Question

evalute D N dhanagre as a mixist thinker​

Answer 1

Answer:

Professor Dattatreya Narayan Dhanagare, a towering figure of Indian sociology, passed away at the age of 81 on 7 March following a brief illness due to cardiac problems. Born in 1936, he graduated from the Nagpur University and later obtained his Masters degree from the University of Massachusetts US and PhD from the University of Sussex, UK. He began his teaching career at the Institute of Social Sciences, Agra University and then joined the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and subsequently shifted to the University of Pune (Savitribai Phule Pune University), where he worked for more than two decades.

With his passing away, an era of scholarship in the history of the agrarian and development studies in India has come to an end. At a time when Indian sociology’s boundary was confined mainly to caste, family and kinship studies following ethnographic-cultural and structural-functional traditions, a few sociologists like him broadened the horizon of sociology emphasising class analysis and drawing attention to issues of social movements, inequality, state, civil society and the like which were central to the understanding of India’s development experience and its contours of major contradictions. Dhanagare’s pioneering work, Peasant Movements in India was an eye opener where he challenged the western theorisation of peasant movements and gave a new twist to the global discourse. His most recent book Populism and Power is a brilliant critique of the rise and fall of farmers’ movements particularly, the Shetkari Sanghatan movement in Maharashtra in the context of neoliberal reforms based on structural Marxist approach, particularly Gramsci’s framework on class hegemony. He was one of those rare Indian sociologists who constantly engage with historians, economists and political theorists. A scholar of his calibre is rare indeed. His death has caused a big vacuum in social sciences in general and sociology in particular.