Indian anthropologists have conducted inter-cultural or cross-cultural comparative studies. Among these are included D.N. Majumdar, N.K. Bose and Irawati Karve. These have chosen to study societies and cultures which were unfamiliar to them.
While doing this they had some implicit assumptions about comparison. Ravindra K. Jain, explaining the comparative method employed by these first-generation researchers, observes:
They undertook explicit comparison, combining the results of their own field studies with library resources. Thus, we have Majumdar’s general comparative writings on primitive tribes; Bose’s comparative treatment of Indian tribes, the peasantry and of urbanization processes in Bengal and Orissa; and Karve’s classic Kinship Organization in India, first published in 1953.
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The fact that comparisons such as those undertaken by Bose and Karve were all situated in India and was, moreover, attempted within the framework of Indian cultural history, did elicit a protest from latter-day structuralists.
At a later stage, with the coming of Dumont and Pocock, the comparative method fell to disrepute. In the tradition of Levi-Strauss and Evans-Pritchard, Dumont is reluctant to accept the comparative perspective. Instead, he has adopted the structuralist approach.
As a matter of fact, Dumont, in his Homo Hierarchicus (1970), has taken ideology as his major perspective for studying the Indian society. He compares Indian ideology which is holistic and hierarchical with the western individualistic and egalitarian ideology.
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We have, in India, a large number of village studies. These are, in fact, holistic studies. But, the researchers of these studies should have employed the comparative method. From all considerations, today, it appears that the sociology in India has given up comparison as the dominant method of enquiry.