The Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai, has the distinction of being the oldest
centre of teaching and research in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology in India. In addition,
it is the oldest Department in the University of Mumbai. The Department was set up in 1919
with an eminent British sociologist and town planner Sir Patrick Geddes as the first
Professor and Head. Over the last ten decades the department has made pioneering and
significant contributions to teaching and research of Sociology in South Asia.
The Department, from its inception, contributed in a major way to the project of the struggle
for freedom and later to nation building. The Department has played a leading role in the
promotion of social science research in general and in the development of sociology and
cultural anthropology in particular in four major respects.
Firstly, it initiated an ambitious project of mapping out, independently, the vast and
variegated ethnographic landscape of India through systematic field studies. In the span of
over ten decades, more than 300 Ph.D. and M.Phil. dissertations have been completed in the
Department.
Secondly, it trained a fairly large number of talented students who were drawn from different
parts of India and who, in turn, advanced the frontiers of sociological and anthropological
research in India. Some of the leading figures in Indian Sociology and Anthropology had
their initial training in the Department. Mention may be made of M.N. Srinivas,
IrawatiKarve, I.P. Desai, Y.B. Damle, Vilas Sangave, M.S.A. Rao; among several others.
Thirdly, the Department played a leading role in the professionalization of Sociology and
Anthropology in India. The Indian Sociological Society and its Journal Sociological
Bulletin owe their inception to the initiative of Professor Ghurye and his colleagues in the
Department. Professor Ghurye served as the President and Professor K.M. Kapadia and
Professor J.V. Ferreira served as secretaries of Indian Sociological Society from its inception
in 1952 till 1966.
Fourthly, long before the value of inter-disciplinary research came to be widely
acknowledged and emphasized; several inter-disciplinary studies relating to the varied
dimensions of Indian society were taken up in the Department. The faculty of the department
has made significant and path-breaking contributions to the leading paradigms of
understanding Indian society such as the indological and civilizational approaches, political
economic approaches, approaches from the dalit bahujan perspectives, and feminist
perspectives. Critical approaches from the vantage points of gender, environment,
marginalization, urbanization, media and so on add cutting edge sociological depth to the
teaching and learning practices in the department.