In 1957, sociology arrived at the University of Dhaka not because Bengali scholars had demanded it, but because a French structural anthropologist recommended it. Claude Lévi-Strauss, touring the Chittagong Hill Tracts under a UNESCO feasibility mission, judged the region’s indigenous communities worthy of systematic study and urged the colonial-successor state to institutionalise the discipline. Pierre Bessaignet, another UNESCO advisor, became the department’s first chair. This origin story is rarely told, but it matters: sociology in Bangladesh was born as an instrument for outsiders to observe and classify local populations, not as a tool local communities built to understand themselves. Seven decades later, the discipline still carries that birthmark.

The curriculum that followed mirrored European intellectual models, built around Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Parsons. Early Bangladeshi sociologists studied urbanisation, labour relations, and social organisation through frameworks developed for European industrial societies, treating local communities as case studies that illustrated Northern concepts rather than as sources of theory in their own right. This was not unique to sociology. As the historian Bernard Cohn (1996) showed, colonial administrations across South Asia governed through “forms of knowledge” — censuses, surveys, ethnographic classification — that turned communities into legible objects of rule. Sociology inherited those categories even after the colonisers left. Even after independence in 1971, curricula and research largely continued to reproduce these epistemic patterns, with little engagement with local histories, indigenous social knowledge, or the lived realities of rural and marginalised communities.

The costs of this inheritance are concrete, not abstract. Studies of rural Bangladesh routinely rely on modernisation theory or development-sociology frameworks imported from the Global North, examining villages as “traditional” or “backward” without recognising local adaptive strategies. Research on the Sundarbans — at roughly 10,000 square kilometres the largest contiguous mangrove forest on Earth — frequently applies generic environmental-sociology concepts, overlooking the sophisticated ecological knowledge of fisherfolk who have developed long-term strategies for navigating tidal rivers, mangrove ecosystems, and seasonal cyclones, knowledge that predates and often outperforms imported models. Cyclones Sidr (2007) and Aila (2009) tested exactly this kind of local knowledge, and communities that read tidal and wind patterns through generations of accumulated observation frequently fared better than models built for temperate coastlines. Similarly, women’s informal networks in flood-prone haor villages — based on labour sharing, credit, and social support — are often interpreted through Northern gender frameworks rather than appreciated as local mechanisms of resilience built for a specific hydrology.

A growing body of scholarship has named this problem with increasing precision. Julian Go’s (2017) concept of “epistemic inequality” describes how sociology has historically privileged European and North American knowledge, relegating the Global South to the role of empirical illustration rather than theoretical source. This echoes a wider critical genealogy: Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) “coloniality of power” argued that colonial hierarchies of race and knowledge outlasted formal empire and continue to organise whose ideas count as theory and whose count as data. Raewyn Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory showed how metropolitan sociology treats its own categories as universal while extracting raw material from the South. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) Provincialising Europe made the case that European thought is indispensable and inadequate at once — necessary to think with, but not sufficient to explain societies it was never built to describe. And well before any of these terms existed, the Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas dissected, in The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977), how colonial administrators manufactured the image of the indolent Southeast Asian to justify labour extraction — an early template for exactly the kind of epistemic distortion Bangladeshi sociology is still working through. Locally, Hossen (2023) shows that reliance on Western frameworks constrains the discipline’s ability to address pressing local challenges such as environmental vulnerability, rural inequality, and ethnic marginalisation, while Mondal (2024) documents the structural obstacles Southern scholars face in producing theory at all, including editorial gatekeeping, funding inequities, and the dominance of Northern journals.

Decolonising sociology in Bangladesh, therefore, is not merely a critique of Western theory — it is about transforming the very foundations of knowledge production. This requires provincialising Northern frameworks, recognising their historical specificity, and resisting their uncritical universalisation. It also requires centring local knowledge systems and South Asian intellectual traditions that already exist, waiting to be taken seriously as theory rather than folklore. Subaltern studies, the intellectual movement Ranajit Guha (1982) founded and to which Partha Chatterjee was a foundational contributor, foregrounds marginalised voices and the agency of peasants and workers in shaping social history. Bangladesh has its own homegrown precedent for this kind of work: Akhtar Hameed Khan’s Comilla Model, developed in East Pakistan from 1959 onward, built rural development on indigenous cooperative traditions rather than imported blueprints, and went on to influence institutions as different as the Grameen Bank and BRAC. Decolonising sociology does not mean inventing something new from nothing; it means recognising and building on intellectual work Bangladesh has already produced. Bangla literary and historical scholarship, along with ecological cosmologies embedded in riverine communities, provides additional conceptual tools to understand local social and environmental dynamics.

