Abstract of an article for the proposed edited volume on Practices of Sociology and

Anthropology in Nepal (2019).

Paper Title

Practicing Sociology in Nepal as an Instructive Specimen of practicing South Asian Sociology

By Swatahsiddha Sarkar

The chapter proposes to argue not only for the need of regional imagining in the way sociology
as a discipline has been practiced in the South Asia but also for providing with a makeshift
methodology through which such a regional imagining could be fostered. The chapter would be
prudently appropriating from an earlier study on Indian sociological research highways to Nepal
completed in 2016 as a part of BPKF funded and Martin Chautari, Nepal executed research
project and also draw further insights from later works of similar nature (like the recently
published edited volume Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and
Practices 2018, in short SSASA). Paraphrasing the absence of regional imagining in sociological
research practices in South Asia as a disciplinary crisis is an argument that demands serious
academic concern and engagement which, however, has been an inadequately discussed issue
either in India or in Nepal or in any other country in South Asia. Initiatives by disciplinary
associations across South Asia, barring their few inconsistent attempts, did not thrive to deal with
the issue with adequate engagement. With the establishment of South Asian University (SAU in
2010), its course structures and other academic activities, besides the recent publication of
SSASA now we at least have an institutional platform that has expectedly initiated the debate
rather formally. Yet we do not have much leverage on the issue as to how one may practice
sociology in the South Asian context. In other words, what would be the methodology of
practicing sociology in a cross-country context? How to foster regional imagining among South
Asian colleagues about a sociology that would reciprocate across, between and beyond national
territories? Is South Asian Sociology all about doing comparative sociology in South Asian
context? Will comparative sociology be the route through which the roots of a collaborative
sociology among the South Asian colleagues be established? Are ideas like comparison and
collaboration complementary to each other? Is there a methodological inconsistency/ fallacy of
some sort in such propositions? Can we really reach the goal of collaboration (one that projects
all the parties so involved as homo equalis) by comparison (that represents the comparable
components as homo hierarchicus)? What then could be the best way to collaborate and to create
occasions that may foster regional imagining based on methodological pluralism? Within the
limits of a chapter all these questions might not be answered fully, nor even a chapter is
sufficient enough to resolve the ‘crisis’ of regional imagining in South Asian sociology.
However, based on the trends of sociological research practices in Nepal vis-à-vis India an
attempt is made in the present chapter to offer a provisional case for consideration while dealing
with the question of practicing sociology in South Asia.