blindfold students with a select theory, with a select ideology. That should not be the case with teachers. We have had many exemplary teachers coming from all walks of life. They were in the profession of teaching. Many of them were also not in the profession of teaching. There was a rickshaw puller who was a very good teacher. There was a prisoner serving sentence in a jail who taught me. I learned my basics from a prisoner in a jail, not a professional teacher. There was a cobbler as a child. I used to sit with him and I saw what he used to do sitting by the roadside and looking at his activities, I acquired some skill of craftsmanship. He was not a professional teacher and likewise we have had several teachers in the profession of teaching who were not playing tricks with us they were telling us very openly that you know here you are wrong no this is not the right way don’t jump to conclusion don’t be in haste to offer your argument and spend more time with this reading do not convert this reading into an ideological piece of Right? So there have been such examples of teachers. But unfortunately, our world is dominated by those teachers who are demagogues, who are into the business of doing nuisance. And the higher degree of nuisance makers called teachers are more successful these days.
This is unfortunate, but this is true. But in the middle of all these things, I should not be so cynical. I should also acknowledge that in the middle of all these things, there have always been some exceptional teachers who have removed blindfold from our eyes, who have helped us break free from our chains. Unlike the dominant variety of teachers today who would like to invent new chains and enslave young minds. Our job is not to enslave young minds. Our job is to free young minds so that in that state of freedom they explore new things, they find new meanings, they provide new ways of leading successful healthy good life. Our job is not to make our students clone or a caricature of ourselves, our job is to set them free so that they find they find out who they are.
13. Insightful sir. On this only, you have often transverse the risky zones like culture, religion, identity, politics, everyday life. As an intellectual, how do you think about risk? Is there a trade-off between being critically honest and personal safety or academic acceptance?
Very difficult and tricky question I must say. See, risk is commonplace thing these days all around us.
There are industries generating risk. There is capital enterprise based on risk perceptions of the consumers, clients, all around us. There are manufacturers of risk all around us. At times there has been criticism that even state participates in the manufacturing of risk. So on and so forth. Having said that, when it comes to the life of an academic, risk is an inevitable, unavoidable factor. Anybody who does not take risk is, I would say, dishonest person. Taking risk is a sign of honesty. You’re honest to your calling and hence you take risk. And this is something which I tell often. my students and I keep reminding myself time and again that there would be a lack of acceptance there would be a dismissal there would be rejection there would be scornful remarks coming your way if you take risk and if you are very honest there would be punishment probably at times for taking risk for being honest and being very truthful Having said that, one would not shy away from taking risk wherever necessary. It doesn’t mean that I would not or anybody who is inclined to take risk would not worry about acceptance, wider acceptance. We do worry. uh we are social creatures and we would like to look at others when we articulate a point we would like to see how what kind of hermeneutic bonding we create when we talk to others uh and we would expect that you know there will be some engagement uh having uh you know accepted the importance of acceptance from the wider public i would say that you know we do not fail to come across certain occasions in our academic life, professional life, also in our personal informal setup, we continue to take risk.
14. Yes sir. Sir, if you were designing a sociological curriculum for 2030, what key skills, topics or methods would you prioritize to make students sociologically aware and critically engaged?
A big question. This question requires me to spend probably at least a few hours. It would involve designing the whole set of course curricular content. To keep it very short, one can say that it would be a curriculum of contemporary whatever is contemporary concern. It would be a curriculum guided by ethics of care. It would not be a curriculum which is prepared and offered only by way of serving certain kind of professional requirement. It would be a curriculum which will be a response to the calling that we pursue. Right?
15. So my next question is people often see religion, science, sociology and philosophy as separate worlds. But are they actually asking different questions or are they trying to understand the same truth in different languages?
No, I would not say they are totally separated from one another. History of ideas would show you that they have intersections. of science, religion, mythology. There are plenty of examples of such intersections. So they are not separable. A. B. They are all sources that provide us insights, pathways to understand. I would not use the word truth because truth is debatable.
