22 SOCIAL SCIENTIST to facilitate revenue collection. There were studies by Charles Metcaife (1832), B H Baden Powell (1896) and others. Colonialism needed knowledge of Indian culture, and there were scholars like Max Muller and W D Whitney who evinced keen interest in Indology. Various speculative and untenable theories were put forward to account for the origin of castes and their historical development. Meanwhile, the 1871 Census, Imperial and District Gazetteers (1908-9), and All-India Ethno-graphical Surveys of Castes and Tribes (Nesfield 1885; Risley 1891; Crooke 1896) contained valuable sociological data. There were also studies on the same subject by census officers like Risley, Thurston, O'Malley, Hutton and Guha, and administrators like Dubois (1816), Maine (1861 and 1871)and Fick (1897). During 1910-20, steps were taken to teach sociology in Indian universities. Every sociologist was trained to study social organization and religious beliefs and practices. During the 1930s and 1940s, sociologists sought to make contributions to cultural history on the basis of collection and comparision of the customs and values of different castes. However, the bulk of sociological literature included simple descriptive and ethnographic material. The occasional interest to interpret the data was always done with a functionalist framework uncritically borrowed from Britain. • Conformists and Dissenters In short, sociologists not only helped the British administration by providing information on issues crucial to the British rule, (which was previously the responsibility of untrained administrators, missionaries and tourists) but also other social scientists who ^created a high estimate of Indian society, culture and government. They insisted on a policy of preserving Indian civilization."9 With a few exceptions almost all the works had exaggerated the segmentary and pluralistic foci of Indian society through the details of castes and tribes and sought to convey that Indian society was never a coherent nation. Emphasis on the continuity of the segmentary society helped the colonial power to implement the policy of ^divide and rule". Hence, ^To sum up: the administrative needs of the British rulers led them to collect information about the economic, social and religious life of the people. This task became increasingly complex and systematic as the nineteenth century progressed, and it provided the stimulus for not only social anthropology and sociology but Indology".8 In other words, sociology originated in India in complete isolation from Indian society to buttress colonial interests. And the main body of the literature of the pre-independence period comes to us basically as an imperialist legacy. Hence, one often witnesses extra-academic considerations in the sociological works of that period. Granting that colonial sociology was the dominant sociology in pre-independence days we also notice the contribution of several