94 SOCIAL SCIENTIST documenting its substantive and methodological foci; in fact, the analysis is deliberately incomplete and 'open*. We will concentrate on what may be considered a purely descriptive excursus, concerned with accounting for the 'how' rather than the 'why' in the ongoing discourse/practice of Indian sociology. Indeed, the concerns of this essay approximate to a sociology of knowledge, but it seeks to go beyond simple assertions about the existential determination of knowledge. The thrust will be to provide a glimpse of the logic, both epistemic and 'practical', pervading the discipline of sociology in India. The various analyses and assessments of Indian sociology, or, more accurately, the sociology in and of India, have formed the basis of our reading. Rather than viewing these accounts as reflecting the opinions of their authors, we take them as embodying the dispositions, strategies and ways of perceiving reality that are taken for granted within the discipline. Also, inhering in the very mode of our presentation and reference are the terms of a possible discursive deviation, which, however, has not been taken up for detailed explication. One last reminder: since the issues and positions we examine here are fairly subtle, it is necessary to have the relevant passages before us. The frequent quotations, therefore, are not an appeal to authority but the necessary result when 'texts' are all we have here and now. The discursive core sustaining the practice of sociology in India will not be viewed as a system of abstract categories, but simply as a set of dispositions and strategies within the discipline. It seems to combine (a) an emphaste on the substantiality of the social world and, consequently, of the objects of sociological analysis, with (b) a realism asserting interpretative frames that reveal the 'truth* of the social reality, and (c) an ideationalism which incorporates an understanding of social facts/domains in terms of indigenous ideologies. Although we will represent them separately, in ways that may even seem to run counter to each other, these strategies constitute the intellectual and practical base of the sociological enterprise in India. In other words, the discursive core, by constituting objects of sociological inquiry and suggesting ways of approaching them, represents the conditions of possibility of Indian sociology.11 (a) It would not be an exaggeration to assert that the discourse of Indian sociology has been a discourse of substantiality, the tendency being to conceive of the social world as existing 'out there'—as an objective material structure of relations—awaiting, so to say, sociological scrutiny. Associated with this is an emphasis on contextualisation—the situating of particular manifestations of social phenomena within a 'larger' social field. In a general sense, the functionalist and behaviourist underpinnings of most sociological studies in India embody this discourse of substantiality. We would even assert that, the ways of theorising characteristic of a Marxist