Discuss the Contribution of G.S. Ghurve to the Study of Sociology in India.

1.
No one can dispute the fact that Professor Govind Sadashiv Ghurye is the founding father of Sociology in India. Even in the last decade of his life when he was over eighty years old, he continued to make his intellectual presence felt as an incisive social thinker, highly innovative and equally at ease with Vedic India and contemporary India.

One great advantage that Professor Ghurye had in his studies of India was his thorough grounding in the Sanskrit literature and in the high traditions of Hindu civilization. In 1921, Professor Ghurye was awarded a scholarship by the University of Bombay to study Sociology in England. Ghurye received his sociological training in Cambridge University from where he earned the degree of Ph.D under the guidance of Professor W.H.R. Rivers. For a short time after the untimely death of Rivers in 1922, Ghurye was put under the guidance of Professor A C Haddon. Rivers was then considered as a leading intellectual of Britain. He had already become eminent as a psychologist with his own school. He had established his reputation as an anthropologist with his study of the Todas of Nilgris in 1906 which at that point of time was considered as a model of intensive investigation. Professor Haddon, the other great luminary with whom Ghurye came in close contact in England, was senior to Professor Rivers and had become famous as an Anthropologist with his original works like The Races of Man and The Wanderings of Peoples. This was the kind of academic ethos and milieu in which Professor Ghurye had the privilege of receiving his sociological training

On his return from Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under W.H.R. Rivers and later A.C.Haddon, Ghurye succeeded Sir Patric Geddes as Head of Department of Sociology in the University of Bombay in 1924. He continued to head the Department until his retirement in 1959. After retirement, he was designated the first Emeritus Professor in the University of Bombay. Thus,...