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Research Journal of the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka- Rohana 12, 2020

Western Sociological Heritage, Modernist Paradigm, and the Crisis

of Sociology in South Asian Countries

Gamage S.

University of Western Sydney

Email: gamage.siri@yahoo.com

Introduction

South Asian sociologists argue that the sociology discipline and its practice in South
Asia are facing a ‘crises’ and/or an ‘impasse’ due to a range of reasons including the

dominance enjoyed by Western colonial-imperial heritage, i.e., theoretical and

methodological, engrained within the scholarship, practice, institutions, and
research. The rapid growth in the number of universities and colleges teaching

sociology without achieving the required standards is also contributing to this crisis.
The reproduction of the Western disciplinary heritage by contemporary sociologists

who are not grounded in their own scholarly traditions is causing considerable
damage to the discipline and to the intellectual growth of new cohorts of students

who follow sociology courses in growing numbers in university-affiliated Colleges

in India, Bangladesh and elsewhere. Against this trend in the sociology discipline,
some sociologists even talk about the end of sociology (e.g., Nazrul Islam 2004).

There are stronger pleas for an autonomous or indigenous sociology along with the
need to pluralise and globalise the discipline.

It is being argued that there is an unequal relation in the global division of labour
relating to social science knowledge production and dissemination. Thus, the world

social science powers in Europe and USA enjoy an advantage over these processes
in other countries. This relationship has created dominant-subordinate epistemic

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