Between Tradition and Modernity: A Sociological Reading of Bimal Mitra’s Saheb Bibi Golam

In his book Modernization of Indian Tradition, Yogendra Singh advanced a ‘paradigm for an integrated approach’ to analysing social change. Drawing insights from this paradigm, this lecture delivered in his memory analyses the dialectics of or the relations between tradition and modernity. It is based on a sociological reading of the historical novel Saheb Bibi Golam by the Bengali litterateur Bimal Mitra. It elucidates fiction as ethnography and provides a corrective to the conventional polarisation between fiction and social research.