Crucially, sociology in Bangladesh must reckon with the internalised epistemic hierarchies of instructors themselves. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1986) Decolonising the Mind argued that language itself carries a worldview, not just theory — and Bangladeshi sociology, still overwhelmingly taught and published in English-medium frameworks even when its subject is rural Bangla life, has not fully absorbed that lesson. Many faculty members trained in Western-centric curricula unconsciously reproduce Northern assumptions about knowledge, modernity, and governance in classrooms and research supervision. Addressing this cognitive dimension is essential: faculty need to cultivate critical reflexivity, engage with decolonial scholarship, and recognise the value of local knowledge. Only then can students be empowered to think sociologically about Bangladesh on its own terms.

This is not a uniquely Bangladeshi reckoning. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) has written of “epistemicide” — the destruction of non-Western knowledge systems as a byproduct of colonial and capitalist expansion — as a global condition, and student movements from Rhodes Must Fall at the University of Cape Town in 2015 to “decolonise the curriculum” campaigns at Oxford and elsewhere have forced comparable reckonings across disciplines and continents. Bangladesh’s sociology departments are not late to a local problem; they are one node in a global one, with the advantage of a rich, underused local intellectual archive to draw on.

Practical steps to achieve this transformation include:

1. Curriculum reform: Courses should integrate South Asian, indigenous, and locally generated knowledge alongside Western theory, emphasising Bangladeshi social movements, ecological systems, and historical contexts — including the intellectual traditions of the Chittagong Hill Tracts communities that sociology was first built to study but has rarely let speak as theorists.

2. Collaborative research: Communities can be engaged as co-producers of knowledge, documenting strategies for flood adaptation in haor (a bowl-shaped shallow wetland depression in northeastern Bangladesh) regions, sustainable fishing in the Sundarbans, or women’s mutual aid in vulnerable villages.

3. Methodological innovation: Participatory action research, oral histories, ethnography, and archival analysis can capture the social, cultural, and ecological complexities of Bangladesh more accurately than imported quantitative frameworks alone.

4. Institutional engagement: Universities, journals, and funding agencies must recognise and reward locally grounded scholarship, creating platforms for contextually relevant theory production rather than treating Northern publication as the only marker of rigour.

5. Decolonising instructors’ minds: Faculty must interrogate their own assumptions, challenge internalised Northern paradigms, and embrace South Asian intellectual traditions to mentor students in locally meaningful sociological inquiry.

The stakes are urgent. Bangladesh sits on one of the most climate-exposed deltas on Earth, home to roughly 170 million people, and faces unprecedented social and environmental challenges — from climate-induced flooding and salinity intrusion to persistent rural inequality. A sociology still borrowing its categories wholesale from societies that do not face these pressures is not just intellectually thin; it is practically inadequate to the problems it is asked to help solve. Sociology grounded in local realities, attentive to epistemic justice, and informed by historical context is not just academically desirable — it is socially necessary. By rethinking how we teach, research, and produce knowledge, Bangladesh can develop a sociology that is locally meaningful, empirically robust, and globally significant, demonstrating that scholarship can be both rooted in local realities and relevant on a wider stage.

References :

Alatas, S. H. (1977). The myth of the lazy native: A study of the image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th century and its function in the ideology of colonial capitalism. Frank Cass.

Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press.

Cohn, B. S. (1996). Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India. Princeton University Press.

Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Polity Press.

Go, J. (2017). Decolonising sociology: Epistemic inequality and sociological thought. Social Problems, 64(2), 194–199. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spx002

Guha, R. (Ed.). (1982). Subaltern studies I: Writings on South Asian history and society. Oxford University Press.

Hossen, M. A. (2023). Decolonising sociology for social justice in Bangladesh: Delta scholarship matters. Critical Sociology, 49(3), 545–561. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205221085687

Mondal, D. (2024). Building sociological theory in the Global South: Problems and prospects. Journal of Sociology, 14(1).

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey.

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.

Santos, B. de S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge.

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Shamsul Arefin is an educator, researcher, and columnist specialising in decolonial and postcolonial scholarship from the Global South. He is on education leave as Assistant Professor at Gopalganj Science and Technology University, Bangladesh, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.