It is debatable whether there can be a singular truth and also because truth is largely subject to truth claim, right? There are a lot of truth which are subject to truth claim in public discourse and there are a lot of other varieties of truth which are not yet subject to truth claim in public discourse. So truth I do not know but they all these are certainly sources which gives you ways to accomplish understanding get to different kind of set of meanings right there are various ways in which you can acquire embodied experience and that way all these sources all these pathways are equally important so sir i would like to ask you last question now to wind up the podcast so Sociology, as you said, has become very kind of academic compartmentalization. We are more like focusing on theories and as you said that we are running after the methodology and all those things.
16. How can a sociology student find meaningful research questions from their own life?
As I said earlier, the pursuit has to start from self. One has to figure out oneself first. The questions which may become research questions are already part of our life. One has to go back to that life. One has to go back to our life world and figure out what these questions are, which have been with me for quite a while. Maybe we have not articulated those questions in clear terms. But an inquiry into self helps us to realize, acknowledge and then articulate them in clear terms. And then see whether these questions can become questions within sociology too. That is number one. Number two, I would like to provide a little bit of your correction here when we say that sociology has become theory focused. Unfortunately, sociology in our part of the world is also not theory focused. It’s a very strange sociology that we do. If it were theory focused, we have had quite a few new theoretical insights coming into picture. Very rarely do we find emergence of new theoretical insights. Very rarely. Secondly, when we say we do sociology in theory, ideally our theory that we do in sociology is not supposed to be detached from our praxis. It has to be certain kind of, you can say, Gramscian praxis framework in which we have to do theory. If we are not doing theory in that praxis framework, then we are only conducting a sociological fraud. Why fraud? Because we are not allowing ourselves to understand the reality, the relationship between theory and praxis.
17. Yes. So, Professor, according to you, what is organic intellectuality in sociology work? And do you feel your style of connecting academic sociology with everyday praxis is an extension of organic intellectuality?
This is because I follow Gramsci on these things very closely and even if I go beyond Gramsci, I have been a student of folklore from Africa to Europe and of course closer home in India. I like to read Kannada folk tale tamil folk songs, maithili folk songs. I like to hear the kind of impromptu singing that bahurupis in Bengal do. So I have been a student of folklore and even from that perspective I can say that meaning exists in the frame of ordinary life and ordinary life is very organic. Even if something is very bad in ordinary life, say for example superstition, superstitious practices, you would see that those so-called bad things also emerge very organically. They are not imposed from somewhere else. Say for example our belief, which may appear like an illusion, and some kind of awkward thing for somebody who is a non-believer. Some non-believers may feel that this is a thing of past. Belief is a thing of past. But that belief may have an organic relation with our day-to-day life. And the power of belief is in that organic nature.
As a result, I would feel, I mean, located in that framework, I would say that if a sociologist, if a sociology student wants to conduct a meaningful exercise of knowledge production, it has to be done in that organic fashion. Therefore, I said that the questions of a research has to arise from one’s own biographical interest. It can’t be something away from biography. It has to emerge in very organic fashion. It can’t be something imposed upon someone.
18. Okay, so based on your ideas on organic intellectuality, so therefore you had the show called Radio Rakshasa which uses a demon-like voice. What made you choose that voice and what energy or meaning were you trying to bring into the listener’s mind?
Yes, you can say so. In various ways, my own organic connections come up in my work in writing, in teaching, in the kind of research that I do as well as in some of these other stuff that you have mentioned. Very temporarily I had a couple of episodes with that demon-like character which was named Rebi Rakshas.
And it was to give us the sense that these Rakshas kind of voices are all around us organically available in our day-to-day life and they can be also meaningful voices so through that kind of voice I tried to do some social critique I must mention that Radio Rakshas had annoyed a lot of people it was very subversive in nature.
And many friends became my enemies after listening to Radio Rakshas and I was not even given any opportunity to explain. So what to do? I mean, this is how. That’s why I said that, you know, anybody who takes risks will be subject to all sorts of consequences. And people who I really value and I really value.
Freedom, intellectual independence, academic freedom. Anybody who would value freedom would have to take risk and would have to face consequences. So, Radio Rakshasa show may have stopped, but the demonic voices which are very organically available all around myself, they are still with me.
And hence you can say, by and large, I tend to be subversive even now.
Great, sir. Dr. Devnath Pathak, thank you so much for your thought-provoking remarks. Your clarity, depth and practical insights have given this episode both focus and strength. We remain deeply grateful for your time, your guidance in sharing your wisdom with us today. Thank you.
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