In an Age of Dissolving Boundaries

The boundary between public sociology and academic sociology has always been delicate—a line at once faint and fiercely guarded. For much of its institutional history, shaped by dominant intellectual discourses, public sociology remained nudged to the periphery, treated as a softened extension of “serious” scholarship. Many of us grew up in an academic climate where sociology radiated outward from two powerful centres: Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics. One remained anchored in Srinivasian Functionalism; the other expanded through a constellation of innovative perspectives emerging from shifting debates on the nation-state, citizenship, and the volatile interplay of caste, class, and power. In that moment, modernity was not simply a positivist aspiration. It became a prism through which India sought to recognise and reconstitute itself.

It is in this intellectual landscape that Dipankar Gupta’s recent reflections assume particular significance. His manner of thought reminds us of the precision with which sociological categories can be wielded when they are not allowed to ossify. For him, modernity remains an unfinished project, just as democracy does. He argues persuasively that nation-building in India cannot be understood by isolating Ambedkar from Nehru; their visions, convergent at moments and sharply divergent at others, form interwoven strands of a shared historical fabric. Likewise, he treats caste not as a timeless textual abstraction in the Dumontian mould but as a dynamic field shaped by lived relationships, political mobilisation, and the ethical demands of fraternity that Ambedkar identified as democracy’s moral core. Equally compelling is his reminder that any canon, once sanctified and mystified, eventually fractures under the weight of its own contradictions. Manusmriti, like many ancient texts, underwent centuries of revision, compelling us to rethink patriarchy, gender, caste norms, and the social imagination that sustained them.

Professor Gupta’s own career stands as a testament to intellectual versatility. With more than two dozen books published by leading presses, academic appointments across continents, a longstanding presence as a columnist, and even a recent foray into fiction, he exemplifies a rare blend of scholarly rigour and sociological imagination. His elegance of expression, stylistic poise, and assured command of language lend his work a distinctive grace. Yet an irony of our present moment surfaced at a recent JNU seminar when he began his remarks by assuring the audience that he “too was like them,” as though his brilliance required a disclaimer. Perhaps this gesture marks the quiet shadow of ageing in a discipline whose younger members encounter him without the memory of his intellectual prime. Or perhaps it signals something larger: the transformation of academic life in an era when artificial intelligence has entered our everyday world not with spectacle, but with quiet, persistent force.

Editing, refining, and articulating arguments have become astonishingly effortless. Linguistic limitations—once decisive in shaping scholarly trajectories, now recede into the background. As these shifts gather momentum, long-standing hierarchies loosen. We can no longer ignore how profoundly chance, institutional context, and one’s location within particular networks shaped academic destinies, often more than intrinsic merit. Figures who once defined eras, held prestigious chairs, and served as reference points for entire fields now appear curiously fragile, their authority no longer secured by tradition, citation, or the moral weight of meticulous empirical labour. If the critique of positivism once belonged to theoretical debate, today it is accompanied by a waning appetite for the very literature that upheld its methodological severity.

For students and colleagues entering the discipline today, the terrain is wholly unlike the world navigated by those of us who began our journeys in the mid-1970s and completed our innings by 2010. In those decades, the field bore a visible social stratification: origin, fluency, and institutional pedigree often shaped one’s academic fate as powerfully as intellectual merit. There existed a cohort of scholars who stood apart not only because of their sociological insight, but because their social backgrounds, linguistic mastery, and institutional locations reinforced their authority in ways that aligned with the hierarchy of the time.

Yet, in the shadows of that prestige economy, many scholars of profound depth remained unseen. Teachers who transformed classrooms into spaces of genuine inquiry, thinkers whose conceptual provocations quietly reoriented debates, and writers whose manuscripts brimmed with epistemic labour rarely attained the visibility they deserved. They lacked the social capital or linguistic ease that opened doors to elite networks. Their work circulated only within small circles; many lived and died without recognition, not because their ideas lacked merit, but because the structures of acknowledgment were never designed to include them.

Today, as technology unsettles familiar boundaries and erodes hierarchies once thought immutable, sociology finds itself at a genuine crossroads. We must ask anew: What constitutes scholarship? Who is allowed to be heard? And how might the discipline reimagine its future in a world where capability is increasingly decoupled from pedigree, and where the very practices through which knowledge is crafted are undergoing profound transformation?

This raises a more fundamental question: What is the future of sociology itself? If the discipline were to collapse into pure data, it would cease to have meaning as a distinctive intellectual endeavour. Books, brands, and long-accumulated citations would no longer guarantee relevance. Perhaps the challenge before us is to remember that sociology is more than a discipline, it is a sacred human project. Public sociology, far from being profane empiricism, becomes meaningful only when it generates the public sphere anew, creating spaces of participation, dialogue, and collective inquiry.

What I take from Gupta’s reflections is the reminder that sociology does not merely use data; it creates data. It illuminates realities that would otherwise remain unnamed. It invites the sociological imagination to reorder what we observe into new patterns of meaning. In this sense, sociology moves beyond disciplinary boundaries. It is shaped as much by intellectual acuity as by creative sensibilities, performing arts, fine arts, literature, and public conversation are all, in different ways, sociologies of multiple- modernity. They expand our capacity to understand social interaction, emotion, aspiration, and suffering.

Perhaps the most revealing moment in Gupta’s recent conversation with Professor Surinder Jodhka came when he spoke of his move into novel writing. Here, he hinted at a deeper truth: fiction allows one to generate ideas and data through a fusion of empiricism and imagination. It opens pathways to understanding that conventional methods sometimes foreclose. In doing so, it broadens the field of what sociology can be; a discipline rooted in inquiry, committed to democratic ethics, and constantly reinventing its forms.

The future of sociology, then, may lie not in defending its old boundaries but in embracing its capacity to transform itself. As intellectual landscapes shift and technologies reshape our ways of knowing, sociology’s task remains what it always was: to illuminate the human condition with clarity, compassion, and imagination. The discipline will endure not because of its canons or its hierarchies, but because it continues to ask the questions that matter and to create the worlds of meaning through which societies understand themselves.

Prof. Ashok Kaul, Retired Emeritus Professor in Sociology at Banaras Hindu University