Revision as of 19:28, 7 October 2020

Yogendra Singh Yadav; Graphic courtesy: The Times of India

A brief biography

Avijit Ghosh, May 11, 2020: The Times of India

Yogendra Singh played a seminal role in reorienting and modernising Indian sociology as a discipline and authored the pathbreaking and bestselling Modernization of Indian Tradition.

“He was intellectually alive till the very end. On Saturday night he told us about the need to come up with new concepts to study post-industrial society in a post-Covid19 world. He said it is a new challenge for social scientists and they must develop new tools to analyse the problem without ideological bias,” his daughter Neerja Singh told TOI on phone. The cardiac arrest happened around 10 am. “He was gone in 10 minutes,” she added. Due to the coronavirus restrictions, only family members attended the cremation at south Delhi’s Lodhi Road.

“Indian sociology was for quite some time under the shadow of British social anthropology. He extricated it from that orientation and made it what we call modern sociology in the Indian context,” said eminent sociologist and colleague TK Oommen.

“He helped create a new post-graduate syllabus where theory, methodology and Indian social reality became integrated with the subject,” Oommen added.

Historian Mridula Mukherjee said, “He was a crucial figure in the construction of JNU’s egalitarian culture in teacherteacher, student-teacher relationships. His home was always open to students.”

Singh set up JNU’s Centre for the Study of Social Systems in 1971. Among his areas of expertise were social stratification, social change and sociological theory. “But not many know that he was equally knowledgeable in literature, popular science and nutrition or that he turned down various offers of vice-chancellorship in different universities,” recalled former Jawaharlal Nehru University professor KL Sharma, also his student.

Singh’s magnus opus Modernization of Indian Tradition was published in 1973. “It has been reprinted multiple times. The book is also sought-after among civil service aspirants,” he said.

Singh was born in Chowkhara village in east Uttar Pradesh’s Basti district. He went to Lucknow University and taught in Rajasthan before moving to JNU, where he retired as professor emeritus. His long list of students include Dipankar Gupta and Pradip Bose, wellknown academics in their own right.

From all accounts, Singh was a hugely popular teacher whose lectures were often attended even by students of economics and history. He lived with catholicity, taught with relaxed calm and expounded dense theories with lucidity.

“When he taught Marx, you thought he was a Marxist. When he taught Weber, he sounded like a liberal ideologue in German tradition,” said Sharma, also former vice-chancellor Rajasthan University.

Singh’s former student Suman R Timsina wrote on Facebook, “There is no reading on modernisation of society where I do not think of his lectures.”

Now he is gone. But a generation of JNU students and others he interacted with would always remember the ease with which he explained complex sociological concepts and that ever-present twinkle in his eyes. As Mukherjee said, “His death marks the end of an era.”