Modern discussions on Indian culture and civilisation are rarely neutral. The academic disciplines that claim to study India—particularly Indology and Sociology—did not emerge in a vacuum. They developed within a larger historical framework shaped by European expansion, industrialisation, and empire-building. To understand how Indian civilisation has been studied, interpreted, and often misrepresented, one must critically examine the intellectual foundations of these disciplines and the historical context in which they arose.
This essay offers both a historical overview of Western Indology and Sociology in India and an Indic evaluation of their underlying assumptions. At its core lies a civilisational critique of what may be called the Empire Project—a knowledge system produced by newly industrialised European societies to justify domination over non-European worlds.
The Empire Project and the Myth of Enlightenment
The Empire Project was founded and institutionalised between the first wave of industrialisation in Catholic European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Italy during the sixteenth century, and the second wave of industrialisation in Protestant countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This project was ideologically sustained by what is commonly celebrated as the European Enlightenment.
From an Indic perspective, the Enlightenment cannot be seen merely as an age of reason and progress. It marked a decisive epistemological shift that displaced “truth as it is” (noumena) from academic discourse and replaced it with logical consistency, instrumental rationality, and abstract epistemological systems focused on appearances (phenomena). This shift inaugurated what may be described as a post-truth age, long before the term became fashionable in contemporary political discourse.
Immanuel Kant stands as the canonical figure of this transformation. Kantian philosophy, the European Enlightenment, and the Empire Project represent three interlinked dimensions of the same historical moment. Kant did not initiate this shift but gave it philosophical legitimacy and institutional authority. The intellectual trajectory leading to Kant can be traced through thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, John Calvin, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton. Kant’s achievement lay in consolidating these tendencies into a systematic framework.
This epistemological revolution enabled the growth of inductive logic and instrumental rationality, which in turn facilitated the second Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Europe. The same intellectual framework also produced a systematic theology of exploitation—complete with its own aesthetics, biology, physics, political economy, and accounting systems. In this sense, the intelligence of evil was not accidental; it was institutionalised within the academic culture of the post-truth age.
Indology and Sociology as Colonial Knowledge Systems
Indology and Sociology in India developed both as romantic intellectual pursuits and as explicit colonial projects. In some cases, they were driven by individual scholarly fascination. In many others, they were financed and institutionalised by commercial enterprises and imperial interests, particularly the East India Companies of Portugal, Holland, England, and France, and later by Russia and the United States.
When these disciplines were institutionalised by Europeans, they simultaneously provoked Indians to study their own society, culture, and civilisation through new lenses. This intellectual response played a significant role in shaping the nationalist movement of the nineteenth century. Indian engagement with Indology and Sociology was not merely academic; it became deeply political and civilisational.
Cinema in India later emerged as an extension of this civilisational response. It developed not merely as entertainment but as a cultural expression deeply intertwined with the freedom movement and popular consciousness.
Language, Meaning, and the Limits of Translation
One of the persistent failures of Western Indology and Sociology lies in their inability to adequately translate and communicate key Indic concepts. Sanskrit terms such as mantra, tantra, and yantra are routinely reduced to ritualistic or magical elements within Durkheimian frameworks of religion, magic, and science. In reality, these terms belong to complex Vedic and Śramaṇic knowledge systems that integrate science, metaphysics, and spiritual practice.
This failure is not merely linguistic but epistemological. Structuralism viewed language as a closed and stable system, while post-structuralism recognised an inevitable gap between signifier and signified. Meaning became contextual, unstable, and dependent on the reader rather than the author. The author’s intended meaning—noumena—was declared fundamentally unknowable.
Post-structuralist sociology therefore studies not only texts but also the systems of knowledge that produce them. However, this intellectual move itself emerged within specific historical conditions.
Post-Structuralism, Cold War, and Late Capitalism
Post-structuralism and post-modernism were not purely intellectual developments. They were shaped by the deep Cold War of the late 1960s, the maturation of late capitalism, and the political experiences of newly decolonised nation-states. These movements questioned grand narratives, stable meanings, and universal truths, yet they remained deeply embedded in Western epistemological assumptions.
To understand the transition from linguistic structuralism to post-structuralism, the role of Martin Heidegger is far more decisive than is commonly acknowledged in English-speaking academia.
Heidegger, Tradition, and Indic Parallels
Between 1952 and 1962, Heidegger articulated his position on technology and modernity, particularly in The Question Concerning Technology. Heidegger represents a re-manifestation of tradition against the dominance of abstract, one-dimensional thinking.
One-dimensional thinking, it may be argued, began with monotheistic traditions and culminated in the structuralism of Saussure, Durkheim, and early Lévi-Strauss. Heidegger, by contrast, was not a theorist in the modern European sense. He was a teacher who invited his students to participate in thinking itself, rather than merely consume theories.
Indic parallels to Heideggerian thinking can be found in concepts such as rasānubhūti, ātmanubhūti, and brahmānubhūti. As Gandhi suggested, self-realisation and God-realisation are inseparable. Genuine thinking, for Heidegger, is not abstract ordering but a mode of being—an openness to Being itself. Ontology takes precedence over epistemology.
European Enlightenment thinkers reversed this order, making epistemology primary and marginalising ontology. This reversal coincided historically with the political colonisation of India, symbolised by events such as the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Print technology, Indology, and sociology together played a decisive role in colonising the Indian mind-space.
Print Technology, Cinema, and Cultural Transformation
Print technology emerged in Europe around 1440 and quickly became an instrument of empire. While it later enabled colonised societies to develop forms of colonial modernity, it also caused a rupture in indigenous traditions. In India, print culture contributed to the emergence of a rootless middle class, increasingly alienated from its own civilisational ethos.
Walter Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction shattered the aura, mystery, and tradition of art. While this analysis holds considerable truth for European societies, its applicability to India is limited. Indian cinema, particularly during its golden era, functioned as an empathetic medium that empowered semi-literate filmmakers and deeply rooted audiences—the rasikas.
In contrast, university-driven print culture in India often alienated students and intellectuals from their own people and traditions. Cinema became a living cultural discourse, while academia increasingly turned inward and abstract.
Cinema, Sociology, and the Indian Psyche
Indian cinema and sociology emerged as parallel yet divergent responses to modernity. Cinema addressed the Indian psyche through emotion, rasa, and narrative continuity, while sociology often adopted imported frameworks disconnected from lived civilisational experience.
From the Portuguese introduction of the printing press to the consolidation of British colonial rule, technologies of reproduction reshaped Indian society. Yet cinema uniquely retained a dialogic relationship with tradition, unlike academic institutions dominated by colonial epistemologies.
Concluding Reflection
Indology, sociology, and cinema must be understood not merely as disciplines or technologies but as civilisational forces. In India, cinema evolved as a medium of cultural continuity and collective imagination, while academic sociology often mirrored colonial abstractions.
To engage meaningfully with Indian civilisation today, one must revisit these histories critically—without romanticism, but also without surrendering to inherited Western frameworks. Only then can knowledge reconnect with tradition, and modernity find a civilisational anchor.
Add tags: Indology, Sociology, Indian Cinema, Enlightenment, Empire
