In 1957, sociology arrived at the University of Dhaka mainly because a French structural anthropologist recommended its installation. Claude Lévi-Strauss, surveying the Chittagong Hill Tracts under a UNESCO feasibility mission, judged the region’s indigenous communities worthy of systematic study and urged the post-colonial state to institutionalize the discipline. Pierre Bessaignet, another UNESCO advisor, served as the founding department chair.
This origin story is rarely emphasized, yet it remains foundational that sociology in Bangladesh was conceived as an instrument for outsiders to observe, categorize, and govern local populations, rather than a tool built by local communities to comprehend themselves. Nearly seven decades later, the discipline still retains that intellectual birthmark.
The curriculum that followed faithfully mirrored European intellectual traditions, anchoring itself to the theoretical frameworks of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Talcott Parsons. Early Bangladeshi sociologists evaluated urbanization, labor dynamics, and social stratification through concepts devised for industrializing European nations.
Local communities were routinely analyzed as empirical case studies serving to illustrate Northern theories rather than as original sources of conceptual insight. This dynamic was not unique to sociology.
As historian Bernard Cohn demonstrated, colonial administrations across South Asia governed through distinct forms of knowledge—including censuses, social surveys, and ethnographic taxonomies—that transformed complex societies into legible objects of rule. Sociology inherited these administrative categories after the British departure.
Following independence in 1971, academic departments continued to reproduce these inherited epistemic patterns, offering minimal engagement with local histories, indigenous social thought, or the lived realities of rural communities.
The consequences of this intellectual legacy are practical rather than purely abstract. Research on rural Bangladesh frequently relies on modernization theories imported from the Global North, framing villages as traditional or underdeveloped while missing sophisticated local adaptive strategies.
Studies of the Sundarbans—a contiguous mangrove forest spanning roughly 10,000 square kilometers—often deploy generic environmental concepts. In doing so, they overlook the detailed ecological knowledge held by local fisherfolk, whose long-term strategies for navigating tidal river networks and seasonal cyclones routinely prove more effective than imported coastal management models.
Similarly, informal networks among women in flood-prone haor areas, organized around mutual labor sharing and localized credit, are typically interpreted through Northern gender frameworks instead of being recognized as indigenous mechanisms of resilience calibrated to a specific hydrology.
A growing body of global scholarship addresses this structural imbalance. Julian Go terms this phenomenon as epistemic inequality, describing how mainstream sociology privileges European and North American knowledge while treating the Global South primarily as a source of raw data. This criticism connects with a broader intellectual tradition.
Anibal Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of power showed how historical hierarchies of race and knowledge survived formal decolonization, continuing to dictate whose ideas qualify as universal theory and whose count merely as localized observation. \
Raewyn Connell’s analysis of Southern Theory highlighted how metropolitan academic centers treat their own concepts as universal while extracting empirical material from peripheral regions. Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that European thought remains both indispensable and inadequate—necessary for historical analysis, yet insufficient for explaining societies it was never designed to describe.
Decades earlier, Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas demonstrated in The Myth of the Lazy Native how colonial administrations constructed specific social narratives to justify labor exploitation, offering an early critique of the epistemic distortions that Bangladeshi academia continues to process today.
Decolonizing sociology in Bangladesh requires more than criticizing Western theory; it demands a structural recalibration of how academic knowledge is produced. This involves recognizing the historical specificity of Northern frameworks and resisting their uncritical application to different social contexts.
It also requires systematically engaging South Asian intellectual traditions that can serve as theoretical frameworks rather than mere folklore. The Subaltern Studies collective, pioneered by scholars like Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee, demonstrated how foregrounding peasant agency alters traditional historical narratives.
Bangladesh also possesses homegrown precedents for this approach. Akhtar Hameed Khan’s Comilla Model, initiated in East Pakistan in 1959, constructed rural development programs on existing cooperative traditions rather than imported blueprints, eventually influencing institutions such as BRAC and the Grameen Bank. Decolonizing the discipline does not require inventing new concepts out of nothing; it means building upon existing regional intellectual traditions, including riverine ecological knowledge and regional literary history.
Academic institutions must also confront internal epistemic hierarchies among instructors and researchers. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o noted in Decolonising the Mind, language carries specific worldviews and assumptions. Bangladeshi sociology remains overwhelmingly taught and published using English-medium frameworks, even when examining rural Bengali social life.
Faculty members trained in Western-centric curricula can unconsciously reproduce Northern assumptions regarding modernization and governance within classrooms and research supervision. Addressing this cognitive dimension requires faculty members to engage with decolonial literature, evaluate their own analytical assumptions, and recognize the theoretical validity of local knowledge systems.
This structural reckoning extends beyond Bangladesh. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has described epistemicide—the marginalization of non-Western knowledge systems during colonial and industrial expansion—as a structural feature of modern global academia.
Student movements, ranging from South Africa’s Rhodes Must Fall to curriculum reform campaigns across European universities, have challenged these historical frameworks internationally. Bangladeshi sociology departments are participating in a broad global debate, supported by a distinct local archive of social and economic thought.
Achieving this transition involves concrete institutional measures across several operational areas. Curricula can be systematically updated to integrate South Asian theoretical perspectives alongside classical Western sociological texts. Research methodologies can incorporate participatory action models, oral histories, and detailed ethnographic work to document local adaptation strategies in environmentally vulnerable regions.
Furthermore, university departments, academic journals, and research funding institutions must establish mechanisms to evaluate and publish locally grounded theoretical work, ensuring that regional scholarship is recognized independently of Northern journal placements.
The necessity for this institutional shift is driven by immediate environmental and social realities. Bangladesh occupies a climate-exposed delta supporting approximately 170 million people, facing complex challenges related to coastal salinity, seasonal flooding, and rural economic transformation. An academic discipline that relies exclusively on analytical concepts developed for societies facing different structural conditions remains ill-equipped to address these domestic realities.
A sociological practice grounded in local contexts, historical analysis, and rigorous empirical research provides the necessary tools to analyze these complex social dynamics effectively.
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Shamsul Arefin is a PhD Student, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA