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Contents: Preface and Acknowledgements. Introduction: Indian Sociology's Past-Present and Present-Futures/Sujata Patel. 1. Sociological Scholarship on India: The Epistemes of Colonial Modernity and Methodological Nationalism/Sujata Patel. Section One: Debating the Sociology of ‘Traditional’ India. 2. Confronting Disciplinary Practices: Rethinking the Sociology of Family, Marriage and Kinship/Rajni Palriwala. 3. Tribes in India: Why Exclusion Persists/Virginius Xaxa. 4. How Not to Study Caste: Moving Beyond the Avatars of the Orientalist Commonsense/Surinder S. Jodhka. 5. Beyond State and Nation: Anthropology of Muslims in South Asia/Farhana Ibrahim. Section Two: Family, Marriage, Caste and Religiosities in Contemporary India. 6. The Rebellious Woman and the Violence of Consensus: Contemporary Contestations of the Domestic Space/Kamala Ganesh. 7. Deterritorialising Heteronormative Family and Kinship: Hybrid Existence and Queer Intimacies in Contemporary India/Pushpesh Kumar. 8. Modernity without Alterity: Deshastha Brahmins and Hindu Cosmopolitanism in Mumbai/Suryakant Waghmore. 9. Between Text and Practice: Reflections on the Sociological Study of Islam/Sudha Sitharaman. 10. Catholic Citizens: Faith as Activism in Mumbai/Rowena Robinson and Nandini Paliyath. Section Three: On Education and Learning in India. 11. Ritualising Higher Education Reforms in India/N. Jayaram. 12. The Non-academic Uses of the Public University: An Optimistic Note/Satish Deshpande. Index. 

In a path-breaking volume, contemporary India's most prominent sociologists reflect on and reframe the three 'classic' fields that have defined sociology in India since independence: family–marriage–kinship; caste and tribal inequalities; and belief, religion and religiosities. The authors, all of whom are experts in each of these areas, are seized by the need to intervene in the present moment that is being defined by global processes and elaborate the challenges facing the reframing of sociological scholarship in these arenas.

The essays in the volume assert a need to desist from finding singular theories of change and transformation. They recognise that these three fields are suffused with power, its ideologies, its representations and its practices. They thus argue for a need to empirically study their current manifestations in daily practices and in everyday social lives in India. The essays contend that the intersection of received diversities and the current unevenness in the processes of transformation in India are highly complex and multifarious and assert that these need to be examined at various scales from global to regional, national and local. Exploring Sociabilities of Contemporary India also demands that the readers reflect on the ways hierarchies and practices of rule are imbricated in professional knowledge. Thus the authors argue for a methodological focus that combines a discursive deconstruction, a historical sensitivity and an empirical focus on practices. Offering a new repertoire of issues, theories and perspectives, this volume will be invaluable to students and scholars of sociology and social anthropology.